HOW TO TAKE OVER YOUR FAMILY BUSINESS? | UPGRADING YOUR FAMILY BUSINESS | METASTARTUP #15

welcome back to another episode of meta solid guys I woke up today with something really funny somebody my Instagram had sent me a message with an image of an ad date seen while scrolling Instagram the ad was from a talk b-school in India I'm not gonna take names the b-school was essentially offering to teach people how to continue the legacy of their fathers or their mother's family business it was a two-year course but the only catch was that it cost 40 lakhs over 2 years to do the course and as I went through the course material I realized hey if I put 10 minutes into this I can basically compress that entire course into just 10 minutes and make a deck out of it so I said you know what I gotta put this on YouTube for free so in this video I'm gonna teach all you guys and girls who are part of family businesses or who own family businesses to digitally upgrade it and make it future-proof so regardless of what kind of business your parents owned it could be a textile business it could be you know it just takes a whole business we're going to talk about how we can extend its reach and make it viable for at least another 20 to 30 years ladies and gentlemen welcome back to my des startup in this episode we're going to talk about how to upgrade your family business now for those of you tuning in right now Marisa is a course that takes you from scratch to finish when it comes to running a startup you don't need an MBA this one's free it's completely open source and you can find out more at Mehta startup dot o-r-g or on my instagram at instagram. com slash leave on Maya so moving forward in

this deck I want to talk to you about how you should upgrade your family business now the reason is because everyone else is already on it if you're thinking about upgrading your family business now you are already late to the party what we're going to be doing is essentially employing a bunch of technology and building a brand so that we're on par with some of the best technology companies in the world now there's a bunch of information on the right and you know we're going to go through it as we go through the slide deck but in general there's a lot of work on your web presence building an email list there's a lot of work on strengthen your relationships and then of course doing sales and tracking those sales and automating the entire process of running a business so

going to the first slide which is called basic information I'm going to be talking about why your family business needs to go digital the main reason family businesses are going digital is because people are googling everything they buy Google before buy is the norm so even if you're buying something like textiles you will go to Google and actually google it right and you might think the old generation doesn't do this anymore but even they have started using Google as a tool to do research on a company sellers are noticing this and because they know that other sellers are around they are trying to get cheaper back in the day there was something called information disparity which is when a seller is selling something the bio doesn't know the real value of the real price of it so I can sell you a used car but I could tell you that the car works completely fine but maybe the gear of the car doesn't work but the buyer doesn't know that in the age of Google it's very easy for you to do your research and figure out which companies are honest and which companies are dishonest which also means that you can find out which company products are overpriced and which company products aren't under priced so all the buyers will eventually go to companies that have products that are well priced which is why all the sellers that used to be expensive are now getting cheaper simply because the buyer has options because of this sellers also have to reduce costs when sellers were selling products for high prices they could keep their you know cost also pretty high but today with the margins coming down they have to become more capital efficient which means that they have to now you know cut off excess costs in the logistics they have to cut off excess costs on the distribution so they have to cut off costs in multiple different places expansion is easier than ever so if a seller today was to sell in New City he just has to find the right distribution channel or the right partner to make that happen for him so the minute you become serious about running your family business there is one really important undertaking that you to do which is to do research

is critical what do you need something called a sample size now a lot of people call one or two people write one or two customers and they ask those one two customers a few questions and then they come to the conclusion that you know the customer said this or the customer said that but in science we have something called a sample size or rather its statistics we have something called as sample size which means that if you want to take a survey you need to have a minimum number of people taking the survey to make any good or useful assumptions here is the process you simply call your existing customers and you ask them two questions what is your biggest pain point when it comes to buying something and how can I make you back experience of buying something better now this object that you are buying make sure that when you have this call with these people you make the call specific to your object so if you're selling say textiles then you have to ask them what is your pain point when it comes to buying textiles and how can I make your experience of buying textiles better if you don't want to get on a call with them you can use Survey Monkey or Google Forms is free but I prefer that you guys do this on a call because you also get a feel of the entire market when you speak to 10 to 20 different people don't take everybody seriously because some of those people might just be like you know I wanted at 50% off but you know that's not possible that's not feasible so make sure you take everybody's opinion with a grain of salt but there are a lot of people telling you something and you think that is an important thing to pay attention to then maybe that's worth noting remember a sample size of 10 to 20 is a good starting number if you can get on the call with 10 to 20 different customers and try to get a feel of what they're thinking then you have a good basis to figure out what you want to do next the next almost non-negotiable thing in 2018 or 2019 now is to build a

