A Lean Approach to Adapting Agency Changes and Innovation

All right, welcome back to Agency Journey. This is your host, Greg McKenzie from Zen Pilot. This week I've got the pleasure of bringing on a couple good friends from the Lean Labs crew. We got Kevin Barber and Chris Dubois from Lean Labs. Guys, welcome to the podcast. I'm excited to have you here and do a three way podcast. It's been a little while since we've done a three way.

Yeah, should be fun. Excited.

So I wanted to bring you on for a couple different reasons. One, the Lean Labs story is awesome. Kevin, We've, we've chatted on the podcast before, but you guys have made, I mean, there's a whole bunch of just kind of evolution of Lean Labs that's come up. But also one of the topics that I feel like I'm talking to agency owners more and more about in the last probably year and a half, I feel like Covid made people reevaluate a lot of things is I don't necessarily want to exit the business, but I want to hand off some of the day to day responsibilities and so some of the evolution, Chris, of your role at Lean Labs as well. Kevin, why don't I toss it to you first though? Can you give us kind of the, what is Lean Labs today and kind of overview of your role versus Chris's role? How do we get to where we are?

Yeah, sure. So for anybody not aware, so I started Lean Labs in 2013 as the founder and then, and as a founder, typically you would take that same CEO role. But I, you know, I also recognize, and we can talk about this maybe a little bit later in terms of what is, what is even the goal of a business. But, but for us in our phase now, you know, nine years, in next year we turn 10, you know, we're at a phase where the CEO role is not appropriate for me. And I went out seeking out who, who would be appropriate for that role.

Right.

So Chris has been on the team since, for, for several years. And the deal is that his leadership background and skills and ability to be patient and cool in all situations, which I lack, enables him to be simply a superior team leader than me. And then also I enjoyed working the team when we were seven or eight or maybe nine. But now that we've crossed the 20 mark, I, that, that feels like that takes me off of my core skill set. So, you know, it's really, I think the job to always have all the players in the right position. Chris a CEO, right player, right position. Me, not a CEO. And I am formally the head of growth and that puts me in doing the stuff that I really enjoy. So that's the deal.

Yeah. What was. Chris, I'm going to come to you about what the role looks like in a minute. But Kevin, did you look externally before deciding to promote Chris?

Well, so I am always going to make the very best choice available to me.

Right.

The and but it was relatively clear to me probably a year. I mean Chris has known this was a path for a while, but it was relatively clear to me probably two years ago that that that's where we would be going.

So.

So yeah. But yeah, I considered the entire planet.

Right.

So like in terms of. And I'll always do that for every role.

So.

Right, that makes sense. Chris, Kevin, you said you knew that this could be, could be a path or part of a path. Like is this something you'd wanted for a while? What does it look like today in the day to day for you to move from what you were doing into this role? Maybe just talk about that transition.

Yeah, well, first I just found out that Kevin looked at the entire population of the world and chose me. So that's a, that's a win. Yeah. So I mean we, we had talked about so like before stepping up to be CEO as head of operations here and I did that for two and a half fish years. So like Kevin and I have already been kind of doing a lot of this that we're still going to be doing. And you hear a lot of people use the EOS system. Right. As a visionary integrator combo. Although I don't think Kevin's a fan of being called the visionary. He still is. I prefer looking at it like the revenue generator profit optimizer and in that sense we've been doing that for four years.

Right.

Kevin finds ways to sell things and all these cool programs and we're building out these other brands. Then I'm looking at the team, how do we make this more effective, more efficient so that, you know, bottom line is looking really good. And so as I move into the CEO role it's doing a lot of that still maybe looking a little further out, also focusing more on assembling the team now.

Right.

Like who do we, who do we need on board in order to make all these, these things happen? And then as Kevin starts working the like building get growth as a brand and filling that role ahead of growth, I can keep helping to make all these things happen here.

So Kevin has your time investment like average weekly hours work changed at all.

That's interesting. So I'm a I'm a hard worker. So the, the deal is, is that probably not a lot yet, but I know that I have a little bit more. I'm working on becoming the person that knows I have more freedom to step away. And not everything has to be addressed for the team every single minute of the day. And that freedom is already showing up a little bit. And part of it is me just giving myself permission.

