S1E5 - Alita Harvey-Rodriguez - Mistakes to Millions: Alita's Guide to Transforming Marketing Mishaps into Major Wins

Jim Banks [00:00:00]:
It is fantastic to have you on the show today for the benefits of those people listening. We first met back in 2014 in the Gold coast in Australia when we were both speaking at a friend of ours show called Retail Global. Actually, I don't think it was called retail global then was it went through a phase where it about 17 different names.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:00:19]:
It was not PESA anymore.

Jim Banks [00:00:21]:
Right.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:00:21]:
It was something else.

Jim Banks [00:00:22]:
Something else. So Phil Leahy, good friend of both of ours, he put on this show, invited me to speak, invited Alita speak. I had the opportunity to meet her, spend some time with her amazing speaker. If you ever get the opportunity to see Alita speak, then take the opportunity to do that. So, Alita, welcome to Bad Decisions with Jim Banks. Good to have you here.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:00:40]:
Best time, Bad Decisions with Jim Banks. Actually, it was at that show that I learnt Bad Decisions with Jim Banks.

Jim Banks [00:00:49]:
Yeah, can be people who think, how long has Bad Decisions been around? See, it's probably been about ten years. I think that was when the phrase was coined. And funny enough, Alita and I were talking in the green room about where else we'd been. We talked about Boston. We went to HubSpot's inbound event in Boston and we were staying with. Phil had booked an Airbnb for all of him and his team. And Alita and I, we jumped on the bandwagon. So Phil was sleepwalking a little bit and Alita and Olivia and I, so we were out on the balcony and we got locked out.

Jim Banks [00:01:23]:
And so Phil came down and I went into the kitchen to get a drink and we were knocking on the windows and he just completely ignored us. I think he was literally sleepwalking.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:01:32]:
He was sleepwalking and he just smiled and waved at us and then just went off to bed.

Jim Banks [00:01:38]:
So in the end, Olivia shimmied down the drains at the side of the Airbnb, go through the front door and let us in. Otherwise you could still be stuck in that Airbnb in Boston now, I think.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:01:49]:
So if there wasn't that ladder and Olivia climbing down, I think we definitely would have been stuck. Because even the next day when we told Phil about it, he goes, oh, did I see you guys? I didn't know that. And then announced that he was renowned to Sleepwalk sometimes evening.

Jim Banks [00:02:12]:
That's one of our Bad Decisions together. So tell us a little bit about who. Where are you? What do you do? All that sort of stuff.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:02:19]:
Cool. So I'm Alita. I am the founder and managing director of MI Academy. We're Australia's most awarded project based training firm. We specialize in digital marketing, customer experience and innovations, and organizational change. So they're the four areas that we operate in and have a lot of fun helping businesses to think more innovatively, more creatively, and drive better results out of their marketing and their team. So that's that piece. I've been doing this for roughly about ten years now, I think, and my career started off I was working for a number of marketing automation companies and at the time I was getting kicked out of a lot of boardrooms.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:03:02]:
Just saying marketing automation isn't going to be a thing. We're still doing direct mail. Come back and talk to us if this ever takes off. Mind you, four years later, I was getting a lot of calls from ceos saying, help, we need help. Come and fix our database. Things aren't working for us. No worries here. We should.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:03:24]:
Well, I'm located in Australia, if you can't.

Jim Banks [00:03:27]:
And yes, I was going to say, where are you?

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:03:30]:
One fun fact about Australians is the only time we actually say mate is when we're overseas and or if we don't, like.

Jim Banks [00:03:40]:
Oh, ok. That's interesting to know. So if I see you calling somebody mate, then I know where that sits.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:03:47]:
It's a passive Australians, that's for sure.

Jim Banks [00:03:51]:
So whereabouts in Australia are you?

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:03:53]:
I'm in Victoria, in Melbourne.

Jim Banks [00:03:57]:
Right. Ok. Because I follow you on Instagram and I see pictures of you and you seem to be traipsing around a farm sometimes. Tell me a little bit about that. What's that all about?

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:04:07]:
I really have the best of both worlds in my life and I feel so blessed. And not one day goes by where I'm not grateful for what I have in my world. So during the week for work, I'm here in Melbourne and then I'm up in what I like to refer to as God's country, which is up around the Kings Valley region, up near bright. It's in the northeast of Victoria. There's a lot of ski fields and just stunning. I think it's the biggest quartz deposit. Crystal quartz deposit in the southern hemisphere is here in a mountain called Mount Buffalo and got about 54 acres, bunch of cows, a couple of horses, about an acre's worth of vineyard that we do wine with every couple of years. Not every year you get great or.

