How to Build a 7 Figure Remote Marketing Agency

How do you build an agency that allows you to live the dream that you have for yourself, for your family, for your community, for your team, while at the same time helping your clients knock it out of the park and doing it all profitably? These are the big questions that we tackle here on the Agency Journey podcast. I am your host, Andrew Demski. Now let's get to it. Hey, Ryan, welcome back to the podcast. Excited to have you here this week. Would you intro us just by kicking off a little bit about your background, who you are, and how you got where you are today?

Yeah, sure. Thanks again for having us again. I know the first time was a blast and we're looking forward to it today. My name is Ryan. I'm the founder of an inbound marketing agency. We call it intelligent inbound, called SmartBug Media. We are a 40 person and growing shop and we are 100% remote. So we have 40 people in 17 states and Canada right now. And so it's been a really interesting ride to grow the business and do something unique from a business model perspective.

Awesome. Well, today I want to focus in on kind of your journey to getting a team of 40 people and what are some lessons that you've learned along the way, Some things that if someone wants to kind of model a similar approach to what you've got, they can make sure to nail down from right away. And, you know, last time on the podcast, we talked a lot about kind of the team structure, how you got there and everything like that, but wanted to dive into, like, specifics. If people are thinking, you know, how do I create a, an awesome culture structure like Ryan and the team there? What are some things that they should be thinking about? So we just want to kind of toss it over to you and kick us off. What are, what would be some things that people need to be paying attention to if they want to put a model like this in place?

Sure. So I guess let me start off by saying that if it's really easy to go off and start a company and say that you're going to be remote and hire a couple contractors and not have an office and not have employees and call yourself remote, where it becomes, I think, more challenging is when the size of your business turns into a real size business and you've got a large number of clients, a large number of team members that you want to invest in and train and promote and organize and develop and things like that. And it's at that point where I think some of the things that you really need to think about from a growth perspective makes sense. And the umbrella on all the things that I was thinking about when I was preparing for this call was that I think one of the mistakes that a lot of people make when they start thinking about a remote company is that they think, oh, you know, I'm going to go save a bunch of money on office space or whatever. And the truth is that if you're going to actually build the culture of your team, you're going to spend a lot of money building the culture, maintaining the culture, developing your team, having them out to visit, having get togethers to make sure that they're connected like people and things like that. So I would encourage people that are looking for it as just a cost savings measure to think of it more as a cultural advantage and a sustainable advantage rather than some type of an economic gain. That being said, I think the first thing that people really need to think about is to nail down your IEP or your ideal employee profile. And we have chosen, we don't use contractors except for a little bit of overflow type work. We've chosen that everybody who is a full time person here is going to be an employee and we feel like that they are going to invest 8 to 10 hours a day with us and that they deserve to be invested back, which means that we spend a fair amount of money from a training perspective, from a development perspective and those types of things to make sure that they have the same types of benefits that they might have as they were at a company. However, when you think about your ideal employee profile, it takes a different type of animal to work at a remote company. We typically look for people whose social life is not defined by the office environment. So if you find somebody who they can't wait to come in on Monday and go cube to cube and talk about the weekend, and that's really what inspires them about being at a company that doesn't work really well in a remote model. What works well in a remote model is somebody who has their own social life, wants to create some memories with their family, wants to do a great job and have some challenging work, but they're not defined by actually the kind of social energy that they get from being in a physical office. So when you're thinking about your iep, think about the demographics and the psychographics and the skill set and those types of things that you want to hire with, and then put together a hiring system so that you can start recruiting people for a number of positions. Here we've got a short backlog of people who we've already interviewed, who we know that we're going to hire and when the next position comes up in the next few weeks, couple months, whatever, they already know that they have an offer to work here and that we're waiting for the next spot to open up. And so the second thing that I would mention is that you should always be hiring because you never know when you're going to find that rock star talent that is really going to make a difference for your company. And it's really hard if you're growing quickly to stop and start the recruiting process. And so you kind of always have to be on your toes and you have to make sometimes a couple bets to hire people ahead of the curve to make sure that you know that they're going to be ready when the growth comes. So those two kind of play against each other.