Right.

So, like, for example, one thing we did this year is I took off from the end of June until mid August. I opened my laptop once. What did I open it for? To make a presentation I wanted to make, you know, so that was pretty awesome. I did use my phone quite a bit because I enjoy working, checking with the team, doing stuff like that, you know. So I would say that though I'm probably unlikely to slow down in a substantial way for several years, I enjoy this sport.

What. That, that resonates with me a lot. What were some of the tangible things that got handed over in Chris, in your role, changing from leading operations to now taking over the CEO role?

Yeah, so I think a lot of the tasks, we almost were slowly kind of handing some of these things over just because we knew at some point this would be the case.

Right.

Where I would step up. Kevin moved ahead of growth and so. But now managing, you know, all the team reviews, all of the. I'm looking in the books a lot more for revenue numbers, making sure everything's looking good. I'm doing a lot more with clients across the board rather than just the ones that I'm kind of directly responsible for and assisting with and helping the team have everything they need to be successful there. So I'm also building those, those relationships, working client expectations, stuff like that.

Do you have a routine around, like, hey, I'm going to check in with every client once every six months or once every three months. Is there anything in. Not necessarily in stone, but like, here's a common practice versus just, hey, it'd be good to touch base with this person.

Yeah. So we're checking in. So obviously the team, if they get any red flags, stuff like that, right. They can tip us off and we, we jump in, we assist as, as necessary. We're checking in for like, probably quarterly, which is a client check in every so often. Also join it with their sales teams just to make sure that we have total alignment for, you know, between marketing and sales on everything going on. And yeah, I'll join some, like, campaign strategies, stuff like that just to listen in. But one of the, one of the Important things. This probably will resonate with agency owners too, is you don't want to necessarily attach yourself, the owner, as what they're paying for. You want it to be the outcomes that your team is able to deliver. And so we have had that before where clients just want to talk to Kevin they think they're paying for, like Kevin. And so trying to avoid that with me, where, no, you're getting the growth team at Lean Labs and we're able to provide everything you need and we'll pull in everyone that we need in order to make that happen. And so leaning on that. Yeah, we jump in whenever we need to and the client knows that anyone on the team can help resolve their problems.

Yeah. Well, you guys have a ton of cool stuff going on at LeanLabs, which I want to get to in a second. But I think one of the last questions that I had, you have both mentioned, hey, this is coming for a while. What have you. What was that timeline first and the second part of that question, and Kevin, maybe I'll throw this to you is, you know, what would you do differently?

Or how would.

If you're talking to another agency owner who's like, hey, I'm, I'm still passionate about the agency. I'm not trying to exit this thing or switch careers or do whatever else, but I don't like, this is not my zone of genius to handle all the, all the CEO responsibilities. What should they think about or do differently based on your experience?

Right, so, so let me zoom out real quick into like my view of what, why do you even have an agency? Like, and you, the listener might have an agency for a reason than I do, but I look at having a business as a vehicle to ultimately achieve, you know, significant wealth and independence. Like, that is my goal.

Right.

So as a result of that, if you think about, you know, Robert Kiyosaki's cash flow quadrant, right? So like when you own a biz or agency that you run and you're the CEO of, you own a job, you are self employed. Does that make sense? You're not a business owner. You're not a business owner until that agency. You can go away from it for six months, nine months, come back and it's bigger, right? The decisions were made, people were hired, clients acquired, you know, results achieved without you.

Right?

