How Implementing EOS Fueled Fuelius' Growth And Efficiency

All right, welcome back to Agency Journey. This is Gray MacKenzie. This week I've got the great pleasure of bringing on Paul Earndon from FuelUs on the podcast. Paul, welcome in, man. Excited to chat.

Yeah, good to see you again.

So we've got, we've got a funny history. You were a customer of the software that we built prior to pivoting out of doing software, doing bound way back in the day and ran out for a little while and your agency was under a different name that was back in the. It was proto, right, Pro pr.

Yeah, some time ago, I think I was trying to work out when it was. I think it was 2016, 2017 maybe, but it was, it was a good journey. I think we have, we've probably faced that lifelong agency challenge of what project management software is the one to fuel an inbound agency. And we were facing it then, I think to an extent, we're still facing it now. So we still on that journey, but sure, we'll get there one day.

Well, let's. So I think the tooling is interesting. I have some questions I want to ask you about that, but let's dig into like give us the rundown of Fulius. What does the agency look like and then kind of what does your role in the day to day look like? It's my part two of the two part question.

Yeah, sure. Okay. So you mentioned the sort of rebrand protofuelus that was sort of born six months ago really. Because what we realized is we sort of had two totally different audiences prior to this. This, this sort of additional brand creation. We, about 40% of our work was in a very particular niche whereby there's roughly 600 companies in the UK in that niche. And if you then extrapolate that down to the Persona and sort of ideal customer profile in that niche, there's probably 1200 total. The other 60% of our business, which was the inbound, the web development, the sales enablement, rev ops was sort of way more broad and still is way more broad. So what we realized was any one time, if you went on our social channels or you engaged with us in any way, shape or form, it was quite a difficult journey to understand what we did. If you went on on a Monday, it looked like we were the suit, you know, hypothetically on Monday it looked like we were a super niche agents agency catering to this, this really particular niche. But then if you went on the Tuesday, it looked like we were this broad agency that didn't work with that type of client. So we made the Decision that we needed to create some separation. We already had the separation internally, but it was confusing as a brand story externally, so created FuelUS as a sub brand, which is now our growth agency. So it represents the larger part of our revenue. It's still 36 or 37 strong in people and we still do the same things with the same clients. We're still the same company and the same legal entity and everything. It's just a slight sort of brand separation. Yeah, my role in that. So I'm managing director of FuelUS. I obviously am accountable for leadership team within that as well as the, you know, the whole business and P and L and everything and whatnot, which I think probably will lead on to the rest of this conversation because, you know, one of the things, one of the decisions we made a number of years years ago now was to implement EOS as sort of the operating system that, that really powers the business and powers the agency. And I guess my, my role, as you asked, is yes, it's managing director, but it's also to be the integrator within the business to, to run the operating system upon.

Do you have a separate visionary or is there no visionary on the accountability chart?

