From Hands-On to Visionary with Graham Robins

In This Episode

• [02:16] – Graham Robbins shares his origin story in customs brokerage and how he started BorderBuddy to cater to the needs of small ecommerce retailers.
• [10:21] – Graham talks about how he learned about EOS and its simple tools and frameworks to strengthen his company’s productivity.
• [13:48] – Graham shares his experience hiring CEOs and implementing EOS, emphasizing the importance of autonomy and ownership for both parties.
• [16:31] – Graham describes their experience working with Stephan, mentioning the importance of having a well-run business with processes in place to ensure continuity.
• [18:16] – Stephan and Graham discuss the transformation of borderbuddy.com from a simple calculator tool to a comprehensive website with improved design, SEO, and brand identity.
• [24:55] – Stephan and Graham discuss the importance of creating evergreen pages on a website, such as blog posts or informational pages, to rank for niche terms and provide value to potential customers.
• [31:36] – Graham emphasizes the importance of an “About Us” page, including personal photos and employee names, to build trust and credibility.

Jump to Links and Resources

Graham, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. It’s good to see you again.

Let’s start with your origin story if you will. How did you get into the customs brokerage world?

The customs brokerage world came to me through my family. My dad and mom started A & A Customs Brokers in 1979. I was lucky to be born into that and started full-time in 1991. I have been there for quite a while now.

Wow. Did you leave high school and immediately start working for your parents?

Right, and even before that, I worked weekends and summers, but full-time right out of high school.

Awesome. You created this adjunct or sister company to A & A called BorderBuddy. What was the inspiration for that? And what problem were you trying to solve?

BorderBuddy is the same service as A&A; it’s customs clearance but two very different customer segments.

BorderBuddy still services the same service as A & A; it’s customs clearance but two very different customer segments. I actually learned about this case study I did once. Basically, A & A’s core customer is a large business, shipping hundreds or thousands of shipments per month, repeat. They used credit terms, purchase orders and things like that. It’s a typical business.

On the BorderBuddy side, when ecommerce started coming on 15 years ago, our switchboard lit up with customers asking, “I want to import a pair of shoes, or I want to import a car, pizza oven, or just smaller items.” They were clogging up our core customer service—still great customers, but very different needs. 

They needed more education, more knowledge transfer, and things like that. We spun out BorderBuddy fully, actually. We operated inside of A & A for several years and then fully spun it out in 2018.

How long have you been in YPO? And what was the impetus for joining that organization?

I’ve been in YPO since 2008. That’s been going on for sixteen years, I guess. The impetus for joining I was a member of a group called the Canadian Association of Family Enterprise (CAFE), which was a learning group. The YPO was recommended to me through that. It was a group that recommended more peer learning and experiences.

I was looking for some help in growing and scaling the business, and I had a lot of issues that I didn’t have a lot of peers at the time that I could turn to. YPO has been amazing for me, with learning about myself, my business, and how to be a better leader, father, son, husband, and everything. I’ve gone all in on YPO.

That’s awesome. Have you done other programs like Strategic Coach, or is YPO the main thing?

YPO is the main thing for me. I was doing many other things at the beginning, and then I just realized how deep and broad YPO was. There’s a choose-your-own-adventure through the whole YPO journey where you can do things at a chapter level in your city, town, province, or state. Then there’s regional, which is a bigger chunk, and international. It just goes and goes. There are programs and education for whatever you’re looking for.

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Cool. Do you present there as well? You used to run the chapter in British Columbia, but do you present at big conferences or anything like that?

I haven’t done that. I put on events. YPO is completely member-run. Everything is run by the members. You’re expected to champion events, put on events, do speeches, and more when you’re a member. There are a bunch of different journeys you can go on there, but I got involved in the executive, so I am running the local chapter of YPO British Columbia, which has about 110 members.

I did almost everything in that chapter except finance. Forum, learning officer, putting on 20–30 events a year, and then chapter chair. Most of the time, they’ll bring in speakers, such as a YPO member or an external resource, to speak at the conferences and things like that.

