DS_Karl Sakas_93_Edited_Full Interview_v1
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[00:00:00] Within an hour, I concluded that the candidate was almost certainly a pathological liar and they were about to fly him in for the interview. And like everything else had gone smoothly and all the owner pulled on the thread that I shared and the candidate's whole story unraveled. If you want to reach your long term goals in running your agency, whether that's growing toward an exit or running it as a highly profitable lifestyle agency, you need to improve your skills as a leader and a manager.
Because you can't just, you know, yell across the room or do so virtually to get things done. Welcome to the deep specialization podcast, the show, where we blend focus, strategy, and client intimacy in order to scale and simplify our businesses and our lives. I'm your host, Corey Quinn. Let's jump into the show.
Welcome back to the deep specialization podcast. I'm excited to have Carl Sakis on the show today. Carl is known as the agency therapist and helps agency owners work less, [00:01:00] earn more, and reward their best team members. With a background in agency operations, Carl has advised hundreds of agencies across the globe and is the author of multiple books and over 450 articles on agency management.
Today, we're diving deep into his latest book, actually just launched today. As of the recording, the name of the book is calm, the chaos, 10 ways to run a better agency, which offers practical strategies for agency leaders to create a better work environment, improve team morale and achieve sustainable growth.
Welcome Carl. Corey, great to be here. Yes. So we met a couple of years ago through, uh, an association we're both involved with, which is called the Bureau of Digital, which I have found as a post agency guy, I was in the agency life now in the post agency life. Uh, that it is such a wonderful [00:02:00] community. Big plug for Carl and that team over there, um, and, uh, Carl Smith, that is, and, uh, over at the Bureau.
I know you're really active in that community and, uh, it was really great to meet you and been following you and learning a lot from you from all the content you put out. Uh, so I was excited to hear that you're launching this new book or you launched it today. Congratulations again. Thank you. And what is the key message that you hope readers will take away from this new book?
If you want to reach your long term goals in running your agency, whether that's growing toward an exit, or running it as a highly profitable lifestyle agency, you need to improve your skills as a leader and a manager. And so, what point in an agency's life, lifecycle, let's call it, from startup to maybe a sale, or a transition to, to another team, What type of agency in that context did you write this book for?
It really could [00:03:00] apply to agencies at any size. If agencies want to go beyond about 10 people, you as the owner or one of the leaders will need to uplevel your leadership skills because you can't just, you know, yell across the room or do so virtually to get things done, right? You're going to add layers of additional managers.
And you're not going to know everyone on the team really, really well. And if you have big exit goals, for instance, I have clients who want to exit for 10 million for 40 to 50 million for over a hundred million dollars. You're going to have to be a great leader and manager, and you're also going to have to recruit and develop leaders and managers working for you, or else you will not be able to handle that on your own.
And that makes perfect sense. What is going on in their agency that would cause them to really lean into the lessons that you teach in the book? Like, what are some of the challenges they may be facing? Maybe even the listeners today thinking about their own business, like what are the problems that [00:04:00] they're struggling with that would cause them to really want to go and read this book?
A few things come to mind. One of them is if you are doing a lot of firefighting, so if you're, you know, you've got a fire that's popped up and you're dealing with that and then there's another fire and another, ideally you can shift as a leader and I'm using leader and manager somewhat interchangeably because leaders will be good managers and managers need to be good leaders.
If you were just putting out fires all day long, that may be a sign that you'd benefit from calm the chaos. Another example would be if you're working really long hours. And, and, you know, that varies. I talked about in the work lesser and more book that preceded calm, the chaos, you know, working less is unique to each person.
For some, they want to go from 80 hours to 60 or from 60 to 40. I have some clients where their goal, you know, has been go from 40 to working part time and then stepping back completely. So it's relative. But importantly, if you're working more hours than you want [00:05:00] to. And, or you're doing more firefighting than you want to, it's probably a sign you'd benefit from Calm the Chaos.
Beautiful, which I'm sure represents, you know, a certain percentage of our listeners, uh, today. So that's, that's great. You mentioned something managers can be leaders and leaders can be managers. What is the difference in your mind between a manager and a leader? You know, if you're looking at a, a large corporation, for instance, you know, the leaders would be the people with C level or VP type titles.
