Team Memos That Helped Me Grow 3 Businesses to $200M

This simple habit helped me grow 3 businesses to $200M in revenue.

Here’s how it works:

Every week, I send a team memo that outlines exactly what we need to move the company forward, with or without me.

By reading this memo, my team knows what to work on, what's a priority, and why. It helps them make big decisions without my input.

Here’s how to create a team memo to keep your team aligned and focused on moving the business forward.

Align Your Team Around The Business Model

Everyone in the company should be rowing towards the same goal.

Unfortunately, most companies fail miserably at communicating the right information to their team.

A lot of useless information leads to frustration and wasted time. Too little information causes confusion, leading to poor decisions.

When you communicate with your team you should have one simple goal: to align the team with the business model.

To achieve that alignment, my team memo is broken down into three main sections:

1. Mission & Values

2. Where We’re Going

3. Week Update

I often envision a team member reading the memo while I’m out on vacation, unable to ask me to clarify a key point. I’ll do my best to keep it concise and digestible.

Our path should be achievable, too.

Let’s dive into each section.

Mission & Values

I used to wonder how often you need to talk about your mission and values, until I realized you can't ever stop talking about them.  You should be repeating this so often that you’re tired of hearing yourself.

Where We’re Going (and how we’ll get there)

It’s not enough for your team to hear this once a year, or worse, only on the day they were hired. You’re likely on a long, challenging journey ahead.

Inspiring your team should go beyond what you want to achieve, but also what path you will take to get there.

Company KPIs

When I worked for my first startup, I remember the CEO throwing up a slide that had at least 12 KPIs during each all hands meeting. To this day I have no idea what we were trying to achieve. “Growth” was thrown around, but it was hard to know where that growth needed to happen to make the most impact.

Instead we tried everything, and achieved nothing.

You should have two or three company KPIs. I start by outlining the KPI that has the biggest impact for the business (usually a growth metric), with a metric that helps us measure our efficiency second.

For example at Butlr Health, our growth KPI is # of booked therapy sessions, and our efficiency metric is revenue per consumer.

Everyone in the company is aligned around these two metrics, so they can determine which initiatives make sense for the company.

Business Problems To Solve

Teams that tend to make the most progress, are ruthlessly focused on solving one or two business problems at a time.

These are critical problems that will unlock the business to move into another phase.

Company Roadmap

Your team can better understand your vision when they can see how the business will get there.

The company roadmap changes over time, the vision does not.

Engineering/Product Roadmap

Now that we know where we are going, and how we’re going to get there, the engineering roadmap helps us understand what technology we need to build to get there.

Week Update

As you can probably tell by now, the two sections above are what keep our team aligned on what to work on, why, and how to take action on it.

This next section highlights what we learned from the previous week, as well as what we achieved (or didn’t achieve).

We’ll use this to section to determine:

• Do we need to cut initiatives that are no longer a priority?

• Are we using our resources effectively?

• Are we working on the right things?

• Is the team aligned?

• Are we making high-quality decisions?

Here’s a snapshot of what I include in this section. I won't go into detail on these, as this is all pretty straight forward data:

1. Wins/Didn't Go Well

2. My Insights From The Week

3. Business Problems We Solved

4. Revenue + Customer Acquisition #s

5. Team Achieved/Working On

6. Product Shipped/Working On
   ​

Our team needs to see the whole company picture, not just the slice of the area they work on. With this weekly team memo I've been able to keep my teams aligned to move the business forward, with or without me.

How To Delegate Your Inbox

About two years ago, I finally nailed how to delegate my inbox. With the help of my EA, and our email system, I am able to spend approximately 10 minutes a day on email across all four of my businesses.

Here’s a breakdown on how I delegate my inbox.

I try to spend as little time as possible in areas where I am prone to being reactive. Email sucks me in like no other. It seduces me to want to make every single one of those emails disappear.

And of course I could. It would take me just a few minutes to reply to an email.

The problem is that each of these small distractions quickly add up, pushing me into the realms of working in my business, instead of on it.

How We Use Email Across Four Businesses

Email is an ineffective way to keep updated on projects or for team discussions. It’s cluttered and often drowning in junk. The good stuff gets lost.

So to make our lives easier, we shifted internal communications to Notion and Slack. This shift alone easily reduced the time I spent in my inbox by at least 50%.

Email is only used for external communication, such as sales, hiring, partnerships, and customer service.