And at that point you deem business owner. And then from there, like, my ultimate intention is to make it down into investor to where I have multiple businesses that, you know, at a young age I was in network marketing. Truth be told. But someone said that, hey, your job to be wealthy is to create an income producing asset and you take the income from that and you put it into another income producing asset and then you take the income from that and put it into another income producing asset. And if you do that enough times, your asset can be wherever you want. And I was like, that sounds good, I'll do that. So for us, you know, Lean Labs pays for the party. It is what drives our client results, it drives our revenue and enables us to invest. We launched sprocketrocket several years ago. It's you know, seven figure thing, you know, and it's a design system for HubSpot. And you know, that is, that is our second income producing asset. Our third income producing asset is GetGrowth, which is our accelerator and that's for working with brands that go through workshops with us. And so we're branching from one to one into one to many. Our fourth one, not much talked about, but it's brand new. We just did a joint venture with Impact. So like the deal is that we're creating, we're creating the businesses that have their revenue generating income producing assets that I personally do not have to be a part of every piece of it. I do not want to own all those jobs. And then at the end there will be ultimately a CEO of all of them.

Right.

Like that's the mission. And then I love creating systems and growth. Maybe stronger on the ideas than the actual complete system, more of a starter than the finisher on that. But I love the concept of creating the strategy and the workshop in the first part of the campaign and then I love other people to finish it, you know, and that puts me in a spot where I enjoy work. So that's also important too.

Yeah, makes sense. Chris. Kevin, as our, as our so called visionary, did not answer my question about how long it happened, but the context was really helpful. So I'm going to go to you to finish the answer since you're the closer here. How long was that coming and is there anything you would change in kind of handover process?

So, man, probably about a year maybe. I don't even know. Yeah, roughly a year. We'll go with that. As far as changing like with process between Kevin and I, I mean I'm so like, I, I got started working with Lean Labs. Coming off active duty in the army. I had, you know, I did seven years infantry officer. Despite popular belief running around with a rifle, blowing stuff up and jumping out of airplanes is not, doesn't correlate Very much with marketing off the cuff, but so I already had to like, double down and learn everything I could. So I mean, I, like, this is a very small portion of the books I've read and courses I've taken and everything just to catch up on marketing. And so as soon as we started talking about me stepping up to the CEO role, I was like, all right, what do I need to do to be successful in this handoff? And so what is Kevin doing on a day to day basis that I can start pulling over and start learning what other. What books can I read? What, you know, what courses can I take there? And so I think it was pretty easy to do the handoff. Yeah, I think we even did it probably a bit earlier than we had initially planned because we just felt it was, we were there.

Right.

It's kind of like when you have, like, imagine you have, you're single, you have kids and you're dating someone and, you know, after a long while you announced to the kids that you're going to go ahead and get married. And they're like, yeah, okay, I kind of saw that coming and, and like, that's kind of what it was like. Like we had our meeting with the team while we were inbound to formally announce, you know, Chris, the CEO, and they're all like, yeah, we pretty much saw that playing out, although I don't believe it was ever mentioned. Yeah, you know, and so we've been working towards that.

How did you guys first get connected? So first marketer meets infantry officer story. So it's not, not surprising.

So my degree is in English, and the first time I was considering leaving the, the military, I wanted to find a remote job so I could spend more time at home and applied to Lean Labs as a content copywriter and was hired. I worked with Lean Labs for a bit, but as a, an officer in the army, you don't get to choose when you leave. You got to request leaving. And they denied it for multiple years in a row. So I had to call Kevin, be like, hey, I can't do the two job things, you know, until this happens. But then come 2019, when they finally said, all right, we'll let you go this time, I called Kevin, get a letter of recommendation. He's like, well, actually we, maybe we can make something work here. And so.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

And then for me, like, that's, that was an easy decision. Um, you know, one, obviously he can do the job. Like, he's undersells his ability to do marketing.

Right.

But he was already doing the job just like in terms of running the role. But I knew he had leadership expertise that greatly exceeded that. So coming on in Lean Labs, he became the integrator.

Right?

I have no issue with the word integrator. I think that's a good word. Just don't call me a visionary. I like, I like Head of Growth. That's the title I like. But back to Chris, like, you know, I would love nothing more than to build a team of veterans that love to take accountability, own their work and do great things. And like, I would love nothing more than that. So, so that was an easy decision to bring Chris on, recognize his skills and set him up to go and do things that frankly, he's going to massively outperform me in.

Sure.

