Building a Successful Global Design Team | Jonathan Grzybowski, Co-Founder of Penji (Podcast 407)

I think you have to have a very hard conversation with yourself to be able to say, what do you want and why are you doing this? And I think a lot of times the problem that you're solving no longer becomes relevant to you. And I think if the business that you have solves a large enough problem and you believe in that problem, you will do anything in your power to keep your foot on the gas pedal.

Our guest today is the head of operations, the head of marketing, sales and strategy for a company called Pengi. It's also their co founder. Jonathan Grzbowski is a amazing, strong leader, talks a lot about communication, a lot about having the right connections with the team. They run a creative services agency and business that delivers on demand, accessible marketing and graphic design and creative to dependable, pre vetted and qualified creative people from around the world. So they have talent running this business from them all over the world, providing graphic design, business web design, development, and even marketing strategy, all at predicting monthly costs. So really great agency, really interesting business and Jonathan's approach to business and life in general and helping small business owners, agencies and entrepreneurs with their big problems and finding this reliable talent will really interest you. You're going to learn a lot in the episode and we'll see you on the inside. So, Jonathan, welcome to the Second In Command podcast.

Cameron, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to this. I don't remember where it was that I came across Pengi. I think it might have been on the My First Million podcast. It might have been somewhere on social that I saw something and I was super intrigued with the brand. Why is it that I'm hearing about Penji right now? What was the buzz about? Do you know?

Yeah, I was saying creative, strategic, annoying advertisements, possibly, but yeah, I mean, Penji's doing some amazing things. We're a company that offers on demand creative and if you're searching for any type of creative help, I can almost guarantee you will come up in some type of search or some type of ad. So I probably say annoyance more than anything.

Okay, so are you, are you just really leveraging, you know, SEO? Are you kind of listening to our conversations and kind of mining data? Are you really leveraging all the data that exists in your marketing or are you just super omnipresent and, you know, you're just everywhere?

I'd say a combination of all, but for the most part, I think it's, we really understand our audience and we really understand the people that we're trying to target. And so what we do from like an advertising perspective is just create a ton of different audiences, give them exactly what it is that they're trying to that we believe is the highest chance of success. We give them the ability to either choose, you know, call with us or just search, watch a video potentially. And then of course there's funnels, drip campaigns, all that other fun stuff. But, but in terms of what we're leveraging, I think it's just more or less we know exactly who to go after after just client data, analyzing, studying it as much as possible. And then now we're at a stage where we're just trying to fine tune and craft the verbiage. So then when we say a sentence, it's not just a sentence that is spread into a field and nobody listens. It's more or less a sentence where we speak it. Think of it as like a safari, right? Like an impala or, or an animal's head appears out of the grass. We want that to be the target audience that we're going after.

How did you come up with which target audiences were yours? How did you decide which audiences were correct? Because often I see companies, they do a bunch of marketing, they get a bunch of customers and they take the most frequent customers they're getting and they're like, that's our audience. It's like, no, that's just who saw your ads that you were running with. But it sounds like you guys were way more strategic than that. And, and you figured out your audiences first.

Yeah, absolutely. So. Well, in the very beginning though, in the beginning we're like, listen, if you have dollars and a ball, so we will take you, take your money. Yeah, but you know, I think we're at a point now in business where we're a little bit more strategic, where we try to understand our numbers a little bit better. To be fully transparent, I think this is something that everybody should do. Just because you think that a market segmentation is going to be beneficial for your business doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to. You could force a particular agency industry or a e commerce industry and you can say to yourself that these are our most profitable companies because of X, Y, Z reasons. And you could say that, but then you have to actually dive into the numbers and have the numbers be able to speak to that. And I think there's two different aspects. There's the emotional, which is what you want it to be, and then there's the, the numbers where they don't lie. Like numbers never lie to you. Simple facts. And so what we've done is basically break down our market segmentation of who are our customers based on a set of variables. And then we just look at profits. Is this particular person more profitable than the next? And then we just go down the list and boom, boom, boom, boom. And eventually we find that audience that will allow us the ability to speak to them, but also be profitable in the aspect. Because you don't want people like for our business, it's a design business, it's like creative service. So our output is dependent on a lot of different things. And so you don't want the people that are going to use the service, but at the same time you kind of want people that are in the middle on the low end. So it took a lot of time to be able to figure that out. It's still not 100% accurate, but I think now than ever before, we have a higher confidence in our decision making than ever.

