Motorcycling In Vietnam, Scaling to 150+ Remotely, and Choosing Team Over Clients with Zach Boyette

Hello, hello, hello everyone and welcome back to Agency Journey. I'm your host, Kuba Gretzar and with me on the call today is Zach Boyet, co founder and managing partner at Galactic Fed. Zach, how are you doing today?

I'm great today, Kuba. Thank you so much to you and everyone listening right now for joining us on the pod today and really excited to get into it.

Yes, welcome watchers and listeners. You're in for a treat today. Zach is a super exciting guest and we're going to drill into some very interesting topics today. Zach, where are you coming from today for the show?

I am currently at Stanford University in Silicon Valley in California. I made the possibly time inefficient choice to go and get a grad degree while running my company of around 150 people. So I've been quite busy for the last two years, Cuba, getting my MBA here at Stanford. But I thought it'd be really fun to live in Silicon Valley for two years, meet people out here and just get inspired by the startup culture. A lot of our clients are out here as well, high growth startups and such too. So it's been fun to meet with some of them in person.

Right, because running the agency is easy, so why not just do an MBA on the side? I got you. Awesome. All righty. And one quick icebreaker question because I'm super curious about your answer. In particular, what is the most fun thing you've done this year thus far?

Oh, wow. This year? This year I went motorcycling on the Ha G Loop in Vietnam for about five days. So picture you are on a road maybe the size of the room you're sitting in right now. To the right of you is a cliff that drops off a thousand feet into black nothingness. To the left is a sheer cliff wall and between you and that cliff wall is an 18 wheeler truck that doesn't care if you live or die and it's coming straight at you and you need to thread the needle between that cliff edge and the truck to get around. That's basically what I did for five days in a row riding my motorcycle with a couple friends. And it was, it was incredible. It wasn't always that dangerous. There was maybe three incidents that bad. But overall it was just incredible to be out in, in rural Vietnam, meet some of the most sweet and kind people I've ever met, and had some really good meals there too.

Okay, Zach, we're going to talk about agency operations in a second here, but how do you end up in situations like this?

So I Kuba, as we were chatting before, I spent the last six years as a digital nomad, meaning that I worked online and didn't have a home address. I hopped around the world working on my computer as I built my team. So I got really used to and excited about having these big adventures as I travel. And I find that I get inspiration in the work that I do as I build Galactic Fed from being able to get out there in the world to meet people in their element, which may mean our team members. Sometimes there's some people that I've met in real life out and about that have ended up working for us and sometimes I've gotten the chance to go to local communities where our team lives because we have people in about 20 something countries that meet them in person. But overall I just feel inspired by these adventures that I get to do. And so yeah, I love getting out there, doing really, really roll out there, interesting, exciting adventures as I'm building my.

Company that is clear to me. So tell us a little bit more for context about Galactic Fed, the agency that you're building. You know, what's unique, what sets you apart, what's the kind of thing you're building here.

Yeah, so I started galactic fed in 2018 with my co founder, late 2017, early 2018, sometime around there with my co founder Irina. So my background, I worked at Google, I worked at Procter and Gamble, I've worked in the marketing side for a while. I'm also software engineer. My first company was a, was a tech startup. My co founder Irina was a physicist actually at CERN on the Large Hadron Collider. So she worked on a project recreating the Big Bang theory. So she's more of a scientist by trade who then went into marketing and we, I was more of a media expert, she was an SEO expert and it made sense for us to team up and start Galactic Fed together. Our focus from the very start is on high growth, data driven, math driven type of marketing campaigns that help help companies really grow quickly up and to the right. I'd say our bread and butter was lots of high growth startups, maybe tech startups, maybe consumer startups, lots of B2B companies as well. We worked with more traditional businesses, you know, along the same time as well and, and they really seem to enjoy our sort of high growth marketing, mathematical, technical type of approach. In the beginning we hired data scientists, PhD, lots of STEM type of people. It helped teach them marketing and I think that helped us imbue this sort of sci fi Type of culture, you know, embodied by our name, Galactic Fat as well. We've done quite well. Been really happy and proud of the team. As I mentioned earlier, we're about 150 people now around the world in 25, something like that, countries, smartest people I've ever met. So much smarter than me, really privileged to be able to work with them. And yes, we offer our clients full suite of most digital growth marketing services you can think of everything. Pay media, SEO, email, organic, social, legion, web dev, you know, the whole gamut basically. Yeah, that's us.