Let's talk about the portfolio little bit. Because Kevin, I think your point is super well taken. Regardless of how we stumbled into running agencies or service based businesses or whatever. Whether you came into it with the idea that I'm trying to build these cash producing assets and I'm trying to create independence and create wealth or not, at some point hopefully most people are waking up to if we're going to do all this work, like hopefully there's a great, a great payout from it that's coming as well. So the portfolio is really interesting. I don't know about the joint venture with Impact, so as much as you want to share on that, I'd love to hear, but let's just take them one at a time on the Lean Lab side right now. And I was going through some of the funnel last night and looking at some of the materials right now just to kind of put the Lean Lab service bucket, who Lean Labs is for, in a, in a box so that everyone's familiar. Start there and let's go to Sprocket Rocket and talk about what that looks like. Sure.

So the Lean Labs dot is pretty small. It's the center of the bullseye. So we're looking for funded startups and tech scale ups like that is it. So it's very specific. One of the challenges of Lean Labs is that we get a lot of leads that don't meet that criteria. Heck, we do a lot of meetings that don't meet that criteria. So part of the, part of the get growth part is that, you know, because we have that lead flow, last year we sent, you know, we have five partners in growth that are other agencies with other disciplines and you know, with, with similar strengths and processes and we set about 800,000 in revenue to those, to those partners. So like, so recognizing that we have lead flow that like excess lead flow is part of, part of the motivation of setting up get growth. And when we, when we, we send clients through workshops and set them up with the appropriate partner, that's not us. So that's one system that we've set up. And then also we've been doing designs on HubSpot since 2015 is when we went exclusively HubSpot for CMS. So doing Sprocket Rocket only made sense to build our own design system when it really was for us and they were like we could productize this. Gary Vaynerchuk came to an inbound years ago and he said if you're not working on a strategy that puts your business out of business, don't worry, somebody else is. I was like, what would, what would just really, you know, really change the game and building bespoke websites on HubSpot like a killer design system that would change the game. So like, so we went and built it.

What is the Sprocket Rocket business model today? Is it upfront pricing, per site pricing, monthly pricing?

Right.

What's the revenue play?

Yeah, so up until just recently it's been simply you buy a license and it's forever access.

Right.

But we spent gosh, I think the entire summer doing weekly office hours and AMAs where people can come in and explain to us what they're dealing with and what they're looking for. So we're actually, you know, we're actually going to be rolling out a SAS model here and we're going to run that for. We have a 75 day test we're going to be running to see how that plays. We did a prior SAS test, just a really small one and all of them are still doing it. So 100% retention with no system whatsoever. So small, small, you know, fits on, you can count them on your two hands, sample size. But the deal is, is that right now it's by a license you have access forever. We have kind of small, medium, large and, and then in terms of the tier of product and then we've launched a really successful agency program. We were really, we thought agencies would be a pain. They're the best. They're kicking butt. And it's now more than 50% of sprocket rocket.

Wow, that's cool. How much are you willing to talk about this collab with impact?

I don't think, I mean we don't want it to be a secret part of the agency journey. If you go long enough and meet enough people and build enough friends. I mean, I've had merger and acquisition conversations at least a half a dozen times with really great people. But for whatever reason, I don't see a co owner thing. I guess it's just autonomy.

Right.

But the idea of Impact and Lean Labs coming together and making something together is really exciting. So we did that. We've launched Impact Labs and Impact Labs is. We're going to be. We have the systems and tools through Sprocket, Rocket and team members to create websites and Impact is pushing in their direction. Incredibly strong in coaching and mentorship to coming into teams and helping them do inbound well. And then for they have a lot of lead flow just like we did. That doesn't tap that dot. So for all the website work we're set up at Impact Labs and a system for doing that which is going to be a lot of fun.

Yeah, that's awesome. That makes a ton of sense, especially with the. The deal volume that they're throwing off plus what you guys have and the system to go to go deliver on that.

Yeah.

And I've liked Bob ever since the moment that I met him. Other than his age, that annoys me a little. Every other part of every other quality he has is fantastic. So for some reason Chris's age, I don't have to bring it to him all the time, but it also still offends me. So. So there we go.

