Start simple don't try don't there's an expression like Rome wasn't built in a day don't try and build all of it when you're building the Battlestar Galactica Lego model you're not going straight for the big thing you're building it piece by piece and plugging it together and it's the same with the automation so getting the sequencing right don't start shoving lots of new leads into a broken sales process fix the broken and fix downstream first Thanks a lot, everybody, for watching this. Welcome to Remote First podcast, HighLevel speaker series. I have a special guest for you today, Lisa Catto. I think I put a lot of emphasis on your name. We talked about it a little bit. Thank you. So that got me a little bit but yeah lisa's been on stage 2025 she's going to be here again you have a long introduction by the way so you've worked with Adidas Sony Kellogg's these are household names as we all know right now you're running as a CEO the Business Catalyst Queen of Automations I can see how that relates to HighLevel I guess if you were that's your title that you're going with. Returning again, I said HighLevel speaker and the Ultimate Entrepreneur Award at 23. So how would you like to expand your introduction? What do you do in the HighLevel world, Lisa? Yeah I mean I've been building automations since 2011 so that was kind of before HighLevel was even a glint in anybody's I found Eye previous to that my first technology business was actually in the mid 1990s in the days of floppy disks and dial-up modems when we were the first people ever to place an advertiser in a computer game which at the time was That. Coca-Cola floating over the Olympic stadium this is in the days before the internet everyone was on consoles and stuff and before there were digital rights in players contracts so when Adidas they had one of their players that had sold their digital rights for a computer game like Prince Naseem Boxing it was our responsibility to make sure that that player wore three stripes in the game and then we worked a lot with other games providers who've made things at Adidas Power Soccer 98 we put the Adidas ball into FIFA into the EA Sports FIFA game we did all the branding and Sony Gran Turismo so we're working with a lot of brands doing product placement until Unilever said we don't want to be in someone else's game we want our own game so then we became a developer and that's we made a game for a Unilever brand called Peperami which is a a spicy sausage with it with a very big character who we created a role- playing game where he went around beating the crap out of vegetables and that was meant to go on 11 floppy disks but it was the time that CDs came in we're able to get it on one cd and that was amazing and then we were making Xbox and PlayStation games as well so that's my my life in technology was kind of then that was the main bulk of my career before I then retired in my mid-30s to the south of France to raise my children and then came back discovered automation no Then came back. I thought that was the end of the story. And now we It's not the end of the story have you met me so came back in 2011 and then it Have a comeback And then we come back. Was like right what what am I going to do now I'm going to I love technology and it was just at the birth of automation at the time it was Infusionsoft They were really the godfathers of the automation platform. I was trained by them and was very much an advocator of their software right up until about 2022 when I switched to HighLevel. So from working in Infusionsoft, which then became Keap and is now becoming Thryv, that's where I cut my teeth on how to design and build automated customer journeys. So taking that methodology and applying it to high levels toolbox was a very natural step. Wow, that is an awesome, awesome journey. So just from the introduction, I can have 100 questions and we can have, you know, two hours of talk. But FIFA okay so that is very very close to a lot of people's heart and so you've been part of it like a household name and it's more than household what was that journey like right now so you're having that kind of end of spectrum where it was just starting and now you're doing marketing again right so Well, I'm not doing marketing. What hmm I mean, we were doing digital marketing before the internet in that sense, when we were placing advertisers in there, doing loading screens of products and finding innovative ways to get the brands in front of their consumers. What was interesting, actually, is at the time we were retained by Adidas to make sure that they were appearing in the sports games that were coming out. And we were like trying to bundle it with trying to think what the Sega platform was at the time. I've completely forgotten we're bundling games and that was no Thank you. It was it was it was I can't it wasn't the Wii it was something else I I can't Oh, no, yeah, it's back in. Even remember it was it was way back we were talking like 95 96 97 is it in the days of consoles when they no No, I know those, but I just don't have them on top of my head right now. No exactly so when it was a very natural space for us to be and we were a marketing a digital marketing company in those days, not finding innovative ways. And it was a lot of fun. It was at the time when the Lara Croft game was being made, I think by Psygnosis. I can't remember who made the game, but I flew out to Adidas' head offices, which were in Amsterdam on an EasyJet flight. Now EasyJet is like in Europe is the cheapest flights. I don't know where the American Airlines, I don't know what it is. We have Frontier. Frontier. Yeah it's a light Frontier right so this is this is back this is like you know best part of 30 years ago where it was almost like the propellers were on the outside of the plane and I would fly to Amsterdam which was only an hour or so out of London first thing in the morning and I would come back in the evening because that's