Yeah, I see that. When you're putting together your ideal employee profile, are you only looking at working with people who are already working in a remote environment or will you guys also hire people who are coming from more of a traditional background?

We. So we don't. They don't have to have come from a remote background. It's nice if they have worked remote before. But we have a really rigorous interview process and so one of the sections of that process, we spend a good deal of time trying to understand what makes people tick and really kind of to determine where the source of their energy is, their why, if you imagine. So we believe that the promise that we try to make to employees is that we think that we can provide somebody a really challenging career with, with people that they have deep intellectual respect for. It doesn't mean that you're going to be besties, but that you have some very deep intellectual respect for an opportunity for growth, but at the same time flexibility to go out and create life memories. Because the reality is you and I are not going to remember this conversation when we're 70, but you're going to remember Christmas with your 19 year old like we were talking about before the show. So. Or 19 month old. Excuse me. So those are the things that really matter. And so we need to go out and find people who care about those types of things and also are comfortable working in an environment where they don't need a lot of hand holding. They're still very social because our work environment is not a sit in the corner with the light on type job. But it just takes a little bit. It takes somebody who's got some autonomy and some maturity and wants to get Their stuff done so they can go enjoy the part of life that matters.

Gotcha. When you guys are going through the hiring process, then what are. How do you structure, like, the different phases of interviews that people are walking through? Does that vary depending on the role or how many touch points are you typically having with someone before you say whether or not they're a good fit?

Sure. So. So we do things backwards from a lot of people. I think we. We've gotten to the point where we used to do all this internally. We've gotten to the point where we hired a recruiter, an internal recruiter, to help with some of that. But once somebod applies, we do a resume screen, and we're looking for a certain skill set and track record and experience level of the candidate for whatever the particular job is. So when we create a job rec, there's a number of things that we kind of submit with that rec. So if the recruiter finds that they're a good fit, they'll hop on the phone and do a recruiting screen, and they're looking again for certain things, Being able to articulate different scenarios that they've been through, being able to kind of share certain experiences, making sure that they're a social enough animal to be able to work well in this environment and things like that. If that is successful, then they do a first interview with the hiring manager. And we felt like that that is the best way to make sure of a couple things. One is, I think it's the best use of everyone's time. If the hiring manager feels like it's not a fit and you did it the backwards way, which is to let everybody else interview them before the hiring manager, then you've wasted a lot of people's time, and you've also kind of disrespected the candidate because you've wasted their time as well. So we do the hiring manager screen first. Once the hiring manager screen is done, we do reference checks next, because we want to make sure, A, that there's no red flags, and B, that during reference calls, you often uncover information that you want to talk about more on interviews. So it gives the interviews more context. Okay, then we'll do the interviews, and if the interviews pass, then we'll decide whether or not we want to make an offer or something.

Okay, awesome. Thanks for breaking that down. I love how you said that you guys are always hiring and that you actually have waiting lists of people, like, ready to work for you once positions open up. How do you get to a point where you have A backlog of people who are applying for positions at the agency. Like, what's the strategy for keeping that hopper full?

Well, we are always kind of posting in different places for jobs that we know we need or that we commonly need. For example, a marketing strategist. That role is very key to our growth because they're the ones that own the accounts. So we know that in order for us to hit our plan, we're going to need some number of those types of individuals. And so we're constantly advertising, posting, using social media, looking for referrals and things like that. And then we bring them all the way through the interview process and then have a conversation with them at the end. If it turns out that in that particular case that we don't have a spot, then we're pretty transparent about it from the beginning. And I think people appreciate that. I think that you also can't really do that unless you have built the street cred, if you will, that coming here is a good decision for people. And because then when they do their homework, they can understand that. You know what? This seems like a great place to work, and it's worth it for me to wait another month and see how this pans out than it is just for me to take the next available job. And we don't look for people who are looking for a job. We look for people who want to work here because there's enough people out there that want to work here. And this is the same for everybody. This isn't us. But I would highly encourage people when you find that candidate that's like, well, you're one of five companies that I'm looking at, then they don't want to work there. They want a new job. So you need to find the people that want to work at your company because those are the people that are going to stay here for a long time. Those are the people that have found that whatever you're advertising from an employee benefit and kind of lifestyle perspective, that resonates with them. And those are the ones that are going to stay here for a while and be cool.