As far as scaling the business, you’ve done well with both businesses, scaling those to the point where you’re no longer running. Do you want to share some of the results and secrets to making that successful?

Every leader is different in terms of skills and interests.

I’ve learned that every leader is different. They have their skill set, and they have the things that they like to do. I always felt that I wasn’t good at running the company. It might be strange, but I could be good at the strategy, the vision, the ideas of where we should go but the day-to-day running it, making sure we’re executing well operationally, I was never really strong at that.

I fought it for a long time, thinking, “Man, I got to be good at this. I got to get good at this.” I just learned through YPO. I have a CEO coach who talked about what I love to do and felt that I was good at. “Don’t try to turn a weakness into a strength.” In school or something, you have to do that, but once you’re in a business, really do more of what you’re great at and don’t do much of what you’re not great at, so I learned that.

Then, I realized I didn’t enjoy running the business daily because I didn’t think I was particularly good at it. I brought in leaders who are amazing at running a business, executing, and holding people accountable. I can focus more on the future, and that’s been wonderful. It’s been a challenge, but it’s been super exciting and wonderful.

Right. To use EOS parlance, you’re a visionary, not an integrator.

I learned that. It’s hard to say that, in a way, you label yourself a visionary or something like that, but I’m not a strong integrator. The visionary part is something that excites me. I get excited about newness and ideas and think about what we could do and our possibilities. That’s my favorite spot.

You’ve implemented EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System), which we’ve talked about in other episodes of this podcast. What made you want to implement EOS? What value did you get out of EOS? What are some of the highlights?

What I’ve learned about my personality is that even though I can be in this ideal space and love whiteboarding, brainstorming and things like that, I also love frameworks. I love frameworks. I love systems and processes to follow. It could be everything from the love languages in my personal life. I like those frameworks.

With EOS, we were talking the same language. We were all focused on the same goals, which greatly brought me value.

When EOS came about, it was like a paint-by-number process or a system that not only I can follow, but I realized the easier I make it for the rest of the people in our company to follow, the more aligned we can get. 

Some of my weaknesses were getting people aligned and getting them on board. It was amazing once we put in EOS because we were just talking the same language. We were all focused on the same goals every day, week, month, quarter, and year. That brought a huge amount of value to me. 

I joke that if I’m in a leadership meeting, I just can’t not have that in my meeting anymore. The best way I can describe it is that it’s like your iPhone. If you had to go back to a Nokia and press three letters to text somebody, the operating system you use becomes second nature. It was super helpful to me and brought a lot of issues to light, which was great.

Did you learn about EOS from YPO?

Interestingly, it was an evolution from Scaling Up by Verne Harnish. It started with that. That was a YPO event in Alberta. We brought in Verne and had a group meeting with YPO British Columbia—YPO Alberta. That was an aha moment for me. 

That was over a decade ago when it was, “Oh, my gosh, I need rocks, I need the one-page plan. I don’t need a 27-page booklet on that and all the terminology I’ve heard since then.” If your strategic plan needs to be bound, it’s not a plan. If it makes a thud when it drops onto a desk, it’s not a plan because no one will look at it or follow it. 

The simplicity started with Scaling Up. What I found at the time going back to the framework was how to get the person who starts on Monday and the new person who starts with our company on Monday and how I ramp them up as fast as possible. It was my opinion that EOS had simpler tools. We give every new hire what the heck an EOS book is, “Here’s what the EOS is all about. They’re off to the races pretty quickly.”

If your strategic plan needs to be bound, it’s not a plan. If it makes a thud when it drops onto a desk, it’s not a plan.

The marketing and the framework side of it was a bit stronger at the time with EOS. Scaling Up has doubled down on that. They’ve got software and many other things that they’ve developed over the last decade.

All right. What are the weekly meetings called?

In EOS, that’s L10.

Level 10 meetings, yeah. You have your entire executive team on that. It’s a strict schedule with sharing wins and going through issues.

Start on time, it’s 90 minutes. You always have a personal segue at the beginning where we’re all sharing wins personally. Professionally, you’ve got a scorecard to check all your metrics. You are doing any people headlines. It’s just nothing that you have to solve, “Hey, so and so is going to have a baby, so and so is going to be off on a holiday in a week or two. That’s just the updates to the company.”

