916 Kari Poppleton:

Wings of Inspired Business Podcast EP 916 – Host Melinda Wittstock with Kari Poppleton

Melinda Wittstock:

Coming up on Wings of Inspired Business:

Kari Poppleton:

A lot of people start businesses I’ve encountered because, you know, they were good at something, they were great at a skill or a craft, or serving people in a particular way or making products in a certain way And they didn’t always kind of think through the whole thing, I see a lot of shame and guilt like they’re kind of not really a real business owner, not a real CEO because they don’t understand their numbers, or they don’t know what they should be looking at or they don’t know how to track them. If you’re in that position, you are not alone. And I promise you that the business owners that you’re looking up to, a lot of them are dealing with this exact same thing.

Melinda Wittstock:

As entrepreneurs, we’re so busy doing business we may not truly know or understand how our business is actually doing. In every business, the numbers tell the story, but all too often we’re not on top of those numbers, the priceless analytics that can help you spot problems or maximize success. Kari Poppleton is the maven of metrics, the diva of data dashboards, and today she shares vital insights on what you might be missing and how to dive into the numbers even if you think the thought of that is worse than watching paint dry. Honestly, there is a way to make it fun.

Melinda Wittstock:

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m all about paying it forward as a five-time serial entrepreneur, so I started this podcast to catalyze an ecosystem where women entrepreneurs mentor, promote, buy from, and invest in each other. Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together and lift as we climb.

Melinda Wittstock:

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur who has mastered a way of making data analytics actionable so you can more easily grow your business faster and more efficiently. Kari Poppleton is a certified dashboard designer and the CEO and Founder of Kari Poppleton Consulting, where she serves online business owners, course creators, coaches, and those with memberships and subscriptions, putting the numbers they need to make informed decisions at their fingertips via customized automated dashboards. Kari is a seasoned fractional director of operations for seven-figure businesses, and today you’ll learn how to consolidate data across all your platforms and tools for real-time insights through customizable and interactive web interfaces, all easily visualized and integrated into your systems.

Melinda Wittstock:

Kari will be here in a moment, and first:

[PROMO CREDIT]

Eight years ago, I started this podcast because I wanted to help women succeed as entrepreneurs. Over the years, I’ve driven more than $10 million in sales to the women I’ve featured on this show, and this year I’m taking my investment in female founders to a whole new level as a venture partner of the new firm Zero Limits Capital, where we’re dedicated to investing in highly scalable seed stage startups founded by women and diverse teams – a mission more important than ever as the Trump administration cracks down on anything and everything DEI. We’re looking for innovators with exciting new applications of AI, Blockchain and other emerging technologies that make a social and sustainable impact to change the world. Is this you? If it is, take a moment and tell us about your opportunity at bit.ly/ZLCintake.

Melinda Wittstock:

Here’s the thing. You can know, or you can guess. I’m just going to go ahead and state the obvious: Knowing makes for better business. That’s why today, we’re getting into the weeds of data, and why knowing your numbers is the key to your success if you want to build a sustainable, growing business.

Melinda Wittstock:

But that’s easier said than done when you’re using multiple tools and platforms, tracking multiple KPIs across marketing, sales, operations and finance. That’s why customization, visualization, and integration is so important – so you can understand and use data-driven analytics to transform your decision-making.

Melinda Wittstock:

Maybe you’re wondering how to pinpoint what marketing efforts convert better than others. Maybe you want to quickly identify any bottlenecks in your sales funnels, to track and optimize in real time to boost conversions and efficiency. Maybe you just want to know how you’re doing early enough to pivot. And wouldn’t it be nice if all this information was at your fingertips with clear, actionable visualizations to help you save time and make better decisions?

Melinda Wittstock:

From setting up Google Analytics and UTM parameters to shifting marketing strategies based on data, today we explore the significance of understanding traffic sources, optimizing sales funnels, and using data to pinpoint marketing and sales effectiveness. Already feeling a bit overwhelmed? Don’t worry because Kari Poppleton shares how she creates custom dashboards for businesses that consolidate data across various platforms, offering real-time insights through interactive web interfaces – so you can focus on your passion, creativity and vision with newfound clarity.

Melinda Wittstock:

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Kari Poppleton and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

[INTERVIEW]

Melinda Wittstock:

Kari, welcome to Wings.

Kari Poppleton:

Thank you so much for having me today, Melinda. So excited to be here.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, well, you’re all about metrics and data, so we’re going to geek out on that. But, like, what made you get excited about dashboards?