Jim Banks [00:04:55]:
Just drink it yourself.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:04:58]:
Actually, in 2020, I stopped drinking, so love sharing it and the rest of the family definitely enjoy it. And I always cook with it because that's my passion and love food cooking.

Jim Banks [00:05:10]:
And that doesn't count for drinking, though, does it? If you cook with it.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:05:13]:
I don't think so. Because all the alcohol gets evaporated. Exactly.

Jim Banks [00:05:19]:
That's the point there. We. So when we first met, the company was called Milkit Academy, which I thought was a great name for a business. Why did you change from Milkit Academy to MI?

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:05:30]:
Couple of reasons. So I loved Milkit as well. And it was on the premise of milk your business, for what it's worth, get everything out of it that you possibly can. Plug all the holes in your leaky bucket and we'll help you grow. But we started to make a transition and started to attract more enterprise accounts. And we were getting some feedback that there was negative connotation to that, that we were going to milk our clients, which was not in any way, shape or form what we wanted to portray into the market. And we were also starting to develop some programs in innovation. So having this marketing piece of the business and then the innovation part of the business, we sort of thought, well, we can still lean on mi, milket and marketing innovation Academy.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:06:14]:
It's probably time that we need to grow up.

Jim Banks [00:06:20]:
Some big girl pants, right?

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:06:21]:
Yeah, big girl pants on. And the team was starting to grow, and just these enterprise accounts, it just meant that we really needed to grow up. But before I met you, Jim, for a couple of years, I was just working as a consultant, and it was still as milk it, and it was milket digital strategy. And the logo was a cow that had these enormous utters with these beautiful nipples, and she was just this cow with this boobs on show.

Jim Banks [00:06:52]:
Love it. Absolutely love it. Okay, obviously, your primary focus is helping businesses with kind of project based training. Tell us a little bit about how that kind of works. What does it involve?

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:07:05]:
Yeah, so project based training is unique. There's only a few companies who do it around the world, and it is something that is definitely taking off and we've definitely been ahead of our time. And a lot of agency models in Europe are starting to shift towards this type of a model. So what this means is that we take a goal that you have in the organization. Like, we want to improve our email marketing revenue by 30% within the next 90 days. We have a team in the business who are marketers, but they aren't specialists in email marketing. In order for us to do that and to get to this result, we need to have specialist email marketers in the business. So instead of going out to an agency, we bring it back in house.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:07:51]:
We train those skills whilst we're executing on a project so that we can get that 30% uplift, by the way, we haven't hit anything less than 90% uplift in the last, since we started, basically within 90 days. So training the skills in house, executing at the same time. So you're recognizing the training investment with financial outcomes really quickly within the organization.

Jim Banks [00:08:18]:
Sounds good. I'm always amazed at how inefficient sometimes businesses are. And I think a lot of it is they don't know what they don't know. They have money, but they have problems to solve. And I think sometimes it takes an independent set of eyes and a look at a problem to actually see where the solutions fit. From that perspective, you're probably perfect for doing that. I've watched you present at conferences, I've watched you when you've exhibited at conferences as well. You and your team, very proficient, effective, and really good in uncovering the information that will help businesses and grow.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:08:50]:
Yeah, we're absolutely systemized around how we ask different questions. And not only are we trainers, we're also coaches. So we're really helping you to really digging deep to find out what that problem is, so that we can have laser focus on what's going to get you the best uplift, so that we can leave you with a formula that is replicatable, so that the value of what we do isn't just in the time that we spend with you, like an agency that will spend it with you on a campaign, and then that might be the end of it. It's replicatable and sustainable long term.

Jim Banks [00:09:21]:
And where does AI sit in your thought process? Because for me, at the moment, I'm trying to wrap my head around it. I went to a conference in Utah, Park City. I was part of the Sundance Film festival. I was just over there for 16 days, been in Vegas, then drove up to Utah to see a friend and see a client, and got invited to this AI event in Park City. And I was blown away by one. How many people were interested, but two, some of the business cases. What are your thoughts on AI in respect of, are you concerned about it? Do you think it's going to take away jobs, all the sort of things that people are worried about?