They're in the corner office. Kind of thing. And then the, then the managers are in the cubicles reminding people about their time sheets and things like that, you know, with independent agencies, you know, uh, at age describes a small agency is under 150 people, although certainly there's a difference between, you know, 149 people and 10, but.
Um, you know, uh, leaders tend to be in more elevated roles. They tend to be on the leadership team [00:06:00] or executive team. Anyone can demonstrate leadership at any level. One of the examples I talk about in combat chaos is my experience leading a marketing trade association chapter. We had 700 members, a hundred volunteers, and 15 people directly reporting to me as the president.
For the board of the association chapter and we had a particularly good succession planning process. People would start volunteering as a committee member. If they did well, they'd move up to become the director of the head of that committee. If they wanted some could stay there. Others might pursue becoming a V.
P. where they managed. Multiple directors, they might be in a couple VP roles, kind of rotating around, and then some would pursue becoming president. The key is that you could succeed at different levels, and if you did well, you'd move on. You also might find that you didn't want to keep moving up. Maybe you're happy with where you were.
The thing is, the organization needed [00:07:00] leaders at, at every level. Um, whether that was officially leading a team, or maybe leading a project, or leading an event. Something like that. Yeah, cross functional. Yeah, exactly. In the book, you talk a lot about the shift from being a doer to being more of a leader.
Yes. And when it comes to founders or owners of agencies, people who have launched the agency have grown it to 10 plus people. Yeah. How does, how does one do this when that same founder is the reason why all the clients have joined, right? They are maybe the, uh, the face of the agency or maybe the, the, the top functional expert they know the most in the building.
Like how do you, how do, how would you recommend that they begin this transition from being the doer to the leader? One of the big things is to start splitting out the nature of the work you're doing for each client. So in the early days, you know, the agency owner is often doing everything, but over time you'll tend to specialize [00:08:00] more roles will specialize more and you're not doing everything.
And the key to this is being deliberate about how you delegate and the order in which you delegate. So of course there are in my work, there are six agency roles, account management, project management, your SMEs, your, your subject matter experts, client strategy. Business development, which is not just sales, it's marketing, sales and partnerships, and then support, which is operations and leadership.
So, in the early days, you were probably doing all of that. And when it comes to client facing work, that's the first four roles. AM, PM, SMEs, and client strategy. The first thing to offload is the SME work. Depending on what your agency does, those are going to be things like design. Development, copywriting, uh, you know, kind of the day to day implementation, expertise type of thing.
Exactly. You could think of it as sort of their craft and their people are focused on practicing [00:09:00] their craft. Um, that is the easiest thing to outsource 1st or outsource delegate to other people because it's often invisible to clients or clients are seeing it as more interchangeable. That's not always true, but you know, that can be easier to delegate.
So you're perhaps still the client's key contact, but you have a team member who's helping with the design or the development or the writing or what have you. So start with delegating the SME work. The next category to go to delegate would be project management, which I'm defining here as doing basically coordinating to make sure the work is done officially and profitably.
And ideally on time as well, you can delegate that to someone else. You continue being the account manager and the client strategist. If your goal is to delegate or offload this work, the next thing to delegate is likely account management. Now, some people listening might be like, I can't give up account [00:10:00] management.
Clients always want to talk to me. You know, well, you've probably trained them to always talk to you. But the ideal transition is you delegate day to day account management to someone else on the team. You're still working with the client, but you're working with them around client strategy, the higher level strategy advice for the client account.
So, someone else is the day to day contact, and then they bring you in to work your magic on strategy. After that, you then have a further decision to make, and this is the more, more advanced situation. Do you want to continue doing client strategy? If so, that's fine. Keep, you know, keep, keep on as you are.
Or if you want to step away from client strategy altogether, ideally several years before you hit the point of wanting to do the transition, you would have been developing team members as strategists to do strategy along the way. Maybe those were some of your account managers, maybe it was people who had been in SME roles and had a wide range of [00:11:00] interests and they were really good clients.
Uh, that kind of thing. That's more complicated, but ideally you would have started ramping up team members. I have an article on my website about developing client strategists. It's often an apprenticeship type model. First they read examples of reports you've done. Then they read some of the data you've been through.