What do you. What are some things that you guys think that you've done well in order to present Smart Bug as like a good place to work, that would create that feeling in someone that, oh, I'll stick out, you know, one, two, three months at a job I don't like just for that job. Like, how do you. Have you guys told that story? Well.

Well, I think there's a couple. Sorry. This cop has been getting with Me for like four weeks, it seems like, anyway. So I think there's a coup areas. One is if you have somebody who's really passionate about marketing, you have to eat your own dog food, right? You have to be. You have to do marketing. So when somebody comes to your site and you're trying to recruit them for the role of some type of a marketing position, for example, they're going to look and they're going to see, do you do marketing well for yourself? And if you don't, then they're probably going to feel like, am I really going to get the development there that I need? Because if the company isn't marketing well for themselves, then what are they doing for clients? The second thing is that the favorite part of my week is when we have our quick stand up. And a good 20 minutes of that stand up literally is people complimenting everybody for the work that they do. And we have this very flat kind of everybody wants everybody to win environment. There's no kind of backbiting and politics and all that other garbage. And so that carries into social media. And you start to see people who are kind of silently watching the way that other employees interact with each other. And I think that it's really contagious and I think that it shows a lot of goodwill. And then we try to open the kimono a lot to show what some of our other events are like. Our Smart Bugapalooza, which is our annual conference that we do. Last year we did it in Newport beach at Pelican Hill, which used to be one of the five star resorts of the year. This year we're going to the Montage in Deer Valley. And so these events are really cool. And we open the kimono about what those are like. And I think if you take a picture, like a kind of broad picture of all the stuff that we offer, we try to market that by doing what we do rather than trying to convince somebody that it's a great opportunity. And I think that that ends up kind of selling itself.

That's awesome. It's just applying inbound mindset to your recruiting strategy. That's cool. So you said, I mean, right there you can hear just like the culture of the organization, people complimenting each other in the weekly standups. As we were going through prep here, one of the points you mentioned was creating smart systems so that you can focus on the handoff. Can you talk more about that? And just like the importance of having systems in place so that your team can work well together and celebrate wins together?

Well, yeah. So if you're in an in person environment and you're in the office, it's really easy to just sit down with somebody and collaborate on something. It's really easy to go check on the status of something or ask somebody for a clarification on something that you got from them. When you're in a remote environment, you can do that as well. And we do a ton of video and things like that. But you really need to create systems because if you're going to scale, you can't really do back in the napkin stuff. You need to have effectively a process for everything that you do at your company, whether it's large or small. And I would encourage people to focus on the handoff. And I say the handoff because for whatever deliverable you have, it's going to go from one person to another person. And you need to make sure that the handoff from person A to person B has enough context and detail so that the person that gets the next step of the deliverable has the information that they need in order to be successful and to. And to take whatever it is that you're doing through the next step so that they can hand it off to the next person. And so we've spent a whole bunch of time documenting systems and processes and gates and handoffs that include the creative process. But, but also ensure that nothing gets missed, nothing gets kind of left behind. There's no context that's gone. So that things can relatively fluidly flow through a system, whether it's one client or 100 clients using the same model. The benefit of that, of having those systems and having those handoffs in place, is that it's very easy for somebody to come in, get trained on the way that smartbug does stuff, and then be able to insert themselves into any project because there's uniformity and consistency across the way that we do business with everybody.

Gotcha. How do you guys make sure that your processes remain relevant and updated and then also followed?