Yeah, that's awesome. What I mean, as we're recording this, we're almost halfway through Q4 here in 22. You guys are looking into 23. What is Chris, I'll throw it to you first for the Lean Lab side. Like big priorities, big pushes on that side. And Kevin, I'd love to hear with the portfolio, what are we pushing on kind of next?

Yeah, specifically on Lean Labs, pushing through, continuing to systemize everything that we're doing. We have been able to get some great results and we want to make sure that we are codifying the path that we took to get those results. So now that we have this and then when we look at tapping into some of Kevin's side here, some of the other brands that we're building, like we can leverage everything Lean Labs is doing in order to support those. Yeah, doing that.

We're.

We work with 10 brands at a time and so just being able to spend the year working with 10 brands and crushing it and hopefully people keep sitting on our wait list ready to jump on as soon as we got an open slot and.

Yeah.

How do You, I'm assuming you fill those 10 spots on a rolling basis.

Well, I mean, we're kind of bringing them in on a. Consider it like a B team basis. So our b team is 9k, 12k per month, frankly. And then when you move into our 10x program, that starts at 18k a month, those are the one way limit to 10. And the deal is that we have to be seeing profitable customer acquisition happening before we can move into the 10x program. You don't scale something that's not making money. And so that's basically the way that's structured. Um, and yeah, the, like while we're building these other brands, like I'm still, I'm head of growth, not just, not just whatever. So I'm, I'm. I met with one of our most important clients this morning. I'm still going to jump in and make sure things are going well. It's not my client though.

Right.

And, and the deal is, is that we learn so many lessons that we can apply to other clients in our own businesses that that will never shut down. But we may get to the point where just the criteria to be a Lean Labs client becomes very sure, very tight.

Right.

And now that we have five partnerships with GetGrowth, frankly, we can send that lead flow to others. One of them does SaaS and tech.

Right.

So that will just continue to go that way.

Yeah, that makes sense. Chris. What, Kevin, I'm gonna come back to you for the rest of the portfolio and kind of, hey, here's our big goals. Here's the stuff I'm excited to push on. But Chris, what are the, like it's been super cool from my perspective to see a lot of the, like, even the systems prior to you guys have made the move, you're running on ClickUp. But even prior to that, some of the structure that was in place and obviously like thoughtfully designed, you guys were on Liquid Planner, if I'm remembering right back in the day, you know, and have a lot of that built out. But what are some of the transferable skills or kind of most important skills in pulling that out that I would assume a lot of that stuff and natural bent towards organization comes from your background. There's probably some selection bias there in terms of how you became an infantry officer in your, your service. But what are the, what are the big skills that you feel like you've been able to take and apply really quickly in a short time frame to the agency space?

So as an infantry officer, they kind of like beat this into you in your first, like officer base, of course, is that you, you're an expert in synchronizing assets in time and space, right? You got to make sure that when you are calling someone to drop some bombs, there's not people walking in right there and you're like timing everything and doing it so you keep moving so that you're constantly on the offensive, seeking that initiative. Not that we need to turn this into like a war chat and get.

Everybody training, but it sounds cool. It sounds cool and like that's what I want Lean Labs doing. It's just a metaphor, not real bomb. It's more like marketing campaigns. Bam. Bam.

Yeah, but so being able to look at everything going on at once and say, how do all these pieces fit in on a actual, like on a plan, like on a timeline, in the various directions that they have to go, right? Cross platforms, everything else, how do we bring those together in a way that we're actually achieving that, that end goal, Staying on the offensive, continually moving forward, being able to adjust as we need to and hit that. So that's one area. The other piece is getting the feedback. Just being able to receive feedback from clients, from the team, from the market and then not be like sit back and get offended by that.

Right.

My last job in the army, I was working with drill sergeants every day. And so there's very little chance that someone's gonna say something that offends me at this point. But being able to take that in, you know, action, it. Figure out what do we need to do to grow so that this doesn't, this isn't an issue again or, you know, what is working that we can now double down on and then putting it into play fast, that speed to action, right. And just being able to, to get something and not sit on it for a month, which like, yeah, we still have some issues with that, where we, some things might sit there for a bit and we're working on, on those but like the faster we can take action on everything, the faster we can learn. And so I'd say those are, those are probably the best skills for cross functioning here.