Then they read about your analysis. Then maybe they're helping with some pieces and you're doing the final report. And eventually over time they're drafting the report and you're editing it. Someday, and it's going to, the time being to depend on the person and the client and things like that, someday they're doing their own strategy work, you know, that you oversee and then eventually step back almost entirely, but that takes a long time.
Sure. What I love about that is that you outlined, uh, I've not read the article, but you, you clearly have outlined the process to take someone from that SME, that functional expert, a copywriter. To, you know, [00:12:00] eventually becoming that client strategist, which will alleviate the founder, the, the sort of the face of the brand.
Um, what about business development? Yeah. So if you're an owner who loves sales, you can continue doing founder led sales, if that's a match for you. Though in my work across 600 plus agencies all over the world, usually owners want to become less and less client facing over time. Sometimes that includes maybe they'll do sales and they hand it over to their team for ongoing delivery.
Or they want to step back from sales entirely, a key starting point on delegating business development or particularly the sales side of it. Is to chunk out the sales process into the steps involved for instance You're probably doing some initial qualification And then if people pass the initial qualification whether via email or a form or something else Then eventually they're going to go to a phone call, you know When owners are like I don't like [00:13:00] dealing with tire kickers and people are wasting my time You know, but i'm struggling to find a salesperson One of the solutions there is to delegate the initial screening to someone else, whether that's to a business development representative, or maybe a team member you already have on the team who likes doing that kind of thing and isn't as burned out about it.
And they're also going to probably want to protect you from poor fit clients. So especially from the account management side. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, cause they don't want to let the. Let me know what happens happens. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, start by delegating the initial qualification so that then once they get through to you, I had a client in Belgium several years ago where I asked, what do you like doing?
What do you not like doing? What do you tolerate doing? Two owners, neither of them like doing sales and I'm like, that's fine, but someone has to do it. And it emerged that they didn't like dealing with the early stage. So by adding someone else doing the screening, they were able [00:14:00] to, to deal with it. Of course, building up a whole sales team is a whole separate topic.
But start by getting rid of the stuff you don't like, but that still needs to happen. How long does a typical process going from an owner who has their hands across all of these six stages? Mm hmm. To being completely secondary. Now, in other words, not frontline across any of these, assuming that's what they wanted.
Yeah. How long should that process take from a ideal perspective without knowing more detail? Yeah. I mean, it's usually going to take two or three years. Yeah. If you're being really leisurely about it, it might take three to five. I heard from a new potential client recently. And my estimate was, you know, with my help and creating a plan 2 to 3 years, I mean, the project is going to be like 8 to 10 weeks, but getting to that outcome will take exactly the thing is, if they just sort of [00:15:00] leisurely went along on their own, it could take them 3 to 5 years or maybe they'd never get there, but it's not an overnight thing.
So if someone's listening and they're like, Well, I just want to get it, get stuff off my plate and like, get there and like finish this weekend. How about by Monday? We do this, you know, Monday, maybe, maybe Tuesday. I, you know, I spoke at the agency con conference several years ago and I'm doing a keynote at the next edition of that in Denver.
And after I gave a talk about what has turned into the work less, certain more methodology, agency owner said. Uh, I, I like this. I want to become more optional. I've got a bunch of contractors. Here's what I'm thinking of doing. And the comment was they were going to hire a, uh, rising star, pay them 75, 000 a year, they were going to run everything at the agency, and the owner said she wanted to hear from them maybe three times a year.
And I'm like, oh, and she wanted to be there in one year. And I'm like, that's a good general direction. There [00:16:00] are some snags, and we, we talked through that. Um, I don't know how things turned out for that agency. Yeah. It's interesting, Carl, it reminds me of a client of mine who was eager to step out of the sales role.
He built up his agency with his brother and he, um, he was more of the sales facing guy and his brother was more of the operational kind of running the show. Yeah. And he did something interesting to do this, which is he found a sales. Sales person who had worked in the same vertical market at a competing agency.
It was very successful over there, hired them, who spent a lot of money on them. And they came over, uh, and basically the founder said, you run sales, go for it. Right. Okay. Six months later, he calls me and he says, I call him. We got a call and he says, yeah, I just let that person go. And I said, what happened?
