Creating a Monthly “State of The Union” Video

0:00Got a little quickie episode for you here. I'm on my way out to a beer share and I want to get some steps in and I have one specific thing to talk about and I don't think it's going to require that much verbal thinking about. Anyway, so I was talking with someone on my team who runs our customer service. We have a meeting, like a standing meeting every Thursday at around 10 a.m. And the last meeting that we had was very, very short. It's probably less than 10 minutes because the every single time we have a meeting, which is the point, I think, of what we're trying to do, is we just keep improving the SOP over and over and over again. So what we're doing for customer service specifically is we run, you know, we have a week of answering emails, answering DMs, things like that, right? And we have an SOP on how to handle

1:06every single situation that comes up. Now, of course, what we sell isn't that complex and so there's not a lot of complexities to our customer service as there would be for a company, let's say, where the deliverables are much more hands-on, you're operating a service company, ours are like, hey, did your book arrive at the right time? Do you want to refund pretty simple stuff, right? And we don't sell that many products. So again, our SOP is fairly simple. However, each week, some new stuff pops up, but very rarely does it pop up. So when we have these meetings, we go over, okay, hey, is there anything that popped up this week where you were unsure of what to do? And there might be one, maybe two things, right? But each time we go through it, we go, okay, let's make a decision. So if it's like, hey, we keep getting questions about this in the course. Okay, well, instead of updating our SOP, let's update our sales page, or let's update our onboarding emails,

2:12or let's update something so we can stop these questions from even coming into the first place, right? So this was, this is how we run our meetings. Each meeting is an effort to improve the SOP at some level, whether that's, okay, we keep getting this question, here's how we respond to it, or we keep getting this question, we're going to fix something in the larger scheme, maybe more upstream, that stops this question from happening. Those are really the two scenarios. Now, there's the third scenario where things are changing within the business. And if things change in the business, and I'll explain a few ideas here, how do we let customer service know? And customer service currently is one person that could change in the future, but right now it's one person, right? So how do we let her know that things are changing so that she can update the SOP herself,

3:15or respond appropriately to customer service questions without having a meeting every week, where I'm like, guess what? This is what happened this week in our business, et cetera. Now, some things that might change in the business, for example, is, hey, we've updated our course, or we have a new edition of our book coming out, or hey, you know, we added this new feature to our app, we updated the websites, or it reflects this, things that we've, like, big major tasks that we've done in the business. Hey, we added these two new articles to our website. So now if you ever get questions about hot tubs freezing, we now have an article that we can refer them to. We've added these helpful videos to our app. We changed the way the app functions this way. We've added a new lesson to the course. Again, we've updated our website somewhere. We, I'm trying to think of other stuff. We published these 12 videos on social media. We published

4:20these four videos on YouTube, things like that. All information that not only does customer service need to know about, but I think it's important that the whole company knows that we accomplish these things. Now, the whole company currently is four of us. It's me, it's my wife, Steph, my brother Chris, and customer service. Her name is Kayla. That's our, that's our team right now. So, you know, Chris is our editor, like Steph is, Steph is the only creating the content. Chris is our editor and Kayla is doing all our customer service. I obviously know everything that's happening in the business because I have my hands and kind of everything. So I don't need to know this stuff. I don't need to know how many books we sold this month. I don't need to know, you know, I know all that stuff. Now, Steph doesn't know that stuff. All she knows is what she did. She knows that she published, you know, two or six articles, whatever. She knows that she wrote these

5:24scripts, but she's never seen them. She doesn't like go on to our YouTube channel like see the final product and have any say toward that. She knows the videos that she helped create, but she doesn't see the final product. And you might be thinking, that's silly. Why wouldn't she not see that? It's because we all operate, or at least the three of them besides me, all operate in very isolated buckets. And this has always been the case. Now, none of these things are secret. They, you know, like my brother can go look at our website and see what articles are published. He could go into Shopify. He has access. He can see how many books we sold. He can see the performance of all of our social media channels because he has access to all those things. Does he actually proactively do that? No. He doesn't need to in order to do his job. His job is simply to edit a video better. Now, where this, where I'm, where I'm getting at is it does make sense that Kayla see that we

6:29have new articles on our website that we have new videos that we've published. These are pieces of content that she can use as reference for people who are asking questions via email and DM. She needs this context. It's helpful for her job to have this context. It's also helpful to know, hey, we added this new feature to the app because if she starts getting app questions, what she certainly does, then she knows, oh, well, yeah, the app does this, right? It's like everyone should have a copy of our book, you know, not for any other reason, then I understand what our business does. Like it's just a more general understanding of everything that we do, but on top of that, I believe it's just more important as I become, as I move more and more into the role of a true CEO rather than just a guy who owns a business and does work in it. I am starting to think about

7:35how communication flows through the business. I think it is important as we grow the team, if that even does happen, that everyone kind of understand what it is that we do and what kind of output we create. And to feel like they have a sense of like, oh, this is our company. I can, I can feel it. I can see it. I understand it. I am not just a single cog in a machine and I actually don't know what the machine does. It's like that scene in and or where they're all building parts for the death star, but they don't know that's what they're there for because they're just in jail. That's kind of the way we operate now, except that, you know, we have windows. You can look out the window and see what it is you're building and we do have, you know, we, everyone kind of knows, but no one is proactive in going and seeking that. Why should they be honestly? I don't

