[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted podcast host. I'm here with Lloyd Thompson of Virtual D O O. He's going to give us an introduction to himself, telling us two things, why we should trust him and what was his last position before he started the one he is in right now.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: All right, so hi, yeah, my name is Lloyd. My business is Virtual D O O and we help busy online business owners with teams get out of the day to day operations. I've had this business for about four and a half years and it started from one referral to escape Corporate World and built from there. And it's just snowballed from referral, from referral, from referral to get to where I am now with a small team located across Australia and the UK and the us. Prior to having this business I was in Corporate World and I was a software engineering manager and had a team located across the us, the Philippines, Australia and so forth.
And I think it might be a familiar story that like many people, when the COVID pandemic happened, I had a little rethink. Do I really want to do this? And I actually started my career as a programmer, computer programmer. And at some point I moved into management being one of those people that could explain what they were actually paying for and became one of those intermediate people that would sit between the people that were paying for the stuff and the team and then was managing team and such forth. And then eventually in my career I was running global teams of engineers and running projects and then towards the end of that it was putting in real time trading systems and payment systems for banks. But in the background of my life I just felt like this was not where I was. I just didn't feel like this was something I was. There was something missing. And I think in, in Covid there was actually a positive for me in one way and that I've actually come, I've moved to Australia from England and like many English here who moved to Sydney, we'd come here for the beach. And during COVID I started surfing before work in the morning so I no longer had to commute to the office.
And my team had long before moved them off their desktops and moved them onto laptops. I was never a line of site manager. I could make sure that things were running smooth. I was checking with them. We already had a pretty good work from home policy long before COVID happened. And so work wise, things were going along smoothly. But in my personal life I was thinking, I do not want to go back to a brightly lit office after Covid. I'm loving the fact that in the morning I can get up and exercise and go surfing. I can still run my team, things are still going along smoothly. And just by coincidence, one of the people I met in the surf was a guy called James Schramko and he's a podcaster, he's a business coach. And so while my experience was running teams and implementing complex systems, it wasn't running business. But I asked James, I said, you know, you're a business coach, what's the solution here? How do I get out of corporate world and use my skills of running teams and systems? Is there something I can do? And that was the beginning of lots of conversations. And that eventually led to him saying, you know what? I've got a big e commerce client based in Vancouver. They sell a great product, but the founder is just doing 16 hour days scatter, gunning the team with tasks, running on adrenaline. He doesn't know a better way. Like he's got a great product, he's got a good team, but he's just exhausted. And this seems like if you're good with people in teams, maybe you can have a chat with him and see if there's some way you can help. And basically that led to a few conversations and I agreed to take on a short fractional retainer, it's basically an exotic word for part time, right. And started helping him run his team so that rather than every day resetting and scattergunning the team with tasks, we would plan out, what are they going to do for the next couple of weeks? And when a campaign or an event happens, is there some kind of feedback loop to turn that into a process or a template?
[00:03:56] Speaker A: Forth.
[00:03:56] Speaker B: And so from that I built up Playbooks and I had a pattern for, I learned from that, like, how can I do something fractionally? Like how can I just be here part time and be an operator? And then I got referred another client and eventually another client. And I was personally running three clients fractionally. And that led to some challenges for me, like how do I manage three clients concurrently, still deliver a good result? Where do I draw up boundaries? And I realized for me, I couldn't handle any more than three clients myself. And while I had pretty good income at this point, my whole reason for leaving corporate was to have more time, enjoy going surfing. And I was thinking, well, why am I doing this? There must something's got to change here. And so I hired a virtual assistant to just take on all of my admin. But I was still capped at three clients. And meanwhile, I had another referral come through.
So I looked in my network and I found someone who was a good operator in corporate, but they would need my guidance on how's it going to work to concurrently do operations for a number of clients. And then that's basically the model I've, it's a very simple model I have. I now have operators. I hire experienced people, ideally from within my network, who I know like and trust, and they, they typically take on between one and three clients each.
Yeah, we've, we've got a small little international team and, and some, a little bit of operations support in the Philippines, but that's really for internal and, and that's the pattern and that's, that's how it's gone for four and a half years.
I would like to tell you that I would still go, I'm still going surfing every day. But actually my purpose has changed a little bit since then because four months ago we had a kid, so now my purpose is working remotely, being able to support my son. But that's, that's it. And I think over that time I've learned a lot in terms of who my customer is, who this is really good for and who it's. Who it's a fit for, who it's not a fit for, what kind of clients we take. And in the beginning I found that because we started with E commerce and then we referred marketing agencies like advertising, SEO, so forth, those became the core of the kind of clients we were working with because you find the marketing agencies work with E commerce and vice versa, and they bounce back and forth. But then through the network, other types of businesses came, came on. And so in the beginning I was specifically targeting marketing agencies and E commerce and now it's. This is kind of going against what people say, oh, you should always niche. But now for me it's been more about team size and revenue and do they have a capability to run their core team online. And that's really where we've landed. I mean, we've even helped manage some construction businesses. Well, that's not our core icp, but that's, that's been the journey until now.
