How to Build Your Agency's Brand Through Your Team's Personality and Expertise with Jakub Grajcar

Welcome back to Agency Journey. This is your host, Gray MacKenzie from Zenpilot. And this week, da da da da. I've got the pleasure of bringing on our very own Jakob Kuba Grizzar. Jakob, welcome to the podcast.

You know, this is really a moment for me because I was listening to this a couple of years ago as I first discovered Zenpilot. It was a great way for me to find out about the company. And now I'm a guest. Well, hello, Gray. Pleasure to be here.

Welcome aboard. So I said zero context for folks, but Kuba. And do you want to explain Jakob versus Kuba here? But you, you have joined us Zenpilot as our new head of marketing. We're coming up on three months in the role. Explain the name, explain what you do in the day to day right now, and then we'll, we'll dive right in. I've got a whole bunch of things I want to grill you on today.

Awesome. Okay, so for the name, everybody calls me Kuba. And it's a typical you, you explain the best, Gray. It's like a Robert Bob type of situation. So legal name Robert go by Bob. My legal name is Yakuba. I go by Kuba. And it's as simple as that. And with the story of how I joined Zenpilot, shall I go through the thing?

Yeah, let's dig into it.

Okay. So before I discovered Zenpilot, I discovered ClickUp. And the way I discovered ClickUp was my previous company was a software development consulting company. Software development services really kind of grew in the consulting direction during time that I was there. And the way it happened was I joined as the first marketing hire on a new marketing team. And initially I was responsible for everything. Blogging, email campaigns, website copy, social media, sales presentations, you name it, I wrote it. But the fortunate thing at STX was that STX Next is the name of the previous company, shout out to them. The fortunate thing there was that there was good investment in marketing. I really appreciated that. And as soon as three months into the role, I was already hiring for kind of my first, you know, first intern to join, first junior marketer to join. That was amazing, honestly. And the team grew quite quickly. So when I found myself hitting, you know, four or five team members, I really saw the need for some project management tool to help get us organized. Because previously we were using me and my manager. We were using Wunderlist, which, you know, some people might still remember that. I think that's been sunsetted now.

Just thinking Microsoft to do.

Yeah, that was Microsoft to Do well, Wunderlist was wonderful, but it didn't scale. So we switched to Asana for two weeks after which, yeah, very, very briefly, after which I happened upon ClickUp and they caught me through some SEO play. I think I was looking at like Asana versus Trello, and they kind of got that keyword with some ClickUp content. They've always been smart about that. So trying to make a long story short here, I fell in love with ClickUp and as the team grew, we used it more and more. We got the sales team on ClickUp as well, at least partially. And I just decided that I like it so much that, well, to promote SDX and a little bit of myself and just to do something fun, I reached out to them and basically said, make a case study out of me, which they graciously said yes to. I became a case study on ClickUp site. Then when I saw another kind of blog post on their site about project management tips for marketers, I pitched myself as a guest expert on there. They said yes. And one of the other guest experts there was Gray Mackenzie. So I noticed you there. Reached out on LinkedIn on a whim and then we spent, what was it, two years going back and forth about me joining Zen Pilot. One day, potentially the stars kind of aligned near the end of 2022, and I joined at the beginning of March 2023 full time. So that's kind of the shortest version that I can muster of this story.

Yeah. So you'll be hearing a lot more from Kuba as he's taken over marketing and fired me from the head of marketing seat here at zenpilot, which has been wonderful. Thank you for firing me.

Yes, pleasure.

So I've got a couple different things I want to talk about. One is I think this, you know, for us, from our perspective, I'm looking for folks who have a passion around project management technology and have firsthand agency experience and really a love for helping agencies, you know, fulfill our. Our promise of helping teams build more productive, more profitable and healthier operations and finding those folks who've got the shared passion like that. That pool is actually, I would have said if we were having this conversation a year ago, that pool's incredibly small. It's still small. It's actually larger than I thought that it was. But once, once kind of you landed in that pool, I was like, ah, this cool guy is really sharp, has a ton of experience, like doing marketing. The way that we've always approached marketing with a very inbound give first mentality. And so There's a lot of vision alignment. Could you talk a little bit to your vision for Zenpilot? Maybe twofold, like where is the brand going? How does that play out in terms of day to day marketing?