There's not really a visionary on the accountability chart. So to say we have a. We. We have Pippa, who's our founder, who was, you know, set the agency up 25 years ago. This year or 25 years ago. Yeah, 25 years ago this year. Right now her focus is on the, the other part of the business I mentioned, which is that, that, that sort of uber niche. So I think right now I would say we, we don't have a, a separate visionary. I think I share sort of the characteristics of a visionary, but you can't just have a visionary. You have to have an integrator. Visionary's optional integrator isn't. And my experience in EOS is quite lengthy now. We've probably been in the EOS space for. Well, we've been running EOS for about five years. Um, and I first. I actually first weirdly heard About EOs at HubSpot inbound conference and I was at one of the. One of the sort of sub seminars. You've probably seen them with the convention center. And it was back then it was a diamond agency who was the top tier of HubSpot at that moment in time. And it was a diamond agency on stage. And they were. I actually think it was John Akin from Web Canopy Studios, I think, and he had all the diamond agencies up on stage with them. All on a panel. And it was a bit like a UK TV show we have called Family Fortunes. And it was basically like, you know, we asked 20 diamond agencies, what is your preferred project management methodology? And if I'm really honest, the answers were a little bit, I don't want to say weak, but, but weak in respect of like 25% said agile, 25% said prints 2, 24% said a blend of both and 26. And there was no real what you take from a data set that's like that. And then it wasn't until we got to the penultimate question that I think it was John asked, you know, we asked the diamond agencies on stage how many of you have implemented eos, the entrepreneurial operating system? And all but one said yes, the graph suddenly looked like this. And that was, I had no idea what it was. And as they're, as they're talking about it and they're drilling into how it changed their business, I've got my phone out and I'm frantically searching for what this is, what this system is, that sounds like it's all the answer to all our prayers. And I found it was a, it was a set of tools and concepts that give sort of some guidance as to how to run the day to day operations of the business in a very particular way. And you know, there was a bit of an organizational checkup quiz, your classic 2017 type form esque, you know, score your business on 1 to 20. So I went through the process and it asked me questions around like, you know, how transparent is your leadership team? Do you share profitability, turnover, you know, really detailed figures with your team? And it asked me questions, does the whole team understand the future vision? Are your leadership team open and honest to one another? And I answered everything as honestly as possible. And Pip, our founder, did the same thing. And what came back was we didn't score very highly at all. And you know, we really didn't score very highly. And I think out of 20 we probably scored it times those numbers to get to 100. But what off score was was about 18 or 20 out of 100. And when it replayed those sort of questions back to me and explained why we didn't score highly in each of those areas, I agreed with every element of it. It was clearly correct. So we came back to the office, landed on the Sunday, back in the office on the Monday, contacted EOS on the Monday, prepared with an implementer by the Tuesday, I think met him the next week and said we're in, you know, started that process within like two weeks of landing. And yeah, then we became an EOS agent. Well, we became an agency that were adopting the EOS system.

Yeah, that's. I mean, I think you might have the shortest turnaround of anyone who I've spoken to so far in terms of like, hey, I heard about it. A lot of people I feel like the story is I heard about, seemed like it made sense, but maybe it was too basic or in some cases too complicated, sat on it for a while, finally hit a point where we're like, we gotta do something here. You guys are the opposite. I heard about it like, hey, the pain is there, we gotta go solve this. We get so many questions out of that. That's a great breakdown. But first question that pops up to me is how long did you work with an implementer on the outside?

So we, it's meant to be two years. We did three and we did three sort of by mistake, slash. It was our own fault that we did three because the first time we did it we had this real separation of like a board and then a leadership team and the board spoke about different things than the leadership team and we did it at board level. But the people in the board weren't day to day, they weren't the people on the ground running the business. And given the cadence of EOS and sort of the quarterly nature of it, you know, you only have to do three or four EOS sessions, you've gone through a year. So we pretty much did that until we realized that, hang on, you know, these issues that we're finding and resolving and idsing and rocks that we're setting, we're sort of set in for other people who we're asking to run the business and be accountable for them, but we're not giving them a seat at the table. So about the eight or nine month mark, we turned around to our implementer and we said, we think we've made a problem, a mistake. I think he identified that early on and we, we sort of were a bit stubborn and said, let's just continue. We think this is the right approach and it probably wasn't. And as such we, we sort of started fresh and we then pretty much started again with the head of department level, our leadership level in the business, the people who are accountable for each major function. And we then went through a two year experience and that two year experience took us to graduation, so to say, and then we have continued to adhere to it ourselves internally thereafter.

What is that? So what does the leadership team look like today, not necessarily names or people, but how many people on a 30 to 40 person agency? How many people are on the leadership team?

5. So it pretty much looks like when you're constructing the accountability chart with an eos, which is the, you know, the alternative to an organization chart, you know, instead of starting with who sits where, you forget names, you take people out of it and you focus on what functions do we need to run this business and what are the best, you know, what, what should each function be accountable for? At this point, you're not looking at names, you're not looking at existing business, you're not looking at people in the business. And we basically said, well, you know, function one is, is sales, you know, sales and marketing, effectively bringing business in. Function two is servicing that business and completing that business. But we have a slight, slight nuance in the respect that sometimes that is web development work that sits with a fairly, you know, development heavy.net infrastructure team. And sometimes it's inbound work, which is, you know, HubSpot work ultimately, which is, you know, inbound or sort of implementation of the HubSpot suite, which sits with a totally different team. So we almost hive that into two functions. So instead of delivery being a function with one head, we have a head of engineering and a head of inbound. We then have, you know, well, we have a team that are accountable for retaining and expanding those clients, which is client services. So that's our fourth leadership seat. And then our fifth leadership seat is that sort of head of finance and ops function. So it's those five. Those five independent functions that, you know, report up. Up to myself in the integrator seat.