web presence is absolutely mandatory back in the day and by the day I'm talking about before they mention the Internet in a lot of these events offline meetups brochures used to be the norm people would give out flyers and brochures and that is the only way you knew visually about some other company today you need a website to do the same for you or website is your digital brochure a simple website which is well-designed and gets the point across will do you don't need to make it fancy you just need to get the point across what are your products what are they cost you don't even need to have an e-commerce website or have them buy the product online a phone number or an email contact information would do use web flow rather than hiring an agency a typical agency will cost you of anywhere between one to two lakhs and I'm talking about a decent agency will cost you area will be 1 to 2 lakhs to upgrade your digital presence or to make your website but using web flow you can do all of this for free web flow has a thousand or even more templates that you can just utilize and you can change things as necessary and you can use images it's like using paint it is extremely simple to use and I put up a tutorial on it all you have to do is click on that link in the presentation and you'll be able to go learn more about how to use web flow there's a in-depth tutorial that I have made for this you don't need to know any code for this the last thing that you need to take care of or something called meta times now meta tags are what are shown when somebody Google's you and this is a meta description we're talking about so when somebody Google's your company they will see a certain snippet on Google what you need to do is you need to mention that snippet puts all your talking points across very quickly so if you're the number one agency in the world for real estate you need to mention that in that snippet right the snippet is basically a preview and most people don't even click through into your company they will just look at the snippet and the snippet doesn't seem exciting enough they will just move on to the next search result the next thing

you need to do is build an email list now this email list is not to reach new customers but to engage existing customers a lot of people forget or a lot of businesses forget that the existing customers have money on them all right they always want to look for new business where they don't look at optimizing or improving the quality or the revenue potential from their existing clients until now what I've seen is that a lot of people just use whatsapp or SMS forwards to announce new things that happen in their business so if you are a textile manufacturer and you've announced a new line of polyesters i've seen these people use a whatsapp for word and just say you know this business has just introduced polyesters which is not a very professional thing to do and it seems kind of needy when you only send out these outreaches when you need something right when you need them to buy or when you have an announcement to make what you should do is have a joint newsletter button on your website where anybody who looks at your website can opt-in to the announcements that you make but what we are going to do is not just put out announcements we're also going to put out good high quality content now remember this email this doesn't have to be big it could be just a hundred or even of like 25 people or it makes a lot of sense because you're going to continuously keep Rhian gauging these 25 people over the year every month we're going to shoot across one email to them and you never know maybe six or seven months later they might reply to an email saying they have an opportunity right so it doesn't have to be a big email list but obviously the bigger the better

better so talking about email content only announcements will bored and irritate existing customers like I said it's extremely needy all you have to do is send out good content now there's a newsletter that I've been following for a long time it's called CV insights click on the link in the presentation and subscribe to the newsletter to see the kind of content that they send you their content is engaging it's fun it's got data it's got relevant data and sometimes they put out a meme or two now you might think memes are unprofessional especially you know when your digitizing an age-old business but remember even these business decision-makers are human right so make the newsletter engaging people refresh their Facebook feed because they want more content if you are providing relevant content about their industry it makes a lot of sense to them to read through that content what they want to see is data trends funny stuff and personnel and success stories now obviously you can't sell a real estate firm or dental success story right or you can't sell a bakery a home buying success story so make sure it's relevant to their industry you might have to put out video content is amazing for this check out something called Bom or video to put out video content in emails a small video or a testimonial of one of your customers who succeeded who is used you know your textile products or what somebody else take from you and seen an uptick you want to get these guys on camera with their testimonial send these newsletters once a month you never know when a customer might have a need at Avalon we call this a drip feed method we keep sending out emails on a certain drip which is once every month because you never know six or seven months down the line the customer might say hey you know I've been seeing your newsletters for a while do you want to collaborate with me on X or can i buy Y from you right so you never know when an opportunity might come up which is why email is good to keep yourself in the back of somebody else's head the next

thing you want to do is strengthen existing relationships you have those current customers and you don't want to lose them in fact existing customers are your best full-proof against the recession you have to keep these decision-makers happy because the final decision to buy something or to enter a partnership is always an emotional one here's what I do I'd invite them over to lunch and then I give them a printed card with their name or face on it we call this personalization and personalization works much better than just handing out mass flyers that you printed you know a couple of months ago it has to be relevant to them add a handwritten note thanking them for their loyalty to your brand and thanking them for you know being a part of your journey and also ask for introductions the medical give them this discard with you know one handwritten note tell them do you think you can introduce me to two or three people in your network that might need my services or my products now so far