Kari Poppleton:

You bet. I actually kind of fell into it a little accidentally. I was working as a fractional director of operations for a couple of different seven figure businesses, and as I was responsible for the numbers and pulling them and presenting them to the owners of these business businesses, I started realizing how incredibly difficult it was to actually find them. Not that we can’t find lots of numbers because we have lots of them being thrown at us every day. It was more the ease of finding them, knowing that they were accurate, and then how they actually all interacted together. Because we tend to work with so many different platforms and websites and cart tools and all of those kinds of things, and realizing that there had to be an easier way to be able to pull all of this stuff together. And I kind of fell down the rabbit hole once I created those for those first couple clients and realized how easy it was to be able to make decisions. I was like, more people need to have this. And that’s how I’ve kind of pivoted my business.

Melinda Wittstock:

Everybody wants data, right. But they don’t necessarily know what it means or how to make it actionable and how to use it. So, the first thing is understanding it, right, so in the dashboard, you’ve created a way that it sounds like you can integrate from a number of different sources and then really be able to see kind of like where you’re at relative to where you want to be. Is that a good sum up?

Kari Poppleton:

Yes. Because I think oftentimes, you know, we have numbers that are… It’s really hard to compare them. So being able to pull them together and see them in one spot, it cuts out all of the other noise. You don’t have to go into Google Analytics and try to sort around for one thing and then, you know, log into another tool and look for numbers there. We really can pull everything together in one place. That has very easy to understand graphics and visualizations that just make it so much easier to make decisions. Because when we have too much information, that’s actually just as bad as not having any information because we’re still not going to make decisions from it. So, we always want to start small. We want to start with actually answering specific questions that we have rather than just kind of collecting everything. And that’s always a really great jumping off point to be able to start using the data, making decisions, seeing the impact of those decisions, and then looking at it and saying, okay, well now that we know this, what’s the next thing that we want to be able to know?

Melinda Wittstock:

And so, is this an interactive web tool? Is it like integrated with all these other platforms?

Kari Poppleton:

Yes. Yeah. So, the wonderful thing about that is it gives you the ability then to have real time data so you can actually see what’s happening. You can log in and say, how much revenue did I bring in across my three different websites today? Perfect. We can pull all that together and you can see an updated list of what’s actually happening. And that kind of up to the minute data is just so helpful to be able to actually know what’s going on. So, then you can make decisions to be able to keep growing and having the impact that you want to be able to.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, so let’s talk about a scenario. Give me an example of a, of a client and, and a problem they had, like, preferably someone who, you know, has all the social things going on. They’ve got email going on, they’ve got like an e-commerce component. They got all this different stuff, right? And all these different things and their website and all of it, it’s like, oh my God, like, how are we doing? Give me kind of the before and after.

Kari Poppleton:

Yeah, and you kind of nailed it on the head there. There are just all of these things that are happening, right? So, the typical person that comes to me, like you said, is having, they’re selling on multiple places. They usually have a website. They have probably a funnel builder of some kind where they have a checkout there. They might have a standalone cart that actually goes back to their website, something like Thrive Cart or Spiffy or something like that. And they have a Shopify store. And all of these things are coming from different places. So not only are they juggling sales from all of these different places, but as you had mentioned, they also have marketing that they’re doing for many different platforms.

Kari Poppleton:

So, they’re usually running paid traffic of some kind, usually Meta ads. They have, you know, they’re on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook or all of them. And they’re like, we’re putting all of this effort into marketing, and we see that some sales are coming through or lots of sales are coming through, but we have no idea which of those marketing efforts are actually leading to which of those sales. So, what we’re able to do then is kind of set up an ecosystem where, you know, everything is pulled in together. And we can say, hey, you know, from your Facebook ad, that person went to your Facebook page and then they went to your Shopify store and then they made this particular purchase. We’re able to know where our sales are actually coming from, which is so valuable. When you’re spending all this time and money and energy into your marketing efforts, you really want to be able to know which of those are actually paying off so you can keep doing more of those things.

Kari Poppleton:

So usually what the end result looks like is this interactive dashboard. You know, people can go in and use it. The owner, their marketing team can look at it and really use that to be able to guide their decision so that they can do more of what’s working. And they also can stop what’s not working. And they also know not to break the things that are working, because I think that’s something that gets overlooked often. We’re like, oh, you know, this strategy isn’t working. We’re going to throw it all out. But it could be that 90% of it was working.