Gotcha. Gotcha. So you're mentioning that you brought some people with a STEM background on board. I wonder how you would comment on the advantages and disadvantages that they have as you kind of brought them into the world of marketing. What is something that they easily get and what is something that maybe takes them a little bit longer to get immersed in?

Yeah, so I think that in the beginning, as with anyone building an agency, listening to this podcast and can relate, there are challenges. You know, you'll hire some people that are really great, you'll hire some that maybe need help improving. I think that we found on the whole, those folks we hired really added a lot of interesting value where I think that a lot of us as marketers get really used to certain ways of doing things. You know, if you've been working in, in pay media, you know, you're really good at Google Ads, you're really good at meta ads or something like that for so long. You get used to a way of approaching problems, you've seen it before, you think you know the right way. And I find that it's really interesting to bring in people with this sort of engineering mindset who can help view problems from a different and outsider perspective. So I'd say at a high level, that's the value that we got bringing in those STEM people. That said, I don't want to knock my marketing folks again. I worked in marketing with Google, I worked at Procter and Gamble and stuff. I love folks like that too. We have tons of great people on our team as well with that sort of background who are absolute experts in the platforms. They do, they've helped grow brands, they've seen it all. And I find that sort of meshing those two attitudes of the outsider, tinkerer, mechanic type of STEM background with the established experienced marketer makes a really valuable combination of Galactic Fed.

Right. I imagine if you've got an engineering background and you're looking at something like a paid campaign, there's A lot of data, a lot of different levers to pull there to play around with. Right?

Exactly. Yeah. And we found some really interesting insights from that. I think our team's been able to move really fast and to build cool, innovative ideas for our clients because of that, you know, solving past some stuff that agencies before that the client had hired had called a brick wall, you know, we'd be able to bust through them.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Sounds interesting. All right, before we get too deep into anything else, one thing that I make a point of doing early in the conversation is to ask you our traditional agency journey question. If anybody watching or listening has encountered the show, you know what's coming. So, Zach, what is your number one tip for agency operators?

I would say my biggest tip is to remember that the folks you're hiring, while they may all be very talented, need to be, need to adhere to a standard way of doing things at your company. I think that Galactic Fed never could have scaled to the size that we are now if we hadn't had what we call the Galactic Fed way, which is a sort of blueprint documentation that we do for literally everything from the way that we onboard a new employee to the way that we kick off a client, to the way that we build a new campaign. And basically a lot of our team spends quite a bit of their week just documenting the process of the way that we do things. And I found that, sure, while this may take some time away from what they're able, you know, time spent with clients and these sorts of things, that two or so hours per week of documentation helps the entire company as well, because rather than when we onboard a new person, having them have to come in and, you know, sit next to someone virtually since we're remote, and teach them the way that we do stuff. It's all written down, it's all documented. So again, I would say focus on documentation, focus on process, focus on making sure that people do things the same way so that clients have a consistent thing they can approach that doesn't change from account manager to account manager.

Okay, awesome. It sounds like we're a good fit in terms of our two companies because Zenpilot, I mean, this is what we do. We help agents figure out project management, become process driven, templatize stuff, and much more on top of ClickUp. So definitely I have some follow up questions about that, starting with you mentioned two hours per week documenting work, you know, more or less. How do you get people to do that? Simply put, is it a matter of getting the right People in or is it a matter of training, kind of selling them on the idea? How do you get that to happen?