And I would think that your marketing has to. And your whole sales and funnels really completely change based on not just who the company type is, but the decision maker in that company. Because you're often selling to the heads of marketing and then you'd also be selling to kind of entrepreneurs at times. If they're smaller businesses. Who are your decision makers and how do you change some of the messaging for them?

What I've seen that has worked well is like we still go after the same type of person in the business. And then in a way it just naturally fits into the problem that a small business owner is trying to solve. And so, you know, some of the problems that, that we kind of solve as well. If you do it yourself, why are you doing it yourself? You don't need to be doing it yourself. If you have a team of people that are tired or just doing a lot of silly tasks, well, you know, we could fix that. That issue and those particular problems that we've determined ultimately solve more than just, you know, the target demographic that we're trying to go after. So I'd say in our business there's a little lock, just to be honest with you, because the, the problems that we're solving fit so many different types of categories.

Based on what you said, it sounds like you do market more to the smaller entrepreneurial companies than companies that have the heads than have. Then have the head of marketing. Is that right? If they have a market, yeah.

Or so I did not answer that particular part of the question. So I'd say a large majority of the people that we're trying to go after are the decision makers. I think it'd probably be at first the decision makers of, of a head department or you know, team, but then the trickle down of that would be the small business entrepreneur type of focus.

Okay, so your primary is going after the heads of marketing first and then you're going after the small business owner second. Yeah, I would say that's where my logic hit too. And then what is it? Once a company has a full team, do you become part of that team or do they at some point kind of grow past you and they just, they bring stuff in house, which often I think is a disaster. I've had big, big marketing teams report to me and I think often it's easier to freelance stuff and outsource it than it is to have in full time.

Well, I agree very strongly myself. I would say if the company, if the company then hires and after they hire energy, then the company hires in house, then it's a clear indication that the service sucks or at least the service doesn't necessarily work for them. Because the idea of Ping is to be able to have, be the in house type person. If the idea would be to use as much as possible for that in house person and then be able to.

Scale up at some point when the organization gets to that stage that they're potentially bringing it in house, you're almost switching to a second decision maker which is usually kind of the head of finance or the head of ops and they're not even marketing and they're looking at it from like an operational lens thinking that return on capital or return on time is going to be different if we bring in a house and they're often wrong. Is that not the case for sure?

Yeah. I would say a Pensi designer is probably going to have a larger output than a traditional team member. And then also you have to look at like the cost and the value of that particular designer versus that of an in house person that's getting paid forty, fifty, sixty, eighty, a hundred thousand dollars a year more often than not, I think for a fractional cost. Our profit margin I'd say is significantly higher to any business or agency.

And do you operate like a, like a search firm or do you operate more like, you know, an upwork or, or do you operate more like, I guess like a community of, of freelancers that we're like, do you manage these people for us or are we finding them on your platform and we're managing them?

Yeah, that's the beauty of tangy. So we've done our due diligence and vetted the top 2% of graphic designers and creatives in the world. And it's our job to be able to pair you with, with the best of the best. So we have them vetted. I've met a large majority of them myself. I've shared beer with them and meals. But in addition to that, the hardships of these freelance services, which are amazing, right? But, but you usually speak with somebody that's a yes man or a yes woman. Can you do this? The answer is, oh, yes I can. But can you do this at a particular time period? I can, yes. Can you do this in one day? Yes, I can. But I have to pay an extra dollar amount in order to obtain that particular speed. Right. So what if there was a service or experience where you can get a lot of these checks out the gate and, and still pay a nominal fee? And that's more or less what what Penji is. So you don't have to go with the BS of interviewing people. You don't have to go through the BS of vetting them and checking their portfolio and interviewing multiple people. The idea of Penji would be is, hey, you go onto our website, you feel the service is reputable and can respect your company and brand or your processes to the best of the ability. Sign up for the service or the credit card, Jump in within 5 minutes, submit your project brief in 24 hours, you receive the deliverable.