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:09:58]:
I think at the moment AI is still making a lot of mistakes, and we need to have that human intervention, and you can see when a brand goes AI first and takes away that human intervention, and there's so many mistakes that are made there because the systems aren't designed for empathy and they miss a lot of context. So I'm not concerned about it taking people's jobs. I think if we frame it correctly, we can help to use it to enhance people's jobs, which is how we're using it. We use it in a whole bunch of different ways. Everything from how do we develop and optimize copy, how do we use it to analyze data and find out when we should be sending emails or what we should be doing with a landing page based on the information that we can get out of things like GA four, Google Analytics four, and how do we use it to optimize project efficiency? So there's great tools out there. One of the organizational alignment piece that we do where we're working with teams to help them to become more efficient and put good rhythms and rituals in their business so that they can become more effective is really where we're using it as well. Monday is an amazing tool and has a lot of really good AI built into it in order to help businesses become more effective and efficient with their project management. Actually, I think the biggest opportunity for businesses right now, before they go and do any other projects, is to really get very efficient around project management because I see it all the time.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:11:28]:
Businesses are piling things on top of things on top of things, competing priorities, nobody really, their job descriptions start to become really wishy washy and you can't start to move up and through marketing efficiency, marketing maturity models without having good base ground for project management.

Jim Banks [00:11:48]:
We've been using a lot of tools for managing clients and internally we just got access to notion Q and a AI, which is literally going to come out in beta. Honest to God, it's like mind blowing what this thing can do if you ask it questions of everything in your entire database. We've got so much stuff in our database and I can just go ask questions of the database, show me the top five brands in e commerce or supplements or something like that, and it'll give me a list of all of the brands that we've got in our database. So I don't have to sit there and try and run a filter and sort and all that sort of stuff. I can kind of go in and ask it questions, which is one of the benefits of having something like AI, to be able to go and just ask questions of the data that you have.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:12:32]:
Everything that we're talking about here is the tip of the iceberg. What I'm really interested in and what I'll be focusing on in the future is what are some of the products that we can build in with AI in order to make Chat GPT a lot more effective for us. What are some of the integrations that we can use? Just kind of scratching the surface?

Jim Banks [00:12:53]:
I mean, I don't think that AI is ever going to take the place of a good handshake, a hug, a dinner, a lunch. I went to Utah, spent a week with my client. We went out for lunches and dinners, and I got to see the kids, and we went to a show in one of the theaters. And those are the sorts of things AI will never, ever be able to do. They'll never be able to create those experiences.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:13:15]:
It's a collaboration, of course.

Jim Banks [00:13:18]:
Absolutely. And for me, all about making things more efficient and effective. As an agency owner, I don't get paid for do overs. My team, if they make a mistake, we have to redo something. We're not going to get paid for the same job twice. So for me, using AI helps eliminate some of those fallible points where people stray off the track that they're supposed to be on and keep us focused on the job at hand.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:13:40]:
Exactly.

Jim Banks [00:13:43]:
Elise, I watched you on a webinar the other day. You're talking about hack games. When I was watching it, I'm like, wow, that sounds so interesting. Tell me a little bit about hack games.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:13:52]:
What's it all about? It's in its fifth year now. So this is our innovation incubator event for the retail and ecommerce industry in Australia. A couple of years ago, we did it across Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and New Zealand, all in one day. That was massive. How it all came about was in 2019. I was thinking, how do we get our community together and show them what we do at Mi Academy and what project based training and all the elements that go along with that can do for you as an organization. And it can't be a lunch and learn, because a lunch and learn is where I can do a product demo. We don't have a product to demonstrate.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:14:40]:
I can show you case studies. That's pretty boring. We've got plenty of them and you can download them. But how will we take people into an immersive learning environment, which is what project based training is, and show them what they can get out of it? And my thought was, well, hackathons are really great for that kind of thing. And I ran some really amazing hackathons for girls in tech when I was on their board. And I thought, why don't we do a competitive style hackathon event for the retail industry? And that's how hack games was born. So we collect about 50 people every single year. Those people have to apply in order to get through, because we want to make sure that we collect the right talent, that have the right set of skills.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:15:28]:
And it's not to say that you have to be a marketer to be a hacker or a hack games player. You have to either have finance background, you can have ops background. Because we like to create cross functional teams, because that's part of what we do when we're going through the innovation cycles at MI Academy. It's how we create efficiency so that people can experience what a cross functional team can do. Within a couple of days time, they're given a problem statement that they need to work through a whole bunch of innovation templates that we use in our innovation planning at MI Academy. And we give them about four every year. We rotate them every couple of years. Or if the problem statement needs a different type of template, we'll bring that in.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:16:10]:
And then they work through these templates in order to come out with the final exercise, which is what we call the crazy eight, where once you've gathered all your data and information, then you start to develop a whole bunch of different ideas in rapid fire. Then you go through an assumption busting process to find out which idea is actually the best one to solve the solution. Then you solve the problem, then you start to develop what the full solution is going to look like. And that gets pitched to a panel of judges this year, it's getting pitched to a bunch of different investors, and people are getting given hackbucks, and it's a crazy, fun, innovative day where people come in super nervous, not knowing what they're in for, and then they leave going, that was the best event I've ever been to. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Jim Banks [00:16:59]:
Just sounds like the apprentice, but for people without egos, basically, yes.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:17:05]:
Good way to put it.

