How Eric and Neil Spend Their Day to Day

All right, so you have this one over here on how we spend our days.

My day is pretty chill. Like, I look at today, I worked out really early in the morning. So, 4:30 was my workout time. Finished by, call it 5:20-ish.

Yup.

Ate breakfast, showered, did some work, dropped the kids off to school and chilled at home. Watched some TV while working. I always watch TV while I work. Eric knows that about me. I actually don't work as efficiently if I don't have a TV on, which is— Counterintuitive, but for some reason I need the television to be in the optimal mindset to just crank workout. And then we're recording this podcast. Eric and I are going to do lunch after. I'll pick my kids up from school. I'm going to surprise them with the Girl Scout cookies that Eric gave. I'll let them know that Uncle Eric gave them. There you go. They're going to be happy. I'll see if I can get them to record a video for him. And that's pretty much my day. I don't really have tons of set scheduled stuff. What I mainly have is I spend most of my days either on content production, so marketing, or business strategy, or just following up people within the organization and helping them tackle and solve problems or just checking in and putting pressure.

I think the way to look at this for everyone is there's no right or wrong way to do this. It's what are the highest leverage activities you can do today? So if you're starting a business right now, you probably have to do everything, to be honest.

Yes, your schedule is not going to be my schedule.

If you have good, you have, if you have good scale like Neil does, okay, the highest leverage thing, yeah, it is marketing because for 1 hour of input here, it might be millions and millions of views, right? Or if he's pushing someone on a really big thing, it's important. Or if it's a huge strategic thing where he might need to correct a strategy, that's huge because it affects the entire company, right? So leverage points is just, you think about, oh, if I put in again, 1 minute of effort and if I get like thousands and thousands of dollars back, you should probably keep doing that thing, right? But in the beginning, you probably have to do everything. Now, Well, bring it to me. So my response to him, I was like, well, you know, Single Grain side, you know, there's, there's, there's good people helping with the agency side. But the challenge right now is building a startup on the side with the software, right? Where the CTO and I, like, that's startup culture where he's on 24/7, I'm on 24/7, and we've really jacked the intensity up. And I actually mentioned in passing in December, I told someone on my team, I was like, this is a different company now. And I didn't realize.

Yeah.

That I didn't think about that, right?

Well, let's go back.

Yeah.

And I have 2 questions for you before you carry on. The first is, what percentage of your time do you spend on your software versus the agency? And the second question would be, when you say it's a different company now, what do you mean by that?

Yeah, great question. So I don't know, it's, to me, it's 50/50 because I'm always working now, right? It's, and then like in the afternoon or at night, maybe I'm watching Netflix or something. But like, it's just, Every day, you know how this is. Like when you're starting, it's like you wake up, oh, here I go. And then all of a sudden you're like in bed again, right? So that's me right now. And it's not going to go on forever like this. And my CTO is built to work like this. I am too. When I say it's a different company, and this has been brought up on the Single Grain site because people are seeing it. It's like the way we're behaving in LA versus the way the agency is behaving, they're 2 completely different companies because our working styles are completely different. So we addressed it yesterday in that meeting. And we basically talked about, okay, so what are we building here, right? The conclusion is basically we're going to keep pushing how we are in LA, we're probably gonna hire more out of LA. But agency side is just going to keep moving, right? Because I, I believe, even if we build software, whatever software we build, whatever products we build, we're still going to need what we mentioned earlier, we're still going to need great people managing this stuff, right? And so I think the agency of the future, and you're already, you already have the products, right? We're gonna see more and more of this. I think you guys are gonna build more as well. I don't think the agencies from like the '60s, '70s, '80s or so, like you're going to have hundreds of thousands of employees. I think those will still be around. I think we're going to see less of it is what I'm saying, so.

Totally agree with you on that. Like every Wednesdays we do our, I do my software call where I talk with my team for 15 to 30 minutes just on everything that we're doing on technology side for the week. And I go over problems, solutions, and design changes that I want in the product and what they should fix. And they showcase, they show everything to me before they make the changes. most my day is not really scheduled. I think your day is very heavily scheduled, right?

