One of the things that's been helping
Experiment 27 stay afloat and stay profitable
is accountability from mentors.
And, in this video I want to run through,
we've been doing a monthly mentor update,
basically there's a list of people
that I've been sending information on our company to,
and I wanna run through one of these exact updates
to show you the benefits of doing it,
and give you an easy example you can use
to keep your mentors updated with your business.
This is the exact update that I sent out in November.
You can see it's got the good news,
the bad and the ugly news, it's got our revenue for
the month of November, 2016 in here, our pipeline,
our big strategic questions, and links to past updates.
The reason why I send this out is
one of the most valuable things that
you have in your network that you're probably
not taking advantage of are other entrepreneurs
or other business owners that want to follow your story,
and also want to give you feedback
and that can help you out.
So, sending these updates out that have your exact revenue,
you don't have to reveal these publicly,
but sending it to, like, five or six people
will hold you accountable, right.
You'll know that you have to report
on how your business is doing every month,
so it'll keep you doing it,
and then also, you'll get really valuable advice.
I've gotten some great advice from the people
that I've been sending these out to.
This idea came from Techstars.
Here's a post on the Techstars blog from 2016
that goes over a monthly investor update.
We don't have investors at Experiment 27,
so I tweaked it and then just sending it out to mentors.
So, I'm gonna link that down in the description.
You can check out that post.
And, that brings us to what to include,
and in this, I'm gonna run through
our actual November, 2016 numbers.
It's far enough in the past that it's okay to reveal,
plus I think I already revealed this
in a past video, so it's totally fine.
So, the good, we crossed the 400,000 ARR mark,
added another 100k in 30 days, lol,
talked about how we hired eight people,
how we had one refund versus what we were having before,
which was a high refund rate, I was talking about
how good our sales team is, nothing really bad,
and then our key performance indicators here.
So, last month's actual revenue,
this month's actual revenue, forecast
and then how we did versus the forecast last month.
And then, also the marketing pipeline,
talkin' what's coming, and then questions
that I have for the people, and then also any asks.
So, whether they have favors they can give,
you ask about that there, and then link to the past updates.
All of our past updates are in a Google drive
so anyone can go back and see what happened in the past.
And it's as simple as that.
Just by putting the numbers down
and sending them to your mentors,
you're going to improve, right.
What gets measured gets managed,
and what gets measured publicly
and has embarrassment tied to it
is more likely to improve over time,
as I've seen with the revenue for our company
going up every single month, except for December, 2016.
And, the last part is where do you get the mentor list?
Right, who are these people that I'm emailing this to?
Well, they're trusted people in my circle.
So, one of them is one of my
former bosses who I really look up to.
Another one is a friend that runs a business that
I randomly met staying in a hacker house in San Francisco.
And then a few others are bloggers
and YouTubers that I really look up to.
One that specifically asked for updates on the company
after I interviewed him on this YouTube channel,
and then the others that I've just
been sending without permission.
One unsubscribed, but then the other
is still getting the updates and loves 'em.
So, that's the way to do it.
Do I recommend just spamming these updates
to all of your mentors and seeing who responds?
I do recommend it because most people
are interested in this type of thing,
especially if you're actually crushing it.
You can even send the updates to me,
alex@experiment27.com if you want to do similar.
I'm actually gonna make this Google doc available,
or a copy of this available, so you can go
and you can have access to this from your own updates
if you want to follow this on your own.
Hopefully you found this video valuable.
Feel free to like it to encourage
this type of content on YouTube.
Subscribe for more B2B sales training,
and if you need marketing support for your digital agency,
check out experiment27.com.
Thanks.