Let’s Be Mates Podcast – Ways to keep a business productive

Let's Be Mates Podcast | MATE | 9 January 2020

Based on listeners feedback, we have created a series of quickfire episodes to deep dive on what makes us successful.

In this Episode, General Manager Mark Fazio gives us an insight into productivity tools, processes and best practices that helps him, and the Mate business be successful

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Transcript:

Faz: Welcome Australia. It’s that time again for another podcast, from the Mate team where we try and get into your head with stuff that makes us sound smart. Sit back and relax. It’s time for us to be Mates.

Welcome to another. Let’s be mates podcast. I’m one of your hosts Faz and we’ve got Dom Dom. Welcome.

Dom: Hey, Faz. How are you going? Good. Good

Faz: So, over the last couple of months, since we started this, let’s be made podcast. We’ve had a lot of feedback from people asking us to talk and DoubleClick. On certain things that we do in our business that’ll allow us to be successful.

What we’ve done is created a quick-fire series in this quick-fire series. We will tackle individual topics that help us create success in our business. We’ll talk about why they’re important, how we use them and why they allow us to be successful.

Dom: To kick off the series. We’re going to chat with Faz about ways to always keep your business as productive

as possible

and dig into a little bit into his mad scientist

brain.

so

Faz, just for those listeners out there, tell us who you are and what do you do at Mate?

Faz: So, a lot of the listeners know me as Faz my full name, Mark Fazio. I’m the general manager of mate. And ultimately, I work in the sales and marketing division at mate. who am I? I’m an identical twin, my identical twin David.

He’s the CEO of this business. Yes, there is two of us and yes, it is scary for people that know us. but you know, my history in business has been in the last eight years before mate, I was working at Microsoft. I also lived in Singapore and had a channel marketing role across all Asia markets, representing some key brands like Surface and X-Box and Windows and Office, et cetera.

And that’s been my history today. My main goal at Mate is to acquire customers and keep those customers through a bunch of different methods

Dom: How do you define productivity?

Faz: I define productivity is about getting the most out of the things within your control. Things like the amount of resources that you have access to, the amount of budget that you’ve got to spend. And also the tools that you have available at your fingertips to enable you to achieve certain tasks or, or goals that you want to deliver.

this to me absolutely defines productivity because sometimes you don’t always have the shiny bells and whistles when it, if it comes to tools or, or, or the, you know, your dad have a hundred thousand staff in your business and you don’t always have the budget you would love to spend. So, productivity is defined about how you get the most out of what you’ve got, what you’ve got within your control.

Dom: tell us what processes, policies or themes do you put into the business to drive that message forward?

Faz: Yeah, I mean, look from my point of view, I just mentioned, obviously I work in the sales and marketing department and I’ve got two rules, I guess, or two methodologies that I use. First one is process.

Planning, communication, or I should say planning, process, communication. I think if you plan correctly, we build a process that enables your and to be executed. And then you communicate what that plan. Well, their processes, their needs literally cannot go wrong. It manages expectations. It manages the flow of everything that’s going to happen and everybody’s across what they need to do to make something successful and planning, process, communication.

Is that really. Well, what we do at nine and coy, what I do as an individual, the other thing is the five W’s who, what, when, where and why, I think, once you develop a plan or you develop a concept or an activity you want to achieve, if you hit the five W’s of who, what, when, where, and why you can’t go wrong.

Cause you’re, you’re targeting exactly what you’re doing, who has to do it when it has to be done and why you’re doing it. And I think that’s key. If you can stick to those two philosophies, I think that enables everything that you’re doing to, to be achieved, do it in the most productive way. And it basically allows you to be successful now, you know, that’s what we do at mate.

And that’s what I do in my personal life. It works for us. So I’d give it a try

Dom: What type of tools do you use to help achieve the best results?

Faz: Look, I think technology has really come a long way, especially in the last couple of years. I think the whole new phase of collaboration tools, you know, there’s, there’s Facebook workplace, there’s, you know, Microsoft teams and things like that. And, you know, I think what we’ve done in Mate.