There are rocks. “What are we working on for this quarter? What is the check-in on those? How are we doing?” Then there are to-dos, all the things we said we would do. It’s my favorite part because personal accountability is a big issue for me, and it’s important. I love that when you leave that meeting, all your to-dos are tracked, and they will be there in the next meeting, and you either did them or you didn’t. That’s a real indicator of how people perform.

You go through the to-dos and this next, and we’ll see you in seven days. Ideally, there are no meetings in between no meetings after the meeting. “Hey, if we have our meeting on Monday, and you ask me something on Wednesday, can it wait till the Monday meeting?” That allows people to stay out of meeting hell, be more productive, and work on their rocks.

Most things can wait seven days. It’s amazing what happens when you get that discipline in. I don’t want to have seven meetings a week on various issues. “We can talk about it at L10.”

Amazing. You’re just an executive chairman, so you’re not in those meetings. They’re still doing level 10 meetings and implementing EOS. You said something about your CEOs having complete autonomy to implement whatever frameworks, systems, and vendor relationships they want.

Absolutely. I could talk about YPO a lot. Going back to YPO, when hiring CEOs to run the businesses, I would ask many people who had done that. You’ve hired CEOs for your companies, “How did that work?” Most importantly, I talked to CEOs who have hired guns and worked for somebody else, and those were the most fun conversations.

I said, “How do I not be a jerk owner?” I want to be a really good owner, and I want you to be a great CEO. Everything I heard time and time again was, I don’t know if you have swearing on this podcast, but it was everything from shut your hole, know your role, you are not the CEO. There’s a CEO in place, and you don’t tell that person what to do. You barely answer questions because they’re doing all that thinking. I won’t tell them to run EOS or Scaling Up. I will have some mandates on what we want the business to do.

I could be good at the strategy, the vision, and the ideas of where we should go, but I was never really strong at the day-to-day operations.

Actually, in most cases, they’re giving the plan of what they want the business to do, and I’m not telling them how to do that. I really believe in autonomy and ownership. I don’t think either is running EOS anymore, and I don’t ask them. I don’t say, “Hey, how do you run your meetings?” It’s not that I don’t care. It’s that they should do what they feel is best to get the results that they want.

Congratulations on all the freedom. It’s awesome.

It’s a big change, but it’s been invigorating. I noticed that the people benefit the most from it. I joke, “Maybe this is too much, but if I didn’t own that company, I probably would have been fired as CEO because I wasn’t a particularly good CEO.” I was good when I was in the business a bit.

In EOS, it talks about that. If you can’t do that role, even if you own the company, you can’t sit there because you’re holding everyone else accountable for finance, HR, and sales. You can’t be not doing your job very well. It’s unfair to the company. I’ve realized that. “Hey, I need to remove myself, because I don’t think I’m the strongest person for this company. It’s better for the people, too.”

When we were working together—you were a client and I was a service provider—my team helped you with SEO, content marketing, website, revamping, etc. You were the CEO, and you called the shots, but you also had a marketing person who oversaw marketing and someone for operations, financial aspects, etc. I thought it was a well-run business when we were interacting. I guess it’s even on steroids now.

That’s actually a great way of saying it. I put myself down too much because the businesses have done well. But there could be more growth and more opportunities for the people there, people development and things like that. I’m super excited for the teams there to get that with even stronger leadership to take, like you said, steroids or take it to a new level.

Even Amazon jokes about this, like you should be bringing on people at all times who are always raising the bar. Jeff Bezos said that you should look ahead, and in five years, you should be able to say, I would never get hired here again. I’m so lucky to be on this team, and they would never hire me now because the people and everything have gotten so much better in that company that you’ve just brought on better people to make the company better and better.

Okay. But still, I think you’d make Gino Wickman proud. You told him your story. Gino Wickman, by the way, for the listener, is the founder of EOS. He’s a former guest, an amazing guest. That was a great episode.