Okay, well, that's a big question. I think we could spend like a full hour just. We probably will. Yeah. Yeah. And some of it, I will admit is still kind of, you know, I know the, let's say the high level vision, but the details, we're working them out as we go. But there's a few things, I think where there's a bit of a shift of how we want the Zenpilot brand to be perceived. Because right now, and I saw this kind of from the outside when I was coming in, there's a very big association between ZenPilot and ClickUp and our expertise in ClickUp. And it's true. I mean I was the resident ClickUp expert at SDX Next and I'm a total noob here at zenpilot. When I see people like Alex, Maggie, Gabriel talk about ClickUp, it's on another level. They kind of know the software to the bones and that's great. But one thing that I recognized more as I was joining Zenpilot and talking more with you, Gray, is that we actually, we're not just a ClickUp implementation partner, but we help agencies just sort out their operations, period, and find the inefficiencies, find the waste, get the visibility into what they're doing to find where they're investing money wisely and for example, which service lines are turning a profit versus where they might be wasting their investment. And by getting everything into one system, but also applying the kind of framework of thinking that we teach them, they are able to finally get that visibility and to finally see what is actually happening when it comes to their agency's operations. And here I think is where we have a little bit of work to do, if I'm honest, to help the market at large recognize us as agency operations experts first and foremost. And then the tool I want to say is kind of secondary. Now, right now I don't think it's a bad place to mention that we are branching out from just ClickUp to also mentioning and doing some work in teamwork. So that's another tool with that. We're trying to show that this result, this visibility, this level of insight into your operations is possible in more than just one tool. And the key here is for us to be recognized as agency operations experts which looking at the training materials during onboarding, looking at the launch and learns that we've had. I can absolutely see here now how to do this, that I think the details of that are kind of being prepared and we're discussing them week by week. But one way that I'm looking at to get more reach for the brand and for us to become a more memorable brand is to focus more on the Zen Pilot people. So now I'm going to say something that's a little hackneyed, maybe cliche, like when I joined and I am fairly fresh at Zen Pilot, but the culture, it truly is great here and the people that I met, I am maybe used to a certain level of cynicism that I haven't found here and that's really refreshing. So immediately that brought to my mind the thought of, okay, I'm seeing people who have deep expertise in ClickUp, in agency operations, in other tools and also they're quite charismatic. I love to look through our Evoma recordings, for example, to see how we explain things, how we teach. Immediately what popped in my mind is we need to give the zenpilot people more of a platform. So it's not about discovering Zenpilot the brand, but it is, it's about discovering Maggie, our friendly neighborhood ClickUp coach, and seeing what she has to share and all the tips she has to share. I mean, whenever I see any content, video content, I mean from, from Maggie and even text content on her LinkedIn, it's like there's this style, this flair to it that's really hard to replicate and that's really important these days, right? Because a lot of stuff became a lot easier to replicate now with AI. So personality and I've been talking about this personality I think is the moat. So we've got people like Maggie, we've got Jeff Cypher, our productivity professor who recently rejoined, he's putting out a lot of great content as well. And I think people are going to gravitate more and more towards that. They want proof of humanity. They want to follow, you know, Even in this B2B services, fairly niche space, they want to follow people like they follow YouTubers, you know, for the personality and the insight that people are sharing. So these are just kind of two aspects of where I think where I see Zen pilots marketing going in the near and mid term, long term future.