Kari Poppleton:

We want to keep that part and just fix the part that isn’t working.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. So, does it give you a sense of where you may have something that needs to be optimized, you know, or where there’s sort of a breakage point or a particular campaign that’s not working? Or say one sales funnel is working better than another and you should double down on the one that’s working and forget the other one.

Kari Poppleton:

Absolutely. And that’s part of it. That. That’s the part that’s so incredibly important, right, is knowing which of those things are working and where in that funnel, things are broken. So, we actually map it out.

Kari Poppleton:

You know, for specific funnels, let’s say you have a sales page, a checkout page, a thank you page. We can very clearly see the conversion rate for each of those steps so that we know exactly where the bottleneck is. So, for example, it might be that maybe sales are just not as high on the funnel as you want. People like, you know what, it’s probably my offer, my pricing is bad, you know, I need a new sales page, all of these things. But we want to look at the numbers first to make sure that what they’re thinking is happening is what is actually happening. And so, we can take a look and say, hey, you know what? Yes, sales are not performing in the way that you want to on this particular funnel. But look, you’ve only had a very small number of people that actually went to your sales page. So, you don’t even have enough people there to know if your sales page isn’t working yet.

Kari Poppleton:

We need to get more traffic to your page first, because we can see that’s the number that’s lacking. Or we might look at it and say, hey, you know what, we’re getting lots of people to the sales page, but nobody’s clicking through to the checkout. Well, that’s a totally different problem. Right? Because now we need to be able to figure out, okay, are people scrolling far enough down in your checkout page? Are they actually taking in the information from it? Maybe you do need a different hook, or you need to talk about it in a different way. So it helps us to really be able to hone in then on which part of that actually really needs to be adjusted. And then at the same time, we can look at where their traffic sources are coming from. So we can say, hey, you know what, it’s actually converting really well with your warm traffic, but your cold traffic, it’s not going well. So, we need to look at how we can change your messaging to make it more appealing to that cold traffic while also not alienating your warm people.

Kari Poppleton:

So, it enables us to be able to get very, very specific, even down to being able to see, you know, which conversions, which sales are happening from which emails in like a welcome sequence or something like that. We can get that granular and really be able to use that information then to make those tweaks that are needed.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so, does the dashboard actually suggest things to do, or is that where your consulting comes in? So, like, they have all the data and they’re looking at the data and you guide them through and say, okay, here’s where the problem is, and then the company figures it out. Or do you go more the consulting of telling them this is maybe what you should consider doing?

Kari Poppleton:

Definitely a little bit of both. It depends on the company. Some people are very comfortable with numbers, or they have someone on their team that is, and they’re happy to dig into it. And again, we make the dashboards very easy to understand because most people would say that they’re not ‘numbers people’. They’re not comfortable with them. They don’t like spreadsheets. Anything like that. So we try to make the visualizations very, very easy to understand.

Kari Poppleton:

Not that people aren’t capable of understanding them, but they just don’t, you know, it’s not their kind of comfort level. We want them to be able to make a decision. And so, you know, very easy funnel visualizations that they can see to be able to see drop offs as they’re going through things like that. So, some people want to be able to dig into that and other people are like, you know what, I really just want to know the insights. And so, I stay on with them and in a consultative role, help them to figure out what it is that’s happening and give them the suggestions of what needs to get implemented next and then look at the results from that implementation.

Melinda Wittstock:

This is incredibly valuable. I can’t tell you in some more than 900 episodes of this podcast so far how many times we have the conversation about entrepreneurs not looking at their numbers or just like literally not knowing right and almost being, especially for women, almost being afraid to even look right, which is like a disaster in business because like you can’t guess like the data, the numbers tell the story and like, you know, it’s going to tell you what to do. Do you know what I mean?

Kari Poppleton:

Exactly. And I think that that’s such a great point because I think when people are running businesses, a lot of people start businesses I’ve encountered because, you know, they were good at something, they were great at a skill or a craft, or serving people in a particular way or making products in a certain way or whatever the case may be. And they didn’t always kind of think through the whole, now I really need to run a whole business thing once it actually started to take off. From the entrepreneurs that I’ve spoken with, I see a lot of shame and guilt and you know, unease of feeling like they’re kind of not really a real business owner, not a real CEO because they don’t understand their numbers, or they don’t know what they should be looking at or they don’t know how to track them. And it’s such an interesting thing to me that there’s kind of this, this block for a lot of people. So, you know, for anyone listening, if you’re in that position, you are not alone. And I promise you that the business owners that you’re looking up to, a lot of them are dealing with this exact same thing. It just looks like they’re not from.