Gino’s great. I’ve seen a lot of him. Definitely, I would say that EOS helped me get there because it puts those processes into the company that can get up and running without you. I never felt it, even before EOS, but more so after EOS, I never felt that the company needed me.

It was like, “No, we know who’s responsible and accountable with this accountability chart. We know who needs to do that role.” I could take a vacation and have my weekends and nights. There was never an issue where it was like, “Oh, if I got hit by a bus, the company’s going to fall apart.” I never felt that.

Let’s talk about some of the initiatives we push through on borderbuddy.com. What a difference from the former website version before we started working together. The whole thing was bright orange, including the background, and there were five pages on the About page. It wasn’t about the company. It didn’t give any background on you or the company.

It was like a Contact Us page. It’s where to find us.

Yeah, essentially like a Contact Us. Let’s just say it’s like a starter website. We completely transformed that. I just looked at it before we started recording. It looks the same as when we left it. When we stopped working together, it looked like that site hadn’t undergone any overhaul in design, conversion, or SEO.

When we first started working with you, one of the key things about BorderBuddy was that it has an online calculator tool, which sounds simple. But when you’re talking about customs, we need to apply tariff classification and tax codes, which are different for every province.

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Every province in Canada and the US has taxes. There’s excise tax and things like that. It’s not just what’s four times five, and here’s my calculation. It’s, “What’s that product? What’s the origin of it?” The country of origin has a different duty rate from the US versus China. It’s a very complicated piece.

When we first launched the website, we had the tools to do the calculations. Then, we had Google Ads to get people to the tool. That was the website. It was, like you said, 2–5 pages. When you helped us look at SEO and the brand identity, it was all orange. We had people complain about that. They’d go on and, “Man, it’s just a sea of orange.”

We wanted to stand out because so many companies were blue. Blue is huge. For some reason, blue and red are just massive. Orange was fairly unique, and we wanted it to stand out.

We saw huge increases in developing great content that was helpful to importers and exporters, driving content to our page.

Having said that, once you started helping us with content and blog posts, going back to EOS, we had KPIs showing how much we wanted to move from paid to organic. We saw huge increases in that, just huge increases in developing great content that was really helpful to importers and exporters driving content to our page, then ideally getting a quote, and us completing the service. That was a fun journey.

What made it more interesting—let’s just say interesting, I don’t know what other word to use right now—during the pandemic, it disrupted import-export. We were working together when it just started. 

We moved quickly and put together a huge strategy, set of content pieces and so forth around COVID and what importers need to know about it. We wrote so much about it that we turned it into an ebook, a PDF download. We had things like infographics and lots of really meaty, valuable stuff.

It came out so quickly. In April of 2020, we put that out. Our first version of the article came out in March, and the big ebook came out a month later in April. We moved fast. That was a significant differentiator for you versus the other customs brokerage services in your space.

Absolutely. It’s funny you just triggered some memories there. For your audience, BorderBuddy and A & A both make shipments into Canada and the US. We are licensed in both countries. But what happened with the border shutdown is there’s a stat that 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the border. What a lot of Canadians do is drive down to the US when they’re buying things or shopping online, etc.

For me, the border is about 17 minutes from my house. If someone doesn’t ship to Canada, these mailbox companies littered across the northern border from Washington State to New York with parcels delivered to them. People go down on the weekend after hours. These things were open 24 hours; they went down and got their Amazon packages or whatever packages they were, and they self-declared them.

They say, “Hey, I bought a computer,” or whatever they bought. But they couldn’t do that anymore. All their products were being shipped to the US, and they couldn’t cross the border because it was shut down. Our business went bonkers, and our phones and emails lit up. We had very specific wording and helpful articles about their options and how to deal with them. It was a lame time for Canadians trying to cross the border, but it was great that we had a solution.

You’ve heard about all the COVID spikes in certain industries—kayaking, stand-upboarding, canoes, sea-doos, and boats. And We were importing all those when people said, “I was going to have that shipped to the US, but can you help me do it directly?” We were doing a lot of that work and still do because people realize it’s not expensive to stop driving down on your own, and you can just have it delivered to your door. We set up much of that based on that content and that timing.