Yeah, so I think, you know, the two hours is an average, some people's five, some people it's sure half an hour if that. And we're pushing to do more but I'd say we really set the precedent early from the start because imagine you know, you've, you've joined different companies in the past and what did your onboarding look like? Cuba? Maybe it was you sit with your manager for a whole week, you do one on one join ups in real life with people, they show you things, maybe you read a few documents. Well, Galactic Fed, you know, we have, you know, a large, you know, 150ish team and we're fully remote so around the world and so we don't have the luxury of people being able to sit in the same place all day and just kind of watch your shoulder. Another thing we can talk about later too is I'm very, I don't want to say anti phone call but I think people do too many calls and should do more stuff in writing. So I really try to prioritize written communication. Anyways though from, from the start when you're onboarding a Galactic Fed you're given a lot of information to read. You're given like a really long, fun, colorful sci fi themed onboarding doc with like pictures of myself and my business partner Irina and our employees that we met up with around the world and you know, explaining our culture in a fun way. But you read that and it's probably 20 pages and then from within that we also have a sort of scorecard doc and ClickUp workspaces and such that the folks go through that explain all the different ways to do things and those may link out to other Google Docs that they need to read or other areas they need to look into, maybe Google sheets they need to review. But it shows from the start this is the way we do things. And I think that we really hire folks from the start who we believe can have this sort of self starter written communication led type of work ethic because we really want to focus on people at the end of the day the most important thing we do obviously is driving good results for clients. And I find that the less time that people need to spend doing internal agency stuff, obviously we want to do as much as we can to support people and have fun together. But the less time we spend on needless bureaucracy, the more time we can spend helping clients do a really Good job and getting really good results for them. So yeah, long winded way of saying we hire people from the start that we believe can have this sort of attitude. We onboard them through it and then the way that we do the weekly, monthly, yearly, et cetera, check ins reflect this attitude.

Okay, gotcha, gotcha. You mentioned something. Well, first of all, you mentioned ClickUp. I wanted to briefly ask you what made you decide on ClickUp to kind of make your company run on it.

Yeah, I know Zenpilot hearts ClickUp as well. Obviously we do, yes. So we went through very first V1 was like we had Google Sheets organization. I don't know, it was so messy. Just I don't think you can really run a company on just docs and one on one chats. So then we went to Slack. Slack was great, cheap in the beginning, didn't have any money paid free plan. Then we released the messages, finally upgraded premium plan. But even Slack still, I mean that's not the. It's good for water cooler chat in a remote company, I think, but it's not. And why by water cool I mean anything that you talk in real life normally. But it's not good for documenting process and tasks. So we tried Asana, we briefly tried Trello, but that was way too lightweight. And finally, I think I was like flying into SFO or something like that San Francisco Airport and saw, I mean it's funny as a digital marketer being converted by a billboard, but I saw a billboard in the airport for ClickUp.

Okay.

And this was many years ago, probably when they were first getting a big venture round and doing a lot of splashy advertising around the Bay Area. But I was like, okay, maybe, maybe we'll look at this thing. And I've really fallen in love with how intuitive it is, but also how deep the scope is of what you can organize on ClickUp as well. And so we do a lot there for our team.

Okay, gotcha, gotcha. Well, it's always nice to meet a fellow ClickUp fan. And yes, very much it is the tool that we love here at Zenpilot. But not to focus the whole conversation on it. You also mentioned, and this is something that I've been thinking about a lot recently and I would love to get your perspective. I mean you're running a company of 150 remote employees. I'm sure you must have thought about this very deliberately, both in terms of making things consistent, process driven. You emphasize written communication. On the other hand, with the emphasis on written communication that you've got how do you also ensure that there's a sense of community and culture within the company? How do you give them a chance to interact and to make them feel like a part of a greater whole?