Yeah. That's awesome. And then the follow up to that is, how do you set rocks today? Is that the leadership team sets rocks for each of their departments. People are involved in bringing their rock ideas. What does that look like?

We, we literally did this for this quarter last week. So we have our sort of quarterly cadence where at the end of every quarter we run a quarterly. We review the previous quarter from a.

Financial perspective, because the quarterly, just for anyone who's not familiar with the language, that's your leadership team.

Okay, so the quarterly, effectively, we pause and we look back over the previous 90 days. And what we do is the first thing we do is we check in on how did we perform against our vto, our Vision Traction Organizer. So that's a series of metrics that we're saying we will achieve this year broken down into four quarters. So we're looking backwards and we're saying, right, Revenue, we said we would be at X where we X profit. We said we'd be at Y where we at Y and then any other measurables we may look at. So what's our mrr? What's our monthly recurring revenue to the business from that type of clients? Are we on track, yes or no? We spend some time with the financials, then we spend some time reviewing the rocks for last quarter. And each individual member of that leadership team confirms whether they were complete or not. If they were complete, great. We move on. We don't do a big show and tell in that session or anything. That's a separate session. It's very kept very strategic and on track, that meeting. And you know, was it done? Yes or no? If the answer is no, it simply becomes an issue and we'll talk about that later. We then, over the course of that conversation, we're populating this issues list to get bigger and bigger. We then spend some time as a leadership team in this quarterly and the question I ask the team is what are the most important things the fuelists need to achieve in the next 90 days outside of BAU? So not hit our sales target. That that's a given. That's a BAU metric that the sales team are accountable for. What else do we need to achieve as a business in the next. In the next 90 days? So we do something called five quiet minutes, which is where nobody talks to one another. You don't confer, you don't have that open and sort of, you don't have that open discussion. Everyone, piece of paper and a pencil, no laptops because it causes distractions, slack notifications and so on, writes down everything they believe the business needs to achieve in the next 90 days after five minutes. I, as the integrator, I'm sort of facilitating that, but I'm sort of doing, you know, I've got my own list at the same time. And we go around the room one by one. Everybody reads them out. There's no discussion, there's no debate. They just all get written down on the board, regardless of how wild they might sound. And then we go through a process called kill, keep, combined, which is where we. I read them off one by one and I asked the team, right now there's 75 things that you think you need to solve. And we're trying to get this last, this list down to 7 to 20. Less is more. You know, do we really need to complete that in the next 90 days? If so, we'll keep it. If not we'll kill it. And if you think four or five things on the board are actually saying the same thing, we'll combine them and that gets us down and down. And we'll. We'll go through that twice. You know, we'll condense 70 down to 35, and then we'll go through it again and we'll. We'll combine that, we'll condense that as much as we possibly can. Then at that point, we are assigning those rocks to the. Their company rocks. At that point, we're assigning those rocks to individuals within the leadership team. But we're also going through a process of making sure the rock is adequately explained. So saying, you know, the room I'm sitting in now is a result of a rock. Last quarter to launch phase one to build a podcast studio in the business. Phase two is this quarter to launch our podcast. You know, podcast room isn't a rock, but launch a fully operational podcast studio that allows two guests to come in and do XYZ with, you know, on demand. Whatever starts to become more tangible, starts to become more of a rock. So we go to that process to make sure they're all articulated properly and the people around that table at leadership level take accountability and ownership of then achieving those rocks. There's then the next stage, which is then we have a very similar process, but in a more condensed, slightly shorter form version where each departmental head asks that of their same departments. So instead of what does the business need to solve in the next 90 days, it's what does the department need to solve in the next 90 days? And they go through that exact same process. And until every single person in the business has three to seven rocks that they're accountable for achieving every single quarter. And then for context, if you have 10 staff members, and I'm using 10 because it's very simple math right now, but if you have 10 staff members and every single one of those 10 takes up to seven rocks, that's 70 big colossal steps forward your agency is taking. Achieving big transformational things.

