How to Win in Hiring According to Agency Leaders

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 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.

I would like to start off with opening up the floor to some wins for the week. Anybody would like to share their their wins, new clients, success, progress, anything.

I had told you all I would give you some. I'm sorry, I still have a cold. I would give you some feedback on that. Virtual Marketing Hire. That was the company that AOA had recommended, and the process went really, really smoothly. They were great. They found us a rock star. First one that they had us interview, and everybody fell in love with her. And then my team was like, wow, it feels weird to hire the first one. Should we have them give us a couple more? And they gave us a couple more, and the first one was the one. So we hired her a couple of weeks ago. I think this is week 3 and she's doing amazing. So yeah, all good.

Wow. Congratulations. What is she doing?

She's doing a lot of execution. You know, she's doing, she's writing some content. So doing some stuff like case studies and doing some email marketing. But, you know, our language is pretty specific because we're in the property and casualty insurance space. So you not only have to understand marketing and verbiage and all that, but you have to learn insurance. And I mean, she's just adapting so fast. So it's cool. Yeah.

Where did she end up coming from? What country?

She is also in the Philippines. We have others that are in the Philippines. And my goodness, be careful who you hire in the Philippines because their power is out all the time.

Yeah.

But this gal is in Manila and so she shouldn't have the same power issues, hopefully. Yeah. And, you know, it was funny, the original pricing for her, I think they told us that we'd probably have to pay like $12 an hour and then they found her and came back to us and said, okay, she's $7.50 an hour. And we were like, okay.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's fabulous.

Yeah, yeah, really good.

All right, so I wanted to take a second to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. So this is an agency peer group ran by my podcast co-host Neil Patel and myself, Eric Siu. And these were 9 and 8-figure agency owners respectively. And what I will say is at the end of the day, you wanna learn from people that have been there, done that. If you wanna grow your agency to 7 figures, 8 figures, and beyond, this is the group for you. And we bring in other agency owners to speak as well. And it's a great peer group where you can help each other out and you're gonna learn how to acquire more clients. You're gonna learn how to take yourself outta the day-to-day. And to build the business of your dreams. And the cool thing, till November 30th, we are holding a special price and you can apply at marketingschool.io/agency. And the great thing about it as well, if you try to get into group, there's a 7-day free trial, right? So once November 30th hits, we're gonna increase the price by $200 per month. So right now you're getting it at the lowest price possible. So go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more and we'll see you inside.

Similar story. We hired 3 people this week, starting today, actually. So it's been kind of a crazy day. But yeah, similarly, we're using kind of a recruiting firm out of North Macedonia, which is just north of Greece, near Albania. Bulgaria and that area, the peninsula across from Italy. And real— I mean, the first 2, like you, Anita, interviews were like, we're looking for a design lead.

Mm-hmm.

So someone in-house that could oversee all the design projects that we have in from logo design, branding to Just the make sure the brand guides are implemented, you know, through our social media projects and throughout the customers' brands. And that yeah, she she's her English is amazing. Like you you know she's got better English than some you know people live in America that are working here and. Highly educated. She's been drawing and in art since she was young, but she went to like a special art school, a high school kind of thing, then university. Now she's doing her master's, and we're paying $9 an hour. And they, the company we're working with, they house them. So this is in Skopje, it's called. It's like the the main city in in North Macedonia. So they actually have like a really nice office there. And then so they have generators, power, you know, all the time. They have a place where people come and work. So they get their own like cubicle or nice working environment and they provide the computer as well.

Wow.

And that's all included for $9 an hour.

Wow.

Yeah. And so that was the— yeah.

What do you do about security, Kevin?

So we use Google Workspace. So everything goes on the Google Drive, the company Google Drive. If somebody does something wrong, we can— we just change the password on their email and they have no access to anything, basically.

Yeah.

But they sign— we have a really— if you're— I can share what I do. I have a really good onboarding kind of thing where we have— it's more to put the fear of God in them than— it's not like a real legal doc, it's real actually plain English, but it's a non-disclosure, non, uh, you know, confidentiality agreement. And, um, we, you know, we, we have a whole onboarding process that just talks about security, how, you know, we do things.

