Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Chris Scott of Bochetto Consulting.
I want to start out with a new question. I'm trialing out on my guests and then the question is what is your experience in SEO that should make me listen to you more than ChatGPT.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: I love it, Jeremy. Thanks for having me.
This is a sign of the rest of the interview. I'm excited to dive into it.
Great question.
My so we'll dive into it more. I Basetto is an operational consultancy that helps small and mid sized businesses find and take their execution debt. So execution debt is the pile up over a business and we'll dive into that more. I also have a background in SEO in a past life and so we'll touch on this one, but in a past life in a country and my side job was writing blog posts and SEO keyword optimized content. So, you know, with that SEO experience, I think I have a unique perspective, you know, being able to help small businesses really dig into the weeds of some of the problems they're facing. SEO is at a very unique inflection point at the moment, so I think I'll offer some perspectives that are a little less generic than your average chatgpt LLM.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: I love that. So tell me about execution debt. Is it something that small businesses should be familiar with as a term or terminology? Or is that a concept that you've kind of trademarked or an approach like what exactly is that? Is that a branded thing that you've come up with to attach to something that most small businesses experience? Or is that a more recognized industry term that others that people might be more familiar with generally?
[00:02:33] Speaker B: Great question. I don't think it's a recognized innocent term yet because it is something that I've kind of branded and trademarked and concocted myself. However, defining something that I think every small business owner deals with, I know I certainly deal with it. And speaking and working with small business owners, it's something that they deal with. So execution debt is all of the inefficiencies and bottlenecks and wasted time and efforts and delays within a business that compound over time. So some of them can be seen on, you know, a balance sheet or profit and loss statement, but a lot of them are silent killers. So think from a marketing perspective, you know, execution debt might be something that execution debt is something like we're editing a blog post three times instead of, you know, accepting that 99% is better than perfect and we need to get it out and get some feedback on it and see how it ranks and see how it does. Execution debt could be delays with client acceptance or perhaps poor client standards up front. So, you know, we don't have a good initial, you know, scoping meeting with the client and client isn't clear on their expectations. And now we produce the first passive content for them and they're not happy. And we're back to the drawing board and we're trying to understand their, you know, their standards lumps into again, all these inefficiencies that compile over time when you're first starting out, you know, solo partners, entrepreneurs, very small businesses, very limited Runway for execution debt. So I think it's very important that we're testing fall and failing fall and some of the things that we're doing on the opposite side of the coin. I recently saw that Apple, Apple tv I think lost a billion, loses a billion dollars a year, a year on Apple TV plus. So that was also execution debt, but they have a lot more Runway. Right. So that again is a new term, but something that it's really the pain points that I think every business owner would be very, very familiar with.
[00:04:41] Speaker A: Is that something or like a, like a local business? Like a, like Achieve Wellness, their local rehab in a particular area.
Is it tied at all to like the size of the company and the geography and their goal or is it just any organization is going to have challenges in this area to overcome? So what would it look like for like a rehab? What would some of this execution debt potentially be?
[00:05:12] Speaker B: Yeah, so it's pretty industry agnostic. I think it's more of a mindset shift and finding those inefficiencies and finding ways to get better and streamline things. You know, I think especially now with the state of perhaps the economy and I know SEO too. I was listening to a recent episode of yours and you really touched on some of the AI and language models and how that's changing the approach to SEO. And so the organizations that are best going to not just survive, but thrive are those who are agile and able to adapt to some of these changes. And that's a mindset. So to your question, again, it can apply to I think any small business. An example I'll give is a local cafe.
So a local cafe recognizes that sales are down. So their initial let's go solve the surface level solution is, well, let's run a marketing campaign or let's offer a sale, you know, buy a pastry and get a coffee after 2pm or something like that. But if we pause and kind of dig into the problem a little more, and sometimes they're like, it's the five whys. We dig in why five times. And so when we do that, why are sales down? Because regulars have stopped coming in. Why if regulars stopped coming in? Because wait times have gotten longer on coffee. Why have wait times gotten longer? Because we hired new baristas and we didn't train them how to use the equipment properly. So what you initially thought was a, again, like a sales problem that we would just go through a marketing spend at, it's actually a training problem and so we can go fix that. And again, that's like a hidden inefficiency that exists in every business. Again, it exists in my own business, despite me trying to run from it and solve for it. But I think being aware of it is a key first step.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: So I love the concept and it touched on something that Ross Huygens and A.J. cohn were discussing a couple of days ago on the Sage media podcast. And A.J. cohn was talking about the problem at larger industry sites at Enterprise is governance when it comes to AI and these AI search tools, because you have like these multiple different teams where they should be hubs on a spoke and AI should fall into the middle and try to connect them. But each of them is trying to set up their own process to own that and, and muddle through and figure it out. But it's not centrally organized and people are sitting on their hands because they're like, I don't have data on how this works. So, you know, I guess SEO is coming up with something, social media is coming up with something, the product team is coming up with something, and there's no coherent system or tooling. So I think that'd be our a, an example of executive execution debt when it comes to handling AI.