That asking of the teams from the departmental leaders. That happens after the quarterly.

It does for us at the moment. Yeah, we're sort of setting company rocks first based on what we need to achieve at sort of leadership company level. Because we're. We're focusing on, you know, we're accountable for P and L. We're accountable for sort of much larger VTO figures as we get down into the department. If we look at engineering, for example, one of the departmental rocks may be to Implement node JS into the function. Now, I'm not a developer and I always joke with a lot with Sean, our head of engineering, that I know enough to be dangerous in terms of lingo. So I can say no. JS sort of know what it is. But that's, that's the extent of my engineering knowledge these days. Now, that isn't something that a leadership team really need to talk about. It's something that I have complete faith in my head of engineering because he, you know, he's in that seat because he passes gwc, which is an EOS terminology. He gets it, wants it, and has the capacity to do it. So he has autonomy to decide what the rocks are for his function because he understands the vision. He's bought into the vision and he knows what, as a leadership team, we're accountable for what P and L, what profit, what revenue and so on.

That's helpful. I think that is something that a lot of folks go back and forth on and kind of struggle with in the rock setting process is I want to have feedback from the team ahead of our quarterly so that I know, are we directionally in the right place with our company rocks, but. But on the flip side, I want to have our company rock set so we know what team member rocks to piggyback off of that. So I've heard a couple of different models around that.

Yeah, I've seen. And we've had this mistake in the past. I've seen too much of this, like, everything must filter up. And I've seen too much of this, like, well, our rocks must be bigger rocks of what the function needs to want achieve and what the individual needs to achieve. Individual rocks at that point can be person A wants to achieve a certification. Person B wants to increase their knowledge on technology. Type A. You know, that then doesn't have to translate to this rock. That translates to this rock as, you know, as long as every individual person is picking rocks based on their understanding of what they need to achieve, because every individual in the business has a number that they know means they're on track or off track with their role. We're very comfortable in that level of autonomy because we feel people are picking rocks for the right reasons.

Can we pick on what you just said because you're touching on the scorecard here?

Yeah.

Scorecard is something that agencies are constantly struggling with. And everybody wants to know, can I see your scorecard? Can I see your scorecard? I'm just like, I'm so hungry for what actually works. How do I give this person who's a copywriter for us, like what is that metric that they're responsible for? Does everybody have their own unique metric in the business? Or I'm assuming there's roles who share metrics. What does that look like for you List?

Yeah, not, not everybody has a unique metric. Every, every seat may have a unique. Well, even then, let's use engineering as an example. Let's use developers as an example. You know, I, if you work in an agency that is, and we're not story point based, but I'm going to use that as an example because it's an easier story. But if you're a story point based, you know, story point based agency and you sell story points or you're working in an agile manner where things are t shirt sized and ultimately then pointed, it might be that each developer has a requirement to achieve 30 points a week. And if they achieve 30 points a week, they've had a good week. It's not a unique metric because the person sitting next to them probably have the same 30 points and the person to the left also has 30 points to achieve. But it is a metric that all of them developers know that if they achieve it, it's been a really good week. And the scorecard is born off a sort of phrase within EOS that what gets measured gets done. And there's a story which I sort of tell in a Chinese whispers style format that changes a little bit each time, which is based on eos, which is, there was a factory in America somewhere, the produced, I don't know, they made something. And a new guy comes in and he runs the, he's the manager of this factory and he walks in on day one and as the shift finishes, they leave the room, the, the manufacturers, they leave the room and he says, how many widgets did we make today? And the shift margin says six. So he gets a piece of chalk out and he writes a number six on the floor. And all the staff are like, what are you doing? It's just like, just making a note. So the next shift comes in and that shift, they're like, what's the number six on the floor? And he's like, well, it's how many widgets the morning shift got done. So they go through their day and they achieve seven because six was the sort of parameter. So he puts a cross through to six and writes number seven. And the story goes on day by day, day by day, until 18 or 19 becomes the norm of output in this function because they feel as measurement there's that wish to strive and beat and be competitive. You know, I imagine if you're an engineer or a developer and there's 12 of you in a team and 30s, the scorecard being top with 45 would be quite nice.

Yeah.