You get a couple things there. I want to come back and spend some time on the, the people side and promoting folks. But a couple of things that I would tag on to what you shared. So one for sure, if we are, we're the folks that you go to when we're trying to figure out, hey, we as an agency have figured out, like, how to sell. I've got clients coming in, we've got business here. I know that we are losing money by not being able to retain or we don't even have the bandwidth to breathe to go upsell or resell or go back to opportunities that are out there. That's one bucket. The other bucket is, hey, things are going pretty well, but our team, like, we just have zero visibility into. I don't know how to do forecasting, resource management, capacity planning, any of those types of things. And as a result, from a management layer, it feels like we're constantly overstaffed. And from a delivery team perspective, they feel like we're constantly understaffed. So how do we get some objective truth here? Those are the folks who should be coming and should know, oh, ZenPilot has the answer for this. They've solved this for thousands of agencies before. They can help me solve this as well. And so servicing still the bulk of the business is doing that. We're still a strong believer in the power of focus. And the combination that solves these problems is technology is a big piece of that, Processes are a huge piece of that. And then people change management and building healthy habits is the third huge piece of that. We've talked about that and probably beat that to death here on this podcast. And so the power of focus is great. ClickUp is an amazing tool. A second tool for the right use case that I think like the. The top two competitors in the space right now are ClickUp and Teamwork.com and so building out now that we've kind of earned the right by building a large enough team on top of ClickUp to have enough margin in the business to be able to expand and say, hey, these are both solving. There's a lot of. There's overlap for sure, but they're both taking a very different approach. And so for some agencies, and this has come up in the past where we worked with agencies who are considering both gone through the blueprint process and said, hey, actually for you, teamwork's the better fit for most folks, hey, here's where ClickUp is the right fit. And so being able to take folks and say, hey, let's not get so bogged down and what is the exact. Like, let's not prescribe the technical solution before we actually understand what the problems are and what the outcome needs to look like. So I think you touched on that point really well. And as we Build that towards that vision. I love your approach of we want to feature our people at Zen Pilot and we want to feature our people who are our clients and our audience and let them tell the story and bring their experiences, wisdom, expertise and highlight that. But a number of agency owners listening are going to have the common fear in the space around highlighting people. And so there's both the practical side. So how do you. So I'm going to ask you another, yet another two part question. The practical side is how do we aggregate that? Do does somebody really want to subscribe on YouTube to seven different Zen pilot people or follow nine different Zen, you know, nine different pilots on LinkedIn. That's one. How do we centralize and aggregate that and make it easy to consume? I think that's an easy one because you've got a great answer for that. The second one is the fear of, well, what happens when Maggie leaves or Jeff leaves? And now this followership that we've spent our time and money to go promote and build and we've accelerated their brands now walks out the door. And so there's good answers to both of those and I think you've got some wisdom to share there.

Yeah, yeah. Well, the second question that you mentioned here, what happens if they leave? It certainly presents itself as you go into this sort of strategy and it's a risk, I think, to be taken here. And I would only go with this sort of play when I see that there's strong loyalty and strong alignment with the brand of the people. So let me tackle this one first, because the answer I would say is there's no sugarcoating it. That risk always exists. But I see it like this. If you're playing the long game and if you're treating your people well, then you might actually end up being to some extent happy when they move on because they'll always have that brand and their previous content will always be their personal brand, will always be associated with you as you get bigger. That's always on their cv. I mean, hopefully they keep it there and that promotes you kind of long term. And second, what I would hope for here, although I don't have much to back it up, just the feeling is as people are discovering your brand, as they're watching Maggie or Jeff or, you know, or you, for example, or even me, somebody's going to present themselves as like a true fan of the brand and in the back of their mind something's going to pop up like I want to be the next Maggie, you know, like coming in here I'll admit I was even looking at Agency Journey. I thought that would be fun to host, you know, so that I can even say from my own experience, that is something. It's a thought that presents itself. Now for the second thought, for the. Well, for the question they actually asked. First. First I'll ask you to kind of state it again just so I can answer it more precisely and the listeners have the context again.

Yeah. How do we, if we've got all of our team members creating content, how do we then aggregate that or make that easy? Basically, how do we solve for discoverability? Does someone need to go subscribe to eight different people on YouTube and follow a dozen people on LinkedIn to be able to get content?