Yeah. We were your content department. We were writing all your articles and all the web content, everything from the About page to the Import-Export page and the frequently asked questions, all of it, the blog.

I’m preaching to the choir here, but it’s almost comical about how much that content drives visits. People said, “Oh, we got to do content, we got to do content.” But when you’re following EOS and got the KPIs, we had two main KPIs that were fun to watch. “How many blog posts did you do? And what’s the organic traffic?”

If we didn’t do blog posts, we got no organic traffic. If we did blog posts regularly, our organic traffic went up. It’s just super simple, but it’s a long game. It’s like, “Oh, we’re going to do ten blog posts,” and then they stop. But you have to keep at it, and the traffic snowballs.

It’s important also to have evergreen pages, not just blog posts that are of the moment, like here’s what you need to know about import-export with COVID-19 restrictions this month or something, but something specific to importing a car. It is not just an import-export page, but import a car, import a horse, import into Canada, and expand out of Canada to the US. These pages are essential to rank for those specialized, more niche terms.

I completely agree. I’ll ask people, “What are our most visited pages?” It’s shocking after the calculator, which is still our most visited page, because there’ll be a little niche item in importing a car. There’ll be importing a vehicle, and then there’ll be like, “There’s a bunch of documents and things that you need to do.” Inside of that is one of our most visited pages, and that’s an evergreen piece. You guys wrote it. It’s amazing because I think you might have said it. Every blog post in every evergreen content is a sales rep.

I have said that.

Once you said it to me, my eyes lit up. I was like, “Oh, my gosh, he’s right.” Every question in your industry should be a page on your website, whether it’s a blog, evergreen, or whatever, or a video link to your podcast about it, whatever it is. It is surprising that it’s happening in the background until you look in your Google Analytics and go, “Wow, that page is one of our most important pages to potential customers.”

Do you remember we did a brand script for you at the beginning of this process? We implemented the storybrand framework and SB7 and came up with the internal problem for your audience. We came up with the shared villain, the process plan, and the agreement plan.

In storybrand, you typically go with a process plan, sometimes an agreement plan, but almost never both. I think it’s in the book called Building a StoryBrand, where Donald Miller said that about 70% of the time, folks go with a process plan and 30% with an agreement plan. I figured, why not do both? So we did.

On the About page is your agreement plan, which is we treat customers the way we’d like to be treated. Keep it simple, leave the math to us, change is good, and then add a little verbiage underneath each.

In the import-export section is the process plan, a simple four-step process. Step one is to get a quote using our handy customs calculator in seconds. Step two, you send us the invoice. Step three, you pay us. Step four, you relax as we prepare your documents for import. 

Every question in your industry should be a page on your website, whether it’s a blog or a video link to your podcast.

It makes it so simple-sounding for a potential customer to say yes to. It makes it seem like you’re a company that does what it says it’s going to do to have an agreement plan, to have those commitments laid out for folks. It’s almost like your company values.

It’s finally being refreshed because we’ve also closed the loop on that. We’ve focused on our Google reviews. We have the most Google reviews for any customs broker in the world. By the way, I challenge anyone on the podcast. If I’m wrong, please tell me who it is. We look, and we can’t find anyone. We’re probably 5x–8x anyone else.

What’s fascinating is the simplicity that you talked about. Every Google review that we get that’s positive is four and above. We ping into a Slack channel to our ops team. 

That thing on the website that you just described that our customer promised, basically or however you want to word it, is amazing what happens in this Slack channel with the reviews coming in. They made it seamless. I was so scared. I thought this was going to be a brutal process. They made it so easy.

It’s a self-fulfilling positivity loop to our people that shows, “Oh, the customers do care about this.” They were doing what we said we would do. You could see from the views like, “Why would I do anything other than what these customers are raving about?” They made it easy. They answered my call, returned my email quickly, and did all the things that you wanted to do. Because we’re not perfect, anything below a four-star goes just to the leadership team.

We’re not tricking anyone. You can go to our website. You can go on Google reviews and see all the reviews, but our ops people never see the negative. It’s fun because our leadership team goes, “okay, you got a one-star review because you took two days to return an email, someone deleted it, got lost, or something weird happened.”