My EA works across all four businesses, which helps her intimately understand each business, how I work, and how I would respond to something.

We started out by creating templated responses for instances where the format didn’t change.

For example, when a founder reaches out for an intro to an investor, I respond with the same few sentences each time. I might occasionally change it, but the less I have to think the better. A quick email intro is not where I want to spend my energy thinking about how to do something I’ve done hundreds of times.

It’s easy for my EA to use a templated response to draft up the email.

Make It Easy To Share What You Know

Every day, my EA scans my meeting recordings, Twitter and emails for new questions I've answered. The responses are then tracked in Notion into what we call our Q&A info base.

Most emails I get are questions whose answers I have already shared elsewhere or with someone else. My EA will use our Q&A info base as a reference when drafting up a reply to an email.

As a result, my EA mastered how I answer different questions across each business so that she can step in without my input.

Email Diligence

For each email that hits my inbox, my EA performs diligence by using the framework below.

Her goal is to filter for the small percentage of emails that only I can reply to.

1. Does the email need a reply?

Most don’t. We’ll archive FYI and Thank You emails. There are instances where I might be on an unfortunate email chain where everyone loves to reply all. These will be muted with a reminder for my EA to review them weekly in case my actual input is needed.

2. Who needs to reply?

Many times someone on our customer support team, or a sales lead might be better suited to reply to the email. My EA will forward or loop them in to make sure the email gets answered without my input.

3. Can EA draft the reply?

98% of the time my EA can draft the reply on her own. She might use our Q&A info base, or her own knowledge here.

Drafts Folder > Inbox

Instead of opening my email to see a screaming inbox with hundreds of emails, I open up a quiet drafts folder. My EA has drafted up email responses that I will review and edit if needed.

Then I hit send.

Using my drafts folder I am intentionally working through only a handful of emails that need my attention.

Here’s an example of an email my EA helped draft with responses to three separate questions:

After delegating my inbox, I no longer spend my energy reacting to every single email that comes in. Instead, the work I do in my email is intentional, requiring little effort on my part.

When Your Revenue Is A False Positive

I received a number of DMs yesterday after I responded to Justin Jackson's tweet on a business' false positives.

Here's how the revenue that led to profitability turned out to be a false positive.

First, a little context on the business...

Butlr Health is a two-sided consumer marketplace that matches people with highly vetted therapists. The business started with a subscription model, offering a monthly and annual sub for therapists to join the platform. There was no cost to consumers who were matched with a therapist.

The Sales Process

When we first launched, our sales process was fully manual. We manually searched for sales leads. Then entered them into a spreadsheet. I did all of the sales meetings. We manually followed up. You get the picture.

After a few weeks we had nailed our messaging creating a framework for building a stable supply of therapists.

Within 2 months we were profitable.

Over the next few months we focused on streamlining the process to create a mini machine. We developed a beautifully predictable flywheel for getting from a lead to a sales meeting to onboarding a new customer. Automation was used to perform 75% of the sales process.

Hiring Sales Reps To Take Over Sales

Our sales process was ready to be scaled. So I hired two new sales reps to focus only on closing deals, removing myself from the process completely.

Although the team closed sales, we started seeing drastic changes in our sales patterns on the third month.

Therapists were no longer buying annual subs. 100% of our sales were now monthly subs. Then, we saw a high amount of churn. If a therapist wasn’t matched within 2 weeks, we were seeing them cancel their account before the month was even up.

What was happening?

The first thing you might think is that it was the sales team's fault here. It wasn't. They were fantastic. But what they couldn't have solved for themselves was the lack of trust the market would have in a new business.

The CEO Is Not The Business

When I was directly selling to therapists, my personal credibility was enough to stand in for the lack of brand trust and name recognition of a new company. 100% of my sales were annual subscriptions with little to no churn.

This helped us achieve profitability quickly as well as sustained cash flow.

Transitioning sales to a new team member had the opposite effect. 100% of our sales were now monthly subscriptions, and therapists were canceling quickly if they did not get a new client within a couple of weeks. Our cashflow dropped significantly, too.

The problem was clearly brand trust of a new company. Therapists weren’t signing up for our product because they believed in its value, they were signing up because they believed and trusted that I would provide them value.

This is fine when you’re first trying to get the business on its feet, but a false positive for scaling. You can only scale a business that works.

And I'm not the business.

Had we stayed on this route, trying to force it to work, we would have had a long, unnecessarily hard road.