Kevin, the rest of the portfolio here into 23, is there one that's got your main attention or what are the big goals for the other suite, the rest of the suite of the products.

Right.

So basically what I've been working on for the last 11 months, I can draw on a single sheet of paper that's a little bit, a little bit depressing, but I'm pretty excited about it. It's finally Coming together. Um, but what. What we've basically realized is that when we struggle with clients, we're bringing them in. And. And there are still some foundational components that. That they don't exist. They're. They're concepts, but they don't exist.

Right.

It can't link to them. We're not tangibly using them. So. So some of the. I don't want to go super long, but the idea is. Is the whole idea behind Get Growth is to have the. The workshops that literally create our ideal client.

Right.

So that there are six steps that if someone has those built in, it makes them, frankly, ready for what we're good at. At Lean Labs, and I'm building the GetGrowth workshops in order to. Whether they work with us or not, there's no prerequisite whatsoever, no intention. We're only gonna get more picky on who we take on. But I'm gonna solve for those six dots so that brands have. Have the things they need to go to any agency but do so successfully. And that's really fun. I get to do that as well as continue. Now, instead of having to jump in and get in the middle of every conversation, I just get to throw these little penalty markers. I got a yellow one, I got a red one. I got to throw them on the field. The team. I probably throw as many or more on the field now, like, oh, here's how we could do this better. Here's how we could do this better. And I have an entire operations team, CEO that gets to take care of it. It's pretty fun. So while not building that program, still paying attention to what's happening at Lean Labs, showing ideas of how we can position what we do, how we do it, or just how we talk about it.

Right. That makes sense. All right, I've got two. Two last questions I want to wrap up with here. Pace of change, pace of innovation. This is something a ton of agencies struggle with, especially as they're growing internally. For us at Zen Pilot, you know, there's a lot of stuff that we do where we should be the guinea pig. Hey, we should pilot this out first before we're going to teach other agencies to go do it. And so we put our team through a lot of. A lot of changes. How do you deal with that? Because I think all three of us are wired the same way. We're all optimized. We all want to, like, that's great that we're 97%, but what really irks me is, like, there's 3% still to get to. And we all want to get to that, to that 100% mark, especially as the team has grown. How do you keep the team employed? Like, keep them on pace with you as you guys are pushing things and optimizing things quickly?

So, yeah, I'll take it. So first, we just spent a year plus figuring out core web vitals, using our own website as a guinea pig. We did a complete revamp of the website. New design everything, and stripped everything that could potentially hurt our core web vital scores out just so that we can learn if it has any impact, so we can start doing it for our clients. And the team has kept up for the most part, like, just being like, what else can we remove from here? How can we, you know, how can we change this design so it actually looks good, even though we can't have certain animations and, you know, things like that? But we're constantly challenging on that front. We have a professional development program here as well, where we want the team, we pay the team every quarter to go read books, take courses, but then to take that information and actually put it into an application exercise. How would. What items would you take from this book? How would you apply them here at Lean Labs? What can we do to test whether it works? And then we learn a bunch of things really fast. And we have, you know, we're up to 23 team members now. And so when everyone on the team is starting to do these things, like, is easy for everyone to keep up because we're learning all this stuff really fast. And I think it's a benefit here that everyone wants to win.

So, yeah, it's a risk, right? So when you make changes, you do. It does. People are. People come and work as intrapreneurs in a company because they want some stability, they want some security. And, you know, the pace of change of Kevin Barber creates instability, right? Doesn't so much destroy security, but it creates instability. And so we need to be careful. I have a little note on my wall about how people view change. I view change as necessary, immediate, and like, the moment I speak it, it's already happened in my mind. And that is not. That's not how others receive it. So. So I think tuning into that, Stefan on my team had to show me that. He's like, hey, when you make this change and you make this change and you make this change, I know that those are set for you, but you just kind of broke the team and.