My question, follow through question on that is kind of tongue in cheek of like, I've got a product management tool. Does, does that mean that just because I have Trello that I. I'm set, I'm set.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: You're a better part named Profit.
You know, then it comes down to, are you using Trello? So again, tools like that very much help with visibility. So I have a project management background. So that's admittedly where a lot of this comes from, is some of the visibility and project management concepts that I've seen that I've used to drive my own projects and stuff like that. So you're 100% right that your tools like Trello and Asana and sports and Monday.com and ClickUp and like, whatever it may be, those are good.
However, I'd still challenge that. There are probably still pain points that exist. Again, I'm going back to think back to like a marketing agency. So think to, you know, a marketing agency that scaled quickly and it's Maybe doing around 3 million a year, but they have concerns because they're still missing client client deadlines. And when they dig into it, what they realize is that every one of these kind of product managers might be using their own tool, but the account managers then don't know. Okay, if I'm working with Jeremy, I have to use Trello, but if I'm working with Chris, I think I'm using Asana. But Chris doesn't update it all the time. So you can still see that a tool is great. But it's the again the mindset that goes into properly, like utilizing those tools. Inefficiencies are always going to exist. I guess my challenge is that the more we search for them and find them, the better position the business is going to be in.
[00:10:05] Speaker A: Got it. So is the first step in your process when you come in and you're working with a new client, you're onboarding in the process, is it just kind of talking to multiple different stakeholders within the company? Is it like a primary touch point and just acting like a therapist and finding out what's not working? Man, why are you frustrated?
Is that the basis for a lot of your games is just hearing the complaints and coming in and being a neutral third party and letting people whine about how many bosses they have?
Are you one of the Bobs coming in and saying, what would you say you do here?
[00:10:53] Speaker B: Yeah, like an office space. Exactly, yeah. And then I promote the one who pulls the wool over my eyes.
Great movie. I'm gonna have to watch that this weekend. It's meant to rain Saturday here, so I'll have to check that out. No, that's a really good question, Jeremy. So to your point. Yes. There's a diagnostic aspect. I really take the approach that I will never understand your business better than you do. Right. Like everywhere, every business is like a fingerprint or a snowflake and that they're all unique. They took different paths to get to where they are. Sure, we can be in the same industry, but there's different people, there's different processes. Again, different organizational mindsets and culture. So I'll never. It's not my approach to come in and say, this is exactly what you're doing wrong. That's I'm humble enough to admit that I don't have that solution, nor necessarily should I. But to your point, there is a dying a diagnostic aspect to it. So in some cases, you know, I might have the problem laid out to me or what we think the problem is. Even then we'll take time to pause and again maybe run the five whys or something like that and really dig into like the root causes behind the problem. Other ways are, like you said, maybe diagnosing some of the pain points and the solutions.
From a change management perspective, I think it's very vital and critical to work with the actual employees doing the actual work, you know, your people doing the actual work. So. So I'm not a fan of top down directives, right. So even if I would maybe perhaps have a one day workshop with your product managers like you said and your account managers and like what's working and what's not and we really, I try and frame in a very constructive way. So instead of it being like what are all the things that are going wrong with the business?