Fix negative reviews and cherish positive ones. It’s customers’ love language.

We go and fix that and make sure that that gets fixed. But the positivity of those constant four- or five-star reviews tells our people again and again this is what they care about. Basically, this is our customers’ love language. Keep doing it. It’s gratifying.

Yeah. I remember I interviewed you to extract all the About page content from you because none of it was documented anywhere. There were a couple of little tidbits that I could get from internal documentation because I know a bit about EOS: that you have the vision, core values, those things documented in a vision-mission planner or something like that.

The VTO for EOS?

VTO (Vision/Traction Organizer). I got those items from you for the About page, and then the rest of it, the timeline of the history, the evolution of BorderBuddy, I interviewed you for, and then we took that recording and turned that into content and got that visually designed. 

By the way, our partner for all the design stuff is Studio1 Design, Greg Merrilees. He’s amazing, a good friend of mine, and a past guest on this podcast.

The visual conversion focus design that came out of our work together was pivotal. It brings back memories here to recall all this stuff that we did together to bring about something out of nothing and end up with 10 or 20 times more content than we had when we started and were not experts at all in the import-export world. That was a challenge.

For every positive Google review we get, we ping into a Slack channel to our ops team.

I remember seeing some of the blog posts. I was editing them or reviewing them at the beginning. I said, “Wow, I don’t have to touch this one. It’s really good. You guys, either your content people, are great.” It’s interesting to say that about the About Us page because I will admit I undervalued that at the beginning because we didn’t have one before.

Personally, I don’t care that much about that for other people. If somebody goes and says, “We’ve been in business for 52 years.” I’m like, “I don’t care. Snapchat has been in business for four years. Who cares if you’ve been in business for 50 or 100 years?”

I don’t care about that. Can you do the service in the way that I want and the way that I like? Is it a reasonable price? And then I’m going to go. I realized that once you start telling what you’re about, people resonate and care about that. That’s the visited page.

Because we were a calculator page, if you search BorderBuddy, one of the things was like, “Is BorderBuddy real? Is it a real business? Is this a calculator page that spits out things? Can you do what it says it will do?” That helped also round out our content to build some trust.

Not only our Google reviews were here. I even asked people and said, “Are those scam reviews? Are you paying somebody to do those reviews?” We never have and never would.

You can’t trust Google reviews and some people because people can hire people to give you good reviews. But then, once the About Us page was there and we added pictures of our actual employees, it was a big thing for me. There are no stock images of fake people that look like models. We all look how we look, like real people. Let’s make sure we put a face to a name there.

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Actually, that’s another thing that comes across in our Google reviews. They name the people a lot. I worked with Blair, Katrina, Jeff, or whoever it was, and they were awesome to work with. They were fantastic. They held my hand and helped me. That About Us page was something I undervalued, but I know that people look at it and care. Who am I dealing with here? Where are they? What are they about?

It adds legitimacy, and people do business with people. Human to human. If they can relate to you, if they can know, like, and trust you because of your story, your scrappy out-of-nothing creation of BorderBuddy, how successful that’s gotten, your connections to YPO, and your passion for things like EOS and also KPI checklists. That was another thing that we learned from you that you implemented. We put that on the timeline as one of the milestones when you implemented that. The book by Bernie Smith and the whole system around that.

Bernie is great. We use his stuff every day. It’s amazing.

Yeah, so lots of great, great stuff. Your core focus on that page sums up your ethos, the business, and how it differs from everybody else. Our passion is to deliver AWESOME. Our point of difference is that we simplify customs brokerage. That just encapsulates so much in just a handful of words.

I give credit to Joey Gibbons. He’s a YPO friend of mine. I was asking him because he’s got a great brand. He runs Gibbons Hospitality in Whistler. It has an amazing brand identity up there.

I asked him. He knows nothing about customs brokerage, but we’ve imported things for him. He goes, “All I know is you deliver awesome. I ordered something online, it was a big pain in the butt.” I was like, “Oh, how do I get this across the border, or do you need a customs broker?” He goes, “I just emailed you the invoice,” and it was done. I stole that from him. I give him credit for the awesome part.

