Bonus episode #3: A sneak peek of what our AOA hangouts look like

All right, so we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in the agency space, you are a services business, this is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call. It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so, and you'll get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you want to learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. Hope you enjoy the episode. So one thing I talked about, I've been talking about a little bit is these memos, right? And I'm happy to share this memo with you guys. I'm not going to have you guys read it right now because that would take up valuable time right here. But, you know, Brendan talked about chaos, right? Sometimes there's just shit that pisses me off and I just end up writing about it at the end of the day, right? And so, like, for example, here I have this memo that I'm going to be deploying Actually, people are reading it today. My leaders are reading it today. I'm gonna deploy it to the entire company on Monday. And the title of this memo is The Silent Killer of Companies, right? So, you know, I lead off with this one saying the one thing that doesn't get talked about enough is the speed at which we operate as an organization. The reality is velocity matters a lot. And you're all founders here, right? I assume most of you are moving pretty quickly. The problem is your organization doesn't move nearly as quickly as you do, right? And nor are they incentivized to move as quickly as you do. at the end of the day, right? Like, you shouldn't expect them to move as quickly as you do, but you can have high expectations when it comes to velocity, right? So one of my favorite quotes from Frank Slootman, who's the former CEO of Snowflake and ServiceNow, he wrote this book called Amp It Up, which I recommend everyone read. Go pick up that book. It'll inspire you quite a bit, right? But he has this quote over here. So if you narrow the focus, you increase the tempo, and you raise the standards, the Those are the 3 things that you can do in a company to wrap things up, right? And that's how he's led multiple publicly traded companies at the end of the day. And so the analogy I use here is, you know, let's say it takes 2 days to get one thing done at Company A while it takes 7 days to get something done at Company B. That's a 3.5x difference, right? So over 150 days, Company A will complete 75 initiatives, Company B will complete around 21 or so. But if you compound that over multiple people and multiple years, That's just way more things being done at the end of the day. And I think the problem with remote organizations is people become too complacent. And it's also hard to have that accountability at the end of the day, right? Like if David's sitting next to me in the office, I can be like, hey, like David could tap me on the shoulder, hey, like what's going on with this right now? And then I could do the same thing to him, right? But we, you just can't do that really in a remote environment. So, you know, I call it out in this overview over here. This is how the memo works, right? And then I just call out all these examples, right? these examples down here. Like, how can we do— how can we, um, if, if, if Ezra says something's gonna take 7 days, by default I should be asking Ezra, hey, how can that be done faster? Right? Um, and then Ezra might push back and say it can't be done faster. Well, why can't it be done faster? Right? Um, but then as we continue to do this in an organization, we, we have a habit of asking these questions. We just end up moving a lot faster because it becomes, it becomes accepted as part of our culture. And if people aren't comfortable with that, well, they can self-select themselves out at the end of the day, right? But I think it's establishing certain memos like this that are very important. So speed, for example, right? Writing these memos out, getting everyone to read it, and getting people to initial it too. Because the way we're thinking about some of these memos is which one of these that we've written can they become core memos that are central to how we operate as a business, right? And these are things that You know, you as a leader of a company, you're the chief reminder officer, right? You have to be reminding the same shit over and over. What's your mission as a company? What are your values as a company? But also, what are the key things we do as a company, right? And you have to just continue to bring these things up to the point where people start to kind of make fun of you a little bit for bringing it up too much, right? So I call it a lot of different things here, like be direct but be respectful, right? You know, call people out directly or make Looms to explain things, right? You know, talking about prioritization, there's all these things over here that I've outlined that I'm happy to share in the— I'll share this memo in the group afterwards. But this is just one of those things, right? Because I'll give you one example. One of my friends, his company does, let's call it $400 million in ARR. Okay? They raised a lot of money from a, let's just call it a big financial institution, maybe $100, $200 million or so. And What ended up happening was they got very sloppy and they got very lazy, and they started hiring a bunch of— let's just call them— some of my friends like to call them Americans, right? And I'm American myself, right? I think most of us are American here. It's like, but we all know how Americans work sometimes. It's like really slow. They want extra time off. They want to get paid extra as well. And oh, they also like, they'll go do yoga classes, right, during like client calls. And so What happened with that company was that they lost their velocity and they lost their way in terms of doing things, right? They're like, oh yeah, we'll try the remote thing. Yeah, let's hire a bunch of these Americans and see what happens, right? And what happened was the culture was destroyed and the company almost fell apart, but now the company's back on track again, right? So all these things matter. And a big thing for them, part of their culture is their ability to do things quickly. Once they lost that, they became a shell of themselves, and then now they're kind of getting back to that. So I'm going to pause for a second because I just said a bunch of stuff. Anybody have any questions, comments, or feedback on this in particular?

I do.

Go for it.