Melinda Wittstock:

The outside because yeah, I’ve seen eight figure businesses that aren’t on top of their numbers. You know what I mean? You know, like, seriously, I, you know, there, there are. There are companies, you know, that they never quite figured out. I mean, but they could be so much more successful, or they could spot a problem coming before it becomes a big problem. You know, all this kind of stuff. Right. So absolutely.

Kari Poppleton:

And when you look at the success level of those businesses and then realize, oh, my goodness, if you had your numbers and you could tweak just those small things and really just optimize those things that you’re already doing well and that your customers and clients are already loving, but you could just, you know, make that, you know, 10 difference that has a huge impact on a business that’s already very successful. So, it’s, you know, it’s just kind of those little course corrections that can make a fantastic difference when you have access to those things.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. And I think it’s just the overwhelm, like helping people get past the overwhelm, because entrepreneurs and business owners, depending on the stage you are at, the company, you know, really, most folks, you know, before they get to the stage where, you know, they can work on their business instead of in it, there’s so many things to be overwhelmed by. So, anything you can do to reduce the time that you have to spend or the friction of trying to figure these things out is incredibly valuable. So, what is the ideal time? When is a business ready to work with you?

Kari Poppleton:

That’s a really good question. So, I mean, I’m always going to say that people should have some numbers that they’re looking at right from the beginning. Right. And even if someone is just starting out, you know, pick three numbers that are going to kind of give you the ideal health. There was someone that I used to work with in a different business that the way that she described it was, you know, if you were on a deserted island and a bird could bring you a piece of paper to tell you the health of your business each day, what would be on that piece of paper? So, kind of looking at it from that perspective, and then as people are kind of growing their businesses, that’s something where we would. We have the ability to teach them how to do this kind of thing on their own if they’re not ready to bring somebody in to completely do it for them. And we have a course that we offer that, that, you know, teaches these skills and how to know what to measure and then how to actually do the measurement. And then as businesses are kind of growing and their business is doing well, and they’re having consistent sales, but they’re getting to that point where they’re sitting in meetings with their team and they’re like, oh man, if only I knew.

Kari Poppleton:

Blank. That’s usually a really good time when they’re starting to realize, you know what if we had this, this understanding, if I knew how long people were staying in my membership before they turned out, if I knew that my Facebook ads were actually, you know, converting and I knew what the actual ROI of them was, that’s when we kind of come in and we can really have a big impact on them. So usually, we’re looking at businesses that are, you know, kind of closing in on seven figures, sometimes a little bit before that, depending on what’s happening in their business. But it really, there’s kind of a continuum as to kind of the depth of the things that they need to be able to pull. But usually, most businesses have some questions they can’t answer right now.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, exactly. So, if you’re at a relatively early stage, say with a. E commerce or online, you know, I don’t know, online business of some kind eLearning or, you know, any of these things, right, and you have your say, you’re at the early stage, you’ve got your first funnel, I don’t know, using click funnels or something like that. You got your first funnel up there and you have some sort of email autoresponder, and you have a website and maybe you’ve started out with Shopify and maybe you’re selling stuff on Amazon, you know what I mean? You’re at that kind of early stage and then obviously you would be on social media, but you might not be doing paid spend yet or thinking about paid spend or I, you know, like all that kind of stuff. Right. So, at that stage, at that very early stage where there’s more that you don’t know than you do, like what? How early should people try and get ahead of this just to set up the systems for success from the ‘get go’. Does that make sense? Or do they really have to be out in the wild for a little while first before it makes sense to really set these systems up?

Kari Poppleton:

No, there’s definitely some right from the beginning that are great to put into place. So, if you have any kind of online presence at all, you know, getting your Google Analytics set up properly so that it can measure all of the things that are happening is wonderful. Even if you’re not ready to kind of, you know, dive headfirst into your numbers, it’s great to be able to have it, you know, recording that historical data so that you have something to go back and compare to. And that’s something that tends to get overlooked in the hustle and bustle of getting websites set up and shops launched and all of that kind of stuff. Stuff. But it’s so incredibly valuable. And then once you have that set up, the biggest recommendation I would have from people is to start using UTMs, which are parameters that go on the end of your link. It kind of looks like a bunch of gobbledygook, but it tells Google exactly where your people came from.