He’s, in, embrace technology to allow our business to become successful and productive and productive productivity to fly. Right. We use two key tools in our business Asana, which is project management tool, and Slack, which is a collaboration tool within our business. Now we always say, if it’s not in Asana, it didn’t happen.

And look, I mean, I’m not sure if people are familiar with  Asana, but. I recommend that you do check it out but Asana and allows for tasks that need to be completed to be listed in a, in an area with timelines with people, associated to them and, certain milestones to hit. Right? If, if you Asana, if you.

Execute a Asana properly in your business. You can never fall down in regards what has to be done, who has to do it and when it has to be done by. And so, if you got a tool like that in your business, there’s no chance for error, there’s no chance of people not, not knowing what is going on. And ultimately it delivers accountability for the individual, the individual.

Ultimately holds accountability for something going wrong. If you’re using a tool, like Asana, and that’s where it needs to go, right? If, if people take accountability in everything that you do, they’re the ones that are, you can easily flush out who, who actually gives a shit and who does it. And, and I think Asana really enables things like that to be black.

Now, now I think with Slack, I think it, a lot of people might use Microsoft teams. We also have teams in our business as well. I mean, I think at the moment in the world, it’s a bit of a fight between Slack and Microsoft teams and they all have their benefits. but for us, we do, we do use Slack religiously.

Now why, why such Slack is so important? It allows our business to communicate in forums in a much more efficient way. Instead of sending multiple emails around in the business. Now we then we’ve actually banned emails internally in our business because it doesn’t serve any purpose and it makes people confused and it’s hard to follow up.

Whereas when we have different channel threads in Slack, then that enables us to be more efficient and the reason, and the reason for that is simple. Each channel, you can assign relevant people too, and those channels, you can assign the, the people that, that, that, that content is going to matter too. And take out the ones that don’t, and which means it limits the amount of spam and content that they’ve been.

That’s been thrown their way or outside of that as well. Slack allows us to, adding, external channels. So people from external businesses, you know, in our business, we work with a lot of, partners, whether it be media buying, whether it being, you know, digital space and agency space and all of that, and Slack enables us to create channels that invites those external people into our world.

Which means that it all stays in one spot. And so for us, Slack aggregates all our communication with all the people, with any our business internally and externally into the one spot, which makes our life a hell of a lot easier that enables us to do a hell of a lot more. And, and on that fact, that Asana does the same thing as well.

We know Asana, we can bring in external people into our, into our world and assign them tasks as well. And so. I recommend working or looking at two tools like that because you put your whole business into one place and it limits the amount of places you need to go to, to find that information and to understand what’s going on.

Dom: So the mate business has grown pretty significantly, especially over the last 12 months and the scope of your role as well as, you know, Quadrupled would probably, what are some of the results you’ve achieved through implementing those methods that you mentioned in the tools?

Faz: Yeah, look, I mean, not just from a sales and marketing point of view, this is a business whole, you know, you know, we’ve only, we’ve got roughly 50 people in our service and marketing teams and all of that.

And, you know, we were quite a significant, business size and we probably, you know, I don’t know for sure, but I think we’re, you know, if not. One of the largest independently owned service providers in the country. And if you look at competitors like our, that compete with us, people like Aussie broadband, et cetera, who have come out and said, they’ve got 459 staff, you know, working across multiple offices.

I think the methodology that we have in place, the tools that we’ve got, I feel like where we can do. A double the work than other people do, and we have less resources and why that’s important. One, it means that, it means that we keep costs down, which means that we can bring more value back to our customers.

And two, we have more control of what happens, what happens, right. Especially what the end customer sees, now we have this goal in our business that this goal of customer happiness, right? And so we, we say one of our goals is to ensure that we deliver customer happiness. And when you start losing control of the consumer journey, you lose the elements, or you don’t have control of some of the elements that they need to achieve customer happiness.