And he said, well, he came over and he experimented [00:17:00] with a bunch of different ideas for six months. And we lost a lot of money on him. A lot of sales opportunity closed two deals during that time. And it was a big, a big mistake. And, um, a big failure and I think, uh, how I approach that just, just to share is I typically coach my clients to have some type of repeatable process that the founder, since they're running sales has actually been able to prove out that despite the fact, maybe a rockstar salesperson, another agency, the, the, the failure that he, that he made was he assumed that they would be able to just repeat that success over at his agency.
What he missed, what he was missing was that repeatable play that the, Salesperson can come over, start to run themselves, run the, the, the founder's play and over time improve it or tweak it based on their, their experience. Yeah. I, I mean, I, that happens a lot, you know, client strategy is hard to hire.
Sales is hard to hire. It's hard. Um, [00:18:00] I was helping a client in New England years ago that had a finalist and they were, I was working on some other stuff and they were like, could you take a look, any questions you recommend asking them? Within an hour, I concluded that the candidate was almost certainly a pathological liar.
And they were about to fly him in for the interview, and like it, everything else had gone smoothly and all, and the owner pulled on the thread that I shared, and the candidate's whole story unraveled. More often is, is what you mentioned, where they're trying, but it's just not working. I had a client years ago who said, uh, that, you know, they'd hired a salesperson.
18 months ago, the job of the salesperson was to double the agency's revenue. And things were up maybe 10 percent at this point. You know, not, not enough. Uh, and I said, how long has he been missing his quota? The answer the whole time. Yeah, never hit his quota in 18 months. So, no consequences. It takes time, [00:19:00] right?
I mean, it could reasonably take six months for someone to ramp up or potentially longer if you're enterprise oriented, but 18 months is too long. It's very frequent. So, In the context of running a growing agency and wanting to step out of maybe the PM role or the SME role, as you mentioned earlier, maybe again, this is kind of a made up context, but when you're thinking about identify as a founder and you're looking at your organization and you want to elevate someone to more of a leadership role, what are some of the things that you recommend that your clients do to identify someone on the team who has a lot of potential as a, as a leader on the team?
In the company, whenever you want something to get done, you need a Venn diagram. And I talk about this in the calm, the chaos book, and also in work lesser and more with three, three circles in the Venn diagram, and they'll need to overlap desire, competence, and capacity. If people are missing any [00:20:00] one or multiple ones of those things aren't beginning to get done.
So when it comes to bringing in a new manager or elevating someone to management, they need the desire to be a manager. If they're a reluctant manager, it's not going to go well. They need the competence to be a manager, which is a mix of training and coaching and on the job experience. So, desire, competence, and the third is capacity, having time to do it.
If they're moving to a new role, they're likely going to have the capacity. But, you know, if they don't want to do it, it's not going to go smoothly. If they don't know how to do it, they're going to do their best, but they're going to make a lot of mistakes. And if they don't have the time to do it Stuff just isn't going to get done.
So I would start by understanding what is their desire to be a manager and also do they know what they're getting into? For instance, I wrote an earlier book on managing people called, well, you're laughing, but I laugh only because it's like. It's a great point. Uh, [00:21:00] being a leader or being a manager isn't always as glamorous as one may think.
Having been, uh, a leader at a hundred, sorry, a thousand person company, I know it's not as fun as one may think, but go ahead. Sorry. No, no. So for instance, I, I, my first book on management called Need to Lead, it's a pocket guide to managing marketing and creative teams. I had a client where a department head had left and two team members were both interested in becoming the new director of the department and the owner of the agency, my coaching client said, how do I decide between them?
One of them I think is a lot stronger. The other one has potential. I don't know if they're quite as good of a match, but I also don't want to just reject them out of hand because that's not going to be good for morale. My recommendation was to assign both employees to read made to lead. It's a pocket guide.
You can read it in an hour or so. Uh, and to report back, basically write a book report about what stood out from the book. [00:22:00] What do they see their strengths and weaknesses being as a manager and anything else that stood out? One of the team members, the one who is the highest potential, wrote this great analysis of it.
He read it right away. He did the analysis. He even sent a copy to me since he knew that I was involved in the process. You're thinking about politics, right? Uh, and the other team member, I, I hadn't heard anything about it. So I asked the, the agency owner about it said, yeah, um, they got a copy of it and they started reading it and they're like, Oh, I do not want to do this job that they liked the title and they liked the pay rate they would have gotten, but the actual day to day reality of being a manager was not at all appealing.