So we had to start all over again.

What's The Fastest Way to Build Brand Trust?

I looked at two options:

1. Step back in to do direct sales until we built brand trust

2. Change the business model

Building brand trust in an industry where therapists are allergic to marketing could take years as a consumer company. Since I wasn’t interested in VC funding for this business, I knew that without capital for large scale branding and marketing efforts our path would be harder.

I was interested in the simplest solution with the least amount of effort and highest return.

After two weeks of experiments, we switched to a transactional model. Without the friction of needing upfront costs to join our platform, therapists had little to lose with a lot of upside.

The therapists fear of signing up with a new company quickly changed into helping the company succeed. We saw an increase in referrals. Therapists reached out asking how they could help or get involved.

The New Sales Process: Email

It's hard to change something that appears to be working. We had revenue and profitability with our initial business model. We just didn't have a business that worked.

When I had first hired a sales team, we focused on them understanding "who" we were selling to and "why", before understanding our product. The information our sales team had nailed helped us get super specific in our email messaging.

Email was now driving sales, so we heavily focused on personalized painkiller messaging without fluff. If you're not familiar with this concept, Cole summarizes it here well.​

Our team slimmed down, too, as we no longer needed help with sales meetings. The end result was a new sales flywheel that could scale. It took us a couple of months to really nail it, but our revenue and profit was no longer a false positive.

Why Your Team Can't Meet Their Goals

First time leaders often wonder why their team can't seem to meet their business goals. You may be surprised to learn that it's not the team but the leader that is often the cause.

Here are 5 behaviors to watch out for:

1. You Make 99% of The Decisions

2. You’re a KPI Hoarder

3. You Don’t Use a Decision Making Framework

4. Your Focus Is On Crossing Tasks Off Your List To Get A Dopamine Rush

5. Your Team Doesn't Have An Operational System to Work In

Let’s dive deeper into each one.

You Make 99% of The Decisions

The fear of failure creates an irrational need for control. I felt this with my first business. I decided that to make sure nothing went wrong, I'd make all the decisions in the business. It exhausted me, while demoralizing my team.

What does this look like? You might wonder why your team can’t run without you. Or feel that you don’t have people who can think on their own, or solve problems without you.

Instead of trusting that they are closer to the problem and capable, you insert yourself in, holding them back. They quickly learn that their job is to tee up the problem, while you make the decision on what to do. You do their job, not yours.

Your job is to help them make decisions by removing obstacles out of their way.

Your job is to empower your team so they can run without you.

You’re a KPI Hoarder

Tracking too many KPIs is counterproductive as too much information becomes useless. It's a waste of time, energy, and attention.

Instead, keep track of a few KPIs that will help you get to the business outcomes you want.

You Don’t Use a Decision Making Framework

Without one, you can’t quickly prioritize the most important areas to work on for the business. Instead decisions become heavy, hard and feel like the world will collapse if you get it wrong.

The more time you spend over-analyzing, the less chance your team has of meeting their goals.

The most successful businesses consistently make quick, high-quality decisions. A simple decision making framework will help you remove the emotion out of prioritizing.

Your Focus Is On Crossing Tasks Off Your List To Get A Dopamine Rush

Ahhh, the feeling of getting things done... even when they are not where your time should be spent. You know someone else should have done these, but you can do them faster than they can.

The business needs you to work on its most important priorities, but you don’t have time for that, because, well…dopamine.

My friend Chase recently shared his rabbit hole time waster. As did I. We all do it, but if you let this get the best of you...you're screwed my friend.

Your Team Doesn't Have An Operational System to Work In

Instead, communication is fragmented and messy, so they have a tough time doing their job. They’re constantly distracted without boundaries protecting their time and headspace, which creates anxiety and stress.

A team achieves outcomes with less effort when they spend their time focusing on doing their best work. Removing the chaos with an operational system helps your team know where to communicate and how. It's easy to find information, so energy is preserved, not wasted.

Decide early where you want your team to spend their time, energy and efforts. Do you want it spent on all the crazy distractions? Or on figuring out how to achieve the desired business outcomes?

Here's an example of what we use for running Butlr. Ours is Notion based, but you can use whatever platform you prefer. The key is to have a central location where the team’s work is organized, resources are easy to access, and communication is centralized.

​
In Summary

When your team is not reaching their outcomes, take a hard look at whether you're what's standing in their way.