we've spoken about warm outreaches and the different warm and cold is that warm outreaches mean that you already know these people oh you've got an introduction to these people from somebody they know and somebody you know so mutual connection has introduced you guys whereas with cold outreaches you are reaching out these people without them having any knowledge of you what you need to do cold outreaches is get an email and a phone database and get a computer with email and a phone number or if you do is get an Indian database sites like Fox bond dot IO which is an Avalon investment have an Indian database otherwise you can just find a lot of relevant sites with the database of people you want to contact it might take you know a couple of days to go through the internet and find all the real estate companies in India that you want to contact with their phone numbers and email ids and it might take you a little more homework to call those numbers because those numbers will be the helpdesk numbers or you know an assistant numbers and try to get a decision-makers number this entire process will take you a week it's called cleaning your database you load up these emails and phone numbers into an excel sheet for advanced users use Salesforce because if you have multiple sales reps sending out outreaches you want to make sure that these people are not crossing over and you also have a room dot view of everything that the team is doing now the word CRM basically means customer relationship management right so these are CRM tools that you will be using to manage your relationship with these potential customers send please 500 emails a month that should be your minimum bucket some people send even more emails a month follow-up every 14 days if there's no response there are lot of email automation tools of the Foxconn can already do email automation but maybe you want to use a lightweight tool like mail shake I've put up a tutorial on this just click on this link this watch my tutorial link to see how we send out cold emails at Avalon your demand should be three parts the first line should be an intro to lines of why this email is relevant to you and a three line value prop the value prop basically means these are the things that we are offering the second part why this email is relevant to you is more about why they are receiving the email maybe you read in the news that they want something or maybe you've heard in the neighborhood that they want something which is why it's important to have customer intelligence the more you know about a customer the easier it is to sell to that particular customer and please do not spam it's very easy to keep sending an email every two days you will just piss off customers don't do it one thing I forgot to mention is that your contact information has to be in the signature of your email you don't want your email to be very long emails look like spam so what you need to do is keep just three pass the email and leave the contact information for the footer or your signature the next bit is called colleague now I'm

sure all of you have received cold calls right recalls you saying hello sir would you want to buy something like this and as much as cold calling is annoying it actually works what you need to do is cold call well you need a cold call like an executive like a professional which means you don't start the call with a hollow sir what you need to do is start with a name and why you called so if you know that raj has been looking for textiles pick up the phone and say raj i know you've been looking for textiles and if you've got five minutes i have a really exciting proposition for you write a script and read it from in front of you will forget if you do cold calls back to back after the third or fourth cold call you will kind of realize that you are losing the script or you're saying the wrong thing or you're misspelling words or your grammars going haywire so write this down and read from it in front of you do not sell on your first cold call if you say something like sir can you buy this on the first cold call it will never work out instead use the word exploratory conversation say something along the lines of raj I know you'll be looking for textiles and if you've got five minutes I have a very exciting proposition for you and then he tells you something and then you respond with look I'm only trying to have an exploratory conversation we only work with people that we are confident working with and that we can actually deliver to and I just want to have an exploratory conversation about whether this makes sense for both of us do not act like you're obviously selling something to somebody because nobody likes that ask questions let them do the talking these are called trap setting questions which basically mean you ask the other person a particular question and you want to hear a particular answer so for example if you want them to buy textiles you say so what are the problems you have with your existing textile manufacturer and they say a few things and then you catch them on those few things so if you eventually want to say my textile manufacturer is delivering to me to slowly keep pulling the conversation in the direction of textiles and speed and set this trap setting question which is what happens if you don't get your textiles on time how much money do you lose do you want to trial an alternative that promises you textile delivery within a certain set amount of time so you lose no money and people want to have exploratory conversations around this if the prospect is interested go meet them and present a deck there is too much noise and you cannot expect any deal to close over the Internet especially in a legacy business or a old-school business you need to meet these people and you to go with the PowerPoint presentation the next thing