So they stayed in their SME role and did fine in it. Well, I think that's a great point. Helping those folks who may be eager, wants to expand their career, wants to take on more responsibility, helping them maybe paint the picture of a day in the life so they can have a better understanding of what they're signing [00:23:00] up for.
Yeah. I mean, I see that with clients where, you know, often I'm helping agency owners with succession plans. You know, as you mentioned at the beginning, I'm helping agency owners find ways to work less and earn more, as I describe in my previous book. While rewarding their best team members and the, the key on that is that ultimately if the owner's working less, someone's working more, that's an opportunity to promote people to create career paths.
I mean, it works out really well. And so as I'll work with owners initially, eventually I'll start bringing in, you know, at an appropriate time, their number two as they're moving up and inevitably I'll check in at the end of the call. Um, the number two, but I'm like, what were your top takeaways? They're like, there's a lot to do like they're realizing that the owner was doing a lot Yes, and now they're going to do some of it.
But of course they're getting paid more. There's some sort of profit sharing or bonuses Maybe there's phantom stock that they become, uh, receive shares in the, in the business [00:24:00] sale, um, and things like that. So yeah, the managing is hard, leading is hard, but you know, that there are rewards to it as well. So you mentioned the Venn diagram, desire, competence, and capacity.
I think desire and capacity are very straightforward. What, what does competence mean in this context? Competence is knowing how to do the job you need them to do. For instance, someone might be a team lead, where they are coaching people, but they're not officially a manager. When they move up to becoming a manager, now they're doing things like performance evaluations, sharing, sometimes negative feedback with team members.
That's a big shift. But you want them to do that before you elevate them to lead the entire department. Because if they can't have those hard conversations in a smaller setting, it's going to be even worse. And that's going to cost you money. So in other words, help take more of a gradual approach. That's my word, not yours.
But a gradual approach [00:25:00] to giving them the keys to the kingdom in the context of really being the true leader. Test them as the founder or owner, but also give them maybe some confidence. In their capacity to be able to actually do the job versus potentially shoving them in the deep end. Yeah, I don't recommend that, uh, and, and, you know, sometimes people are overly confident, which is why you do the phased approach so that you're not making them CEO immediate rate, but also sometimes people are under confident and, you know, they have greater potential than they believe in, in themselves.
And so by giving them opportunities to succeed. They can see for themselves that they have that, that ability that they weren't recognizing on their own. You also talk about the need to hire a great number two as well as a reliable assistant. Um, how, how do you recommend agency owners approach for hiring, for these two roles?
When it comes to finding a number two, most agencies have an [00:26:00] unofficial number two, you know, for people who are listening, if you've been running your agency for. Several years or longer. You probably have an unofficial number two a way to think of it would be let's say you're on vacation Who's the person people go to while you're away that person probably is your number two now?
If no one knows who it is Or if it's multiple people or the person they go to isn't the person you want them to go to You've inadvertently created a leadership vacuum, which is a problem I talk about that in the book, including about how to eliminate leadership vacuums, ultimately by clarifying, all right, we have a problem here.
Here's the solution. Make sure everyone knows what you want them to do in the future. You know, so the number 2 often happens organically, or you might have a couple people who are vying for the spot. I know it's easier to just say, well, you know, I don't know. You're both sort of unofficially the number two that tends to go poorly.
That creates a leadership vacuum, put someone in charge. [00:27:00] Right. And that, that could include putting someone in charge of one area, another, another area, but not butting heads. Make it publicly recognized within the organization who, who has leadership role. Exactly. You know, I have a whole series of articles at the Sakeson company website about.
Hiring a number 2, including job description and things like that. But, you know, the exact rule will vary depending on your agency. If, for instance, you're focused on doing business development, you might have a number 2 who is running all of the day to day activities. Other times you might have a number two who's more operations focused, but they're not doing everything.
It's bespoke to you. You get to choose what they do, but don't let everyone else choose. Rather than you being involved in deciding what it should be. That is true. Based on my experience as well, having worked in agencies for many years now working with them as a consultant, there [00:28:00] is in many cases, a natural number two.