Kari Poppleton:

So, you know, you could create one of these special links and put it in your Instagram profile so that every time somebody clicks on your Instagram profile and goes to one of your websites, you know that they came from your Instagram profile. You can use a different one for your Instagram stories. And again, then you know that people are coming from your stories or from your paid Facebook traffic or from your emails or whatever. And it just. It gives you so much great data of, like, where your people come from, because, you know, we usually kind of have like a sort of idea of how things are going, and this platform is probably doing better than another one. But to actually have the numbers and to know for sure, you know, it’s just. It’s incredibly powerful. I had one client that I worked with where, you know, we were looking at where her traffic was coming from, and then which of those people, like cold people coming to her website were becoming leads and which people were actually making purchases. And we saw that. That, you know, their. Their focus in their marketing had been very Pinterest heavy because of the type of product that they sold. And we saw that, yes, they were getting a lot of traffic from Pinterest, but they actually weren’t getting those people converting into leads and sales at a very high rate. It was actually very, very low, whereas her Instagram traffic was lower, but those people were converting at a very, very high rate. And so, looking at that, we were like, hey, you know what? We actually need to put more of a focus on Instagram than on Pinterest. Their strategy was sound on both, but they just kind of were.

Kari Poppleton:

They were so Pinterest heavy. So that actually caused them to stop spending as much of their team’s time on their Pinterest presence and actually pushing it over to Instagram, which then led to an increase in leads and conversions. So that even if you’re just starting out, that’s incredible information to be able to have because, you know, like, you said we’re juggling so many things, we’re wearing so many hats, we have so much, you know, so many decisions that we make every day. If we can make that just a little bit more streamlined and just cut the noise out a little bit, it’s amazing. And UTM’s. UTM tracking is incredibly valuable for that, for anybody at any stage of business.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. So, you know where they’re coming from. So, it gives you a sense of where, where you should double down or where you should change your strategy. And a lot of people are really overwhelmed. Like when we think of social media, like what you have to do on TikTok and those algorithms are different from the Instagram algorithms, which are different again from say Google, different again from say if you have a presence on Reddit or like now with threads or Blue sky or like YouTube, like, I mean, oh my God, right?

Melinda Wittstock:

Like it’s really overwhelming and you almost, you need a sort of different marketing strategy for each one of these things. So, if you don’t know where they’re coming from and you don’t know who is actually, I don’t know, buying from you as a result of that. Yeah. I mean, you’re blind. It’s really, really difficult. It sounds like you can just get more sophisticated with this over time.

Kari Poppleton:

Exactly. And the questions kind of change a little bit and become more nuanced and more granular and everything like that. But, but basically for everybody, you know, no matter the stage of business, we kind of start off and then we, we build its other aspect of our business. Right. So, in terms of understanding our marketing or for understanding our operations, you know, we kind of do it bit by bit. We’re never going to be able to snap our fingers and kind of have everything beautifully optimized right away, right from the start. And that’s okay. It’s kind of the fun of business.

Kari Poppleton:

Right. There’s always something new to learn and new to apply. So that definitely holds true within the numbers realm as well.

Melinda Wittstock:

So how does this compare? So, what you do say if a business is a little more advanced, they’re on something like HubSpot or Salesforce, which kind of, you know, they say they do all these things, right? They sort of do, but not. It’s very, very complicated. How, how do you integrate with a business that say, has a tool like, I don’t know, HubSpot. How is this different or better?

Kari Poppleton:

That’s a great question. I actually haven’t worked in this capacity with any business that works with HubSpot or Salesforce or those kind of ones. I tend to work more so with online businesses that are kind of very like almost completely digital in their presence and that tend to be very agile. So, they’re kind of, they have new offers that are coming out. They are not as concerned about kind of building kind of long-term clients relationship. Sometimes it’s, they have more people that are kind of coming through on an ongoing basis.

Kari Poppleton:

But typically, as we’re looking at all of the different things that people are using, there’s ways of pulling that data in to be able to pull it into one spot. Right. And that’s really the biggest question that people have is, you know, how does X relate to Y relate to Zed? And then what does that mean for our business? Because that’s the hardest part to do. And honestly that was what I found so hard to do in the beginning was like, you know, I can see this information from, you know, platform A and this from platform B. But what if they’re measuring users in a different way? Or what if they’re measuring something else in a different way? How do you pull that together? Because you want to make good decisions, you need the information to be accurate. If the information is inaccurate, you’re going to make terrible decisions because you don’t know what’s actually true.

Kari Poppleton:

I don’t think there’s one perfect platform. I think if there was, I think that person would be unbelievably successful because everyone is kind of missing just a couple of little pieces that are really important. Like some platforms for example, where people have, you know, ongoing recurring like membership fees that people pay every month or subscriptions, that kind of thing. You know, the overall dashboard will tell you what your average churn rate is. So maybe it says, you know, people on average stay four months and you’re like that’s great except for the fact that maybe you’re losing half of those people after two months and half of those people after six months. And you’re not actually losing anybody after four months. But this is giving you a kind of a wild average which I mean, I guess helps in terms of knowing how much your customer lifetime value is, but it doesn’t actually help you in terms of fixing the problem in your membership to get people to want to stay longer. Right.