And that's in the, that's in the right interest of the business. So we're very, you know, with, with that comes the scorecard and take it, take it back a step. Yeah. The scorecard for anyone who's not been through the EOS process is every department has a set of numbers up to 15 that basically, if you imagine you were lying on a, on a, on a beach next to a pool, and the individual who sort of runs the pool comes up to you once a week, gives you a pina colada, but also hands you a piece of paper with 15 numbers on, you'd be able to look at in your leadership seat or in your head of department seat or whatever and say, okay, things are on track, thank you very much. And you switch off for a week. That's the goal of a scorecard. So scorecard metrics need to be leading, not lagging. You don't want a scorecard metric that tells you you had a terrible week last week. You want a scorecard metric that tells you, wow, okay, number of new MQL is down. What that means is if we don't do something about it, there's going to be a problem in 12 weeks. But fortunately, I can fix it now and fix that problem in 12 weeks. So we've been really focused on making sure our scorecard has those numbers that almost predict the future as opposed to tell us the past.

The scorecard is something everyone struggles with. I think you brought out a good point, which is the incentive. You know, I always think of the story of the cobra effect in Delhi, India, where the British colonial government has. They've got a huge cobra problem. And so they introduce a bounty for, for every dead cobra that you bring in. Hey, we need to get rid of these. So we'll just pay people for killing them and bringing them in. And then all of a sudden there's just cobras everywhere because everyone starts breeding them to then kill them and bring it in for a bounty. And so you do have to be intentional with the scorecard metrics are. But my encouragement to agency owners is always like, I think your story really exemplifies this. We need to take that responsibility seriously to set good scorecard metrics. But it's absolutely okay if it's not fine in round one. You Guys are five years winning. There's probably still, at some point. Oh, yeah, I'm sure it's a lot smaller iterations on it now than there was before, but it's okay to have that evolve over time.

If I was to screen share our scorecard, we've got 15 numbers. If I was to screen share it and unhide all of the rows we've previously tracked and then decided to supersede it with something else, we've probably got 50 or 60. It's okay. You know, even three years in, it's okay to say, look, guys, I don't actually think this number is the right number for what we're trying to achieve anymore. You know, to give you an actual example, one of our scorecard metrics was overdue debt at risk. And what we meant by that was late payers, but not late payers. Late payers who aren't, you know, who are exhibiting signs that, that they may not pay. And it's such a rarity, really. We've got great clients. You know, we have an ICP that is fairly mid market Corp. Enterprise. It's very rare that we're in that situation. So not only was it pretty much zero every single week if it ever happened, it was covered in customer employee headlines, which is one of the. One of the sections with. On the, you know, on the level 10 meeting that the scorecard is in. So we found that, well, why is it a scorecard metric? Why is it one of our 15 measures if it's also something that we rarely hear about? And we do hear about it, we hear about it 15 minutes prior in the customer employee headline section. So we just removed it. And that's one example where we're constantly looking to refine and iterate and tweak that scorecard so we get the best value measures that we can.

Right, right. You mentioned tooling a couple different times. I just mentioned your spreadsheet. So I got to ask that what do you guys run? All of the EOS are using a dedicated EOS tool. Are you running it in spreadsheets?

We were running on spreadsheets until literally, I mean, we're doing this podcast now. At the beginning of quarter four, my quarter three rock was to. One of my quarter three rocks was to transition away from them spreadsheets to 90io. I'd already sort of determined that 90 was the right product in a previous date at a previous quarter. Just, just naturally, you know, if I didn't, the rock would have probably been to identify the platform and implement it. On that platform. But instead it was just to, to migrate to 90. So we held our quarterly last week for the first time on 90. Our scorecards were in 90. Our accountability chart in 90. As a result, everything just, just works. You know, I can sign individuals to the, to the seats with, on, on the accountability chart. I can assign the measures of the scorecard to them seats I can run, you know, I can run the quarterlies with those people and if there's any issues that come up, I can add them to an issue, the issues list there. And then there are other tools out there that I had a little look at and you know, EOS themselves have just sort of brought their own one out, which I did review but just not in the best place right now in my opinion. It's in beta as well, which, you know, give them, give them some leeway. Is in beta and it's something that they're looking to do. But 90 is a, is a very good platform and I evaluated a few of them.