[00:06:43] Speaker A: It's interesting because I've, I've interviewed, you know, fractional CFOs and fractional CMOs alike, and so it's interesting. Tell me about that operation side. How does that, what are the roles and responsibilities? Like what are, what are the, some, some of the tasks there that are burdensome, that you're kind of Taking away that you've kind of productized this offering around. I'm familiar with, you know, some of the tasks were on the marketing side. It was interesting when I talked to the cfo, how he distributed out. So I'm curious because I feel like slicing and dicing businesses differently because we have these online capabilities now.
So what is within the realm of these operations that you're working on?
[00:07:35] Speaker B: So firstly, it does vary depending on the size of the team. So if they're a really small team, let's say they're five or six people, then this, and I call them an operator. The operator is that person who sits between the founder and the team. They're going to be much more involved in the day to day. They might look at almost down to, to an operations manager level, like what's happening in the task management tool, what's everybody doing? And then at the other end, if it moves up to a team of say 25, which is the upper bound, it tends to be more like what they call an integrator, someone who's bringing the leadership team together and looking at the operational rhythms, what are the reds and greens of the, of the business, what are the feedback loops like, are we learning? And so how we gauge that and how we assess what we're actually going to do for a business is start with an assessment. So that's how, that's our starting point, our first, our product, if you like. And that's a piece of work that takes, we complete it within a month, it's a one and done piece. And what we're looking at is a really, really quick high level, we're looking at, you know, vision values, do they have accountability framework, where's the founder spending their time and how can we take that off them? And that will directly address the question you're asking in a minute. And I'll come back to that. And then what are the operational rhythms, are they efficient, what are the kind of dashboards they're running and what are the feedback loops? So then once we've completed that, that gives the client a, a picture of what we can actually do for them. Clearly, if we were to come in on a month to month basis, so we can say, okay, here's a list of things prioritized by effort and impact and here's the remedy, that's the important piece. And then that will set us up, if you want us to come in and do the work, that will set us up to come in on a month to month basis and complete this work, what it Generally looks like when we start is that was the initial.
Of course businesses change as they get going. That list of things change. And so every week that operator will catch up with the founder and be okay, here's the priority list, here's the reds and greens. I think we should put this to priority number one. What do you think we should do? You know, what's your buying? And that's how it goes. But then to directly answer your question, like what are they actually doing?
One of the lenses we're looking at is where's that operator? Where's that, Sorry, where's that founder or business owner? Where are they spending their time in the business? Because the pain point that they're coming to us to solve is it's a founder led business and they're stuck in the operation and our objective is to get them out of it. And they might have a general manager or an operator in there, but if they're coming to us, it's generally because they're struggling. It might be they're struggling with capacity or the founder is the person trying to do all the things.
So part of it is looking at, well, what is that founder or business owner actually doing?
And then can we take it off them? Is it something that can be automated? If it's a quick automation, maybe we'll do it ourselves. But we're generally trying to look at what's the biggest bang for buck for our time. So do we have a partner or a vendor or someone else that we can give that to to have them automate it? Is it something we can delegate? If it's not clear who in the team can that be delegated to, then that goes back to accountabilities or is there some hiring that we need to help them do if they've got the budget for that and is it something we can do? Is it like a project management? So it's always looking at what's the founder doing? Why are they doing it? How can we free them up so that they can focus on strategy, relationships and shaking the tree for new business?
[00:10:51] Speaker A: I like that. I think I've seen a trend, I hate it, of a push of RTO or return to office and you know, post Covid. You know, some lonely middle managers got too lonely around their coffee pots and needed some somebody to push it around again is my perspective. But I'd love for you to chime in and see from an operations perspective, what is the pushback to those CEOs that are saying, well, we need to bring people back to the office or the middle manager who says I need people here for accountability purposes. What's your counter RTO argument either based in stats and or experience.
What's your hot take?