8:38know if I would. However, I might just be more interested in the average person, but I wouldn't either. So something that I told Kayla that we would start doing and I think it's a good idea is to do what I'm calling a state of the union video. And this is something that I will do at the beginning of every month as a part of my monthly, you know, get all your numbers in order. I, you know, every month, I or at the beginning of every month, I sit down and I say, okay, I have a spreadsheet, how much traffic do we get, how many subscribers do we get, how many, you know, how many books do we sell, how much money do we make, et cetera. And I put those all, all those numbers into a spreadsheet that only I really see. And I do this because it's like, I just need to have the data for reference when questions like this come up, but I don't actively share that information with everybody. And it's been a long time. I really never need it to do

9:39this, but now I feel like that the team's a little bit bigger. I'm starting to feel more like a CEO. I feel like, hey, maybe some people in our company will have good ideas that we can implement and improve the business. So let's be more transparent with this. Let's, let's make this proactive. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to, on that day where I do all this work, I'm going to film a loom video and a loom video of me just sitting at the computer saying, okay, it's January 1st, you know, let's look at what we did in December. All right, here's how much revenue the company brought in. Most of this came from book sales. We ran, here's the emails that we sent out. Here's how the emails did. And this is going to be a fairly long video I imagine. Okay, here are the, you know, the shorts that we put out. Here's the ones that did the best. You know, hey, if anybody has any ideas for more shorts, leave them in the comments. If you think

10:41we can improve on some of these older shorts and make them a little bit better, I think that would be a good idea. Let's look at the emails. Oh, this email did really well. Why do we think it did well? Let's take a look at it and look at the email and see. Let's go through our story posts, our, our, here we published six articles this month. Let's take a look at Semrush and see how we're doing there. Okay, cool. Like the work that we're doing is improving. Let's look at our traffic numbers. Let's look at our subscriber numbers. Let's look at everything, right? And then kind of give like an overview or a state of what, like, like what state the business is in that month and what we've accomplished. And maybe as I'm sitting there, you know, describing what we've accomplished, start to mention things that, oh, I think we could do better here. How do we do better here? And then the team can leave comments in the loom video that I could perhaps turn into task

11:45and delegate throughout the business. And so this is something I'm going to try in 2026. I think it's a good idea. I don't think it's obviously it's a company, it's almost sort of like a company newsletter of like here's what's happening in the business. And I think it also gives everyone sort of a general understanding of like what we've done. And I think too, depending on how I am as a leader, if I am a, you know, if I'm a dick, you know, and I'm like, you know, we need to, you know, like, I don't know who did this, this in this company or whatever, but like this fucking socks and we need to do better here. Like that's not going to boost morale. It's just going to be like, God, he's getting reigned out on this, on this, you know, earnings call. Jesus Christ. You know, it's like, no, the point is like, hey, here's what happened. Everyone did their job. This is great. Do we see any problems as a team? Where do we think as a group

12:52we can do better? Or do we have any ideas to maybe help one another? And I think being a leader in that way and listening and, but also being communicative, because that's the thing with business and it's something I just talked about in the previous episode. I think a lack of communication is such an easy solve and can really make a business like can really like grow a business by just being more communicative with your customers and your team. And so that's the practice that I'm employing going forward. So that's the whole idea. I'm recording this about a week before the end of the month where I'm going to be recording my first video. I'm probably not going to have anything to report beside, you know, like, hey, I made the video. So I just thought it was an idea worth sharing. And if you work with a team

13:58or just one other person and you, you know, you don't have monthly meetings, I think this is a good idea. Like very rarely do I, I don't like the reason I like this idea as opposed to a full-on meeting is because meetings take up a lot of time. You have to get everybody on the same page, everyone has to join, everyone gets a chance to speak. You know, there's pleasant trees that need to be exchanged, all of those things. I'm not saying anything that any of that is bad. I'm just saying it just takes time. Like meetings just take time. But if you treat it like as an internal newsletter that people can comment on, then it's like, hey, each person on the team can watch it at their own time and respond in text, which can easily be converted into a task or not. And by writing it and taking your time analyzing it, it's not a, in the moment, there's no

15:01prep work that needs to be done. It's just, hey, here's the state of the union. How do we feel it's just going? Thumbs up, thumbs down, where do you think you can improve? Does anybody have any ideas? And then great, everyone watches that at their own time. Somebody collects all of the feedback, which would be me, sticks it in the Asana project to do certain things here and there. And it's, I think it's a lot more productive than having like a giant team meeting. I think team meetings are great. And I'm going to continue to have them one-on-one. I have one-on-ones with staff, my brother, and Kayla. But to just have this big group action, I think is a good idea. So that's the whole episode. Let me know what you think. Shoot me an email, madatmoneylab.co, and I'll talk to you next time.