where Adidas's head offices are and that was a lot of fun and I took them a mock-up of a PlayStation controller with the three stripes on it and a memory stick with the three stripes on it and I went I can get Lara Croft wearing three stripes in the computer game and they said no not core sports so I thought it was a brilliant idea but they said no so yes the taking the three stripes off the Adidas logo so it could go in the hoarding in the digital game that was a big deal so lots it was very good experience working with those big brands because we work with McVitie's which is a big brand over here Nestlé Ferrero Amen. Rocher you know Coca-Cola a lot of really big brands you learn a lot of like more cerebral marketing as opposed to what we do now which is very quick online marketing we're not I we're not a marketing company we are an automation agency and I specifically yeah So tell us expand on that. Right. So I think we jumped on what is Business The Catalyst basically. Business Catalyst so what I found was is for many years when there weren't as many social media channels probably back in the days of MySpace which just shows my age when it was just like kind of Facebook and Twitter at the time and maybe LinkedIn was just starting, it was easy to support people with their social media in the days where you could put meta tags on your SEO hidden in the footer of a website and get away with it. So back then it was easier to support people in their marketing. But what I was doing email marketing a lot as well, originally on a platform called MyEmma, which I think still exists. So well as it got over time and I realized it was actually a Traffic and Conversion event which is one of Ryan Deiss's events probably back in 2012 2013 in San Francisco where I had this light bulb moment of I need to be a specialist I can't if I'm going to be a generalist I'm going to be really good at nothing I'm going to be quite good at a lot of things so it was like finding people that are best in class at what they do, whether it was SEO, websites, social media posting, copywriting, whatever it was, and us really focusing on creating scalable systems. Because With Infusionsoft as it was then, it didn't have all the tools. We had to plug in calendar software. We had to plug in websites and landing pages. So there was a lot of connections going on, not so much obviously with HighLevel but not having things collide we have a very good framework for how we design a customer journey so that there's a proper flow going through it and it's something that's scalable we build it in a modular way a bit like a Lego model so that we can plug bits in so that when there's a new offer or when there's a new technology like AI or there's a new person joining the business you don't have to tear it all down but it all comes together built on stages Just add it up. Yeah. So I will go from there to your answer. As I also found out, you know, you have like with your customer journey that you're talking about, you call it ideal customer journey. And there are of course, multiple, you know, things, but number one thing is 54 So Checkpoints to a customer. So what do you, what else can you tell us about this customer journey and what are the stages? The what it comes down to is if we chunk up a customer journey has three distinct phases you've got prospecting conversion and fulfillment right so there's three overarching stages that a customer is going to pass through. And then when each of those, so in prospecting, once you've identified who your ideal customer is, because you cannot have an ideal customer journey if you haven't got a specific avatar, you may have more than one because you might have more than one product or service. But ideally, you want to have one that you're solving a problem for so that you can speak to the solution that you have for them. So then you've got to know where you're targeting them, making sure that you're capturing them and that you're nurturing them so that you can then engage them into making the offer. And then they're in the sales process and knowing what that sales process is. And then you're into the delivery of that, followed up by making sure you increase the average order value, the lifetime value. And then you go on to making sure you get testimonials, case studies and reviews. So there's nine steps underneath the three phases at each of those steps we're looking so this is where the checkpoints are we're looking at what the gaps and the opportunities are what are the points of friction what if they do what if they don't what are the opportunities that we could leverage here and what are the points of friction that we can release like having too many questions on a qualification form or you know it's that how can we make this a really smooth journey so by the time you've gone through each of the nine stages and you've looked at the opportunities and the points of friction and and the gaps and all of that there's 54 things that we're doing across all of the nine steps to make sure that it's as smooth a ride as possible and you have to measure them because it's not it's not just about the sales and marketing at this point it's about making sure you know what the reporting is what's on track off track and at risk so that you can go oh if I could just one percent on that bit it's going to really have a big uplift having a look at what's happening in your operations and your finance so that you can deliver a much better customer experience For that person as well and so there's there's many layers to it that doesn't all happen off the bat just when we start we've got to start with the overarching plan and vision of what we think we want this journey to be and then pressure test it at each of the checkpoints and make sure that each of the different layers is accounted for so it happens over time and a business is constantly in motion as is the world we live in so but it's something that we've That's