Wow. Okay, so you guys are like an outsourced creative agency, more than a, than a platform, like an upwork where you're just hiring independents. Correct?

Correct. Exactly. Right. Yeah. So every, like I said, we have hundreds and hundreds of designers that, and creatives that in our company. And then based on what the customer asks for, it's our job to be able to pair you with that person to the best buyability. And if you like them even better, we could assign them to you permanently.

So when you guys started the organization seven years ago, AI was talked about, but it was, you were really high and we talked about the concept of are we in a, in a three dimensional game or something and, but now it's here and now we have like these tools like midjourney, etc. Where we can actually do creative images. But there's, there's AI tools now that people are using. Those have got to become actually really good for you and really bad at the same time, I would think. Really good because it become really great tools that are going to increase the growth gross margin that your creatives can capture because they can create work faster and better. And then on the flip side, you've also got a new competitor in a way where companies can actually maybe three years from now can start doing stuff on their own. How are you thinking about AI on both of those sides?

So I think the natural reaction that a lot of people expect is, oh my gosh, AI is the future and it's going to destroy businesses and it's going to destroy jobs. Right. And I would say in full transparency, this has nothing to do with like the business's view on AI, which I'll get to, but my, I guess my personal view, I guess it's business view as well. You always need a human being regardless of the scenario, right? Like at least right now. And even if they put the brief in, like you have to put the brief in, that makes sense. Like you and I could put together the same brief and the main objective is write an email to a hundred thousand people in order to get them to sell. Right? But guess what? I can almost promise you whatever that email that is written is going to be dog crap and you're going to have to modify it in sub capacity. And I think the same aspects go for AI. So you submit a brief again, I could submit a brief that's going to be a heck of a lot worse or a lot better than you can and then there's going to be some editing. Now, whether the ability is do you want to do it or whether you don't. And what the good thing is, regardless of AI, even if it doesn't exist or, and even if it does exist, the problem that Penny solves is the exact same thing. Do you want to do this yourself or do you not want to do this yourself? Do you need help or do you not need help? And so people who don't need help or don't want help, they're going to do their own thing anyway. They're going to use AI, they're going to live their own life and do whatever the hell they want. But the people who need help, the people who just don't feel like dealing with the bs, they still need a service. So to answer the question, like, I mean, designers use it, it's helpful, but at this point I don't. I still think humans are very vital.

Now then what about the humans on the peng side that are the designers, the creatives, are they starting to use some of these AI tools that exist and how are you seeing that leverage their game and make them more Efficient or better.

Yeah.

Or are the tools not quite there yet or for us to be able to use them to that level?

I mean, I think they can be. I think everything. You have to take it with a grain of salt. I think if. If any aspect of prompt is going to get you a little bit closer to the end goal, then I'd say, you know, the pedgy team members are instructed to use it. Some people do use it, especially like Photoshop's AI tools that kind of like allow you the ability to, like, crop something or another and change it into something else. Pretty bad, obviously. Yeah. Explaining it in layman's terms. But in short, like that, like, they're encouraged to use it and they're not instructed not to use it. Like, we're not necessarily shining away from it. I think as a company, we're embracing it.

Oh, yeah. Oh, no. I think the only people that should be afraid of AI putting them out of a job are people that don't use AI in their job.

Right.

Like, yeah, it's like saying that, you know, I'm going to come to work, but I'm not going to use a laptop, I'm not going to use WI fi, I'm not going to use the Internet, I'm not going to enter my credit card online. Well, okay, cool. But you're not working here either. Like, you know, AI is now becoming a tool. Have you familiar with a book written by Dan Martell called buyback your time? Have you heard of Dan or the book?

I have Short and Dan. I've actually interviewed him on a podcast I had many few years or so ago, so I am familiar with him. He's a really interesting fellow. He's really good at optimization and funnel hacking. You've heard that, right? Yeah, he's sass in particular, actually.