Okay, so the way I see it is that the brand is the platform and the brand is the unifying element. But you mentioned two channels here, YouTube and LinkedIn. I think for both of those, really tactically speaking, in terms of the nitty gritty, it works differently. So for example, on YouTube, and we were just discussing this yesterday with Jeff and Ian on the team on YouTube, it's one channel, but it has these kind of distinct series and, you know, the thumbnail tells you who is running this particular, who is kind of hosting this video, who's the speaker on the video. And the YouTube algorithm is smart enough to recognize that, you know, from the Zenpilot channel, you're watching primarily videos by Maggie, videos by Jeff. It's gonna serve that up to you again, especially if you give it a hint. And one hint that you can give the algorithm is to put these videos in distinct playlists. So we do have, you know, we're planning to have, actually this is something we're working on. We're planning to have like one big playlist of, you know, all ClickUp tutorials and webinars. But also for the people who love what kind of who are gravitate towards, for example, Maggie's personality. There's going to be a separate playlist, just Maggie, separate playlist Jeff. And there are already separate existing playlists for Agency Journey. And this is kind of the advantage of focusing on particular people is that it allows you to also look at kind of the multitudes that your brand contains and map the aspects of your brand to the particular people. So here on Agency Journey, I know there's, you know, a lot is mentioned about ClickUp, but the main thing is you know how to win as an agency. Right? So if you're this high level agency owner, maybe you've got, you know, project manager who is more focused on the tooling and stuff. But you want to think about the mindset and the processes and the people. Then you'll tune into Agency Journey. If you're looking to get the absolute most out of ClickUp, you'll tune into our ClickUp content. So this is YouTube for LinkedIn. And it's one of the first things that I kind of proposed as I was coming in. This is something that I was also arriving at with the team at STX Next is that the company pages on LinkedIn are not really getting much in terms of reach. And we invested a lot of effort in the company page, like original content, long posts, lots of copywriting, multiple rounds of revision per LinkedIn post to just get this very limited reach so gradually over time. And this is a lesson that took me entirely too long to learn. Over time we started focusing more and more on the personal life accounts. And a simple question to ask yourself is, you open this social media platform and obviously you know your, your algorithm has trained differently to other people's, but for LinkedIn, I would wager 98% you see people's posts same on Twitter. So just, you know, apply that thinking. Which is why right now, the LinkedIn profile and it's a simple plane, people post about things, you know, there's a big announcement, it comes out from your profile, right? There's ClickUp tips, it comes out from Jeff or Maggie. What the, what the Zenpilot LinkedIn company page does is it leaves a reaction and it reposts the content so that it's kind of. If you want to check what everybody at ZenPilot is posting, then you go to the ZenPilot company page. But you would only go there when you have a keen interest in the brand already. That's not how you discover Zenpilot. You discover Zenpilot through posts like Jeff's recent post last week where he shared this AI process builder and I guess we have to kind of drop that in the show notes now. He shared this AI builder that can build your processes for you and got 800 comments, 1000 reactions under that and just a lot of traffic to our site. That's how they discover the brand. Then they can move on to following other people, getting to our newsletter, et cetera, et cetera.

Right. I think we need to do an opt in for that. If anyone wants this AI powered process builder, which is a really cool Google sheets tool that Jeff built out. Email jakub j a k u b zenpilot.com Please spam him and make him, make him reply. He'll send, he'll send you the direct link. It might sort your emails, it might be the tip that you already gave. But what is the low hanging. Actually, actually I've got two different places to go here. First one is I want to shout out and I want to ask you, are there other folks who you see doing as well? I think of our friend James Carbury at Sweetfish Media and I think Sweetfish has done a really exceptional job of building team member brands or giving people the space and the ability to grow their brands, which then grow Sweetfish. I think of Connor and the team at Aptitude 8. I think they've done a really nice job of this in the HubSpot ecosystem. But are there other teams that you look at as inspiration for wow this company? I've got a warm feeling in my heart because I see all their team members sharing this or some subset of their team members.

I'm on LinkedIn a lot, so there's quite a few people that I would point to. One person that I think maybe is not the source of my thinking here, but very much is confirming my suspicions here is Mark Killens. K I L E N S. He's the CMO at airmeet. So shout out to him because he's talking a lot about this creator first approach when it comes to your go to market strategy. And another great example and a really fun one is everybody should follow lavender if you're in B2B. If you're on LinkedIn, the stuff that they're putting out. I want to say Todd Clauser is great with his Worst Marketer in the World Series. It's really fun to look at and so they're doing great with showing that you can be fun on B2B LinkedIn and you can show your personality. And I wait for every episode of the Worst Marketer in the World. I just saw one today that really brightened up my day and I shared it on Slack immediately and not because of the kind of the wisdom that was imported, because the message boiled down to have your own thoughts and not just regurgitate from other thought leaders. You know, that's basic, but you put it in the format of this Worst Marketer in the World. It's funny, it's short, it's digestible and you just get attached to the character. So I think more and more, even B2B brands are going to wake up to this, that you need to have these compelling characters, these personalities. That's what's going to cut through the noise. So Mark Killens, Lavender and kind of, those are the two that immediately come to mind. I bet in five minutes I'm going to be like, okay, I got to stop you. Somebody else came to mind. Let's leave it at those two for