The second really fun part is that our business tends to be technical. I noticed that there’s a habit of flexing that to people like, “Oh, this is technical, we’re the experts, and here’s all this knowledge and stuff we have.” We realized that our customers don’t care about any of that. There might be a percentage that does, but most of our customers don’t want us to give them knowledge. They want their shipment delivered like yesterday.

Once you start telling what you’re about, people resonate and care about that.

If that happens, they’re happy. They don’t want to know that we had to apply the tariff classification and that all our people need to be licensed and qualified. They’re just like, “I don’t know, did it show up at my door?” I’m good.

It just works.

Yeah. They want to be compliant and make sure that we’re not breaking the law and things like that. So many times, you’ll get on with people, and they’ll start telling you the intricacies of like when you order a steak at a restaurant. They don’t tell you that, okay, we’re going to put some oil on the grill, and we’re going to light it at 325, and then we’re going to flip it after two minutes. Who cares? Was my steak medium rare or not? I’m good.

That was really fun, getting our people to realize that even though we are very knowledgeable, experienced, and licensed, our customers don’t want to hear much about that. But if you have that on your page, and you have that on your content, the people who do care about it will find it and learn that, but they just want it delivered.

I know we’re running out of time here. Do you want to share any nugget of wisdom, anything that stands out for you from our work together, or any lesson learned?

I think we covered a lot today in some ways. I think, for me, I really think it’s understanding what you’re most comfortable and good at doing. Try to go in that direction. Not everyone has a lot of choices about what they can do. But when you realize that you’re good at this and you’re not so good at this, sometimes you get stuck thinking. I need to get good at that.

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I actually don’t believe in that. I’m like, “I’m not good at that. I don’t want to become good at that.” But somebody else out there loves being good at that and is really good at that. I think the faster you can get into your wheelhouse or your magic spot, the better for you and everyone around you. That’s one of my biggest learnings in the last 20 years; I want to get to that role as fast as possible.

As Dan Sullivan says—he’s the founder of Strategic Coach—that gets you a self-managing business or, even better, a self-multiplying one. It sounds like that’s where you’re at. You’re on autopilot, your team’s doing great, and you can just go fishing.

Yeah, and for kids. There’s not a lot of fishing happening unless it’s with them, of course, but not a ton of spare time. But absolutely, it allows me to think about larger things. It’s been wonderful.

Awesome. Thank you, Graham, and thank you, listener. I hope you’ve got some great little tips there, got some at least inspiration to maybe do a revamp on your website, do better content marketing, or create more pages for your SEO initiatives so that you know you have more virtual salespeople out there. We’ll catch up with you in the next episode. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Identify and understand the distinct needs of my different customer segments. Tailor my content and services to cater to specific customer requirements.

Ensure my spin-off brands provide specialized services. However, don’t dilute my core business focus, and always address the unique needs of my niche markets. 

Provide knowledge transfer to empower my customers. For my diverse customer segments, invest in educating the audience about my services.

Consider implementing frameworks like EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) for my operational alignment. Use structured systems and processes to enhance my organization’s communication and goal alignment.

Foster a business culture of accountability. Implement regular check-ins to track my team’s progress and promptly address any issues.

Evaluate and enhance the design, conversion, and SEO of my website. Ensure a user-friendly experience by focusing on site navigation and aesthetics.

Identify and implement online tools that cater to the complexities of my industry. Increase my website’s traffic by combining online tools with targeted Google Ads campaigns.

Set clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to transition from paid to organic traffic. Develop high-quality, informative content that addresses the needs of my audience.

Create evergreen pages focusing on niche industry terms. Optimize content to rank for specific, specialized topics relevant to my business.

Connect with Graham Robins through LinkedIn and learn more about customs brokerage and cross-border ecommerce on The Graham Robins podcast.

About Graham Robins

Graham Robins is the Executive Chairman of A&A Customs Brokers. He’s also the Founder and Executive Chairman of BorderBuddy, which is digitizing the customs clearance process into the USA and Canada for carriers, digital platforms, importers/exporters and customs brokers.