[00:11:33] Speaker B: Look, before I go the counter, I'll actually go for it, which is if I've worked with a client for a while or if I've got a new team member in my business at some point, I want to try and see them very face to face if I can. Even if they're around the globe and get to know them, there is a connection that is hard to make online that you can't replicate face to face. So I will entertain that and say there really is something, especially if you're onboarding a team member to spend time with them. But for the kind of roles where you're managing a team, I don't know if you really need to be like if delegation is done well, I'm managing by outcomes. And so when I look at things that I'm delegating, I'm looking at visibility. So if I want to enforce accountability for a team, I'm looking at how can I make the things visible, how can I make the accountabilities visible? You know, is it who's accountable for what in the team? Making sure two people aren't accountable for the same thing? Is it making sure there's process owned and making sure that we have clear ownership of tasks and then actually putting in rhythms in place to make sure they get done? I think line of sight management is there. If you don't have all that set up for a classic remote business, like if you're a SEO agency, a marketing agency and you have a good setup for an online team, you should be able to run your core team online. Sure, there's, but I mean there are businesses out there like you know, a construction business, you're going to have to have an office, they're going to come in, they want to see someone. But for, for the vast part of online world, I mean it's a very expensive thing to do to run an office. So you've got to have to have a pretty good reason why that is justifiable to be able to have and pay for physical property.
If like you've really, I think you've just really got to question why you need to do that. Like what is the justification for doing it? Do you have to have customers come in and see you?
[00:13:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: Are you, I mean with an E commerce client. Yes, they've some of the major E commerce clients that we've had, they've had like a shop where you can go in and see the product. Okay, that makes sense. And they're going to have warehouse anyway, so that makes sense. But if you're a classic online business, I just think you really need to make sure you can justify the cost for that. Because we work with a graphic design business and they had a number of expensive people sitting in an office and I'm thinking, why are you doing that? Like some of these people could be in a lower cost location, offshore for a start. And in having them all located in one physical office is a very, yeah, very expensive way to go.
[00:13:58] Speaker A: And I work with, I've worked in numerous capacities, both as a freelancer, a direct hire, working in house with a company and as an agency and as a subcontractor with an agency. From your perspective from operations, let's say you're Michael McDougald of Right Thing Agency. What do you wish that agencies knew about operations that could make them more successful both for the company and for the agency side? Where's the friction come in?
[00:14:30] Speaker B: I think the friction comes from they don't necessarily know if they're going to spend this money, the outcome they're going to get. You know, it's very easy if you're going to spend on a marketing business. You know, it's clear, okay, am I paying for this, am I going to get qualified leads? If I'm paying for operations, how can I tangibly measure the roi? And so for us it's like we need to clearly identify when we, when we, when I have that call with the client, like what is their pain and can I be confident that we can solve it? Like is the pain that it's the founder working the many hours and am I confident by hearing what the kind of activities they're doing that we can solve it and get them out of their day to day, or is it that they've got operational chaos and an understanding of what that is broadly like? Is it. Because quite often the things I see are, it might be the setup of the team, it might be the operational rhythms are wrong. So if I've got a certainty just from a couple of calls with them that okay, this is a problem that I can solve, I can be very confident and say, yeah, you know, I can already see there's some things here in the team set up or the system set up that this is something we can resolve another face to it. And this is not something we've done. We do a huge amount of. But it's another element of our business that a couple of years ago I hired an operator and he could also do revenue up. So it's more focused around if the process is around how the CRM is set up. Like with sales and marketing, making sure that people are maximizing the the amount that they're getting out of the CRM. Like making sure that if they've got leads, they're making sure that they're getting the best out of it. For example, if marketing warms up a lead and then passes it over to sales and then sales try to close it and then they don't close it, it should to marketing. But we've seen businesses where that process falls off a clip. So this is an area where as a part of our assessment, we have a quick look here.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: And.
[00:16:18] Speaker B: And this is not our core business. It's just a kind of if they've already got a CRM in place, we can assess. Okay, have they got some basic rhythms around maximizing what they're doing around the CRM to make sure they're not losing leads? And the reason I bring this up is because sometimes you make a few changes here and we can justify our costs from the get go because you turn a few dials in the CRM, you're not losing leads and suddenly they're making more money. And it justifies the cost of having us in there in the get go. So that's another element. But the most reason that people contact us is because they're in some pain. It's because the founder is doing the 16 hour days, or it's because of operational chaos, or both. And it just comes down to understanding what their challenge is and can we really fix it for them.