Yeah, thanks, Eric. This is great, man. I heard you talk about it on the podcast, but this is the practicalness of sharing the framework and showing an example is really good. It's inspired me to kind of just put my thoughts down. I'm kind of always like to look perfect. So I struggle with that, you know, just being vulnerable and saying I'm struggling with this. Just, you know, you seem to be very vulnerable with your team. I was just wondering if you could expand on that. Like, is that just who you— your personality, or is it received well by your team for company culture?

Yeah. So communication is everything at the end of the day, and I don't think you can communicate enough. I think overcommunicating is It's like even overcommunicating sometimes is like, is table stakes, right? So you have to be able to get to that level. You have to be comfortable with it. And I think it does help my team when they understand what headspace I'm in. What I think we should all understand here is like, one, you can be vulnerable, but two, you can't lose your shit in front of your team, right? If you think the company's gonna crumble, you cannot tell your company that, right? Because once they feel like you've lost confidence in the company, Right. And then that's when they're going to fold, right? So you can do it. I think, Kevin, you can be vulnerable up to a certain level. You can say, hey guys, there's a lot on my plate right now. I could really use some help. That goes a long way. And say, hey, when this happened over here, I was really irritated because it made me feel like X, Y, and Z, and this is the potential impact, right? So what's the behavior? What's the feeling? And what's the impact, right? If you can communicate in that way. But I think it's You have to be— you have to have good judgment at the end of the day.

Yeah, no, thank you for that. I'm a good verbal communicator. I do Loom videos, things like that for the team, but not everybody always watches. I think a memo allows everybody to have the time to absorb it and process it. So thank you for that. I just wanted to say that.

Thank you.

And Kevin, by the way, and you're welcome, I would say for the memos, it's gonna take like 3 to 6 months to build that muscle into your team because in the beginning it's gonna be like, oh, it's one of like, It's one of Brennan's ideas again. Okay, well, let's see if it actually sticks, right? Because your team will test you because you're going to bring in all these ideas from a conference. You're going to come back from a mastermind. You're going to come back from like a, I don't know, like a founder's retreat or some shit, right? And then it's like, oh, here he comes again with 12 ideas. Most of the time those ideas don't stick, right? So they're going to test you. And so because you're— they're going to test you like you're a parent, right? Like, oh, is daddy really like telling the truth this time? Let's see it. And so 3 to 6 months to put— to push this. I'd say about month 2 or 3 when I kept writing the memos, the team started to really dig in on it. And they, I think they're really enjoying the fact that we're doing these now. And I think it's certainly helped us stay aligned a lot more than we have before.

Cool. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

Yep.

Eric, are you also encouraging your team, not just leaders, to be writing memos as well, like maybe on what they're seeing?

Everybody.

Yeah, everybody. And David, I don't know if you're in for the meeting, but the book I keep going back to is the Working Backwards book from Amazon. And so they go through everything. And the other thing I've been looking at too is there's a lot of these people that have worked at Amazon to this point where you can just hire these people. And I think at some point, maybe in the next 6 to 12 months or so, I'll probably hire one of these people just to audit how we're going about the memo process and how we can improve it. All right, everyone, quick message from the Agency Owners Association. So this is the peer group for agency owners that Neil and I both put together. This is for people that are doing 6-figure, 7-figure, 8 figures, even 9 figures as well. And we're all here to help you grow your agency faster. In this group, we share leads, we share learnings with each other. It's a community where people can ask questions, their most burning questions personally, professionally. We'll share templates, reports, things like that. We're constantly adding more value to the group. I will tell you that the price is continuing to increase. The good news is that there's no long-term commitment, so you can just learn more by going to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, that's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And we hope to see you inside. I might have missed, you might have already said, how often are you doing these memos? Are they weekly, daily? So I did an interview with the Eight Sleep founder, Matteo. And did I tell you about— I told you guys about that last week, right? I think I did. So, and I'll just give you a quick refresh. So I invested in this company called Eight Sleep. They have that cover over your bed and they just released a new version this week, right? And, you know, I was talking to him and it's interesting because when he goes on vacation, he just starts writing memos, right? And then when I'm gone for an extended period of time, I'll probably write like 4 or 5 of them and I'll come back with a bunch. Look at, look what I did, guys. Because it gives you that space, right? So Danielle, to answer your question directly, I'm probably writing 1 or 2 per week because there's so many problems in the company. And oftentimes, like, I'll write it and I'll want other people to kind of chime in, right? And I'll say, hey guys, like, If you have a question, you can drop it in the margins of the Google Doc, but if you have feedback, drop it in the very bottom because I want to see your complete thinking and how you might think about the solution. Because just because I'm writing the memo doesn't mean I'm completely right. So yeah, food for thought.

Awesome.

Thank you.