Jim Banks [00:17:06]:
I've done a bit of speaking over the years, and we've gone to events, and I mean, like you, I've hosted a few events here and there. I've had clients that have run events and I know how stressful that can be. And again, I don't know what your thoughts are, but for me, I think that the event industry has really. I mean, although it's kind of back to normal, as in, like, everything's open, I don't really think the event industry got back to where it was prior to Covid. And I think it's probably because there's been a bit of a knock on of the venues that have opened up, have had this backlog of events that used to be in, say, October. Now they can't get books in October, so they have to try and find another slot. How do you actually choose which events to sponsor or exhibit at? Speak at, organize? Because for me, I'd love to get your take on what you think is the best way going to go about that.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:17:56]:
It's a big question. So we've got a couple of things that we look at. We won't attend events unless one of our team members can speak or invite a client up on stage. And typically we won't sponsor an event if it's just a panel. We want to have a breakout session or a keynote session, because we know what we do is really valuable and we know from history. The best way for us to get the most out of an event is to put one of us on stage so that we can collect leads and get people to come to the stand afterwards. In terms of attending an event, I'm really looking for something that has brilliant speakers who are going to be talking about something that I'm really interested in. And typically not too many vendors speaking on a stage, or if there are vendors speaking on a stage that they are with their clients, and that it's not a pitch fest for that vendor.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:18:58]:
I want to be making sure that I'm there to learn something, which is, I think, a real value when I'm speaking is that it's not a pitch fest. I really deeply care about helping the audience that I'm speaking with, so I'll give over more information than I usually need to, and people could leave something that I'm speaking at and know exactly what to do next if they've got the capabilities in their team.

Jim Banks [00:19:22]:
Do you think the audience has changed? When I first started speaking, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Literally, you'd stand on stage, you present, and there'd be like a queue of people that want to come and work with you afterwards. And it was fantastic, right? I loved it and it was great. But what I noticed was, as the industry has matured and evolved, what tends to happen now is that the people that attend the events are the people that work for the companies rather than the decision makers and budget hold. So the people that go don't have the authority to be able to say, hey, I want to hire you to do stuff. And the people that historically used to be there are not there anymore because they're focusing on running the business rather than learn what the best SEO techniques are. I didn't know if you found the same in your line.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:20:04]:
Yeah, definitely noticed that and I think it also comes down to the size of the business. There's a couple of things. So enterprise businesses are sending a lot of younger talent in to go and learn and develop, and then you've got the emerging businesses where you'll still sometimes get a founder showing up, maybe with two or three of their team, and they kind of disperse and go about their day in order to learn what they need to. Which is why I think when it comes to marketing a b to b business, you have to think like a consumer based business, because you're dealing with a person at the end of the day. So you need to have a mixture of what are you writing in industry publications right through to where you're speaking. And then, of course, you need to have the digital element, which is YouTube's Reels TikTok.

Jim Banks [00:20:53]:
Yeah. Involved with retail global. And Phil, in his event, was his passion. He raised a ton of money for good causes, and one of the causes that he raised money for was the retail orphanage initiative, which I think was original, like a us thing. But you're now involved in that in Australia, is that right? Or is it the whole of Southeast Asia Australasia?

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:21:23]:
Yeah, really, really good time to bring this one up. Because Phil, if anything, he's an incredibly passionate human being and he loves helping people, and he's so genuine about the way that he goes about that. And it was started in the United States, and Phil wanted to bring a chapter here, and he asked me if I would be the chairperson of that charity, because I had previous board experience with other charities. And naturally, I said yes because of Phil's passion. But also the projects that had been done over the last couple of years, we've raised about a quarter of a million dollars, and we've done some amazing things, like built a hospital in Haiti in a town called Bursi, which is one of the poorest towns in the world. And some of the stories that come out from there are just heartbreaking.