He wrote a book around a year ago now called buy back your time. And the basic idea, I think, is a really good principle for your marketing team and sales team to think about and even to go after his customer demographic. What he's doing is teaching the entrepreneur that you have an effective hourly rate. So let's say the entrepreneur makes $200,000 a year running their little business. That that effective hourly rate is $100 an hour times 40 hours a week, times 50 weeks a year, gives you 200,000 a year in profit. So if your effective hourly rate is $100 an hour, he says, divide that by four and call it $25 an hour. And if there's any task that you're doing that is less than a $25 an hour task. Outsource it like it is not worth your time to do it. I'm way more aggressive. I say if it is below your effective hourly rate. Like if your effective hourly rates 100 bucks an hour, you should not be doing anything that's less than a hundred dollars an hour because your time is better off doing your unique ability stuff. And he's got this massive entrepreneurial audience now globally and mostly, mostly US and Canada, but, but who are literally trying to get everything out of their business and outsource to companies like Penji when it's below their effective hourly rate. And I think you guys would be a great niche to either somehow partner with them or figure out their clients. I would. You know, you'll probably be able to scrape their audience and, and directly target their audience. But read the book and it'll. I think it'll make sense.

I appreciate the recommendation. I think those types of books are really, really important. In addition to that, something that I probably learned a little bit too late, unfortunately, is the aspect of delegation. I have a business about delegation, but then you have the aspects of the human being that's running co. Running the business, and you have to figure out, you know, your level of delegation as well.

Right?

So it's kind of, it's kind of an intriguing aspect of life, I'd say. But delegation is very important.

I launched a course three years ago, an online leadership course, and One of the 12 modules is on delegation. And when, when companies and leaders are not good at delegating, it's almost like doing a creative brief. In fact, it's exactly like doing a creative brief. When you're delegating a project to someone, you need to know, do they have the skills to do it? Do they have the confidence to do it? They have the time to do it. Do they know how little time they, you know, how much little money you want to spend on the budget? Because I could give you a project and take you all a year, but I need it back in a day for 300 bucks. So how little money, how little time? Confidence, competence, you know, what you're expecting back and at what quality level, and then what level of support do they need from you as the leader?

Right?

Do they need more time, more cheering them on? And almost every leader I've ever met sucks at delegation, which has got to be hard for you guys in your company. So how do you train your clients to delegate creative briefs and projects? Have you just mapped that out and given them A really good kind of framework to delegate a project.

I wish I had a better answer. I would say that that's something that we actively think about. I would say it's a hard. It's a fine line, right? Because we can tell them a little bit about the creative process and what we think that they should submit, but at the same time, people are going to just use their natural tongue, whatever that may be. I will say from an experience standpoint, the people that are the best communicators succeed. The best envy the people who are not organized in their own bots. Do do. I do find people struggle and those.

Are the entrepreneurs because they think out loud. So they say stuff that's all over the place and then they think that you get it and they move too quick. Right?

A hundred percent. Yeah, yeah. And it's such a hard thing. Like I empathize with that because I even I myself can become that sometimes. I've never had a job. I've never been in corporate America. This is all I've ever known. And this is a lot of other people I've also ever known, especially if they're just starting out. It is difficult to be able to control your thoughts. And I think it's just something you just have to teach within yourself or have to experience something really stupid to be able to like change that brain. But yeah, yeah, it's. It's difficult.

I want to talk about the operational side of Pengi and what it's been like building the business. And one of the questions I have, let's go back to the kind of initial starting of Pengi. You and a co founder. How many co founders were there and how did you decide to divide up the roles and responsibilities and who was going to focus on what?

Yeah, so there were three in the very beginning, two now when it comes to. And primarily just due to unfortunate differences, now it was more or less sales and, and sales and operations, which would, which would be me. And then take big picture growth, which is my co founder. We decided that just based on skillset personality I'd say, and track record. We've known each other for quite some time and kind of understand like where the this person's better at and where this person's not. Not as good at. And me being the salesperson natively throughout my entire career, it just made sense for me to just do sales in terms of growth, marketing and things like that, like advertising and data analytics. Not me. But if you can get that real and bring them in, there's a strong chance that the team that I manage is going to close them or at least pester the hell out of them until they submit.

So, okay, so you and three co founders are. When did the third exit the business? When. When did you go from three to two?