Like it might, you know, again because then that just becomes event session. So it might be something like in what ways can we improve? In what ways can we improve X And then we will have a design thinking, like creative thinking brainstorm and then we'll come up with some solutions and then there's a implementation and improvement aspect on the back end. But to your first question, it's very again working with teams to understand how can we fix this inefficiency and not just have it be like you said, a week long. My boss sucks and oh, I hope you don't tell him about this conversation.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: No, that's definitely true because I worked with my friend Michael McDougald who's an SEO, but he was working for a steel door manufacturer and working through the process of how do these quotes get fulfilled and get things out the door. So it was actually really important to understand the difference between the positions and how they viewed the challenges of the organization. And somebody who was trying to fulfill the quote was frustrated with the website of things because every time the quote was coming in with this missing piece of information, which meant that they had a call and they could only, you know, had a field, you know, they had fewer people that they could reach to get a quote because they needed this critical piece of information. So actually adding in that one extra element to the form led to a dramatic improvement in conversion rate because they were able to proceed directly and actually provide a quote instead of needing More information to give a quote.
[00:14:31] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes complete, complete sense. And I think you know, like in talking with teams it's good to have that second set of eyes or third set of eyes come in because everyone has their, you know, little niece of info that they can provide and not every one person or not every three person team has all of the answers, like you said, about the different challenges, you know. And again an account manager dealing with clients is going to have a different perspective than you know, an operations manager dealing with your writers or something like that.
[00:15:07] Speaker A: Is it largely in an organization technical debt around like implementation of marketing or is it other aspects of the business as well?
[00:15:22] Speaker B: Yeah, technical debt is kind of where this is born. That was born out of. So that's, you know, technical debt, if you're familiar with software and whatnot is obviously a pretty familiar term there. Again, I think execution debt takes it one step further. So it's not necessarily just marketing, it's again it's operational. It could be accounting, you know, it could be on the invoicing side of things where you know, you have a cash flow problem and you dig in and you realize that your contracts might be net 30 days but clients typically pay in 45 days. Like that can create big cash flow problems for small businesses. So you know again, and then what is the downstream effect of that can, is that one less freelancer that you might be able to use a month or something like that. So again, it's all of these inefficiencies that it's not really, it's pretty vertical agnostic, it's pretty industry agnostic.
It exists, it exists. I mean, I'll give you an example of myself too. So recently I launched a minimum viable experiment on LinkedIn and it was a quiz that assessed your execution debt score. And when I was building it, my first inclination was I'm going to build it and then I'm going to set up, you know, automations and receive and then I'm going to have those automations pushed to me and send automated emails and it was like timeout, pause. I don't even know if this thing works right. Like let me, it might be a week or two where it's going to be painful where if it, you know, if it takes off then I'll have to do some manual responses and stuff like that. But at least that's traction then that I know. Like okay, now I can go put some bells and whistles on it as opposed to I have this great idea and I'm going to go Build this solution and then no one takes the survey. And I've wasted a week and a half doing something that the market didn't even want. So, again, I think it exists in any industry, in any business. It's a mindset of really trying to get super, super efficient in execution.
[00:17:26] Speaker A: Okay, I think I got it now because a good example would be like, Majestic photo booth.
[00:17:33] Speaker B: There's.
[00:17:33] Speaker A: They go out and they get their photo booths into these business locations, but then never actually built a location page on their site. So nobody can actually. Nobody actually knows unless they happen upon a photo booth.
There's no centralized location page saying, hey, there's a kiosk here, or even a Google business page, you know, isn't registered for per kiosk. So the kind of connecting, you know, you want to do the thing, and then you got to make sure you do all those things. I have execution debt of too many podcasts I've recorded. Recorded in December and got backlogged and realized, oh, hey, I actually have 20 conversations. I've had fantastic conversations. And some of the podcasts I've released, I'm talking about podcasts that hap. That happened in December that haven't yet been released. So it kind of can cause some kinks in your workflow for sure.
[00:18:36] Speaker B: Nothing to do with ability or lack of ability or anything like that. It's something that is natural. It's inherent for every business owner. I mean, we get very, very busy building a business, working on the business, working in the business. So it's inevitable. But I think, again, like, to your point, being aware of it, you know, and finding solutions, how can you release one more episode a week or something like that? And taking that mindset of continuous improvement. And continuous improvement.
[00:19:05] Speaker A: Okay, so then let's talk about some of the steps to solve. I already jumped the gun a little bit and said tools, when the first step was obviously talk to your shrink, Chris Scott, about the woes or ways.
So brainstorm out, have conversations, introduce potentially some tools. And then what?