you can optimize is you can automate a lot of things in track sales move things from paper to Excel paper is the lagging factor in every legacy business once things have made it to Excel start moving to crms CRM is a customer relationship management tools like I mentioned before they help you optimize things even further than what Excel would Excel is still a low power tool compared to something like Salesforce anything on paper is bad avoid paper set KPIs now key performance indicators I'm sure you guys have heard this word before the revenue the total quantity sold profit margin logistic costs etc are KPIs some kpi's need to be increased and some need to be decreased the cost for example so you need to set KPIs for yourself and for your team and try to hit those KPIs the only way you will know you are hitting a particular KPI is if you actually are tracking these on a CRM use the API for automation things like posting social media or an HR contract you can use a peer for all this it makes a lot of sense to automate some of the small tasks make sure you use HR and payroll software like some HR use CRM like PI private salesforce use Zoho invoicing software and invoicing basically means when you're sending out a bill if you're doing this on a piece of paper and then scanning it that is slow that is inefficient that's gonna delay things use an online invoicing software do not be afraid to use something like DocuSign for contracts I know a lot of legacy businesses that are scared of using digital signatures but the world has moved to digital signatures and in fact digital signatures are harder to forge then pen and paper signatures write pen a paper signature is actually very easy to copy you can just trace over it whereas with DocuSign these are digitally signed with a timestamp and is unique to a particular ID with two-factor security so make sure you start using DocuSign and convince all the people you're working with to use DocuSign as well try to get rid of paper also don't forget to get a payment gateway like citrus pay of CCR when you invoice a client they still need to go to the bank or write you a check and that process still takes four or five days if they do a bank wire they still need to add you as a beneficiary all of this takes time instead give them a payment gateway where they can just swipe their card online we just put their card details their company card details and a pin so that payment can be done within a few seconds people are lazy and during that period of laziness people might double take their decision which means that maybe I'm too lazy to do a bank transfer and in those two or three days that I take to do a bank transfer I might change my mind people are fickle and you need to convert them as soon as possible finally create training materials for vendors to use your software a lot of vendors don't understand how to use a phone well even though that's changing you need to make sure you have videos on how to use these different softwares because they're not very difficult a payroll software or a CRM is not difficult to use at all anybody who knows how to use a phone and type on a phone will be able to use a CRM what you need to do is create a very specific video on how to use it and this is not very difficult you can shoot this video with the phone you don't have to make a high-quality video remember you're not impressing anybody with this you are trying to teach people things just the way I am teaching you this in the next

section we're gonna quickly go over setting objectives you need to meet with all the key employees one on one now remember there's an age difference between you and some of the key talent in your company which means that you might be your 25 or 27 year old but some of the talent might be in their 30s or even in their forties so it might seem awkward to get into a one-on-one meeting and set the KPIs in which case what you should do is get them in a room close the door and ask them to set KPIs for themselves which means you ask them what do you think you capable of can we both be accountable for it use the word accountable these KPIs and they would put a certain set of KPIs for example if logistics guy he will say okay I'm going to try to bring the logistics cost by 10 percent this year down so you print those out you keep one copy with you and one copy with them so that they have a not star an on star basically means they have something to look forward to achieve a target a goal and goals and targets for every single person one on one is important I see a lot of legacy businesses with business targets but if you ask each individual person what their targets are they probably can't answer you I know in the 1990s business owners were very uncomfortable sharing their PNL sheets with their employees but I think times have changed and everybody knows how to get access to the profit and loss sheets of the previous year it's not a very difficult task you can do it on the MCA but using your profit and loss sheets is a great idea because you will be able to show these people and short tell these people how their actions in the previous years have impacted the business and how you expect their actions to increase profits or decrease losses in this year always involved in the conversation and ask them what can improve the next thing is

to run ads this is fairly obvious a lot of smaller buyers don't use social media so it might not make total sense but bigger buyers definitely use LinkedIn use account based marketing techniques which are basically super personalized techniques to reach very specific company decision-makers it's on my Instagram take a look at it your cost of acquisition should never drive you into a loss your cost of acquisition plus your cost to acquire material plus your cost of manufacturing delivery so on and so forth should never drive you into a loss usually the cost of acquisition should be less than two to five percent of your entire goods value experiment measure and repeat keep experimenting again and again with different type of ads because you never know which ad works best in my experience video ads and testimonials work absolutely the best all traffic must be sent to your website so when somebody clicks on the ad it needs to go to your website and on the website because we had the joint newsletter forum as well as maybe a contact form that takes their phone number in an email make sure you get their phone number and an email because once you get a you can continuously trip them month over month like we've spoken about in the past 500 rupees per day is a great starting budget now this isn't a one-size-fits-all starting budget but a lot of people ask me what starting budget do I start at and my answer to this my standard answer to this is 500 rupees it a try rupees a day on Facebook and see how it works try 500 rupees a day on LinkedIn and see how it works it might take up to a week to optimize so both Facebook and LinkedIn have an optimization process and you need to make sure that you give it some time to be able to optimize now a lot of Indians would teach you advertising strategy you know how to put out advertising material how to convince people how to do audience targeting but the fact is that today a lot of the audience targeting bits are automated already so you don't need to learn them you just need to know that you need to create the first persona of your customer and if you already have done your research you know what that persona is expansion specifically happens