Not to. Not too long ago?

What happens in that kind of discussion? How does that discussion go? I mean, it's got to be delicate. And I don't need to get into all the details. I don't. I don't even know what any of the details are. But how does that discussion go when you're, when you're going from three to two and you still try to maintain some aspect of friendship and fairness?

I think you have to have a very hard conversation with yourself to be able to say, what do you want? And why are you doing this? And I think a lot of times the problem that you're solving no longer becomes relevant to you. And I think if the business that you have solves a large enough problem and you believe in that problem, you will do anything in your power to keeping your. Your foot on the gas pedal. And if you lose sight of that, it's okay. This train, whatever you want to call it, car, and you continue that analogy, is not, Is not for you. But I think where a lot of people. This isn't just like a founder type of BS story thing. This is like life's. This is life stuff. Like, even in a marriage, if your goals aren't aligned anymore and you don't want to do those things, it could change, of course. But I think setting a realistic expectation with, with your partner and knowing that this is where I want to go and this is where you both want to go, you stop at nothing to do it. So that's, that's, that's really the short end, I guess you could say.

Okay. And it's interesting. I think all founders, co founders have to have a healthy sense of narcissism when, when everybody is saying no, we've got to continue to say yes. Clarity of our vision, that tenacity to kind of keep going. So I get it. You know, you're three, four years into the business, three years into the business, and Covid hits, and it kind of comes out of nowhere. Were you already hybrid or remote, or were you in an office when, you know, coming into Covid, Covid was amazing.

For my personality, believe it or not. I loved it. I wish I did it differently. I wish. I wish, respectfully, it could happen again without the cause of casualties. Of course, from a business standpoint, we pretty much are remote. You know, we come to an office for meeting grounds to have discussions, important conversations and things like that. Recording content, things of that nature. We don't need an office. I could be in British Columbia, I could be in Philadelphia. It doesn't really matter for us because 98% of our workforce is not in the office.

Yeah.

So you know, they work 12 hours difference, they work the same time zone, they work six hours difference. I mean like it's where we live in a global world, in a global economy. So it doesn't matter. Offices, we're not bound.

Now I would think that for your business you've got some, some labor arbitrage opportunities. And I think by the way, for any, for any company that is not outsourcing a good component of their, of their labor globally, you're really, you're not going to be in business in the next five years. And Eastern Europe tends to have a lot of the best tech people. 20 years ago it was all about India, was the, was the text building tech and then it kind of migrated and then it was the Philippines, was, was customer service. And now that seems to Mexico and Colombia. Where are you hiring people? Where are you finding great creatives or are they just everywhere?

Well, first I think that mantra of like country specific is complete bull crap personally because like, I mean there's some crap salespeople in America and just because you speak English and you have a, you don't have like a, a native tongue or, or dialect or whatever the hell you want to call it, people suck in no matter where you go.

Yeah.

So I think you have to like, you really have to have an interesting like hiring process first and foremost and you have to ask the right questions to vet the individual because again, going back to the, I'm not going to mention their names, but going back to those like freelance economy type of things, you can literally ask somebody can you do it? And then they, they are awesome for like a week and then they just crap the bed and then they end up sucking. So before you hire anybody, put them through a test of some sorts. But to answer the question about where we're hiring, Philippines, Eastern Europe, Central America, other Asian countries, countries in Asia. All over the world, man. All over. Like even, even America.

Yeah, I was going to say, and then even in America you're getting stuff that is slightly different. The price arbitrage might not be the same, but even at times it can be. So yeah, I had, I had a discussion with Tim Ferriss about this years ago. We were at Burning man together and I was talking about his four hour workweek and I said the problem with back in those days, I don't remember upwork odesk whatever the hell he was talking about back in the day. Elance I'm like, great, we're going to outsource, but you didn't teach us how to hire the people and how to manage the people. And there's an entire art and science to that that simply outsourcing it is not the solution. Nor is hiring a person the solution. You got to hire the right person and lead the right person and retain the right people. So is there a balance or do you train your customers on how to work with these creatives? Do you teach us how to do that or is it more you're teaching us how to find them and then you leave the relationship up to the relationship.