That is not a founder. Yeah, exactly. And. Make sure you've officially given them the power they need, and also the compensation they need, because you're asking them to do big stuff that includes paying them appropriately. Can we, can we talk a little bit about that, the compensation piece? Yeah, yeah. Hey, it's Corey.
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You can check out E2M's transparent and flexible pricing model at e2msolutions. com slash the deep specialization podcast. For limited time, E2M is offering a special 20 percent discount for the deep [00:29:00] specialization podcast listeners on your first month. Go check them out. Now back to the show. For someone who's not a founder, who.
Is taking on theoretically a lot of the risk of starting and running the business, making payroll and so on and so forth, uh, an employee who is being elevated to a leadership role. Number two, how do you, what's, what's, what's your advice around how to compensate them? In addition to maybe just the salary bump?
Well, salary bump is the first step. You know, I'm generally seeing number twos with salaries. This is that independent agencies. A base of anywhere from a hundred thousand to two hundred or even to three hundred thousand But you raised an important point. It's not all salary as their compensation They're likely going to get some sort of bonuses based on performance Okay, and they may get other compensation too.
For instance phantom stock Which is synthetic equity, so [00:30:00] you can make it do whatever you want, but most often the phantom stock is if the agency sells, you get some percentage of the proceeds, but don't just hand that out to anyone, right? People need to earn it, they need to have earned your trust, and you know, they need to be competent at their job.
So the initial starting point might be they're getting an increase in their base and then maybe they're getting some sort of bonus based on something about their performance. If, for instance, they're overseeing delivery, you're probably giving them a bonus based on gross profit margins. On the other hand, if they are running everything about the day to day, maybe they're getting compensated based on EBITDA, more or less your net profits with some adjustments, because that, if you want to get acquired, Your acquirers are going to look at your EBITDA.
So for instance, you know, if you can get to 1 million, the multiples go up. If you can get to 3 million in EBITDA, the multiples go up again. So I have clients where, for instance, [00:31:00] the day to day head of the company, their job is to keep the EBITDA at and above 1 million a year. I have another client that's bigger where they're approaching 3 million.
They're like 2. 7 million now. My advice was the day to day head of the agency, their job is to get that to 3 million and keep it above that because that's going to help them get a bigger valuation, you know, part of getting the incentives right is making sure that you are incentivizing things they can control, not things that are out of their control.
For instance, uh, an agency number 2 reached out asking for advice saying that basically they were compensated based on net profit margins. But the owners were spending money on things that were beyond the number two's control, yet they were getting penalized. For instance, the owners had gone on a spa retreat weekend at the agency's expense.
I mean, it was a business trip. Unfortunately, though, that got charged to the net profits, which meant that the employee [00:32:00] was dinged on the net profit achievement, even though they were not invited to the spa weekend and to pay the price, but didn't get the benefit of the actual spa treatment. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Like if I had been advising the owners there, I would have said compensate them based on gross margins, which they do have full control over. Uh, and then in the future, it might shift a net, but that will be more as the owners step back to working part time and not charging the spa weekend to the company.
What about the phantom stock? Um, how do you recommend agencies who maybe haven't gone down that path? How do they approach that? Like, where do they go? What, how do they think about, uh, doing that type of incentive? I would start by looking at what are you trying to incentivize? So for most agencies, it's.
Getting a big exit, but big is relative pre pandemic. Agency owners were often saying they wanted to sell for 3 to 5 million, you know, post pandemic. I'm usually hearing more like wanting to sell for 5 to 10 million. That's a [00:33:00] big difference. So. Ultimately, the more the number two is helping you grow, and usually it's growing your profit margins because EBITDA is what acquirers are primarily looking at, if you're on a three year rolling average, you want them helping you get those numbers higher and higher.
Um, so it's reasonable for them to get a percentage of that. So you could, for instance, do phantom stock where they get, say, 10 percent of the exit price. Or. Maybe they've joined the team somewhere recently. Maybe they get 5 percent of the exit price. It's all negotiable. You could also split it and you'll need to coordinate this with the future acquirer, but maybe they get half when the deal closes and the rest of it as you collect the earn out or something along those along those lines.
Um, you'll need a lawyer to create the phantom stock paperwork. That's not a do it yourself kind of thing, but ultimately [00:34:00] figure out what do you want to accomplish, which usually is a percentage of the sale. Uh, and then the lawyers can put it into, into writing. Great advice. Yeah. Yeah. Figure it out first and then hire the lawyer, lawyer to actually create it.