Proven that has worked, we've been doing it for 15 years, and it's a model that we have used for every size of business, up to 40 million in revenue is the biggest one that we've done. Every size of business in every possible niche and sector at every possible stage of its growth. That's a lot of you know steps so it is and you said all of this you're doing to smooth out the process, but it seems like this is so much information coming. It is not a bottleneck and it slows you down, but it is organic. So you get this information easily or how hard is it? Well we do a diagnosis so we we I say here and it's not an original line for me that prescription without diagnosis is malpractice. So the very first thing that we do whenever we start working with a client is that we take a walk through their customer journey. So I do a flow chart. And if anyone's ever seen any of my YouTubes, there's masterclasses that I've done with HighLevel on this. There's plenty of webinars that I've done specifically walking people through and giving all the resources. So in my community, there is the literal template that I use when I walk a customer through it. We query the customer. And this is what I'm talking about in HighLevel in Dallas, which is part of how to do this process to become a Parody. Consultant in being able to do it. It's taking the customer through going, what happens next and what happens next? But what if they don't? And does this happen there or does this not happen there? And identifying where the gaps are in the customer journey or the points of friction so that we know where we need to bring attention. And then we go, right. The most important thing that we can do to release time or increase revenue is that bit there. And then we go and build a scope for it and then we build it and we fix it and then we come back and go, right. What's the next thing that's going to Next one. Release up? So it's done in stages. But in such a way that we can come back to it and if it's Black Friday and you've got a new offer or a new team member has joined it everything is is So Working and we can work on whatever bit's relevant to the business at that point. You just brought up that you're going to be on stage. Usually I ask it at the end, but you're talking about you don't scale chaos. You scale clarity, right? That's your topic. I think I just saw. I think it's the clean handover I think is what they've they've termed it last year might have been the chaos to clarity so I'm all about keeping it simple is that we we like to solve for our clients who are a lot of the time very low tech or no tech so it's about creating as much simplicity as possible for them and their experience in their own customer journey in order that they can scale the more money we make them and the more time we save them the longer they stay with us which is good business practice for us so Hello. I love it. No, it's simple. So just simple, repeatable, an experience that your clients are enjoying. And what it comes out to is you scale. That's the end result of it. Keep things simple. I think innovation sometimes is overrated. I say it a lot. And especially the way you're saying, that is how you want to identify small and be like one step at a time. Because most of the times, right now what happens is, you know we just come in and we want to conquer everything and You Thank Then nothing happens and that's what we call over you know whelming that's that's one other thing right now is we're talking also about overwhelming right now is you know what is your take right now that you're working with your current clients and then you were working on what's the difference that you would say is in a corporate 500 company that you've had enough experience with and what is the main difference in your side from your view you have a little different of course role there different here but what are But The major differences and what are the some things that us normal small medium business people can learn from It depends you've got to be clear on what you're solving for and be very clear on the outcome just make sure that you're clear on the outcome and that you that your client is clear on the outcome there's nothing worse for us than a client telling us how to do our job it's like no Don't tell us that you need a this there and a this there. Just tell us what you want the outcome to be. Tell us what the important things are that it's reporting. And obviously we consult with them on that. And then we go and build it. We have plenty of the one of the one of the key things to success. I believe in the HighLevel world is having lots of snapshots. And I don't mean like full systems, but it's things where you can layer it on. So it's like if this is the capture to opportunity pipeline, if this is and that you can plug things in, but that they're not going to collide. There's a lot of planning that goes into making sure that these things dovetail and click together very nicely, which are three pillars, a customer journey, customer experience and documentation. And documentation is essential, whether it's technical documentation, user documentation and user guides, the visual flows that we do, because it really underpins, really does prop up the rest of the process. I guess it is what the old saying it is divide and conquer. It worked and has worked for more rich, but it is small segments that you're talking about Legos, you know, you just have this thing and it is just minimum viable products standalone, it will work also and it can you can bring it into the bigger model also. Yeah start simple don't try don't there's an expression like Rome wasn't built in a day don't try and build all of it when you're building the Battlestar Galactica Lego model you're not going straight for the big thing you're building it piece by piece and plugging it together and it's the same with the automation so getting the sequencing right don't start shoving lots of new leads