[00:17:04] Speaker A: That makes sense. I have been in those situations where, you know, from an SEO perspective, hey, we created content, we built the links, we're getting the organic traffic. Organic traffic is turning into leads. And have a talk with the client. They're like, it's been a terrible quarter. Or like we have more leads than you ever have. Oh, well, the sales said they weren't turning out and like, okay, well that you should have told us like four months ago and then talk to the salespeople and go, no, actually these are good qualified leads. You're just pitching them wrong. Yeah, like it was that, you know, like the mismatch, there's communication there of like, if we get too siloed as SEO professionals into just, okay, I need to nurture. And they're elite, they're in, okay, they're goodbye, I done my job. Like no, like you should, you know, it's kind of cross discipline call for us marketers, we like, let's go a little bit further and understand where's the end business impact of that lead. Like because you can do a lot in your marketing to change it if, like if it isn't, if you are driving, you know, submissions of these forms but they're, they're too early in the sales cycle or they're too late in the sales cycle or they're dropping out because of friction of this X, Y, Z specific problem, you know, and they're not, they're having to spend half the call explaining a problem. You should be marketing to that problem first. So there's such a wealth of, of valuable marketing content to find out from the operations side, like what's, what's happening in that CRM where, what, what is the actual conversion rate for leads? Or is there a huge, you know, on the e commerce side is there a huge problem things that are in cart that aren't getting purchased? Maybe it's because you have like five steps to input your credit card and it's actually a tech problem in your tech stack. You know, I did had that problem with like a dog collar e commerce shop and you had to it seven minutes to actually make a purchase for a dog collar. I'm like, ain't nobody, they're going to disappear on the bat, they're going to bounce over to Amazon where they can click a button. You know, like added friction can really spoil your day.
[00:19:18] Speaker B: And I mean the CRM stuff, we're just, I mean we've just got a few basic lenses on there. You know, our sales and do sales and marketing have a process that you can work together with. So I guess I'm talking more about classical B2B when I talk about that if they win a sale, why did they win it? If they lose a sale, why did they lose it? And we've even seen for classic B2B businesses where they've sent their teams around to different events around the globe, handed out a stack of business cards and these people have never made it into the CRM. And you. And so they're just understanding their process around there and then that can be changed quite simply to be when you're at the event, give them a link book in the meeting right there. You can attribute that event in the CRM. Where did you meet Fred? What was his job title? And have him meet, book a meeting with you straight away and then you can see well, what was the roi of flying my people to that event in the first place. So there's a few things that we do around there where a few dials there can, can make a big difference.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: Curious about this. Talking to Matt Brooks of SEO Tarek last week he brought up that sometimes a cure causes more cancers and it was context of LLMs and AI power tools. What are the cancers you're seeing from the operation side that is coming from this sudden cure all of LLM based tools? I'm sure that things are, some things are probably better in some ways. But I'm curious, what are the downsides of answers at your fingertips with that IOI stuff?
[00:20:55] Speaker B: I think the core businesses that like we've, the core behavior of the businesses that we've been working with haven't changed. They're still using it as a, I mean I use it personally, I use it to get for creatives and I use it for critique and I use it to chuck my transcript to our call and ask it for feedback and things like that. But for the, for the core of the businesses that we've worked with, I haven't seen them make a really impactful change by using it yet. I haven't seen that. What I have seen is that people try and jump down an untested process too quickly, turn up the volume and it backfires. And I see this with things like dashboarding tools for example.
So you were talking about all of the different measures and all the different dials that you can turn in terms of how that shopping cart responds, how that's going to work. I see we go into businesses quite a lot and they're either measuring nothing or measuring everything. And actually we just want to know what's the actual signal. And I see, I think I see this with dashboards and I see it with task management tools. And a lot of the founders or that we work with, business owners that we work with are classic visionaries. Perhaps they've got adhd, they're shining after the next shiny tool. And so if they, they buy ClickUp, they buy all the add ons and all the features when actually they only need a core few things to really make a difference. And same with the dashboarding. They hoover in all of this data when we need to figure out what we actually need to measure. So the real impact is noise. Like they just get so much noise from all of these different things where they just need simplification.
So it might be it's death by tools. That's the short of it. It's death by is so Much noise. They've, they've bought all the features in, in ClickUp, like they've got the fancy dashboard. They're now getting messages in Slack on SMS, on WhatsApp, on all the email and they're just overloaded. But it's like they keep thinking that the next tool is going to solve the problem and AI is also a part of that. And what I think the solution is is to simplify. So if you've got lots of channels, it's to have just a few channels and understand what is the channel for an emergency. For me, if someone's got an emergency and they really need me, it's WhatsApp, WhatsApps for social or an emergency.
Slack. I just have a few people that I need project by project in Slack so I can find out what's going on. Only the people that are in there. ClickUp ass all of these different task management tools, we understand the flows that a business is going to have but justify everything that they've got in there to make sure it's really needed. And then dashboards having a look at the. What actually needs to be measured and why. Because if you measure the wrong thing, you can incentivize the wrong thing.