That is a great question. And that's probably, I'd say the top question that I get when I'm mentoring new agency or remote startup founders is how? Because it's paradoxical. On the one hand, I say process documents, minimize phone calls. On the other hand, you want to build a great culture where people feel supported and have a good time and can relax. I think it really starts top down at the very beginning with attitude. Like, I try as a leader to be very just open and funny and fun and give our team chances and not like a super hardo type of person who ends their sentences only in periods and never uses an emoji and makes people feel, you know, like it's not a place where they can come to us and give real advice, real feedback. But as far as setting up more institutional things to build culture, we have all these different channels that are like pets and parents and rock climbing and music and culture in different areas within Slack where people can kind of congregate and chat about things. And we also have at least quarterly calls with the whole team, where normally I know that quarterly, all hands, these sort of things. It's kind of like leadership going through a slide deck and being like, here's an update on the things we do. But from the very start I was kind of like, okay, like again, I could do that in writing, right? Like, I could send out like a, like a slide deck to the whole team. What I want to do when we're all on this call, instead of making people sit at this random hour for wherever they may be based, I want to just share community culture. So what we do in that call is we do a one minute show and tell for everybody. And as the team's grown, we've had to kind of break this up into departments because 150 people would be well over 150 minutes, which would be a long call. But people will bring an item within their life, usually a physical item. We've seen new babies, spouses, ceremonial family swords, hot sauce collections, favorite perfumes and colognes, surfboards, man, you name it. And everyone spends, I say a minute. They end up taking at least two minutes normally, which is fine, explaining why this thing is really important to them. And then everyone just blows up the chat as they're going, being like, oh my gosh, this is so cool. I Love this. I feel like I learned more about you. And then we found that those one on one sharing have led to other connections with people within the team. Or someone might show their surfboard, which makes people realize, oh, there's other surfers at Galactic Fed. And then maybe a surfing channel is created or something similar, people start chatting about that. So I also think culture is something that you need to be deliberate about it. But there's also sort of like magic that happens with your first few folks you hire that I think scales out to the rest of the team. And I wish I could say that right now I am like the grand czar of culture or something like that. I do my best, but I think that I've gotten really lucky in having just such a fantastic team. And the early people we brought in who then help scale that culture to everyone else, where everyone feels, you know, supportive, they're never going to get yelled at, they're never going to get, you know, a first time, they make a mistake, they're not going to get demoted or downgraded in our eyes. And I think that really scales out to the rest of the culture and makes people feel secure. We've, I've heard a lot of people internally call it like corporate detox at Galactic Fed. It's, it's just a very fun chill culture. I think that's reflected in our Glassdoor reviews too. We have like four or nine or something like that. So.

Yeah. Okay, well, congratulations on that. A comment like that must make you.

Very happy for sure. I'm very thankful to our team and really proud of them.

Okay, I'm curious, do you get a minute on these calls and if so, what do you show?

Yeah, I'm trying to think. The last thing I shared, I think it was I was in the last one we did. I had just gotten back from Taiwan and I had gotten, gotten this like tea that was this like ceremonial tea from this part place that I was in. And my, my business partner Irina really loves tea. She drinks all the time. So I show them, hey guys, I got this tea for Irina that I'm going to give to her and, and because of that I shared that I was in Taiwan and then someone else was like, oh my goodness, I was in Taiwan recently too. Then we got chatting from that. But man, I've got some other weird things I can't remember. It's been so many years. Yeah, once I brought my. During COVID I was locked down, hanging out with my family in Tennessee. So I brought my BB gun and showed Them that I was using to shoot, shoot tin cans for practice, but all sorts of weird stuff like that.

Okay, awesome. You know, it's a small tactic you might say, but it's actually really smart. The way you mentioned that it gives people kind of more information about the basis on which they can connect, like shared hobbies or shared experiences. I really dig that. Which is why I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into this before I move on to the next thing I'm curious about. Is there anything else, any other tactics that are helping you build this strong culture?