into a broken sales process fix the broken and fix downstream first so you'll see in my trainings I talk about starting at the point of conversion and working backwards so making sure the sale is sorted and then like what's the bit before the sale what's the bit before that before you get to even putting any new leads into it otherwise you're wasting a lot of time and energy And sales is where you want to start with. Yeah. You never you want that process to be the most efficient one because you know I think there's also a saying sales solves most problems and then Sullivan you know and he also says if you have money to solve a problem then you probably you don't have a problem and then I really like your clarity part I'm actually speaking also and I'm talking all about, you know, how actually you can get high-performing You. Teams if you give them clarity, right? Nobody, for us at RepStack, number one reason people resign in first 90 days is they get overwhelmed. Now, obviously, everybody's doing the same things, but it's just, you know, everybody's a bunch, like you said, the Lego set, they're like, okay, you know, here you go. Now, if you give them, okay, just a little part of it, can you build the wing first? Can you build the tail first? Then they're easy, you know? That's what we figured out give them clarity are you hiring the for the right I Person for the right role and clarity goes a long way so I'm going to be talking about it hopefully you'll you know I'll ask you definitely to join because we had definitely shared same ideas and I saw your post also hmm Think we share the same ethos what you're talking about is the onboarding journey which which we have as well whether it's onboarding a client or onboarding a team member doing it intentionally not just going I'll go sit here go do that but it's understanding the journey they need to be on so that they're not overwhelmed and that they have a mentor in place and the materials that they need are in place we have a very rigorous hiring gauntlet before people can even work because I don't hire for skills my Tell us about your hiring strategy. That's what RepStack is. And how big is your team right now? My Team is seven which I'm very happy with I I don't want to be a massive massive team I'm a terrible terrible people manager my business partner my head of operations got me out of having to manage people as quickly as possible I'm impatient I'm distracted I do meet with my team every day at nine o'clock so that if they've got anything blocking their workflow they come to me every morning and we do two hours training every Monday which is everybody training everybody it's like what they've learned and then every day at nine o'clock UK time we meet they come to me with anything that's blocking questions they've asked issues that have come up sometimes not even work related and we have good quality conversations so but then I don't That's that's the amount that I get involved. And then everybody's autonomous in what they're doing because we've trained them in our in our core values and how we get stuff done and what the important things are to do along the way that are non-negotiable. And apart from that, they can think as long as they get their work done on time and to quality, then then we're all good. So there's a book by a guy called Geoff Smart which is called Who oh I've got it on my bookshelf somewhere it's called Who? Who let me see if I can see it on here somewhere so this book Who Literally called Who is a fantastic hiring process it's the different interview stages so we've taken that and we've adapted it with there's another coach called Keith Cunningham who has got the job ad so basically we're very clear we have something called a talent map for each of our job roles which is who we are and what our customer what our core values are because we don't if someone's not a fit for our core values which we pressure test against then we're not then they're not a good fit then we've got different Thank They've got there's a questionnaire that they have to fill in so that we under we can see accuracy we can see if they're overusing AI we don't mind AI being used but AI absolutely must be humanized Yeah. It can't just be copy and paste sometimes people forget to take out you Don't trust the AI. Know and people people are dumb so then once they get through that there's certain there's different interviews and tests that we put them through to pressure test the way that they think more than how they know how to use the software platforms that we're using because anyone can be taught how to use a software platform but we're looking at how they think through solving problems and how they would go about their day and then there's final interviews I don't even get to be part of the process anymore my my business partner went oh so- and-so's starting on Monday and I went do I get to meet them before they join the team and he's like do you need to so I'm in a very privileged position where I we have managed to create a massive That's pretty awesome. Team a massively talented team of A So Players You know what you're building what I learned as far as culture in your team is you know and you say oh you're not doing anything but you're doing these daily calls at 9 a.m you're doing everything every call on Mondays you're meeting with a team so this is biggest part of the culture right having this routine it gives a kind of structure it gives someone okay whatever is happening at this time, no matter what, I have Lisa. So right, these, and these people say that a culture is, pizza nights, having games online or something. Yeah, that comes later. If you don't know your job description, you're not gonna be enjoying any coffee breaks or anything, right? You wanna have clarity at work, you know exactly, okay. And you have a question, you know I can get Lisa here at this time and I'll get my question answered. But that's how you're creating. Well it's