Exactly. I've had lawyers recommend that to me. They're like, figure it out, then come back to us. Right, right. You know, so. Lawyers can be expensive and, um, you know, the, the, uh, the figuring out is usually what takes the most time. Yes. As relates to being, to finding a reliable assistant. What, what does that typically look like?
What do you recommend? The ideal assistant may be someone, you know, already, it may be one of your current team members and maybe someone who's in your network. It may be someone that you have. You know, thinking about the idea of weak ties in terms of building a network. Someone you know probably knows the right person.
So I'd start by defining the job description and turning that into a job posting. What are you looking for? Are you looking for someone full time or are you looking for someone part [00:35:00] time? Are there particular things they need to know how to do? Are they helping with bookkeeping and QuickBooks, or are they more focused on calendar, schedule, travel booking, things like that?
If they're booking travel, do they have experience booking travel or doing travel themselves? I had a case where a client had recruited an assistant who didn't fly by, you know, by plane, they were usually driving. And so the problem was they were booking these, these sort of challenging itineraries where if you were a regular traveler, you would know you wouldn't want to do that, but they just weren't, that wasn't part of their day to day life.
So ideally they've had some experience doing things you've done before. I will say people who are good as assistants or in other operations roles often had a, have a wide range of experience. You know, maybe they've done some accounting work, maybe they've worked in retail, maybe they've done this, they've done that.
And now this is where they're focusing. [00:36:00] A key piece is that, you know, ultimately their, their job is to make your life easier to help you be more productive, to help you get things done. That means that they owe you certain things in terms of what you can expect from them, but vice versa. If, for instance, you need to sign off on something, you need to get them to sign off because that's going to unlock all of these other things.
Or if you know you can't get to it, give them advance notice so they can adjust accordingly rather than being stuck, you know, having to make up excuses. For clients for other external parties or things like that get clear on the role you need What do you want them to focus on? And then share that job posting with your network to find the right person Keep in mind that the way they approach the interview is likely going to be An example of how they approach the job, you know if they're late for the interview That's not a good sign if on the other hand, they reconfirm the interview in your time zone [00:37:00] and, you know, repeat back the way they're going to connect.
Here's the zoom link. Here's the google meet link or, you know, you're calling them at such and such number or they're calling you at such and such number kind of thing. Those are all examples of how they will do in the job. Any preference or recommendation around offshoring versus onshoring? One that you find works out better.
Either can work. Um, I think you need to find someone who we talked about desire, competence, capacity. Their competence meets your needs. That could be someone locally near you. It could be someone far away and they're working virtually and they're doing that well. So that's sort of an it depends. Um, if you do need an assistant who's for instance Picking up mail or depositing checks or, or things like that.
I mean, you would likely need them to be there in person though. There are options for basically virtual office delivery where the company will, you know, scan the check and, [00:38:00] and things like that. So there, there are options in the book. You talk about one of my, I guess, pet peeves, which is wasteful meetings.
Having worked in an agency agencies from, for many years, one of the. The challenges that happens is meeting bloat, um, is one way to say it, but how would you, you talk about this in the book and you know, how do you streamline meetings, make them more productive, less chaotic, those types of things. As a manager and leader, the bad news is that meetings are now part of your job.
You know, agency owners sometimes say, if only, you know, I was in so many meetings, I can't get my job done. Well, meetings are part of your job as a leader or manager. That's the downside. The good news is because they are now your meetings, you're primarily overseeing and dictating most of the meetings that are happening.
You can make them better. Yeah. For instance, if there's a meeting [00:39:00] and this is, you know, exercise for everyone who's listening. Take a look at your calendar for this week, uh, or, you know, or, or next week and review what are the meetings you're going to, do you need to be going to all of those meetings? Do you need to be going to them as often as you are now?
Are there meetings where you are leaving the meeting and maybe you'd rather just attend it and you have someone else who has desire, competence, capacity, they could be leaving the meeting and you just show up and maybe you make decisions and things like that are good meetings that you could make a synchronous where you don't need to have the live meeting or maybe some parts of the meeting need to happen live.