So everybody's got a project management system. We use teamwork. I think a lot of people probably do. It's a great system. But we create templates for all of the systems that we use. We document them, we make sure that each step in the process has a role. We log time against the different steps in the process so that we can go back and say based on what we thought this would take. Maybe it took longer this month. Is that an anomaly or is it some systemic thing that we need to fix? And then, you know, we'll typically Monitor for outliers on a monthly basis as we go through our closing, our financials for the month. And then once a quarter we'll go back and look at systems and say like, okay, great. So you know, what's working, what's not working. Are there any ideas that the team has? Because we try to hire people that aren't fresh outs. We hire people that usually have about 10 years of experience and have some pretty significant marketing experience. And so they have a lot to add. And so we go back and we have, I guess, a system to go back and review our systems, and that's how we make sure that they're up to speed. Nice.

So that's on a quarterly basis, you said?

Yeah, we usually typically do it on a quarterly. There's stuff that's, I mean, you guys have your business too right there. Sometimes there's stuff that just stands out and you're like, okay, we got to fix this.

Yeah.

But for the stuff where you're trying to optimize things or, or do something more effectively or more efficiently or whatnot, typically quarterly is plenty.

Yeah, I think it's healthy to have like those regular rhythms to just go back through and comb comb out the stuff that's outdated or just hasn't been used or hasn't been followed.

That's.

That's essential. So now I think, like, when you're thinking about the remote setup, a lot of people think like, well, how do I know what my team is doing at all the. All the time? Like, I kind of have that desire to peek over someone's shoulder. With 40 people spread all over the US and Canada. How do you guys handle that kind of accountability piece of the puzzle?

Yeah. So, well, we track time. Time's kind of, you know, some agencies think time's a dirty word. We don't. We track time not because we want to know what people are doing. We actually track time for two reasons. One is to, for the example that I just mentioned before, which is to make sure that the way that we built systems are working the way that we think. But more importantly, we have this concept of a fair work week. So. So we feel like people should be able to get everything that they need to get done in 40 to 45 hours. And if you start seeing people that are exceeding that on a regular basis, it either means that the resourcing isn't set right, or maybe there's some thing that's just a one off occasion. But we work really hard to make sure that it's not a sweatshop so that people have time to go create life memories because A, that's our mission, but B, also people need to stay fresh so that they can think. So we do track time. At the end of the day though, if you're a pro services company, you know, if people are doing their work because their teammates depend on them, you're communicating with clients. And so we've never really had a problem with somebody not doing work where they say that they're doing work and stuff like that because it's so obvious when they don't. In fact, I think there's a tendency out there to use tracking systems and tracking software to monitor what people are doing on their screens. And I was on a call once and an owner of an agency was considering using some software that would take a snapshot of the person every three minutes or something crazy to make sure that they were in their chair. It just seems so foreign to me because if you're going to hire somebody to be a part of your company and you don't trust them enough to actually let them do their job without recording their screen or taking a picture of their chair every three minutes, then you probably need to spend more time focusing on your hiring model rather than software to monitor people. So we just don't have that problem. I mean, you do it because you see the results if stuff doesn't get done, you know, it. You know, we've never really had a problem where people are malicious or people are just not doing something for the sake of not doing something.

Yeah, that's. I've never heard anyone like put the reasoning on their time tracking in the positive light to make sure you're not working too much or to just make sure that you take the time to go out there and make life memories. So that's cool to hear that that's how you kind of position it for the team when you, when you're bringing, when new people are coming on board who haven't been used to tracking every, every minute of their day. Have you, have you guys noticed any common practices or anything to help bring those new people up to speed to adopt to this kind of a regiment?