Kari Poppleton:

Because then you’re going to be fixing the wrong spot in the membership. So, there’s, there’s all those kind of little quirks.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s the exact data gap. So, you’re getting sort of historic data, but you don’t necessarily know what to do with it, right? So that’s what of differentiates what you’re doing, right? So, these are all custom dashboards for everybody. Talk to me about the process of, of how you build these for people. Is there just basically a basic tool and then you adapt it or how does that work from a sort of a product or tech standpoint at your end?

Kari Poppleton:

I use a tool called Looker Studio, which is a free tool that integrates beautifully with Google Analytics and Google Sheets and all of those kind of ones because it’s a Google product. The great is that there’s no ongoing fees then to upkeep the actual dashboard itself. And you know, like those integrations happen like I said very beautifully. And one of the reasons that I love it after trying a lot of different visualization tools was it’s so incredibly flexible. And you know, when you have the ability to move beyond just kind of a basic block builder that where you kind of drop things in, it means then that you can really tailor the visualization to exactly what those people like, what your people are looking for. And everybody interprets that in a different way. Our brains all work differently. You know, some people will look at a pie chart and they kind of go glossy eyed like they have no idea what that means.

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Melinda Wittstock:

And we’re back with Kari Poppleton, the data dashboard diva and metrics maven.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUES]

Kari Poppleton:

Whereas if you visualize in a different way, it makes sense to them. So, part of it for me is making sure that the person who’s using the tool understands it, that it makes sense to them, that it’s easy in their brain to make a decision because you, again, you want to be able to make the decisions fast. You don’t want to have to like stew over and be like, what did that mean again? Right. And again, every company is very unique in the numbers that they’re looking for. So, we typically start off by saying, what are the, what are the questions that you would love to have answered? Because that really helps to be able to kind of focus us in on the right parts of it. Um, and as we go through that process and then I dig into their businesses and look at how is their tech set up, Is there things that they could tweak to be able to make their, their tracking easier and more accurate so that they can really get those numbers they’re looking for? You know, it is very, very custom for each business because all of those questions are different, and all of their tech stacks are incredibly different. There are so many different tools out there and different combinations of them that people use. So, getting into the weeds in that is kind of my happy place of figuring it out and kind of taking the chaos of it and kind of turning it into order, but then presenting it in a way that even non-numbers-people feel very confident in looking at and being able to make decisions from.

Melinda Wittstock:

So how much pain did you go through that inspired this, say, when you built the company Snugglywunkins? Because before you were doing this, you founded an e-commerce business that made handmade kids accessories. And while you were building that, you know, I imagine you were encountering a lot of these issues.

Kari Poppleton:

I did. And you know what’s so interesting when I look back at it now, I think, man, I wish I would have used my number so much more than. I don’t think I had the same understanding of the value of it. I think, you know, I was kind of in survival mode at that particular time. I was dealing with some very significant health issues and, you know, was trying to put one foot in front of the other and, you know, create the things that were in front of me. And I look back now and think, you know, if I had had better tracking, if I had actually looked at those numbers more often, that would have made my journey so much easier. And I find that as a business owner, you know, there’s just so many decisions that we make all the time and that we’re responsible for. And when you’re making those decisions from gut feeling all the time, or trying to remember back and thinking, oh, you know, I made this change to my tech in September, or I ran this sale in October, that’s why sales were up, or whatever the case may be me. But not actually really documenting it all that well. It is so much more exhausting because you’re trying to hold all that information in your head.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, yeah, exactly. As an entrepreneur, I mean, you really do need to free your mind to be thinking more strategically. Like, the CEO needs some white space to really function, you know, at our best. And so, if we’re cluttered with the minutiae of all of this and just the overthinking of all of. I mean, it’s. It’s time spent on things that are like, need to be done. But, oh, my gosh, the business runs much more effectively.

Melinda Wittstock:

If you, as the founder and as a CEO, can really think more strategically about how you’re going to grow the business, you’ve got the kind of mental space to be able to have creative ideas, to be able to innovate all those things. Right.

Kari Poppleton:

So 100%, anything that can be taken…

Melinda Wittstock:

…Away is a good thing.