I think you can only teach somebody so much about communication until it's just like we guide them as much as possible. I want to actually, if I could speak to what you said prior, which is like more the operational aspects of like the internal stuff, if that's okay.

Yep.

I think the biggest thing, like we as human beings, we value communication and understanding. And so whatever it takes in order for you to deliver that level of understanding to your team, then I think you need to do it. So what I try to do specifically with teams that I manage is number one, to write everything down and then a video. Like we, I'll use like a screen recording software of some sort. And prior to giving them that information, I get on a call with them and go through it. And then after I go through it and I ask for validation, I ask for confirmation, then I go into the actual training aspects of it. And I think a lot of times what people do is they have these expectations that if you just write a letter and that people are going to do it. I think we kind of hinted at this at the very beginning. No, that's not the case. There's always going to be a little bit of ambiguity and you have to be able to dot the I's, cross the T's as much as you possibly can. So I think like extra clear communication, transparency is like the utmost importance. And I know these are like really basic ass like pieces of advice in order to do it. Like you, you don't really understand what I'm saying until you actually do it and then you put it to paper. Because we've tried furlough, we've tried Google Docs, we've tried videos, we've tried, like, we tried everything. And to me right now, the best use is actually Notion, which is the only app I'll probably promote without being paid for it. And Notion's been a game changer.

That's really interesting. I was listening to a podcast with Lex Friedman and Elon Musk yesterday, and Elon was talking about with Neuralink, now, the ability over the next 20 years will be for the exact idea that I have, like, exact, exact, exact, be transferred from me to you, from my brain to your brain, without any potential for miscommunication or loss. Because it's literally the data that's freaking crazy. Like, you try to explain your dream to somebody and then you're like, oh, you can't. Because you just know you can't explain it. We will, we'll literally be able to go, here, here's my brain. You'll be able to like. It's crazy. All right, I want to go back to Notion for a second and I also want to ask, why would it be the only software you would talk about? Are there not. Are there other softwares, like, in your tech stack that you really could not live without, that you would just do not do any marketing for anybody unless you're paid?

Yeah, no, I mean, I'm not, I'm not like that. I'll gladly give credit to where credit is due.

But one is mostly curious. It's mostly because I'm curious on the operations side is what are progressive kind of tech companies using to manage these distributed teams? People all over the world to scale to, to be more profitable. Like, these are tools in business now that are. We take them for granted. But there's, there's a lot of companies out there that don't even know what Notion is, let alone Trello Monday, anything else they've ever heard of this stuff. And we're just like, well, of course, like, we're using it forever. So how are you using the tools? What are the core tools you're using?

Yeah, so I would say, I think in the very beginning it was like, oh, we need more tools. We need all of the tools and we need to pay for everything. And everything will be a subscription and we will be happy and loving and we will grow to a billion dollar company in no time. And that's obviously not the reality. So I'd say, yeah, the Google core products are going to be the best. And so my point in saying that is like, we literally, like, change everything. I think we probably pay for like one or two subscription services, like Max and More or less. It has nothing to do with like communication. It more or less has to do with like the marketing aspects of the subscription services that we have. But when it comes to just communication, I think it's just like whatever the answer is to have the complete understanding of a particular job. Then you do whatever that that is. So you could do that in the Google Doc, you could do that in a notion board, which is again notion. I mean in full transparency I use notion and Trello is probably like the two, the two big ones. But outside of that, I mean I'm looking at my apps on my computer right now and that's literally this. All the other ones are like personal stuff that I use to manage my, my relationship with my wife. So.

Right. All right. Talk about working with people in multiple countries. What have you learned from that? Not specifically the freelancers or the design, your kind of front side, but the teams and the operations and the salespeople. Like what have you learned from working with different people in different parts of the world that have made you a better leader?