Yeah, that's awesome. I'm going to pull, this is unrelated to eos. I'm going to pull on the tools thread though, because this is, I'm a nerd. Are there any other. I always like to ask people, are there one or two tools that maybe are lesser known? They don't have to be. Hey, no one's ever heard of this before because that's, that's tough to do. But lesser known in the agency world that you love either day to day like you personally or team.

I'll be honest, we're, we're now going through a bit of a consolidation exercise in terms of tools because we've anyone who's inbound. This isn't why, but it was a very poignant point that the average SaaS company has something like 300 subscriptions or something these days. And I don't think we have 300. But the message rings true for our project management. We use it just in engineering. We're using the Atlassian suite for our, sort of our project management of dev projects. We're using Harvest for time tracking, but Atlassian does have time tracking but we've opted not to use that for a report reporting reason. We're not using a forecasting tool within Atlassian. Instead we're using a forecasting tool within Harvest that doesn't link between the two. So one of our rocks last quarter was to sort of start that transition to consolidating it all into the Atlassian suite. And our rock this quarter is the extension of, you know, the phase two of that, which is to now remove those disparate tools and use tools that either exist natively inside JIRA and the Atlassian Suite or have great extensions and the data can be pulled in and used accordingly. So we're sort of, you know, as I say, we're 25 years old as an agency. We're sort of in the, in the mindset now of we're trying to remove software that once upon a time we thought was cool. It'd be nice. That said, honestly, if we weren't sitting on Riverside right now, I'd have probably said Riverside, the podcast tool. Yeah, you know, we've, as part of, as part of building this podcast studio that we've done recently, there's some great hardware behind the scenes, but Riverside was something we found prior to you inviting me on this podcast and thought it was a very, very good way of sort of removing the need for lengthy editing afterwards and 20, 30 hours of editing to throw out a half an hour podcast. So in terms of, I guess, cool software at the moment, I'm not really on that journey at the moment because I'm trying to condense and consolidate, but if I had to pick one, I'd probably, I'd probably go with Riverside.

Fm love that answer. I think there's a interest that we manage all our software subscription. Every single tool that we use is a list inside ClickUp with all its property subscription, who's the owner of that tool, all that kind of stuff that all relates back to people. So someone coming on board, there's a relationship then between the person and the tool. So if someone's offboarding, you know, okay, here's all the tools that they were on and that all gets tracked. Then those tools have their own user guides. Here's how we use. Here's our standards. Here are slack standards and whatever. And when we did that for the first time, we were small. I mean, maybe six or seven people. And it's like we have 52 tools. How are six or seven people using 52 different tools? So I love that. Yeah, you have to be mindful and pay attention to, hey, what's in the tech stack? What do we really need? And what's just there to cause a distraction? Or that's just going to be. As we scale. Trying to scale knowledge around all those tools is really challenging.

Yeah. And we, you know, we actually don't have a list as sophisticated is the wrong word. But we don't have a list as useful as the tool you've created there. We Go. You know, I've done some sort of clever and not clever, but I've done some tagging inside Zero, our accountancy platform, which basically I can pull a list of what we're all paying for and when and sort of all that. But, you know, it doesn't go as far as your list. Now, as you were saying that, I was thinking it's become commonplace in business to have a hardware audit, a hardware log, not a software log. You know, the first time we went through an exercise where, and I'm talking five years ago, you know, we realized, you know, our software costs have gotten quite high, substantially higher than they were this time last year. Let's do a bit of a pro. Let's do a review and see what we're paying for and what we don't need to pay for. I think we, I think we killed 10, 11k a month of software that, wow, person A had signed up for, used for a year, left the business. Someone else had come in and did something a little bit differently. And one person retained the license, but we didn't need 15 seats anymore. And just a bit of a general audit as to the software being used. And it doesn't take many software licenses when you've got, you know, 30 to 50 staff to, to. To build a fairly extensive amount of sort of monthly billing within software.

Right. That's awesome. There's a tool called subtrack, so Subtrack SUV Trac. This is not a helpful recommendation for you because I don't know that the business is still alive. I think I saw maybe early in 2021.

Okay.