Yep. All right. So Adam is not here, but we're going to talk about— he had a question around Reddit. Would that— is that helpful for everyone? Yeah, a bunch of people asked about it. Okay. And Discord too. So what's funny is we've been getting more leads around Discord management, and there's a lot of gaming companies and gambling companies that need help with Discord management. So that's one thing. And then on the Reddit side, a lot of people are looking for Reddit and some Quora because— and maybe David, you can speak— David Kim, you can speak to this as well. On the Reddit side, it's because Reddit and Quora are getting so much more favored in the Google search results that people are looking to kind of, you know, as a proxy optimize for Reddit and Quora because it's for Google, right? At the end of the day. And so a lot of people are looking for Reddit community management, which is interesting to me. And I think we're going to see more of that because the macro thing here is people want— people are looking to diversify from the same channels, right? The SEO channels, the paid channels. They're like, okay, you know, marketing is getting harder. So where are people actually hanging out? And I think they're coming to the conclusion that, you know, these other channels might make sense for their business. All right, quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain. And Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. I want to talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint. And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more. And we'll see you inside. David, what are you— Kim, what are you seeing around that?

We're not doing any of that stuff. The way we view it is all these things are solving for the end user, and Google is bringing up Reddit and Quora because users are saying, hey, we actually prefer responses on these forums. Like just the last couple of weeks, I was researching remote.com versus deal.com. All the search results from Google were fucking horrible. So I went to Reddit and I was like, if someone presented the same information I found on Reddit, firsthand experience about what actually sucks or what's really good about these platforms on their website, I would prefer to read that, not browse through like dozens of Reddit posts to find information I need. And so I think it's like kind of solving for the proxy goal and not the actual goal itself. And we're finding that that's not something clients are even asking for. And it's kind of like, I don't even know. I don't think we have a strong hypothesis on whether they're going to continue surfacing Reddit and Quora as often either. So that hasn't been something that we kind of put a stick in the sand for yet.

Got it. All right. Any other questions or else I'm going to go through all these questions that Ezra sent me. Brennan, you mentioned chaos. What's going on on your side right now?

I don't know. I should have said, you only said one word, but I would have said indiscriminate chaos if you said, if you allowed to. Yeah, just, just, well, really what I'm trying to do right now is I'm noticing some areas of like lack of health within the organization. So I'm, I'm working to cut out some clients and cut out some employees to make us, we're, we're definitely in a growth, we're in a growth era right now and I wanna make sure we do that healthily. Like I found a team member that we were billing $12,000 a month for that cost me $10,000 a month. That doesn't make sense. So we fired all those clients yesterday. It was, they were like not scalable ad accounts, for instance. Right. So.

Got it. Yeah. And side note, I mean, how many of you are actually growing this year in a shitty economy? If you raise your hand, most people are growing. Okay. So John Abanov, we should come back to you. But I'm going to, if you guys have any questions around that, feel free to ask them. But Kevin asked this question. I don't think Kevin's in here. But as an agency scales, what are some key processes to put in place to keep things running smoothly? Is that a relevant question for some of you? I think, Alian, you asked something similar, right? Yeah. But yeah, that's That's the question that I think most 6-figure agency owners would have. So yeah, I do have that same question. Yep. So look, I mean, that's a very broad question. I think it matters in terms of which problem you're facing right now. This applies to 6, 7, or 8-figure agencies. What is your biggest problem right now? I would just focus on that first. I don't think it's a matter of like, hey, you need to get these processes in place. It's more so you need to solve this problem first. And once you've solved it 2 or 3 times, then you can think about making it a process. I think here's the other problem, right? You're 6 figures, 7 figures, 8 figures. As you go to each level, you get to $1 million, you get to $10 million, you get to $100 million or so, your processes are going to break at each level. So I wouldn't, I also wouldn't like hold your processes sacred too. It's like, I think a lot of people get, they read these books, right? Like, you know, EOS, which I think is a great book, right? You can operate on EOS if you want to operate on EOS. There's also Scaling Up as well. And then I talked about the book Scaling People as a management system. So look, I think you need to figure out what works for you first and then you can make it into a process. But we've done this so many times, by the way. I'll tell you the mistake I made was we, like in 2017, we dedicated one quarter to creating this thing called the Single Grain Way and everyone's writing all these fucking processes, right? And then what happened afterwards was nobody used them. Nobody gave a shit, right? Because the people are just used to doing things their own way at the end of the day, right? So I think you have to keep that in mind. Like in my mind, I'm like, What are some of the core things, the core processes or memos that we need to have that we hold sacred? So one of the things, Elian, is time tracking. If your time tracking isn't submitted, you're getting a warning. If it's not submitted 2 times, like, okay, you're basically, you're close to subject to dismissal. 3rd time, we're firing you, right? And so people didn't take us seriously until we said, hey, there's going to be consequences on these things, right? So you can only pick like a couple things to hold sacred. And then, you know, the other ones, I think you need to be flexible.