We, we—

all passwords and stuff are in like a Google Sheet. So again, we just take somebody off the Google Sheet, they have no access. Kind of thing. And so, um, security is a concern and something that we promise our clients, especially if you're dealing with clients, you know, lawyers or insurance. Is, uh, so, you know, you can't, uh, put handcuffs on people, but, uh, but definitely, um, protocols are important. Uh, I learned the hard way on the few years ago, but I've been really, you know, I have quick Keys that I can shut off things very quickly. Yeah.

Nice. Well, congratulations. That sounds awesome.

Thank you. And then one more hire. We had a, we had a growth hacker. So same process, um, hired somebody could just do everything. Like they, they know coding, they know, but they're client-facing. This guy's been a mark— you know, marketer for 8 years, 9 years, really more of a senior guy. Again, bucks an hour.

Wow.

And yeah, he's, uh, he's almost a strategist. I could put him in like operationally in charge of teams. He's managed teams of 20, 30 people, you know. But he, um, the economy there is kind of suppressed because of the corruption in the government. So, you know, paying them like $10 an hour, you think that's cheap, but that's a really good— they have some doctors who are working for them because they make more money as marketer than a doctor, you know, kind of thing. And so that's— anyways, I, I'm really enjoying this North Macedonian marketplace. I've hired in the Philippines and it's hit or miss, you know, kind of thing. And they're getting more spoiled, in my opinion, you know, they're just expecting more and more and more. So this is kind of a new thing. I'll keep you guys posted. But yeah, excited.

We've hired, um, most of our Philippine employees through a gal that I met in a mastermind group, um, and she does an amazing job. She finds them for you. I think she does charge like $1,200 to find them for you, but she'll bring as many people as you want until you find your person. And then once you find them, they're yours and she's out altogether. But she also trains them, um, not obviously on Things that are marketing specific or things like that. But she trains, she does like some mindset training and team building stuff and that kind of thing. So she holds on to them for the first couple of weeks. And then they have a community where, you know, they can still interact with their peers and that kind of thing. She's built something pretty beautiful. I like it. And we've had really good success hiring through her as well. But they are not marketers. They are more admin people. So we've gotten, I think 3 or 4 of them through her, but haven't, haven't found the marketing people. So.

Yeah, that's a really good point. I think that community, like, that's why we did it through this group as well.

Yeah.

Is they have their office and they have developers there. They got other people. So they're all working for American companies and they work our East Coast hours. And that's the other thing, Philippines, they're 12 hours difference time zone. So they're working night shifts a lot of time to work our time. These guys are only 4 or 5 hours difference. And so, yeah. And so I was gonna mention one other thing with that is, yeah, we don't— we can't buy these employees. These are like rentals. And it's like, so, but it's— if someone has to leave, we can get them replaced. There's no additional recruiting cost. I've done that before too, where I paid like $1,200 to—

Mm-hmm.

To get someone to find us. But this is all included. They provide the laptops, the technology, everything to the employee and local, you know, benefits, take out taxes, do it right. So that's another thing just for everybody's, you know, if you— I'm gonna put the resource in the school. Austin asked if I could put it there, so I'll do that.

Awesome.

Thanks guys.

Yeah, and I'll do the same for sure.

I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host's agency. So NP Digital, so Neil Patel Digital. What they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global, they're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you could just go to npdigital.com to learn more about it. Nice.

Is anybody else looking to make like strategic hires before the end of the year?

I'm thinking about it. Okay.

Yeah, it kind of seems to be like a hot topic. What are you thinking about, Rebecca?

I, um, so I'm listening hard on these ideas and, um, I need— and everyone here knows what I— I don't have to explain it to you. I basically need a customer-facing, um, project manager type person who can run the stuff. It's my superpower, and that's what I've always contributed, except I'm doing all of the sales right now and other things. And so if I'm very successful on sales, I'm going to make the wheels fall off the bus with project management. So it's, you know, it's— I'm in a different place than a lot of you. But anyways, that's what I need to hire, and I know it because we're right there. We're running out of hours in the day.

So when I was growing my, when I was growing my agency, Rebecca, that was the biggest hurdle for me to get let go of. And now I have 2 project managers. One's in the US, one's in Argentina.

Okay.

And they both are fabulous. The one in the US, I'd have to pay like $30 an hour.