Jim Banks [00:22:12]:
I remember watching the video that was made when they were talking about the kids eating glass that bad been baked in the sun and clay, tears running down my face. It was like, horrible. I say horrible. It wasn't horrible. I mean, it was an amazing video, great story, and fantastic that Phil and Jeremy and a whole bunch of people went to Haiti, sought this hospital out because it bad been closed for such a long time. I was happy to put up a day of my time as a consulting the auction that always kind of raised such great. And they used to sell a box of nothing, which was fantastic to watch.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:22:45]:
Thousand dollars for a box of nothing.

Jim Banks [00:22:47]:
I'm going to get John Lawson as a guest on the podcast. But I just wanted to make sure that whatever was bid for my day got more than whatever was bid for John's day. And neither of us were ever going to be able to beat Bob Schwartz, because Bob Schwartz was always going to be able to throw extra things onto his day and make it worthwhile for the person that was going to be bidding for him. Ultimately, all it meant was that the charity got tons of more money.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:23:12]:
Yeah. One of the stories that really stands out in my mind for RoI was, and this is why we built the hospital. So the mud cakes thing, the women in the town make mud cakes and sprinkled a little bit of salt, and they dry it out on a basketball court. And that's what the children eat. There's about 60,000 orphans every year in Haiti. They've got generational child trafficking challenges that people have been having children in order to traffick them so that they can feed themselves. And it's been going on for generations now, and it's going to take another three generations to stop that. There's a lot of organizations that will send down canned foods, and they'll send down bikes and all sorts of things, but what these people really need is sustainable farming, which we've gone and built farms there now so that they don't have to eat mud cakes.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:24:06]:
We've built schools that also have safe housing in it for children. These kids are living in sticks under sticks with some cardboard over it, and hoping that they're going to stay safe from traffickers. I just can't even believe that's a multi billion dollar industry around the world. It's sickening that people would want to do this to children. And the hospital was built because when Phil was there, there was a woman who was laying on a doorstep, and she'd had a miscarriage, and she was bleeding heavily, and she was going to die. And Phil said, how can we help this woman get to a hospital? And the people said, there's no hospital, but there is a hospital. It's just not operational, because the government is so corrupt there. And they pointed to this building that was derelict down the road, and that became our mission for the year.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:24:58]:
And we understood how much money we needed to get that hospital up and running, and we made that happen. And a really proud moment in our fundraising to see that hospital come alive. I think there was about 270 people that went through that hospital in the first couple of days of just people that needed medical attention and really makes me so proud to be able to do this. In the next twelve months, we're shifting our focus from international aid into local aid because we have a major problem here in Australia as well with child safety. You can't legally adopt a child here in Australia. They can only go into foster care, which has a whole bunch of complexities and issues around it. There's so many charities that are trying to do something, but these children are so poorly loved and in and out of the system that they're fundamentally heartbroken and broken and just go into an abuse cycle. It's awful.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:26:00]:
So we're trying to shift our focus here to make sure that we can get children the safety that they need. We want to lobby with the government to make changes and reform the foster care and see if we can bring back adoption in this country. Because you can go and adopt a child from Peru, but you can't adopt a child locally. It doesn't matter how long they've been living with you. So that's our focus, is local communities over the next couple of years, and that's where we're going to be doing our fundraising.

Jim Banks [00:26:29]:
That's fantastic. And obviously, I'll make sure that all of the things that we discussed in the podcast episode today will be in the show. Notes, all the links to the video that will make you cry, I promise you. And the retail orphanage initiative. I think, again, for me, such a worthy cause, wherever it is, whether it's Haiti locally, it doesn't really matter. It's dreadful that we have these sorts of things going on in the world, but we do, and we just need to try and do what we can to try and prevent them from happening in the future. And the best way of doing that is good people like yourself and Phil and Jeremy and everyone else that got involved in that going and getting off their asses, flying to Haiti, doing stuff, just doing things over and above what's expected of them in terms of their normal day to day job.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:27:13]:
Jim, one of the things that really surprised me when I first got involved was Greg, who's the founder, shared with me that the largest day for child trafficking in the United States is the day of the Super bowl, which is just insane. Everybody's attention is so focused and diverted. It's like the old, I'll make an aeroplane disappear and they'll traffic hundreds and tens of thousands of children and women on the day of the Super bowl because nobody's paying attention.

Jim Banks [00:27:41]:
That's quite scary changing gears a little bit. Obviously one of the most important things in running your own business and doing all the sort of stuff that you do is staying motivated and focused. How do you stay motivated?