Kari Poppleton:

Definitely. And as you had mentioned before, you know, anything that we can do to reduce friction in the way that we’re working is going to make it so much easier. Because it doesn’t. Otherwise, we kill our momentum every time we kind of get going and then we hit that spot of friction. You know, it keeps us from really being able to accomplish what we want in that day or in that flow state that we’re in. And so, I see that often when people are like, oh, okay, I just need to be able to get this number. And then like, oh, wait, no, I need to log into this tool. No, I can’t find it in there.

Kari Poppleton:

I need to log into this tool. And by the time that they actually get to the point where they’re, you know, looking at that number, they’re so frustrated that they kind of forgot what they were looking for in the first place.

Melinda Wittstock:

Traded in hours, hours lost, that could have been doing something much more productive for the business.

Kari Poppleton:

Exactly, exactly. And especially as you can keep building that momentum and you’re doing the things that are in your zone of genius and that you love to do, you’re going to become more and more effective and more creative and all of those things that the business owner needs to be able to, to be without kind of getting all bogged down in the details.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. So how many people, how many clients can you serve? How many clients do you have? And what’s the scalability of your company in the sense of how, like, how many if lots of people listen to this podcast and say, oh, my God, I need this, and you get overwhelmed. How does that work?

Kari Poppleton:

Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, one of the things that’s really important to me as well is in the dashboard builds and how we plan everything out. I mean, the planning part is always kind of the biggest part, right? Because if you plan well, you know, you have a. You get a much better result. Result. But like I said, that, that part and the figuring out how the tech stack works together and things like that is a lot of fun for me. So, I like to actually really work on all that, all that part. I do have some limitation on kind of the amount of clients that I can have simultaneously.

Kari Poppleton:

But all of these projects are kind of… They always are working kind of at different stages at different times. So, for some of them, we’re in the planning process and it’s still a little bit collaborative with the client. At other ones, you know, we’re in a testing stage. So, everything is set up and we’re waiting for data to come in to be able to validate that it’s, you know, it’s coming in accurately. So thankfully, that kind of spreads everything out a little bit, which definitely helps the capacity. And then, you know, being able to have help with some of the other aspects of my business that isn’t in the client things specifically, but help with my marketing and admin and things like that kind of enables me to be able to spread out a little bit more. But it’s such a joy to be able to dig into all of these different businesses at the same time because it gives a really interesting perspective too, of kind of what’s happening in the market and seeing trends between different, you know, types of businesses and types of products that are being sold.

Kari Poppleton:

It really is a lot of fun and it’s really fun to get to work with people who are very mission oriented and really want to have an impact in their businesses and be able to help them to do that better and to expand their impact. It’s pretty cool.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so how big is your team right now?

Kari Poppleton:

In terms of the data stuff, it’s actually, I do all of that stuff and then I got it to.

Melinda Wittstock:

You do?

Kari Poppleton:

Yeah, I do. On the education side, I have a team member that helps support that and the students in that particular product. She is a whiz with dashboards and all of the tracking and analytics as well as just a lovely human. So that is a lovely combination of things. And then I have two other just part time people that help me with some of the behind the scenes in my own business, like in the, in the dashboard, full-service side of the business.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so, when you think of your business in terms of it growing or scaling, I mean, what, what’s, what’s your thinking about that? Because there’s always this tension of, you know, when you have a consultancy or service-based business, there’s like, as you said, there’s a limit to how many clients you could have. But what are some of the things, do you think about how to scale this and be able to serve more people and what it would take?

Kari Poppleton:

Definitely, I think that’s always the question. Right. I think all of us have that in the back of our minds trying to, trying to decide what the best path forward is. Pardon me. I think that I’ve never really had a desire to grow a really big, big team, especially kind of for the, the implementation and fulfillment side of things. I’ve, I’ve worked in an operational capacity with a lot of other businesses and kind of seen, you know, the pluses and minuses to all of those things. But I think there’s definitely space for growth in kind of some of the more streamlined services that can be offered. Kind of the simpler ones, not the super complex ones because I honestly really love that part of it too.

Kari Poppleton:

And I’ve worked with a lot of founders who had that thing that they love to do. And in the process of building a team and continually growing their business, they lost the ability to get to do that thing that they actually really loved, really love. You know, then it kind of starts to make you not love your business as much anymore because now you’re managing a business and a team rather than doing that craft that you’re so excellent at. Right, right.