I think also at my level, most of my communication, at least 80 to 90% is with the executives in our company, the brilliant folks. Rachel, who runs our pay media and SEO and growth labs product teams. Michelle, who runs our sales department. PJ who's our cfo. Peter, who runs our HR team. Kat, who's another operations VP for us. These types of folks are the main ones I'm chatting with on a day to day basis. So what I realize is all these people manage people and the way that I communicate with them is really going to trickle down. So something I've noticed just for fun, even as experiment will do, sometimes I'll just start randomly using a new emoji in Slack. Maybe it's a blue heart or like a tiger or something like that. And I found within a week the entire company is using that emoji within the communications they do. It's so funny. A week might be maybe two weeks or a month max, but I swear I've done this like half a dozen times. It's so funny. And I think that is a good microcosm for the reality that the way that I speak and communicate with the executives of our company is the way that they will communicate with the people they manage. So again, I can't emphasize enough this giving people chances, speaking kindly, not being angry, trying to be a problem solver, not jumping up the possibility to just infer things about people's intentions, but really trying to put yourself in their shoes and be empathetic. Starting with the way you do that with you communicate with your leaders. I think that trickles down to the rest of the team.

Excellent, excellent. And you're guiding us very smoothly towards the next kind of segment that I wanted to have here. And that's all about, I mean you're managing, it seems to be, you know, to have quite a lot of freedom despite your position as co founder. I feel like that's something that a lot of agency leaders covet basically to have a Business and a life you're managing to do that. I wanted to ask what your strategies are here for being able to do that, to give yourself that freedom that you're not kind of not locked working in the business. And to start with, well, okay, let me ask you the question in a more general sense. And then regarding some of the things that you said before, I'm also curious about a couple of things, but like what's the key to being, to having this freedom as a. As a co founder?

Yeah. So I think that from the very start, when I launched Galactic Fed, some of my friends, former entrepreneurs, gave me really good advice, which is that you want to be removing yourself from as many processes as you can. You do not want to create what some people call a key man or key woman scenario where you are at the absolute center at all times, a sort of Steve Jobs, where everything, the heart beats around you and you're reliant for everything because that makes a brittle company. What happens if you aren't good at something? What happens if you have bad advice or something like that? So from the very start, I focused on always trying to hire as we made enough money for the next thing that was taking up the most of my time in which I felt I was not the best at. So at the very beginning, I mean, I was doing everything. I was. I was running tape media campaigns for clients. I was talking to the clients. I was doing sales, I was doing our, you know, QuickBooks financing stuff, our taxes, our HR. And so at the very beginning, I was like, I need to free myself up. I'm going to hire someone to help, you know, run the operations for our clients. Right. That's kind of like agents. That's freelancer to Agency Transition 1.0. Right after that, I was like, okay, I want to hire really great people who can talk to the clients who are good communicators. So we hired account managers in that direction. After that, I think it came finance because I did not feel comfortable reconciling everything there and doing our taxes and such. So I hired our wonderful cfo and then it was sales and then it was hr, then it was internal marketing, and we kept scaling from there. And I think another thing that I kept in mind as I was doing this is like, I don't want my whole. My personal brand, Mr. Zach Boyet, to be. I don't want Galactic Fed to be Galactic Fed, Colon Zach Boyet. You know, I want it to be Galactic Fed, this wonderful business that can stand on its own. So I think A big mistake that I see lots of agency owners making is they just, they're. They just. I don't know if it's ego or if it's just fun or if they. They feel like scarcity stepping away, in a sense, but they just feel like they need to be so wrapped up and they almost feel proud that all of their, Their. Their clients come from referrals and their own personal network. And don't get me wrong, I know a lot of people and you know, our clients, you know, a number of our clients are from folks that I know, and I love that, and I'm honored that they give me that trust. But I really want to build a company where people who don't know me are finding us online and willing to work with us. So I think at a much earlier stage than lots of other agencies, I hired folks for the sales departments. We started doing our own outbound marketing, inbound marketing, you know, writing tons and tons of blog posts. If you look on our site, we have hundreds, I think, of blog posts and really trying to just build a brand for Galactic Fed beyond myself. I think that's a big piece of advice I have for new folks trying to build their own life because that allows me to not be involved in client operations, to not be involved in sales, to not be involved in our own marketing, and to do what I think is the most high impact for me at the moment, which is normally speaking with our team.