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:27:56]:
I get stay motivated by the end goal, which is helping our clients and bringing on more clients to help them to have happier and higher performing teams. Every time we finish a program we have a little brag that we've just lost a client, which is very different from everybody else. But we're happy we've lost a client because we know that they are more sustainable. And most of the time they come back to us when they've got a new project in mind. But for the purpose of what we're aiming for, it's that we lose clients all the time because we want to.

Jim Banks [00:28:30]:
Make sure, or if not, they'll refer you onto other people as well. Right?

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:28:35]:
Do you know what? We have a very strange referral problem at MI because people don't want to know that we're this team's secret weapon.

Jim Banks [00:28:44]:
Funny, I have the same issue. I run paid advertising and I've always had really good results from Microsoft and they've always like, can we get a case study and testimonial from you? I'm like, no. And they say, why not? And I'm like, look, I don't want everyone else to know how good it is, right? But obviously everyone's going to know now because I've just put it out on the podcast.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:29:02]:
You should know.

Jim Banks [00:29:04]:
Yeah, and obviously Mi Academy is great, so you should use them for sure. So what's the future for Mi Academy? Most people go into business for one of a few reasons. Quite often the reason is they want to grow something, turn it into a unicorn, billion dollar company, blah, blah, blah. What's the future for Mi Academy look like? What's it going to be?

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:29:23]:
The future for Mi Academy is to continue to keep building it. We just had our biggest month on record and we plan to keep moving in that trajectory. Over the last twelve months, I've cut about 40% out of our delivery time, so we've become a lot more efficient. And the next part for us is actually to start looking for investors and partners that we can continue to keep growing with so scaling the business. And I think for every entrepreneur we're always looking for an exit plan, so there's definitely that part in play. So actively working on that part of the business as well.

Jim Banks [00:29:58]:
Sweet, that sounds great. So Elisa, thank you so much for spending some of your time today. It's been fantastic to have you on as a guest on the podcast today. All of your details will be in the show notes and all that stuff that we talked about before will be in the show notes as well. Links to where people can get in touch with you socially and everything else. Is there one thing in particular that you would like people listening to the podcast to take action and do for you? Is there something specific that you would love to go hey, everyone that's on this podcast that listens to it, I want you to do this. I want you to take this action.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:30:31]:
Okay, there's a couple of things. So if you want to become more efficient and create a more efficient team, this is what I want you to do. I want you to sit down and write down every single one of your business as usual tasks and write down every single one of your major projects. And I want you to get your team members to do exactly the same. Because you need to make sure that you have alignment between you as the director of the business and what you think are major projects and what your team thinks are major projects. And if you don't have alignment between what those are, or if your team doesn't even know what the major projects are, then you've got a bit of an alignment issue and you need to fix that. So write down your banks, write down your major projects and start to plot them on what we call the impact matrix, which is what the effort is and what the impact is going to be on the business. I think we might have a download for that.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:31:25]:
If not, it's definitely in our programs. There is a course that we have on agile project management through eschool, which is our online learning school. And you can go and check out that course and I think I'll make.

Jim Banks [00:31:39]:
Sure we include a link to that in the show notes as well.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:31:41]:
Yeah, great.

Jim Banks [00:31:43]:
Sure.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:31:44]:
I'll set up a code for you.

Jim Banks [00:31:47]:
Bdwjb.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:31:49]:
Bdwjb. There we go. Bad decisions with Jim Banks 50 and we'll give everybody 50% off. But if you are looking for something more tailored, we've got amazing tailored programs. We've actually got a guarantee on our email marketing twelve week email marketing accelerator at the moment that if we don't get you at least 30% more revenue from your email marketing in 90 days, we will absolutely give you your money back. That's how confident we are that our formulas and training works.

Jim Banks [00:32:18]:
And at the time of this particular podcast being recorded, Yahoo and Gmail are a bit janky at the moment, right?

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:32:25]:
They are a bit janky at the moment.

Jim Banks [00:32:27]:
There's definitely an opportunity to revisit and make sure that dial in your email the way it should be.

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez [00:32:33]:
Absolutely. Follow that customer journey.

Jim Banks [00:32:36]:
Great. Well, again, thank you so much for being on the show today. We're going to wrap up now, and obviously all the show notes will have all of Alita's details and all of the great initiatives that she's involved in her business. It only leaves me to say, if you've been listening to the show, I hope you enjoyed the episode. Don't forget to follow us. Share with your friends, tell other people, because we can't grow the podcast unless you do that. So thanks a lot and we'll see you on the next episode of Bad Decisions with Jim Banks.