It is scheduled now. Because even today, I was not going to have a scheduled afternoon. And then like, a couple of these sales calls where my CTO and I get on the call, they're important. Like, these are like enterprise-level companies, right? So like, we're doing these sales calls. And this is maybe any of you that are building products right now. If you're building a SaaS product, and you're talking mid-market enterprise, you want to use these sales calls, they almost become customer development calls, because they help guide the product roadmap, because a lot of them start saying the same things over and over. And we're like, And we have this product roadmap, we'll start to shift things based on like what people are saying more and less of. So it's like sales calls doubling down as customer development calls. And then there's also customer success, right, with the customers. And we have, we have people, other people helping too. But it's just a lot that you have to juggle when you're starting up. And that's how my days look right now.

So the first follow-up question I have for you is, I've seen more passion in you recently than I have in the last few years. I think you're You've always loved Single Grain. I think at the same time though, you love product more than running an agency. And I think most people would agree with that. If you run an agency, it is very, very tough. And I'm not saying you're not cut out for it, it's just more so building product, I think for most people is more fun than running an agency and dealing with all the customers at once. And I can see this spark in you when you talk about it, right? Especially when we're on the phone. Do you think your agency is going to suffer by you not spending 100% of the time on the agency by spending 50% of your time on the software? And I know your agency's still growing to caveat this and it's doing well and it's doing better now than it has been in the past few years. Market's also been bad for all agencies over the past few years.

Yeah.

But if you are spending 100% of the time on the agency, my belief is, and I could be wrong on this, the agency would grow faster. Just my take knowing you for so many years. But on the flip side, spending time on the software, I get they're the same company, right? Or even if they're 2 separate companies, they're still owned by you. And if the software grows, you can say, hey, the total pie is growing anyway, so everything is growing, so you're still good. But the service-based revenue may not grow as much because you're spending so much time on the software.

Yep. Great question. Fair point. If you're an agency owner looking to break high 7 figures, 8 figures, or even 9 figures, the Agency Owners Association is for you. It's ran by my partner, Neil Patel, and myself. And we've been there, done that from an agency standpoint. And if you want to learn more about it, if you want to grow faster, get more clients, take yourself out of the day-to-day, just go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And I would say you're probably right. And I would say, the thing is, I don't— I still attend all the important agency meetings. I'm still doing the one-on-ones, all the things, right? The all-hands, everything.

Yeah.

I think where you're seeing the energy from is because I've had to jack up the energy for both Single Grain and the product at the same time. And so I think my natural, like, normal is like higher now, right? And I did mention to you, like, Yeah, it's more work, it's more stress, but it's like, you know, I wouldn't have it any other way. Um, and so what, what I— we actually talked about this in the team meeting yesterday. It's like, okay, you know, Single Grain is still very much the first focus, right? Um, but at any given time, I told everyone, I was like, so they're like, what's the plan for next 3 to 5 years? I was like, guys, like, if you— if I can say I know what the next 3 to 5 years is going to look like, I'm lying to you because everything is so unknown now. It's like fog. Like, everything's like a stepping stone.

Like, you have to like—

Yes. closely, like look at where you're going next, right? And that's where we're going. I'm like, if Carrot all of a sudden just overtakes Single Grain and like, you know, we talk about triple, triple, triple, double, double, right? Getting to $108 million in revenue or so, like that could very well happen. Or Carrot maybe just flatlines and then maybe it's just a thing that we fold into Single Grain. Because the thing is, what happens with these leads for Carrot is, I told you this already, but any lead that comes in, Single Grain salespeople then reach out afterwards and it actually books meetings for Single Grain, right? So I look at it as it's building a lead engine and it's actually, So it's focusing us more on B2B ABM. And I think it's a, it's, it's a net positive. So, but to kind of wrap up this answer over here, how is it going to affect Single Grain? It is affecting Single Grain, right? So what do we do? We hire a great person, which I don't let them do their own thing. I'm, I'm going to be heavily involved and we just make sure that they're doing what we need them to do to run the agency. All right. That's it for today, guys. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more about the agency the Owners Association to grow faster, and we'll see you tomorrow.