Okay, so what I'm hearing is you're emphasizing that it's important to build the company brand and not just rely on your own personal brand. I see the logic in it. I think somebody listening to this might be thinking, okay, but how do you make the, you know, the company brand, you know, as enticing or, you know, as appealing? You know, how do you make sure that it stands out?

Yeah, yeah. For that, I think I'm speaking with the, you know, benefit and privilege of a person who has gone through that journey already and now is managing a larger team. I want to be clear to everyone listening now. I was once where you are. I once had to make Galactic Fed tied with my brand as much as possible. I spent so much time of the year, even as a digital nomad, just staying, like flying from New York to Chicago to LA to San Francisco to London to Miami to Barcelona to wherever. And just what I would do is I would meet with random people that I kind of knew, and then at the end of coffee or whatever, I would. Well, first I would see if they needed help with Marketing or if they knew anyone did. But I just asked them, hey, who are like, the two smartest and coolest and most interesting people, you know? You know, someone that you'd be down to, introduce me to. And then I'd be like, okay, well, I'm. I'm in Barcelona for a little bit longer. I'm going to go meet up with that person. And then at the end of that conversation, I would ask that person for two more people. And I really built my own network and connections in that way, in a very deliberate way. And so what I'm trying to say is, all of you out there, I was where you are too. And you have to put in the groundwork. You have to put in that time. You don't have to be this already guru type of person who knew a ton of people. Like, I wasn't. But I really worked hard to build my network and build the people I knew. And then eventually that allowed us to bring in enough money over time from the clients that we were able to bring in to where I could begin to chip away at those blocks. I could begin to hire the first salesperson. I could hire the first person to focus on our outbound marketing. And the flywheel started to grow from there.

Okay, next thing I was curious about is, I mean, it's clear both when you were talking about, you know, your leadership team and you were talking also about earlier on the first key hires that you are focused on sourcing talent, of course. And I feel like that's one of the key challenges that agencies face. So what's your advice for, you know, finding and screening the right people to join your agency?