And I think again, with all the tools that we have in place, and the methodology that, that we keep in the business and ensuring that everybody follows that we can do a shitload more with a lot less and deliver a better outcome.

Dom: What do you classify as success. And how do you actually measure, measure that? Yes. You’ve been

successful or not.

Faz: Yeah. I mean, there’s a million ways. There’s a lot of ways that we, that we measure the success of what we do and. you know, I think if you’re looking, you’re starting up a business and looking to understand what the, what the success metrics are.

I think one of the things that you need to do is come up with those, those targets, or those metrics first, because what gets measured gets done. Right. And I think, I think it’s really important to have measurements in place and sure those measurements may change as you go along because you find out that relevant measurements aren’t applicable, or you’re doing new things, things, et cetera.

And so, but I’m having. Having that measurement in place is critical, right? Again, a measure if it’s measured, it gets done. And for us, we have a bunch of things, right. You know, if you took, if you look at our development side of things and our network, if you look at our customer service, you’ve looked at our sales and marketing.

you know, finance, et cetera, we have all different metrics and targets that we need to hit to ensure our business is achieving the goals, not just from a revenue perspective, but from a profit perspective, and from a product perspective as well, bunch of scorecards in place, particularly around our service model.

And, you know, we measure. We measure servicing about, you know, how quick we answer calls, how many, you know, how many callbacks we need to do, you know, one call resolution, you know, making sure that when we have one call that we, we measure, in that call, ensuring that the percent of one call resolutions where we, we.

Ensure that we answer a customer’s questions and solve their issue on one call without any callbacks or any other communication. We also measure our success via awards. You know, we, we make sure that we get out there into the general public and we get out there to industry standards and put ourselves out there and get ourselves benchmarked against competitors against, different people in different industries.

And to ensure that we understand how we are competing in a bunch of different areas. Against the industry and, and different industries as well. And, you know, things like we’re a member of the Customer Service Institute of Australia  (CSIA)  and we enter their awards program and there’s a bunch of things like that, which are really important to us.

And, and ultimately tell us if we. Winning against our competitors or, or against different industries, et cetera. you know, when it comes to monitoring, calls you know, we, we, we turn our calls into word clouds in those word clouds, we can determine, you know, the consistency of what our team is saying, making sure that we’re saying the right things in the right places at the right time.

And it’s something that we’ve plugged into tools like power BI and those places to make sure that we are measuring properly exactly what we’re doing. you know, reviews are huge note. We were very heavily involved and active in pushing customers to leave us a review, good or bad, platforms like productreview.com.au for us productreview.com.au is important because, If the reviews are verified, meaning that somebody has to prove there, there are a mate customer, or there have been a mate customer to leave a good or bad review.

And that’s why, you know, shows a lot of credibility to our customers because they’re proper reviews and no one, no one leaving random reviews. I mean, we also focus on Google reviews as well, but we all know with Google reviews, anybody can leave a review, but you know, we obviously push the authentic reviews as much as we can.

You know, there’s obviously the other part of that. We determined our successes, simple customer numbers, you know, how many customers were getting through the door and how many are we keeping? Right. And I think that’s the ultimate success of your business because the more happy customers are, the more they love.

around the service and the products that receive the longer they’re going to say. And so, you know, I think one of the biggest metrics in our business is customer churn. And if we can assure that customer churn stays down as low as possible and we’ve beating industry standards. and then we know we’re doing right things in the world that we live.

Dom: Thanks for us today has been really insightful. you know, learn a lot about your approach to business and what makes and break success.

Faz: If you’re seeing this, podcast posted on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, and drop us a note, if you want to hear about something in the comments and yeah, we’ll talk about it on that, on our next show.

Dom: Awesome. Thanks, Faz. So that’s been great.

OUTRO: Thanks for listening to the let’s be mates podcast by the team at Mate. Search for the Let’s Be Mates podcast on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, and at LetsBeMates.com.au. Hit subscribe to get the latest episode each week.

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