And I was like, oh, this is it. This is, you know, business subscription tracking meant towards kind of small teams. There's some more sophisticated stuff at the enterprise level. And then I've not seen. So I tried it out. It was not that there's a lot of manual work involved right now, but there's definitely a product there. Someone may already have it built and I just don't know about it. So if you're listening, you know about it now, but there's definitely a business and I think there might be a software that's still service assisted that says, okay, hey Paul, here's. I don't think that exists yet, but there should be this in the world. Maybe it exists somewhere. Hey, Paul, let me come in and just take it. You know, just like a lot of these bill negotiation services.

Yeah, I was thinking about. Shut it.

Hey, I'll, I'll save you 10k a month in MRR so you pay me whatever the first three months or the first two months or, you know, just pay me the what I save you in the first month or something. There's some percentage model where it's all value add to you. You don't have to do the work and think through it. You just have to say put a check in the checkbox next to whatever. Or hey, we can reduce licenses here by whatever.

Yeah.

But anyways, it's enough. Enough business ideas. We've got enough business ideas of our own to. To work through so. Well, this has been super fun, Paul. I appreciate you coming on other than the website. Fuelious.com right? Yep. Which we'll make sure is in the show notes. F U E L I U S Anywhere else you want to point people to follow you in your story.

Obviously our socials and everything. I think as I mentioned, this podcast studio that we have recently built, we're very close to delving into the podcast world for the first time ourselves. We have a podcast launching in the very near future called Fuel your funnel. Clever play on words with. I say clever with. Um, which is a sort of. It's a. It's a podcast designed for. It's going to sound like a very me too samey podcast right now, but I'll come on to that. It's designed for sort of high level sales professionals, marketing professionals. It's that customer lead generation rev op sort of play. Well, I've gone quite particular on the sort of branding and the theme where it sort of is not going to be sort of middle aged male in a suit and a tie saying how great CRM is. I sort of want to. I saw there's a. There's a marketing one run by. Is it Karen and Kip from Obs Bot, which I can't remember the name of it, but it's very much like they, they sort of angle as another marketing podcast without being another marketing podcast. And it's a bit brutal and a bit to the point and honest and that's I guess, a little bit what my personality is a little bit like sometimes. So as a result I want to, I want to get that across. I don't want to talk about how rosy everything is and how amazing everything is. If there's tools that are a bit substandard, that's fine. We can say that if there's, if there's processes that people are using and techniques that agencies use that are a little bit old school, that's also okay to talk about. We don't have to talk about this incredibly idealistic, rosy approach to those things. So, yeah, fuel your funnel should be coming soon. I've never physically hosted a podcast before, so I assume it's going to be on all the major platforms and so on. We've got Buzzsprout and so on for distribution, so I think it should make its way to Spotify and the podcast app and all the other various platforms.

I know we're at time, so I've got to let you go. Promises me I'll ask. Question.

Yeah, it's okay.

What's the launch strategy? Are you going to get 5, 10 episodes in a queue and release at once? Have you thought through that?

I think so, yeah. I saw a really interesting tweet. Everyone's doing sort of Twitter threads recently, and I read one a few weeks back, and it was something. And these figures might not be entirely correct, but they're close. Something like 99% of podcasts don't make it past episode four. Of the ones that do, 93% of them, in fact, it might be the way around 93% of them don't make it past episode 20. So if you sort of, you know, if you take the sort of. Some of those numbers, if you produce a podcast with 21 episodes, you're immediately in the top 0.03% or something of all podcasts that exist. So I've got a metric in my head now of we must get to 21 episodes. And then that comes with its own challenges, because I don't want that to take 21 months. Therefore it can't be a monthly release. I think I've never done a podcast before. Weekly might be biting off more than I can chew. So I'm in that sort of stage at the moment where. Where we work that out. But we're going through a process internally now, of course, of identifying who the guests are reaching out to them. And I want to be in a situation where we record more frequently than we release. So we've got, you know, a good backlog of when we launch. We can launch 5, 10, whatever it may be.

Right. Awesome. Well, I'm excited to see it come out and check it out. You can tell. You can tell Kip that Marketing against the Grain can go to second place here and take over for over for them. That's awesome. Well, Paul, this has been super fun. I appreciate coming on, being willing to go a little bit long here and walk us through it. Thanks for joining us on Agency Journey.

Thank you. Thanks very much.