Clear communication, as mentioned, clear KPIs to hit and ask for clarity. You have to follow up if something is or isn't done. And I'd also probably give a deadline on everything. So for example, I know this sounds really silly again, hey, I need this email to be written. Well, and when do you think you can have this expectation of completion? Oh well, Friday. Well, I think you can do it by Wednesday. Okay, cool. Wednesday. That awesome. You agree? You agree? So I think that's probably another one too. And then going back and saying okay, well this person says Wednesday. Then you have to be able to follow up on Wednesday because sometimes when you're operating your life there things hits the fan every single second of every day. Be able to come back to that Wednesday truth is really important. I also would say something else that's really important when it comes to talking to other people in different countries is just respect. I think a large majority of like the none of the people that we hire are considered freelancers, although from a accounting principle they certainly are. They're considered like an outsourced type of service or network again according to an accountant. But internally they're all employees and they're all team members. And with that in mind, I just think respect is, is the utmost importance speaking to them just so my point in sharing that was when you work with other people and overseas they have this inherent fear of well, the company can get rid of my, my email or my access to Slack or teams within a second and they can delete my email within a minute and I will never have a job and no one will ever communicate with me again. I would say that is an inherent fear in a lot of people. I think you have to be able to give them the confidence that, number one, the company that they're working for is a really good company. The people that they're working under are really, really good and, and have a set of checks and balances that allow the person to have a level of confidence that they're not just going to get fired if they say the F word or something like that.

Yeah, well, yeah, gladly. Because I'd be gone too, too quickly. Sadly, I'm trying to get rid of it, but not very successfully. A couple questions I want to ask on. You've mentioned communication a few times. I want to go back and double click on that, which. And that's a term I hate. We know why I use it. I want to go back and ask about communication in a second. But the first I want to talk about before I forget is around these global team members. How do you make them feel? What are the things specifically you do so that people who are in the Philippines, in Colombia, in Canada, in wherever, feel like they're a part of a team when they're not coming to an office in a corporate environment with a logo all around them? Like, what do you do to make that happen?

Yeah. Give each team member, regardless of their hierarchy, a sense of ownership of a particular team thing. So I'll give you a. An example. There's a manager, so to speak, that's in charge of a team. And then each people within that team are in control of a particular item or, or KPI or a. An idea that then gets translated to the rest of the team. So this doesn't necessarily work if the team is like 25, 50 people deep, because then you have like a lot of different chefs in the kitchen. That doesn't necessarily work. I would say this probably works best with like, smaller teams that are a little bit more agile. So for example, one person could be in charge of like, team motivation and prep. So they'll find like, motivational. Again, this is just an idea. So this isn't what, like, it's a variation of what Pension does, but not exactly. They go on the Internet and they find a motivational video and they post it onto Slack and they say, hey, everybody, motivational Monday. Make sure that you kick butt today and watch this video. It could be in the form of like a suggestion. It could Be in the form of like, oh, this is a new design trend that I've seen or hey, this is a new sales tactic or video or this is a new script that I've been working on. Like all of these different things have a sense of ownership that could be given to a particular person. It doesn't necessarily have to be translated to the entire company or to the entire team. But we give an end of. I give an individual a specific task to own and they become the experts in that particular thing.

And would that include the KPIs as well then that you've got specific people tied to the specific KPIs?

Yeah, because if the KPIs like phone calls for example, then you should everybody be an expert at phone calls? Of course. Do you hire them for that? Yes, you do. But sometimes some people are better than others. So the people that are really good, how can you learn from that particular person? Well, let's do a training on that particular. How do you handle objections? How do you handle emails? How do you write a custom email to a person to receive a response? I mean there's so many things that you can choose. But yes, they are all related to KPIs.

Talk about training then for a second. Like do you have like a customized internal training program? Is it more ad hoc and situationally based?

Situationally based is probably the best, the best answer to that question. I think you have to create training for the particular job and the goal and then give them the vision and let them just kind of do what they got to do. Yeah, I would say situational based on. Yeah, again, based on their KPIs, based on the objectives.

Do you have training programs there where you actually train the the leaders and managers or are you just hiring people that have already led and managed teams? And how does that work?

I will be transparent and say that's probably something that we could probably do a better job and is doing a management training course. I think everybody needs to be a little bit curious. But as I could. I would be lying to you honestly if I know that's fine. Has like management training, like course regimen. It exists, but it's not to my standard.