I tell you at all it started because on our project management system one is I think it's changed oh no one of the status was blocked and if it went to blocked I got an immediate Slack message that when this has gone to blocked which meant it was like alert Lisa and what would happen is is is the block tasks would get longer and longer and longer and sit there day after day after day with me not getting to it and then my head of ops would go you know can you please go through the block tasks this client is about to go out of the date range our delivery range so that's that was why the drop-ins happened was to stop me being the bottleneck it was a very specific task it was like just get on with Lisa once a day and then everything kept moving and it worked and then in January last year in 2025 January I made a very conscious decision which is like I'm never going to be able to get out of this business unless I man up and start training people in what I do I've been an entrepreneur for over 30 years and I I shoot from the hip and I just do what my instincts say which isn't very yeah You're a visionary kind of a person, I Very disruptive vision but it doesn't Can see. Lead to being able to scale a business if everything's always in my head so I'm like okay I'm in my mid-50s it's now time to sit down with the team and explain it there was no way I was going to be able to record videos or type stuff up I'm much more an interactive talk it through with me so I created like went right back to the beginning of our core values and the customer journey and why I designed the framework the way I designed it and where I learned it so that they could understand my thinking behind it all of the calls are recorded and They're now repurposed for onboarding of any new team members, of course. And so week by week, I just went through that and invited their commentary because my system's not perfect. The fact that I've just done it, it's like, no, give me your feedback. How do we make this better? How are you experiencing this with the clients that you're working on? So it's become very, very collaborative over the last couple of years where, you know, everybody's talking about what they've been doing in AI or with skills or with MCPs or what happened with this client when they had a bit of a conflict or whatever it is. And I'm just sitting here watching and listening because they're now smarter than me everyone which is like it's such Thank you. A joy to watch it really But that's a win. That's a real win when, you know, when you're out of the office and you keep seeing onboardings happening, systems running, you know, and that's like, that is smile. You know, when you look at it and something comes up and, you know, deal closed or a review coming in from the client while you're at an event, right? Now you're going to be in HighLevel. That takes a lot of effort. So you need to be away from your team. Seems like your operations guy has things pretty tight in order. Yeah no they do but everybody's everybody's autonomous they all know what the rules are when they have to be available online they know when they have to deliver work by they know how they have to deliver the work how when when and how to communicate with clients so we've got we're very very processed now as long as those rules are met they get to do it in whatever way that they want as long as the documentation happens, as long as the clients are communicated with, as long as they're available and they're meant to be. You know, it's all, they're very much their own people. And it's really lovely to watch what they bring to it because all they're doing is adding more cool stuff to what My last We do and how we do it. Question to you is, course, you're based out of London, HighLevel, mostly, you know, it is, of course, it is us based. Now it is everywhere it's going global but what difference do you see working with some of your American clients and British clients because we see here in staffing we see australians they're like you know we have changed our messaging we have to redo our emails especially in australia American little different British a little you know that what you call about fine-tuning things so what do you see the difference working with I haven't necessarily done any fine-tuning. I've worked with American clients the whole time. Keep Infusionsoft based in Arizona. We have like you a spectrum of clients that are East Coast, West Coast, South Pacific, Europe and UK. So we've got them all over the world. Sometimes if I'm on a call, and I don't think this is necessarily a nationality thing, it's like reading the room, how you need to speak to someone, how, you know, whether they need to be spoken to in a very explanatory way of all the process or whether they just need to have the headlines. You get a sense of that. I will adapt my language. I'll say Z instead of Zed. I won't use the word fortnight because the Americans think that's a computer game. And for those of you that are watching, that's American. A fortnight is two weeks in English. So, you know, I just the language a little bit so that people feel comfortable. But apart from that, I just it's it's one size fits all really Yeah, that's I guess that's the whole idea about automations and scalable. Keep things simple. One size fits all. And we also got a little bit of English lesson here, radically coming from London. Thanks a lot, Lisa. Thanks for being on our podcast. And I can't wait to meet you in person. I really would like to invite you to come, of course, See me speak also. Definitely. I'll be on October 28th, 1.15 p.m. But I loved having this conversation. I loved how, you know, I didn't go over my ideas because everything you were telling, I was already saying yes in my mind before you would finish. So it was great talking to you today. Oh, thank you so much. Thanks a lot, Lisa. We'll see you in Dallas, October 26th to 29th HighLevel Summit. See you there. Take care.