through distribution channels you need distribution to expand now just like we've made a slide deck for our business we also need to make a partnership slide deck all you have to do it could be like five or even 10 slides what's in it for you and them again we repeat the same process of booking meetings through cold calls cold emails and referrals but this time we're not selling somebody anything we're going there to speak about a partnership or a distribution channel the advantage of distribution is that somebody else is selling for you you're leveraging somebody else's network and they take a cut of it so it makes a lot of sense for you to first test new waters so if you are a trader that sells in Bangalore you might want to try selling in Mumbai or in Delhi through another Vista buta and if you reach a certain scale it might make sense for you to set up an office there and handle the distribution yourself so distribution is a great way to trial things close these partnerships fast and by closing these partnerships fast I mean get them to sign something within 1 or 2 weeks of speaking to them do this on DocuSign because in real life just signing something and scanning it takes one or two weeks because people are busy and people are lazy whereas DocuSign allows you to get an instant signature the minute you close the partnership announced them like I said you have a newsletter so go ahead and tell everybody associated the newsletter what you are up to and what the partnership entailed when people know you've got into a partnership and they are familiar with the other company or the other party in the partnership they will come and they will speak to you either to congratulate you or because they have a query the next thing

is networks right you need to build a physical presence and a physical presence builds you a brand you need to be there or send someone to every industry event keep tabs on every industry event now how do you know which industry events are relevant to you and how do you know when they're coming up the right way to do this is to use Google Alerts I'm not going to help you on this just go to google and type Google Alerts and it will run you through a process where you can set up alerts for certain keywords make sure you set up keywords for the words events for sale textiles if you're in the textile industry and for your city say Bangalore if you're in Bangalore when you go to an event make sure you exchange cards but more important in the card is exchanging a number and an email if you do not get a person's number and email and only get their card it is not as useful because the other person does not have your number or your emails stored on their phone you need to make sure that they have your number stored on their phone so when you call them it doesn't seem like it's a random number calling that is the number one most important thing I tell my sales reps when they go for events make sure that when you call a potential customer your name is saved on their phone always refer to the event in your first email or card to them I think this should be called let me just chain that very quickly so always refer to the event this builds familiarity because a lot of these busy people get a lot of emails per day and to break through the noise you need either a referral or you need to mention to them something that will catch their eye if they've been to a particular event and they recognize the name of the event then you being in their email and mentioning that event triggers an unconscious response set a KPI of getting at least 50 numbers per event a KPI like I mentioned is a key performance indicator make sure you tell everybody in your team especially if you're a team of three or four people that go to an event to get at least fifty numbers or more if it's a bigger event because that's fifty opportunities maybe only 10% of those opportunities will go into a deal but that is still an opportunity because as a family business because you're making bulk orders you don't need too many opportunities you just need a few good ones so that's it

for this quick primer on how to upgrade your family business all of these sections whether it be cold calling cold emailing advertisements networks we're gonna go through all of that in depth in the metas art of course if I have saved any of you from going to a business school just to learn how to upgrade your family business then I consider my job done metastar will have all the content necessary we will expand on every slide in this deck through the rest of the course so I want you to make sure you take a look at the rest of the course if you are interested now all of this content was free but I'll need a favor in 2018 Avalon invested in six companies and most of these investments were made from our own revenues this year we're raising a second fund and we're investing in several more companies now like I told you this content is free I don't expect anything in return but if this content helped if it's helped your business even a little bit I'd like you to share you the meeting between my CEO Shashank and a decision maker from your business it could be your father uncle whoever it is if you can make this introduction to a family business for us just CC Shashank at Avalon labs or Co in any email with a decision make up manager or CEO of that business we'd be super thankful for you we're building an electronic registry of all the family offices in India and unifying them so that we can launch a bigger fund on top of them to do this we'll need introductions and the best way to get these introductions is through you guys especially if you enjoyed and value this content alright

guys that's it for me and be sure to tune in to the rest of Mehta startup because we have some exciting content especially more in-depth content on how to build a website how to do cold calls how to write cold emails we're going to go through all of those things in depth throughout the course so make sure you follow me on Instagram and tune into my youtube channel which means subscribe so guys because next time you see an ad that promises to teach you something and you really want to learn it just DM it to me on Instagram and you know if the topic is interesting enough I probably cover the entire course syllabus by myself within ten or twenty minutes this is me calling you today go make your family proud and they ask you how you did it tell them I learned it for free on my - startup or odd