shout out to revpartners as well. Another awesome agency in the HubSpot space. So it might be the LinkedIn and getting your team involved, but maybe beyond that, I want to ask you about the low hanging marketing fruit for most of the agencies who are listening. And I think when you think of the listener, so you're going to have a whole range of folks listening. You got the solopreneurs, the folks who are really early in their agency journey. They searched on podcast on Apple Podcasts for either a specific name of someone they look up to or agencies and they found this podcast and they're tuning in and listening. And you've got the other end of the spectrum, that's the 600 person firm owner and we've got some folks who are, who listen who are kind of well down the road. They're into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in, in revenue. But for the most part what there are a, a whole bunch of folks in a not too dissimilar range from where we are. You know, 20 people, hey, we're trying to grow. We maybe have a full time marketer probably for most of them there's not a full time in house marketer right now. What should they be doing to grow from a marketing perspective?

All right, yeah, I mean no biggie, right? Just share advice for marketing agencies, how to do marketing. I could do that. I imagine this is the part that we'll be cutting clips from too. So I had a few things listed here. One, I already mentioned investing in personality. So I would re emphasize that, you know, find the people that you know, when you're on calls with them, you know, you have a better day afterwards. You know, the people with charisma with more and more video content and more and more of this call for proof of humanity in your content. You need those people, treat them well, give them a platform, give them a very simple workflow of you know, just hit record. We'll do the rest. You know, find freelancers to handle the rest or have like a solid process documented in ClickUp for example to do that. Right. So just wanted to reemphasize that tip and my second tip here, second low hanging fruit would be for the larger companies invest in infrastructure. I think, you know, over time you start having so much content, you know, as you're scaling your. Your marketing operation that it's really worth. I'm not even talking about going back to your content and updating it, because that advice gets shared a lot. For example, in our Drip campaign that you get after, you know, downloading one of our assets or subscribing to the newsletter, what I did was just some of the emails, they just point. They're not like. Because common advice is that, you know, you share some additional insights, you give additional tips, etc. But chances are, when you're at the scale, anything you might talk about in this drip campaign, you already talked about. So it's a matter of kind of pointing them to the other assets that you have or the other channels. They might be meeting you, quote, unquote, through LinkedIn and subscribing to the newsletter. But make them aware that you're on YouTube. Make them aware that you are on TikTok or Instagram or whichever other channels you're on. And in a more deliberate way than just putting that in the footer of your email is what I mean. Because what you want is to be everywhere for them, right? If they're your target buyer, you can't predict very well which platforms are spending the majority of their time on. You know, maybe they're on LinkedIn for half an hour every week, but they're on TikTok for two hours every evening. Okay. So if you have a TikTok point them in that direction. So we just have so many more touch points with them. So that's investing in infrastructure. It's kind of. It's an idea that, that came to me as I was watching a YouTube video about how countries should be run, to be honest, and it said investing in infrastructure is almost always a good choice. I think it's true for some companies as well, especially as you've got scale. Now, looking at the other end of the spectrum, if you're just starting out or you've got a smaller marketing operation, and this is a piece of inspiration that I actually got from zenpilot itself. At my previous company, we posted a lot of content and there was a certain standard of quality that we wanted to meet with that content. And we saw what worked, maybe revisited it and, you know, updated it, etc. With Zenpilot, what I saw is that you only really need a few, or maybe even just one really, really damn good piece of content. And that can drive so much business. So, you know, for us, a huge part. Well, not, I wouldn't say A huge part, but like a big advantage that we have, that I have coming in as head of marketing is our ClickUp for Agencies guide, where we give away, honestly, a lot of more than I thought we would when I dug through this content. When it comes to our approach, you know, the nitty gritty of actually how to set up ClickUp our way, you can do a lot of it just from the ClickUp for Agencies guide. For all the rest, if you need advice, you can always book a call with us. But especially as you know, think about it. I mean, the web is about to be inundated. There's going to be. It'll be overflowing with AI content. Okay. I sometimes try to kind of reach for a word I'm not quite ready for. Inundated. Okay, thank you. Thank you. So it'll be overflowing with AI content. Right. And there will be so many. The competition for keywords is going to be so much bigger. So you just need to pick a few keywords that are the most important for you and fight hard there and really have truly the best piece of content for that keyword. Of course it needs to have appropriate volume, right? It can't be too, too niche so that it doesn't get enough traffic. But if you find something that there is enough traffic and it's a really good fit with what you do. If they're googling this, you can educate them, but you can also sell to them. Just go all in on that because it really worked, for example, for a company like ours. So that's a piece of advice that I would share. And I mean, that might be a little bit flippant of me. I was just talking about investing in personality, but it can't be denied. You also have to invest in AI too. On the other hand, I like AI for repurposing. So look at all of the loom videos that you've got, the YouTube content that you've got, even recordings of internal meetings. What's awesome about ChatGPT? And one of my first purchases here was ChatGPT plus actually for the company was take these transcripts and just tell ChatGPT to clean up the transcript, make a blog post out of it, clean up the transcript, make 20 tweets out of it. It honestly does such a good job of it, especially now that you can also ask it to browse the web and find additional context. Because the browsing functionality is now more and More available with ChatGPT Plus. You shouldn't miss that opportunity when repurposing Instead of taking two days, it takes 20 minutes.