Others don't. For instance, one of the things that I did and as president of the marketing association was a concept called study hall, which I got from Edward Tufte, the information designer. The idea is that if everyone needs to be up to date on something, you could send out packets ahead of time, they might or [00:40:00] might not read it, or you could have the meeting and everyone just talks, talks, talks.
About their area and and things like that, that's an option or you could do study hall where you have a packet that everyone reads silently at the beginning of the meeting could be 10 or 15 minutes they go through what the updates are. They had to have sent the updates people can see if they didn't do their update, right?
It's it's it's all visible. And then at the end of the time, then you can answer questions about things that are unclear. But, you know, if it was clear to everyone, you don't have to discuss it. You can also use the meetings to do things that don't work well asynchronously, uh, for instance, brainstorming, you could do brainstorming asynchronously.
It tends to work better alive in a single meeting. You can do that other, other things like problem solving, difficult challenges that can work well when everyone is together in one place, whether in person or virtually. So ultimately the goal here is you're not going to [00:41:00] eliminate every single meeting you go to, but you probably can go to some of the meetings.
Less often you can lead fewer meetings. You also thanks to a I know taking tools. You don't necessarily have to be the one to manage every single follow up from every meeting. And if you're doing work, that's too complex for that to handle. Maybe you have. Your assistant or someone else handle the minutes and the follow ups and things like that.
Um, and some meetings you can switch to fully or partially asynchronous. Right, right. It's not default, put everyone in a room and then figure it out, right? Be much more intentional about it. Exactly. We've known this for a long time. I have a book on running business 1970s. And the beginning of that book is basically like, do you need to have this meeting?
We've known this for a long time. Yeah. No, I, I'm a fan of, uh, Patrick Lencioni wrote a great book, a great book about, uh, death, death by meetings, something like that. So, [00:42:00] uh, very, very important. I think that's super helpful. Carl, there's so much good stuff in this book and I know we only just scratched the surface.
Where can listeners learn more about you and get a copy of the book? If you go to comthechaos. xyz, you'll get all of the Amazon links. It's available on Amazon worldwide in Audible if you like listening, in Kindle if you prefer electronic options, and in print as well in most countries. Like it's availability kind of varies by format.
Generally, Kindle and Audible is widely available and print is often available as well. If you go to comthechaos. xyz, you can get all the Amazon links. You can also get a free sample chapter if you want to check it out, as well as access to bonuses from the book. Those are available free of charge once you've read the book.
That's awesome. And if you go to comdks. xyz, it redirects you to my main website. Sakeasacompany. com where [00:43:00] there are hundreds of free resources available for you. Uh, just waiting. Great. Wonderful. Wonderful. That's a wonderful resource, Carl. And I just have one last question for you. Yep. What's your motivation?
You know, I love helping agency owners. Uh, you know, having worked at one agency and then another before becoming an agency advisor. I saw that owners got into it because they, they liked some aspect of the work at one agency, you know, for one person, it was SEO. Another was design. Another was strategy and development.
Another agency. It was one was strategy. One was development, except that once you're running a business, you're now sucked into doing all these things you don't love doing. And so I like that my background coming from agency operations, having been a web designer back in the days of dial up. Growing up as the oldest of five kids, my parents are both career army officers.
My grandfather was a business professor and consultant for 40 some years. I, I feel like I'm doing the work that, that I [00:44:00] was made to do. Uh, and you know, I, I, I like that I'm making life easier for agency owners and helping them become better bosses. Because when people have better bosses, I mean, it's easier, it's easier for the boss when they're a better boss, but ultimately for all of their employees, that's making life more rewarding, less stressful, more stable, and that helps make the world a better place.
Sure. Helps their, helps their employees, their employees families, and that trickles down to the customers and clients and everyone else. Exactly. That's awesome. Carl. Uh, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to be here and, and good luck to everyone. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to the deep specialization podcast.
If you haven't checked out my bestselling book, anyone, not everyone, you can download the audio book for free right now by going to anyone, not everyone. com that's anyone, not everyone. com. And finally, a special thank you to our [00:45:00] sponsor. We'll see you in the next episode. Hey, it's Corey. I wanted to take a quick break from the show to say that if you're an agency owner looking for a strategic and reliable white label partner, you should check out E2M they offer website design, WordPress development, e commerce solutions.
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