An $8000 vanilla latte

I spent $8000 on an operations consultant for my agency — it’s the dumbest money I ever spent.

But 17 days ago, I solved all of my operations issues while waiting for my vanilla latte. Here’s the story…

SEO isn’t new to me, but running & growing a business is.

I love to learn things on my own, though I am a big proponent of paying for knowledge & information from people with more experience than me when it suits me.

So in August, I hired an operations consultant to help me eliminate some bottlenecks in our onboarding & deliverable processes.

We’ve been delivering great results for brands, but I felt like we could be more efficient.

I spoke with several ops consultants, some of whom quoted me as high as $20,000 to "overhaul" our workflow.

I ended up hiring one for $8000, and while they helped me optimize a few processes, it wasn’t worth the price tag.

Funny enough, this was my biggest fear when I signed the contract. I’ve always been weary of consultants and coaches because 99% of them think there’s only one way to do things.

Basically, their way or the highway.

They wanted me to outsource all of our deliverables to increase efficiency, with ZERO consideration of the consequences.

What makes our agency so special is our in-house team, which is why we’re able to deliver the results we do for brands.

I fired them after 4 months — I refuse to sacrifice our service quality for anything.

Funny enough, a few days later, I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop, waiting on my order.

A 20 ounce honey & vanilla latte — my go-to…

It was a busier day than most, and I was one of 6 or 7 people waiting for my coffee.

Normally, I check my phone or work on my laptop while I wait.

But that day, I watched the army of baristas at work, elegantly moving around each other and preparing several orders at once.

All of a sudden, everything clicked.

I won’t share the exact operational issue that I’ve been looking to solve, but that morning in the coffee shop gave me the solution.

Ding! My order was ready — I quickly grabbed it and walked back to my apartment to map out the solution: how it would work, which team members needed to be involved, timelines, etc.

We finished implementing the new workflow 2 weeks ago and the new process has personally saved me 8+ hours each week and two of my VAs 15+ hours each.

I can now allocate more time to higher-leverage tasks in my business, and so can they.

We’re a better agency for it.

Catch you tomorrow.

Kai