Yeah, those are all awesome tips. Along the lines of giving stuff away we've kind of taken so so what's cool about ClickUp for Agencies and that keyword phrase maybe as an example is that started as a long form blog post spun into a 47 page guide. Both of them we give away for free. You can go find them on the Zenpilot website. And then we spun that obviously there were services that led to that but then we spun that into a newer offer that's more accessible for the early stage folks who just need hey, we need what works and we need to get it plugged in quickly and launched the ClickUp for Agencies Playbook. So if you go to playbook.zenpilot.com you can check out the ClickUp for Agencies Playbook. That site is a work in progress but it'll walk through what it is and kind of what's included. There is a whole bunch of training so you get to learn kind of like the, the nitty gritty what works really well for Agencies. You also get to learn a lot of the thinking of why if you want to to consume that as well. But then you also get a ton of pre built templates as part of that. There's an option for some for a little bit of hands on help as well. But in the spirit of generosity I thought this would be fun today if we gave away a copy of the ClickUp for Agencies Playbook to celebrate you coming on here today. So I didn't, I didn't intentionally did not put this in the show notes. This is Kuba's welcome aboard present. If you would like to we have come up with a good prompt for this so you can get your chat GPT fingers ready. But if you are someone who's either on ClickUp or you're looking at moving to ClickUp for your agency, you want to get your agency ops in order to send me an email for this one Greg R a y@zenpilot.com Tell me a little bit about your agency situation and what your goals are. We'll pick Kuba. We'll take all the ones that hey these make sense. We'll put them in a hat, we'll draw a name out and we'll give away a copy of the ClickUp for Agencies Playbook to somebody which would be awesome.

That sounds great.

I'm going to ask you this is your go to question and the one that I knew I couldn't get away if I didn't ask you. So this is. I asked you about the low hanging fruit for marketing related, but what's your best tip for agency operators?

