Success has a lot to do with your sense of being Find out how to train yourself to make money and stay in tune with your mind, body and soul
Hey r/entrepreneur,
It’s time for our irregular check-in! For anyone unfamiliar, we started BillFixers, a business negotiating cable, internet, and cell phone bills.
When last we spoke we’d just overcome a huge rush of signups from articles in USA Today and Bloomberg Businessweek. Little did we know, that was just the start!
In January, thanks to some excellent articles by consumer advocate Bob Sullivan, we had both NBC Nightly News and The New York Times reach out to us on the same day. I was in disbelief, my brother was in disbelief, my friend who works in PR in Nashville (and helped us nab our Tennessean article) was in disbelief.
Our excitement quickly turned to panic as both the NYT writer and NBC both wanted to fly to Nashville to do interviews during the same day, neither could schedule another time, and the NYT writer refused to do the interview if the TV crew was there. As we’d agreed to the NYT article first (by a few hours), to our own horror (and their surprise), we found ourselves telling NBC we’d have to cancel. However, as luck would have it, they were able to reschedule for 2 days later.
Both interviews went smoothly, fortunately. The NYT focused on the ‘ethical’ issues involved with negotiating with these cable companies, and reached out to the companies, federal agencies, and even the Tennessee Bar Association to try to get a quote that we were breaking some law. Fortunately, we had already done the necessary legal research and were well in the clear. (It was especially satisfying reading the comments on the article – turns out people think we’re a lot more ethical than the cable companies we fight.) Read the NYT article here!
We put up our new website in preparation for the rush. We moved over to FlyWheel (which has been fantastic - getFlywheel.com ) for hosting as our old host was unable to handle more than 20 people on the site at once. Turns out it was the best idea we’ve ever had. Here’s a quick picture of our numbers on Google Analytics as the NBC story aired live. (I've also got a video of the live traffic, if anyone's interested.)
And if you want you can watch the NBC piece as well, here.
Last time we gave some stats, so I figure we’ll update them!
Stats:
| Date | July 29, 2015 | November 12, 2015 | June 1, 2016 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clients | 411 | 1,028 | 4,500 |
| Negotiators | 3 | 7 | 24 |
| Total Savings | $115,000 | $250,000 | $900,000 |
While I’ve spent a lot of time on the update, what I want to get to are the issues that we've been facing in the aftermath of trying to quadruple the size of the company in 6 months. In short, the hardest part is finding time to get everything done that needs to get done. I’ll delve into a couple of the main problems we’ve had scaling up (and what we’ve done thus far to solve it). We’re very open to suggestions as to what will help!
Scaling Issues:
As we’ve gained more customers, it’s become clear what the choke points in our process are. Right now we do a lot of things ‘by hand’ that many companies automate. It’s been a bit of a balancing act figuring out what is best suited as ‘high touch’ and what we can automate (and afford to automate) without having any negative effect on our negotiations or our customers.
A few examples:
1. We manually rename each bill we receive to keep track of them more easily. That’s no problem when it’s 100 bills. When it’s 4,000 bills, it quickly becomes overwhelming. As this is entirely internal, the decision is easy! We’re working on automating this, as it would make us run faster and keep everyone happier.
2. Right now we also send out the results of our negotiation via handwritten email (with a few shortcuts). We’re still developing a more comprehensive website that people will be able to log-in to in order to submit bills, check statuses, and pay invoices, but we don’t want to lose the personalized touch of an email. Of course, email has its downsides, as it’s not nearly as transparent and it takes far more time on our end. We CAN automate this and just have our system automatically send results and post them to the customers account, but it will be very expensive and customers might like it less!
3. Customer service: Until this year, Ben and I sent out every email that came from an @billfixers.com address. We had an eye for exactly what we wanted to say and didn’t trust anyone else to do it. Our cousin was the first negotiator and we brought him on as the first to help out with emailing too. These days, some of our negotiators communicate directly with clients, which helps efficiently a lot. We just hired our first full time customer service guy.
It's hard giving up the micro-management since our goal originally was a company with excellent customer service, but there just weren't enough hours in the day and people were getting slow responses. We're still there for complicated situations or people who want to ask us directly, but for the 90% of people who don't care who they're talking to, we can have someone who can give that all of their focus while we focus on growing the business and making it more efficient. Ultimately, people are now getting an even better customer service experience and we're not having to spend every minute on it, so it's a win win.
I think our next move will be to build a group of trusted customers that we can ask questions about the business. There are lots of ideas we play with that we aren’t sure whether or not to implement, and this would help give us guidance from the people who are the ultimate drivers of everything we do.
Livestream Q+A
We’re also considering a live-stream Q&A this afternoon from 4PM EST-5PM EST. We’d been doing this on our facebook page but perhaps youtube would be a better option? Would this be something you guys would be interested in participating in? Which platform would you prefer?
tl;dr We’re figuring things out as we go – sometimes it’s hard to find the choke points in your process before it’s a problem, so just be ready to adapt!
No comments:
Write comments