That's the exact reason I launched my. It's called invest in your leaders. The course that I launched is. It's a plug and play leadership course for companies that are kind of small to mid size because most companies, until you get to the kind of 250 employees, you've got a really solid HR team. You don't have the competency or the time internally to build something like that. So I was more curious if you were getting to that stage yet or not. I want to ask about communication. So you mentioned it, you've mentioned it a bunch of times that communication is so critical. I think it really is. How do you ensure that the message delivered is message received? How do you ensure that the message received isn't pushing the person in the wrong way? Like what are some tools or systems or thoughts that you have around communication to make sure that it's working well? And I'd say this is not so much around the creative brief side as it is around the day to day working with people side.

So I think inherently people at times are, they don't want to ask questions at the time of presenting. And I think it's really important to have people on the ground floor asking those qualifying questions. So then that way you can get a little bit more honest answer. Because like if you as manager stand up on your little pedestal and say, I hereby change this direction and therefore you shall listen. I think a lot of people will go, cool, awesome. And some people, the extroverts will ask their questions, but then there's going to be a lot of people that simply don't. And I think you need to be able to have some type of process if your team is large enough to have somebody on the ground floor asking each person individually privately to be able to get those confirmations, that's how to make sure that it's working correctly to, to set it up. I think it's, it's a matter of like again, checks and balances, creating the vision yourself, writing it down in a very clear, concise way. This works for me. This is not like this is the only thing that works for me. So then you create a video about it that explains it and shows people the actual direction. And then you educate the people and then you send it to the people and then they read and they follow it. And so it's like three levels of clarification before then you can see if it's working. And then, then I think the number one thing is whatever that is, make sure that it's number driven, that's data driven. And then based on that, then you can clearly see if whatever it is that you just implemented is working in effective.

I love that. I love the data driven component to it as well. It's very similar to the way the Air Force does things. They follow a mantra of plan, brief, execute, debrief. That was something when I was the COO at 1, 800 got junk we had written above every one of our whiteboards in all of our meeting rooms was that whole thing like write down the plan, brief the people on the plan, execute on the plan, debrief, and then kind of coach them on the plan. But I like to tie in with the data points on it too. All right, I want you to go back to the 22 year old Jonathan and give yourself some advice. What advice would you have? Wish you'd known when you were like 22, just getting started in your career that you know to be true today, but you wish you'd known earlier on.

It's going to take a lot longer than you think. That's number one. I would also say that continue to be goal and task oriented until the day you leave this earth. And the reason why I say that, and there's a very brief story to that. Every time that my co founder and I have set a goal, regardless of what that is typically number, like specific to numbers, we've always found a way to achieve it and we've become obsessed with that particular thing. And to us that's worked really well. To others it may not, but I've always had like a. Okay, let's get to where again I'm using brief examples. Everybody in the company should, in the sales team should send 100 emails a day. Right. That's the goal. Okay, well how do we get there? And then just figure out a way I want to get to a hundred million dollars a month. Okay, boom. Like what are the numbers that, that break that down in order to achieve that? And so any number that we've ever brought up internally, we've always been able to achieve it because we've just been super focused on that one particular goal. The thing that I would say to you, continue to do that and continue to have that level of aggression towards that goal. And I would say during the 20s and 30s aspects, I do feel like I lost sight of that a little bit and became a little bit stubborn and I wish that I just continued to reflect on that particular numbers driven aspect.

It's really interesting you just said that. It's something that I've lost sight of for so long is that when we get the employees and managers and team to set goals, it actually provides meaning to their day to day when all we're doing is talking about projects and tasks. It's this very menial grunt work. And similar to our personal life. Right. Like having a goal just makes it more exciting. Going to the gym is kind of boring, but going to the gym with some goal that you're working towards for the month or the quarter makes everything a little bit more meaningful. Jonathan Grzbowski, the co founder and head of operations, sales, marketing, et cetera for Pengi. Thank you so much for sharing with us on the Second Command podcast.

Thanks, Kevin.

The role of the COO is to make the CEO look good, right? It's to shine the spotlight on the CEO, to make them iconic. And then behind the scenes, the CEO's job is to shine the spotlight on the COO, to say things like, hey, they have to be the hard. I need them to roll out the tough decisions. So you're constantly making each other look good.