Yeah, probably the, the hardest thing for people is I think people spend too much time to allocate time to that stuff. There's some tools out there that people use or they'll use filters or whatever to try to separate out client emails into buckets. The biggest thing is kind of batching things. I think as an agency, the default, which I don't think is accurate is that anytime an email comes in, you need to respond immediately. And the reality is that the vast majority of emails don't need to be responded immediately. And so we encourage our team to block off chunks of their calendar where they're focusing on clients. We don't use the account manager role that a lot of agencies do because we found that our clients actually don't want to have a go between they're paying for a strategist that can help them grow their business. And most of them get offended when an account manager who typically doesn't have much marketing experience, tries to decide whether or not their question's important enough to get to strategists. And it just doesn't work. So we limit the number of accounts that our strategy team has and we have an open dialogue with our clients. So because of that, it makes it really easy to batch client work. At the end of the day though, you're never going to capture anything. There's text messages and zooms and all this other stuff. And so you kind of got to assume that, you know, there's probably about a 10% overhead on whatever gets logged on people, what they're doing. But it also. Just because you have a time tracking system doesn't mean you have to track time down to the second. In fact, a lot of people will track time on a piece of paper in 15 minute increments. And that's close enough because again, what you're trying to do is make sure there's not a big scary from a process perspective where you know you're three times out of budget for some deliverable because you didn't estimate it right and 15 minutes isn't going to matter and you're or you're trying to make sure that people have the quality of life that you promised them when they came here. And so you don't need to have a minute by minute account of your life in order to do that.

Yeah, those are awesome guardrails essentially to put up around time tracking. That's cool to hear that perspective. There's any other tips, anything else you would share with a company that wants to go remote here?

Yeah, don't be a control freak. So go out and hire some smart people, give them some guardrails in terms of the systems that you have in place and what the goal is of the customer and let them be a hero. If you hire really smart people that really want to work at your company, not just have a job, not just have a remote job, but they want to work for you and have bought into your culture and they have a lot of pride in the work that they do. You really don't have to have a lot of controls. Really all you have to do is let them be, Give them a chance to be a hero and make sure that you let the world know about it when they are.

That's an awesome last tidbit there. Make sure you're celebrating their wins. When you, when you say don't be a control freak, would you mind just giving us an overview of the structure that you guys use? Kind of your, the organizational structure that you have. You mentioned that it was relatively flat, but how are you guys structuring who works for clients and interacting there so that there is that space to just serve them well and be a hero?

Yeah, so when I, when I use the word flat, I mean flat in the sense that we don't have this like super strict communication protocol where I was talking to an agency owner the other day and the lower entry level consultants are not allowed to send an email to anybody more than one step above them in the company. And I felt like, I felt like I was watching like Saving Private Ryan or something, but it's sort of silly. So we have this, you know, we get people together a lot that aren't even on the same team to collaborate and brainstorm on client ideas and work on projects that are not something that they would typically work on and things like that. So we're really flat in the sense that we're all on the same team and there's a very open, transparent relationship at the same time. Everybody can't have 100 reports, so you have to have some structure. We've broken up our agency into a couple different buckets. We've got a client services bucket, a design and creative bucket, a web development bucket, a PR bucket and a sales and marketing bucket. So the biggest team for us is the client services team. Our VP there owns that team. Underneath her are a number of different consulting team leaders. So their job really is, if you think about like a, an associate client services director type role where they have, you know, most if not full autonomy for their team, which includes a number of senior and mid level consultants. And so they have a book of business between them and they're able to resource that book of business with the team that they have. And then horizontally the designers and developers and the copywriters and folks like that assist those types of accounts. And then on the development side we've got development and project management and QA that live underneath there. And so the development head is responsible for making sure that everything is resourced, developed along the schedule and budget that we have and that the customer has. Like, one of our values is rock the customer experience. So if our customer, at the end of that call, when we call them and say, did you have a great experience? If they don't say they had a great experience, which. Which doesn't really happen much anymore because they all do. But if they don't, then we failed. So their job is to make sure that stuff gets delivered on time, on budget, and with the highest degree of quality and user experience that we can. And then the other two groups are smaller, so they don't really have much of a kind of formal structure.

Oh, that is awesome. Well, Ryan, thank you so much for coming on. Breaking down these five steps here. I got a lot out of this. I got a whole page full of notes here. So I'm sure people who are listening got a lot out of it as well. If anyone has any questions or they want to reach out, is there a way they can get in touch with you to say thank you or send over a question?

Yeah, just. You could email me@ryanmartbugmedia.com you could find me on LinkedIn. Or if you're. We're always hiring, so if you're looking for a fun job, you can apply for one of the openings that we have on our website.

Awesome, Ryan. Thanks so much, man.

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