Oh, I kind of dug my own hole here or whatever the expression is. So the context behind that is I used to run a live stream show for my previous company and kind of the kind of signature question that I had was what is your number one tip for tech leaders in this case because it's software development consulting company? I asked always at the beginning and the answers to that were always kind of like a mini nugget of wisdom, not always related to what was the topic of the main episode. So I kind of suggested adding that to Agency Journey and I'm like, now I'm getting hit with that. And look, I'm going to hit here on something that I recently am extremely passionate about and that's the issue of mindset and agency operators. I think they go here more often than people in other roles. My current kind of theme when you look at my LinkedIn is I'm sharing a lot about the mindset that marketers should have, but I just wanted to underline the importance of mindset in general. You're thinking a lot through the day. You're thinking about the tactics that you're using, the strategy that you're following. You know, whether you're investing in the right, in the right kind of places, whether you should increase investment here, decrease investment here. What I would urge you to do is, and I don't have a good way to do that for your people, but at least for yourself. Anybody listening to this, Find more time to work on your mindset. If you're in a leadership position, your mindset is going to trickle down to everything else, everybody else. So it's extremely important that you have that figure out that you bring this. And this is honestly something that, for example, I'm seeing @ZenPilot 2. When your mindset and your approach is devoid of cynicism, when it's genuinely optimistic, that really it has an effect that's not quantifiable in my opinion, but it helps a lot. And to not keep this just on the philosophical level, here's one exercise that you can try that will help you uncover more about your mindset and about what actually motivates you and drives you and what your values are, I really recommend it. It helped me a lot with discovering more about myself. Sit down with a piece of paper, Google Doc, ClickUp, Doc, whichever you like. I personally just prefer typing on a laptop because it's faster. It's almost at the speed of thought. And think back on the top moments of your life, the moments that made you the most proud, the most happy, where you felt like you had this kind of peak experience in a positive sense. And a lot of us have those moments and remember them. What I'm calling you to do is to dissect and really ask yourself many, many times, why? Why did that make me proud? Why was I happy? What was it about this moment and that made me feel these extremely positive emotions? And what does that say about me? What does that say about what's important to me? And how can I use that to drive my decisions moving forward, do more of what fits those values. For example, for me, I was thinking a lot about my public speaking days, and I realized through this that I love to communicate, simplify the complex, inspire, teach. Now I'm looking for more and more opportunities to do that, and being on this podcast is a perfect example of this. So I really invite you to do this exercise to discover more about your mindset, think about your leadership experiences, too, and that'll help you discover your values as a leader and just become a better leader in the process.

That is a great tip, Kuba. As we wrap up, I often will give people the opportunity. Hey, what do you want to plug or where should people follow you? You tell folks about the newsletter?

Sure. Yes, of course. So one of the first things, even before I officially joined Zenpilot, so I joined in March, but even in January, February of this year, we were talking about the newsletter, the Zenpilot newsletter, which used to be called the Dispatch. And that might be news to some of you listening Gray. We had conversations about potentially rebranding it, conversations about me taking it over. And that happened. And now I'm kind of, I have these big shoes to fill to try and continue the tradition of the Dispatch. But the question of a rebrand came up and we decided, I decided to rebrand the Dispatch and give it a new name. So our newsletter, our zenpilot newsletter is now called First Class Operations. And there's a few things contained here. I actually posted on LinkedIn just today about that. But in a nutshell, we're trying to, on the one hand, add more personality and flavor to it. Personality being me as the face of the newsletter. And I'm sharing also personal anecdotes and a lot of kind of my own thinking within the newsletter. And then at the same time, to have a little bit more flavor in the sense of, I mean, you can probably see how it relates then pilot first class coming with this airline flavor just because I think you need to stand out. Right. And we are trying to do that to a larger extent here with first class operations. Adding operations on the end there is just supposed to communicate what I was talking about at the beginning of this episode, actually when it comes to operations, especially agency operations, but not necessarily just that we are experts that are worth talking to. If you're trying to improve that and bring it to this level of quality, that's kind of akin to a first class experience on a flight. So that's the thinking behind it. And you can go to zenpilot.com in the resources section. At the top you can subscribe to first class operations. Or at the bottom, I changed that today, by the way, Gray. So it's in the resources right now. Also in the footer at the bottom, subscribe to First Task operations and you'll be getting emails from me every two weeks or so.

That's awesome. Kuba. I'm glad we've now broken the ice. You are officially an insider on Agency Journey. Thanks for joining me today.

Yeah, seriously, like I mentioned at the beginning, I was really excited to do this and I was kind of thinking and visualizing myself as part of this show ever since I first listened to it and we had our first conversations. So very glad that I managed to have this moment. And hey, I hope this episode was helpful to you dear listeners. If anything right here resonated or you have questions, reach out to me on LinkedIn, Jakub Greizar or Jakub J A K u b@zenpilot.com. always happy to have a conversation and to talk with our listeners.

Love it. Thanks Kuba.

Yeah, thank you.