[00:19:32] Speaker B: And then we. So we. And then we fail small. So I'll give you another good example that I recently came across. This wasn't a client that I worked with, but I saw it and looking at it through this lens, I was like, oh, my God, this makes so much sense. So it was a. It was. And Zeep does these, like, off road adventures that you can sign up for, right? So they do them every year all over the country. And they sent one for the Himalayas. And what it was. So it was an email blast. And it was the same thing. It was as if this was an actual event that was happening. But what happened when you like clicked on sign up or whatever it was, it took you to the landing page and the landing page said this is not a guarantee of admittance and we'll get back to you. And it didn't accept the payment at that time. So you basically go into Waitlist. But what Veep was doing, you know, I think they were all this thing might have cost like ten grand. So you can imagine the logistics of running a jeep off roading trip in the Himalayas and international travel and everything, right? So before they even jumped in, you know, they probably had an idea if we need 10 people to sign up to make this work.
This email was verifying the wait list and I'm sure that if they, if they had 20 people sign up that they would say, okay, we can proceed and go do this versus if they had three people sign up. It's like this isn't happening and the three people are none the wiser that it didn't, we didn't have to go through the event. So again, I came across that and I thought it was a great example of this testing concept that we do, right? So we again, I call it a minimum viable experiment where we have this idea and before we build a full fledged solution, we test the idea and we give some market feedback. This is slightly different than if you're from a tech perspective, a minimum viable product. So a minimum viable product is very similar. But I think a minimum viable experiment even comes for that because you're getting some market feedback on your potential, you know, solution or offering and then you're deciding, should I go through with this?
You know, so that, that's a bit more external in terms of like internal, you know, if you're solving a problem internally or bottleneck or something like that. It's kind of the same, it's the same premise where we brainstorm solutions and then we, we narrow down like the two or three that we think are going to have the highest impact and the highest probability of providing value. And then we go test those very quickly and we have our KPI that we're measuring against. So to bring it back to the cafe example, we'd measure, you know, wait times. And so we're going to run this for three weeks and we're going to make sure that we always, if you recall from the example, the baristas were in frame. So what we're going to do is we're going to pair a New barista with an old barista.
Barista every sift. And we're going to go on this for three weeks and we're going to see how much wait time increase or decrease. And we go back and wait, wait times decreased by 40%. And then we decide, okay, this works and now how do we scale it into the business or how do we take it one step further and how do we improve upon it? Then when we launch a marketing campaign to get our regulars back in the door saying, hey, we heard you and we fixed the wait times problem.
So, you know, again, as opposed to just.
It's so easy to do, to just jump into the first thing or the first solution. But that's how we end up in firefighting mode and reactive mode.
I mentioned this kind of when we were starting before we jumped on the call, Jeremy, but I didn't need to see. So I'm very susceptible to go fight this fire, Go fight this fire shiny object syndrome. It doesn't work. That's kind of what this system was born out of, was I kind of needed it for myself.
But yeah, again, I think it's testing small and scaling small and then getting feedback because resources in businesses are so, so limited. Money, time, effort, momentum, morale, so limited. So we make sure that before we scale, we're confident in what we're scaling.
[00:23:45] Speaker A: No, I love that thinking about, thinking through after you identify the problem, you know, attaching a KPI specific to that, that, that makes sense. And because ultimately, like if, if it's like you, you wasted five fewer ketchup packets, did that relate. Was the time to reorganize around that as like, oh, that's what we're watching. Was that really valuable? So like watching what you select as a KPI and then also, you know, you rush through it. But I think prioritizing as well of having like, once you attach those different KPIs, then being able to compare, okay, well this is going to do this, this is going to change this KPI. This is going to change this KPI. And how much are those? You know, because they're in a wiggle line, they're going poll in different ways on what's truly at the heart of the CEO, you know, or that lead executive's determination of success or failure for the organization. Because I find that that usually actually matters more than actual like dollars per se. Like dollars in a company can and often surprisingly is not the, the KPI that matters most. Because a CEO can be looking at offsetting and knowing they're sacrificing some dollar spend or revenue or profit margin over time for a, for sustainability or for longevity or for compliance or this. So usually the ultimate KPI is CC suite satisfaction.
Would you agree?
[00:25:36] Speaker B: Well, you mentioned the heart of the CEO and I think that I agree with everything you said.