Yeah, great question. Because, I mean, as any leader, the most important thing that you do is finding good people and making them stick around and making them stay happy. I mean, that is all your whole job. I'd spend way less time on a really good hire who can do well than I would on a sort of just okay person who doesn't try super hard, that I have to constantly mentor and double check and stuff. So my advice here, we've gone through a lot of iterations in our hiring process. I think early on we did, you know, the classic thing, you know, a couple. A couple interviews, personality interviews. Tell me about a time when you faced a challenge, that sort of approach. Right. We got some good people from that, but I'd say over 50% of the people that I hired were not a players from that. And it was a bit confusing and hard to figure out. And I heard this maxim like around Stanford land and stuff that A players hire A players and B players hire C players. And that really shows in an organization where if you bring in someone who's really good, the people underneath them will all be really good because they'll be discerning, they'll coach them well, they'll be willing to let them go if they're not doing well, which is really important as a manager too. But if you bring in someone who's just okay, they'll be more relaxed and they'll be more lazy and the people underneath them will be even more relaxed and more lazy than them. So can't emphasize enough how important it is to hire good people. But anyways, how we do it, you know, we evolve from that personality type approach quite a bit. Now what we do, we believe that every single position we hire for, no matter if it's an hourly position or something like that, or something lower level up to an executive position, we start with a written assessment where it has like seven different sections ranging from to a wi fi test where you'd be working to, if you're someone not from a primarily English speaking country to submit a TOEFL test or some sort of English certification. But the bulk of it is asking people to do a sort of case study situation where depending on the role, let's say it's a PayMed account manager, it might be, here's a prospective client who's asked you to build this type of campaign. How would you approach this? You know, what type of ads would you make? These sorts of things. If it's sales, maybe it'll be like, here's a difficult client. How would you convince them that they need to go with us? And I found that we learned a lot from seeing how people approach problems that way and also frankly, how much they care. Because again, this is a remote company. We need self starters. We need people who don't need people looking over their shoulders. If they see a written assessment like this and they're like, ugh, I don't want to do this, I just want to talk to someone on the phone. They might not be a good fit for Galactic Fed. You know, we need to see that they care to do something like this. And another part that I found, Cuba, sorry, that's been really important that we've been implementing lately is a reference check process from the very start. So I found that people really ignore the reference check process of the interview cycle. Like they'll be like, oh whatever, like phone it in. Like is this person good? You like them? Okay, Great. And keep in mind, like, those are the best people this person has given you. Like, those are the people that absolutely love them the most. So we try to flip the process and do it more of a, of a discovery where we have a grid in our written assessment that says, please list your five most recent supervisors, their name, their email address, what they would rate you on a 1 to 10 scale and why. And we say at the bottom, we reserve the right to contact references of our own choosing. Even if you did not list them yourself, we make it clear we'll never contact anyone at their current company. We don't want to compromise their job security or anything like that. But I found that you can learn a lot from finding out who they didn't give you as a reference. It's kind of strange if they didn't give you any of their last three most recent supervisors and the references they gave you are all from four or five years ago. I kind of want to know what the person who managed them at their last company thinks about them too. And you learn a lot from asking tough and probing questions. Another thing that we'll ask is things like, not just what do you think about this person? But we'll say, okay, how would you rate Cuba and the top whatever percent of people in his career as a, let's say, pay me to account manager of any paid media account managers you've ever seen? Maybe they'll say, oh, Cuba's for sure the top 10%. And then I'd say, okay, what separates Cuba from the absolute best paymeeta cap manager you've ever worked with? What is the difference between Cuba and that person? What could they do differently? And that forces the reference to give you real, actual, concrete information rather than a hand wave, easy sort of gesture.

That is such a killer question. I love that. And I think our watches and answers are going to as well. I mean, it makes perfect sense. You want to talk about the top of the top, you want to find the A players. You have to ask these kinds of questions. That is really smart. Thank you for answering that and thank you for the detail. Certainly, of course. So. So here's another question, another thing I'm curious about. You gave me a lot about sourcing talent. Now I want to move the focus back to your leadership team again. Given that you're managing to be, you know, to have a lot of freedom as a co founder, your leadership team must be very strong. So I wanted to ask you about your advice regarding leading leaders. I feel like that's one of the biggest challenges, you're talking with somebody, it might be a weekly one on one or however it's structured and you're having a check in with that person. Maybe it's an hour a week, however it's structured. But you know it's going to influence a team of 30, 50 in their whole structure. So what is your advice? What is the key to leading leaders and to making sure that their whole department is well taken care of?