Melinda Wittstock:

I mean, there’s so many different types of businesses in that sense. I just, you know, I can’t help myself. I always think, you know, when I interview founders and I can see areas where their businesses can grow, know what would it look like to have, you know, a customizable tool that people can kind of take off the shelf then, you know, so gets them, you know, a lot of the way and then if they want the extra consulting or whatever that they can do that. I mean, is that a direction that you consider?

Kari Poppleton:

Yes, Definitely. And we do kind of have that middle ground in there. So, kind of what’s being taught in the course, we can kind of implement that or a piece of that for them if they want that as a jumping off point. That’s kind of the, the middle ground. And then if they’re like, you know what? No, we, we don’t want to be hands on at all. And plus, we have a whole lot of complexity in our business. That’s when we kind of move them over to kind of full done for you.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, exactly. That, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, because there, there are some like, scalable elements. Right. How does AI play into what you’re doing? Or how might it play into what you’re doing?

Kari Poppleton:

That’s a great question. I think for the most part right now, it hasn’t had a huge impact on the actual kind of visualization of the data. Again, just because we’re looking at so much complexity of looking at so many different platforms that it’s really hard to kind of pull that information together. In some ways, AI is not great at like math, it’s great at analyzing. It’s not really good sometimes with actual specific numbers. And so that part hasn’t had a huge impact. I know from my working side of things that it definitely has. Even for things like, you know, I have to write sometimes very complex, you know, Google sheets formulas to be able to, you know, pull information together and categorize it and all of the things.

Kari Poppleton:

And it’s been amazing for that. So, so pro tip for anybody listening, if you need help with, you know, formulas or code of some kind to put into websites, it’s actually remarkably good at that. And even just how much better it is than when, like when ChatGPT first came out. The, the change in that amount of time already and how much more accurate it is.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s incredible, isn’t it?

Kari Poppleton:

Yes.

Melinda Wittstock:

I can imagine an AI, almost, an AI assistant almost being, going, going through the data to figure out, okay, so here’s the data, here’s what’s going on. What do you recommend?

Kari Poppleton:

Yes, absolutely. I think that’s a great place where that could be used where they could say, hey, you know, like, for example, this is my, I have a funnel. This is what I’m selling. My conversion rate from my sales page to thank you page is this. My conversion rate from sales page to checkout is this, you know, what are some opportunities that I have for, you know, for growth or for changing or for optimizing or what’s the biggest bottleneck, that kind of thing. I think once you have the numbers, like, like I said, for analyzing, I think AI is an incredible tool for that because it just sees nuance and things in ways that sometimes we miss because we’re not, you know, kind of looking for that specific thing. It’s amazing what it can pull out.

Melinda Wittstock:

Well, Kari, I could talk to you a lot longer, like, obviously more questions, but we’ll have to talk again or come on the podcast again or whatever. But for anyone listening to this is like, oh, my God, I need this. What’s the best way to find you and. And figure out whether it makes sense to work with you?

Kari Poppleton:

You bet. So, my website is just KariPoppleton.com. I’m the same. Have the same handle over at Instagram as well. Thankfully, I have a unique name, so the domains are very easy to come by.

Melinda Wittstock:

Fantastic. Well, I’ll make sure all that is in the show notes. And thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us. Because, you know, in this new year, right. It’s a good chance always to figure out, okay, so how can I do whatever I was doing better. So, this is an awesome way to start the new year. Thank you so much for putting on your wings with us and flying today.

Kari Poppleton:

Thank you so much for having me.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

Melinda Wittstock:

Kari Poppleton is the CEO and Founder of Kari Poppleton Consulting, offering growing online businesses customized data dashboards for better real-time and strategic decision-making. Check the show notes for Kari’s special free offer, “Five Questions Your Data Can Answer for You.”

Melinda Wittstock:

Please create and share your favorite moments of this or any other podcast episode on Podopolo with our socially shareable clipping feature. You can also join us in the episode comments section so we can all take the conversation further with your questions and comments.

Melinda Wittstock:

That’s it for today’s episode. Head on over to WingsPodcast.com – and subscribe to the show. When you subscribe, you’ll instantly get my special gift, the WINGS Success Formula. Women … Innovating … Networking … Growing …Scaling … IS the WINGS of Inspired Business Formula …for daily success in your business and life. Miss a Wings episode? We’ve got hundreds in the vault, all with actionable advice and epiphanies. Check them out at MelindaWittstock.com or wingspodcast.com. You can also catch me on LinkedIn or Instagram @MelindaAnneWittstock. We also love it when you share your feedback with a 5-star rating and review on Apple, Spotify or wherever else you listen, including Podopolo where you can interact with me and share your favorite clips.