Every organization has hopefully a why or a mission or you know, why are we in existence? And I think that every you're right, decisions aren't necessarily always about dollars and cents. But to your point of like with, you know, if we're solving a problem and we want to test solutions and which is going to have the highest impact. Again, impact is relative, like you said to the organization. And that's what I could never come in and say. This is exactly what your business needs to do because your business will be very different from the one down the street because you believe in different things. So back to a cafe example. You know, that cafe owner could say their company's why could be exceptional customer service. So if that's the why behind every decision they make, then yeah, maybe it's more expensive to have an overtime training where we train all the new baristas on like how to use all the equipment. But they're willing to sacrifice that dollars and cents because it's ultimately in pursuit of their why or their North Star. That customer, you know, customer satisfaction is most important.
So now that I think about it, you know, I think we see Starbucks growing at a significantly larger organization. But Starbucks is going through a little bit of that identity crisis now, as is Southwest.
Starbucks brought in a new CEO and now they're cutting back a lot on the custom drink orders and stuff like that, which, that's their organizational decision. That's fine. But it has an impact on their customers. But maybe their why sifted same with again Southwest and cutting the free dogs. That was Southwest thing for the longest time. They shifted their why. So now some of the strategies that go into that might change.
[00:27:31] Speaker A: Absolutely. I was talking to Josh, Joshua Ramsey last week on an interview and he said that it's really important for your marketing to, to, to delve into and understand your unique selling position as a business because that's going to impact, you know, how you structure your marketing materials and what emphasis you put on the right level when it comes to connecting to your target audience. But I think that that is also true organizationally of what you are determining is the priority goal for your organization and why it exists. And getting buy in from everybody who joins your organization, getting them to, you know, march to the same beat is really hard. If you never set, you know, you don't have a drummer who's setting the beat. Then you say everybody, let's march. They're going, you know, go in different directions, they're going to walk at a different pace. So you know there's got to be some coherency to, to the method to that madness in that organization.
[00:28:39] Speaker B: Yeah, 100%.
Where did you see it? Was that a podcast that you conducted or. I'd like to check that out actually.
[00:28:46] Speaker A: Yeah, that one I'm publishing today. So while I'm recording.
[00:28:52] Speaker B: There we go.
[00:28:52] Speaker A: So it'll be later today. Now I've committed myself. Thanks.
Had execution debt. No, I got it to the last part so we should be publishing that one today.
And I say we by me. But really so your feet to the fire.
[00:29:13] Speaker B: That wasn't pre planned for those listening. That was very unscripted. So what goes around comes around, I guess. No, that's great. I'll have to check that out this evening.
[00:29:23] Speaker A: Awesome.
As we kind of wrap this up, what is the primary to do that you would like? Somebody who listened to this podcast? I'm going to cross post this to the unscripted small business podcast as well as to the unscripted SEO. So it's not just SEOs you're talking to potentially, it's actual small business owners I hope and or that's the target audience. So if you're talking to SMBs, what should they do?
Super actionable. They close this out, they go to X and it's going to have wide impact.
[00:30:08] Speaker B: I love for anyone listening to go take the execution debt assessment I mentioned earlier in the show, it's a two minute assessment that is about 10 questions and it walks me through. It's a quick survey, again about two minutes.
It assesses the debt that exists in your business. It could be solopreneurs, entrepreneurs again, industry agnostic, small and mid sized businesses. It's 50 points. I've never seen a perfect 50, 50 point score. So I would love that. I always post execution debt based tips on my LinkedIn so I'd love to just engage further.
You know my why I really believe kind of we talked about it a bit with the North Star and stuff like that and I really believe that every. Everyone started their business for a reason. Right. That why can vary but everyone has a why as to why they started their business and vision that vision without proper execution is just wasted potential. So again I really, I think this is something that exists in every business and if I could do my small part to help a business owner overcome. Overcome some of it, improve their teams, improve resource efficiency, improve team morale.
I'm more than happy to do my part. So, again, maybe start with the assessment, but also Please engage on LinkedIn again. I post a couple times a week and would just love to keep the conversation going after this.
[00:31:33] Speaker A: Fantastic. I'll be talking to you a lot on there and thanks for your time.
[00:31:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I know we're connected, so I look forward to seeing you. And yeah, thank you very much for having me. Jeremy. This is a very fun interview, so I really appreciate your time.