[00:23:37] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:23:38] Speaker B: So that's, that's really it noise I think.
[00:23:40] Speaker A: I love that because I have, I've been in those scenarios where, you know, there's three different, different product management tools and then there's, you know, this board has controls for this department and it works through this workflow and then you have to, it just, you just get lost with so many, so much red digital red tape and then the solution proposed is always yet another tool.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And, and I think, I mean we don't take, we. When we work with the business it's not like we tear up what they've currently got and then say this is the new template. We look at what they've got and then agree with them. Okay look, this is the challenges we see with that set up now let's move towards that. So it might actually mean turning some stuff off or making some changes. I don't personally care most of the time what task management tool they've got as long as it's got their capabilities. And then the dashboards, I don't really.
The thing with dashboards for pulling all the reds and greens of the business, I find that people over complicate it. And for even quite significant businesses, a lot of the time they can just hoover it into a spreadsheet with some automations and it will do a really good job whereas they, they go with all of the fancy bells and whistles and then, yeah, they can't see what's going on.
[00:24:52] Speaker A: What is, what are some of the biggest challenges for an E commerce business when it comes to operations that you've been able to solve? You know, I know consulting with, you know, Nexum Powertrain, they're, you know, trying to break into a new market for their product.
So what are some of the downfalls or some of the pain points that you've been able to solve for e commerce shops? That could be really helpful.
[00:25:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
Two of our really big E commerce teams, businesses had quite different problems. The first one that I told you about is just managing a diverse team because they have got people in the warehouse, they've got, got designers, they've got one or two software developers, video production staff. So that level of coordination can get quite tricky. And so what I do there is do something like a very cut down, simplified agile. And I don't buy into just using all the ceremonies, ceremonies of project management for ceremony's sake, but just having, okay, what are we going to do for the next week? Having little daily huddles with the team. So, okay, this is what the video production team are going to do for the next two weeks. This is what the developers are going to build for the next weeks. This is. And so there's a campaign that's being worked towards. So it might be, we've got Black Friday, Cyber Monday coming up. What's everyone going to do? Is there a template for what an event looks like? You know, is there going to be a Christmas promotion? What's everyone doing? And so in the beginning when we worked with my very first E commerce client, it was, okay, we got a big campaign. What does it look like? Okay, who's doing what? And then every time we do a campaign, have a feedback loop and say what worked really well and what's not worked well. Okay, how do we feed that back into our model? And when I first started working with that company, what they were doing is just, it was just a mad scramble. Every single event. Oh, what's the running order? We've got an event, what's the copy gonna be? What's the big, what's the big deal gonna be? But it wasn't like a reoccurring pattern each time. And then that changed to let's work out what events we're actually gonna promote for the whole year. Okay, these are the ten events. Great. Okay, who's involved? What are they gonna do what's the template? And then everybody every single time have that feedback loop afterwards and update the model so it's even better for the next event. So that's kind of one classical operations project management side. For our other biggest customer it was actually more focused on CRM side in the end like are they maximizing what they can do out of their CRM to pull in affiliate deals and so forth. A couple of the e commerces that we've worked with, they work with with influencers and so managing how that works and managing partners who can promote your offers. There's lots of. You might have a. That like you might have. I'm trying to think of the one that we did recently. It was like they were calling out to spa owners. So we had to have an automation that went out, found all of the spa owners in the US and reached out to them. How does that then hoover back into the CRM and make sure that we've got all that data we can offer affiliate deals and so forth. So a lot around the CRM is another space where we can add value money.
[00:27:57] Speaker A: Fantastic. Give a shout out to where you're at on social. So if people have more questions about operations and what you do and is there any part of your site where you have like a downloadable or guide that's a stressed out, overstretched founder is running around trying to do everything that they might find some peace of mind that you have some suggestions or an analysis.
[00:28:23] Speaker B: Thank you. Yeah. So you find me very. You'll find me Quite quickly on LinkedIn if you look up my name, Lloyd Thompson. I've got a picture of me with my dog on my lap. So that's going to be me. My dog is going to bow tie on and then to my website, virtualdoo.com there's a couple of things there that you can get. I've got my book on Amazon, 9 Ways to Leave the day to day operations. I actually give the PDF away for free on there if you go to virtualdoo.com book and I've got a very quick five minute assessment that you can do and that will help you diagnose where your big operational bottleneck is. What's that one big thing? So that'
[email protected] assess awesome.
[00:28:59] Speaker A: Thanks so much for your time, Lloyd.
[00:29:00] Speaker B: Great, great chatting with you Jeremy. Have a great day.
