Death by 1000 Cuts

The Hidden Cancer in Your Business

Author

Jordan Ross
December 31, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

🔥 This Week’s Agency Insight

From Jordan Ross @ 8 Figure Agency

December, 31st 2023

Your monthly churn may equal your monthly new clients in 2024

And if it does, it’s probably not for what you think

Avoid death by churn in 2024   👇

Preface

There are two areas we need to excel in to keep our clients

The first one is what everyone talks about:

  • Deliver ROI

  • Do good work

  • Communicate effectively

These items are obvious and something you’re already tracking 

The second reason is death by ‘1000 cuts’

Death by 1000 cuts, in this instance, refers to the culmination of many micro-behaviors, micro-systems, and micro-interactions between a client and your team or your service

The sum of these micro-behaviors creates an unconscious perspective on your business.

That perspective may be a:

  • Lack of trust

  • Lack of alignment

  • Lack of connection

  • Lack of understanding 

But the client will feel like it's not a fit and churn

Here is how you solve for this

1- Issues list generation 

Many businesses churn clients and don't exactly know why

The reason isn't that one thing happened wrong, it's that many things happened wrong

In order to start correcting this, your business will need an active list of items to work on improving

Here is a head start on the items to consider:

  • Expectation setting 

  • Onboarding process flow

  • Onboarding communication

  • Account management communication 

  • How your business shares results with clients

Your action from this: 

  • Create a place to track all ‘smaller’ areas you can improve

  • Have a column to categorize each item

2- Ownership

“When a team takes ownership of its problems, the problem gets solved”- A quote I googled 

At Amazon, there are different teams that focus on different areas of process improvement 

For your business, you will need a specific person who owns the 1000 cuts list

This person is working on a list of 10-100 items that can improve your process on a granular level

For this individual, have them:

  • Organize the list in order of most impactful to least impactful

  • Create a weekly report on the items they have built and areas they have improved

It's simple, but tracking, ownership & visibility are what move the needle here

3- Sustainability, Team training & Auditing 

This one is very important and very underrated

For the items that require training, we will need another owner to ensure our team is properly trained on the micro behaviors that keep clients

Commonly, team members are trained on the main areas of their job function

But when it comes to micro behaviors around communication, expectation setting, getting buy-in, selling their ideas (and many more)

It's often left to chance

At 8F, in 2024, we are implementing two weekly trainings

One training is focused on the main behaviors of our consultants

The second is focused on the micro behaviors that ultimately lead to sustainability 

My process for the second training at 8F is as follows:

  • One to two weekly training videos on the week's area of focus

  • One weekly training call to train the team on that week's training videos

It's not sexy

It’s monotonous

But it's what moves the needle in the long term

TLDR

  1. Issues list generation 

  2. Ownership of process improvement

  3. Sustainability, Team training & Auditing 

Thanks for reading. 

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Jordan Ross

CEO & Founder @ 8 Figure Agency

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