Right.

The one in Argentina, I pay, I think, $7 an hour, and she's got 12 years experience. Not PMP certified, but she's very strong project management.

I don't care about PMP.

I mean, yeah, I know we don't need it.

It's a whole long story.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So anyways, yeah, any way it can help if you want to brainstorm offline. I've hired in Pakistan. India, I don't— those Pakistan I like prefer more than India for technical, um, yeah, things more like that side. Um, South America, they're in our time zone.

I know.

So they, their English really good. Argentina, the, the, again, the economy has been so inflation and stuff, our dollar goes a long way there. So you can get somebody $1,200 a month that you'd pay $5,000 a month easily here, right? You know, kind of thing. And then I'm trying this, uh, north, you know, more Eastern European, only because I want people starting earlier than a little bit earlier on the East Coast time so that they're ramping up. So by the time we come online, they've— we got a bunch of stuff going already.

Yeah. And no, that works really well. I'm West Coast. And so it's Eastern Europe, sometimes a tiny problem. So I definitely want to talk to you.

Oh, you're West Coast?

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, I know. So yeah, but I do want to talk to you. So South America, I've messed around with some of the outsourcers down there. And that was more for tactical stuff. And I have better luck with that in the US in a lot of ways, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

But the account management— so I definitely do want to talk about how you found your Argentinian resource. Yeah, I'll bug you. Thank you.

And if anybody else has questions, we could talk on school, you know, more too.

Okay. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it a lot. So yes, Austin, I'm thinking a lot about this. This is occupying my mind because I'm getting in the way now, and I wasn't before. But that's, that's a good problem.

It's a good problem to have.

It's a good problem. No, I'm really, I'm actually really becoming very optimistic.

No, man, what are you, what are you thinking about as far as like, uh, strategic hires? And then I, I would Definitely want to see what other people are thinking about too.

Uh, yeah, so a couple of things. We had a couple of wins. Let's share. One is, um, so I had a conversation with Scott earlier this week and, uh, he brought, he did some things that for, um, for some SEO work, we might just do some white labeling work with them, their team. So that's really good. Um, uh, particularly with this, uh, financial advisor that we're building an SEO profile for. So that's, uh, I think that's going to help really a lot. So I'm really excited about that. Another win was we got a new client. Basically, an old client became a new client. So that's, that's a huge win. We did their website, I don't know, 5 years ago now, and now it's like they're looking for a refresh and rebrand and everything. So it's gonna be a pretty substantial build for us. Because of that and some of the growth, now I'm looking to potentially hire because I'm kind of getting into the technical weeds way too much. than my capabilities are and probably my own technical knowledge is. So I'd like to be able to hire somebody to kind of like manage, oversee, project manage essentially the technical parts of it, maybe even become, do a little bit architectural design on some projects so that I can focus more on business development and growth and, you know, more typical marketing Uh, I remember Scott was talking about, or maybe it was Kevin who mentioned that Scott was good at this, talking about like, what are those called?

The knowledge cards?

What did you call them?

Yeah. Is that what he was helping you do? Because I remember you talked about that on the last call, Newman.

Yeah, that's what he, uh, he showed me. Um, and so I pitched it to a potential client and they're super excited. I actually pitched it a couple of, um, couple of investor friends of mine too and entrepreneurs, and they're all really, really interested. I mean, these are probably projects that would probably be worth like $50K to $100K each.

Wow.

For getting that Google profile, like—

Yeah. For some investors and some entrepreneurs, it's worth a lot for reputation of their business, reputation of themselves, and how they present themselves with investors and And customers.

So, oh yeah, so that's representing like a high-profile client and not necessarily like a business, right?

Yeah.

Okay, very cool. Is anyone else working with like high-profile influencers, let's say, or is it mostly like businesses that you're providing marketing services for? Mostly B2B, right?

Ours is businesses, B2B for sure. And Austin, I don't know if anybody else would be interested, but maybe we could hear more from Scott about what he's doing because I'm not familiar with what Noman's talking about.

Yeah, that'd be cool. I can actually reach out to Scott and see if he would be willing to maybe post something in school about kind of his thought process. Yeah, of what it looks like. Yeah, that'd be awesome.