Yeah, I found that the most important thing is to have some sort of cadence and expectation in terms of them providing a written update as you go into the call of exactly. Whatever it may be may make sense for your company. For us, it's often like what happened in the last week. Maybe there's a section for ongoing initiatives and priorities we're working at. And how are those specific priorities looking? Any potential red flags we're seeing whether that's clients, whether that's team members who aren't happy, or whatever that may be. And then that gives us a spine and a blueprint to go through when I speak with them on the phone, where it's not just a how are you doing? How are things going? You know, is everyone happy? Type of thing. Because what I found is when people really take that half hour, whatever, and sit down and think about it, it's way easier to organize your thoughts in writing and then talk about them there. It saves us time, it helps us, it helps me be able to go through and make sure we're not missing any important points. And I've also found that not every leader needs to be the outgoing extrovert type person. And some folks find it easier to share difficult information in writing and then talk about it after once they've already shared it. So I want to build a company at Galactic Fed where introverts can be leaders, where, you know, any type of person can be a leader, even if they're not, they don't fit the traditional model. So I found that to be very helpful as well. And then once we do that communication, once we're doing that call, once we're going through, you know, the written update, I think that my job as a leader, leading leaders, extends beyond just that weekly check in where I really want my team to feel that I am a present member of each of their sub teams in whatever way that may mean. So, you know, the person leading our product and client success teams, she may say, you know, I want her to feel comfortable throughout the week being like, hey, Zach, just giving an update on this thing that happened what do you think? And I always really try within 24 hours, or at least as fast as possible to reply back. And I write a lot, like I give bullet points and all my thoughts. And I really show that I remember the names of the people they manage, I remember their individual problems, and I care and I have opinions. I think really good leaders need to be opinionated. I think, what's the saying, like strong opinions, loosely held, you know, like you're willing to change your mind, of course, but you also are decisive and can make up decisions. Because as a leader, leading leaders, problems that bubble up to me are by definition the ones that my leaders couldn't fix themselves. So constantly on a day to day basis, I'm dealing with difficult stuff that other people couldn't figure out. And you need a good framework to be able to figure that out, which is why I think having them think that you're present and see that you're present. And having this good written framework and cadence can be really helpful.

Okay, gotcha. So how then do you structure it with your leaders in terms of their autonomy versus what gets actually kind of. What is it bubbled up to you? Let's say, how do you help them kind of solve their own problems? In a way, of course there's certain stuff that you look at together, but how do you empower them to actually be able to have that autonomy?

Great question. I think that comes from the beginning with having your leaders know that you trust them and have their back when they do make decisions on their own. That if it's something that is relatively routine, even if it's something that is a little bit outside the norm, maybe a client had issue with something, but you need to show that the leader is able to make that call themselves and to just tell you what they did and to talk about it then, rather than to ask you for permission for every little thing. And I think this comes back to what I was speaking about earlier, where if a leader came to me and said, hey, Zach, I, I decided to do this, this thing happened, here's how I reacted, I'm letting you know. And if in that moment I decide, huh, that's not how I would have handled that thing, I wouldn't get mad, I wouldn't be upset, I would say, okay, let's talk about it. Like, what was your thought process getting there? Here's how I would have handled this. I'm curious what led you to do it in a different way? And that back and forth dialogue, I think can be helpful both for me. To understand their rationale as a leader and if necessary, for me to give feedback to the leader about how they can do better going forward.

Okay, yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I like how you frame this, that you're encouraging them, if I'm getting this correctly, to come to you with something that happened already after the fact so you can look back on it, but it encourages them to actually perform the action first themselves and only then get back to you. Makes perfect sense. Alrighty. So then, one thing, one additional thing I wanted to probe on. We spent a little bit of time on your team. Talked about the leadership, talked about sourcing talent. Now here's something. I was recently talking with a leader of an agency, a CEO here in Poland actually, and he mentioned that one of his biggest struggles right now is, you know, they're starting to scale. They're scaling. I do forget the exact headcount. Definitely not on Galactic Fed's level. But the main issue was structuring the agency. You know, past a certain point, you have to start thinking about, like, how do you separate the departments? How do you actually give this whole thing a structure that makes sense where, you know, there aren't silos, but it's clear who does what. How did you solve that problem for Galactic Fed?

Yeah. So at the very beginning, I'm not a big business book guy. There's some people I know who read like 50 nonfiction books a year and they. I find that a lot of business books kind of could have been an article or end up being the same thing. But there are some that I really enjoyed. Right. One that I really like that I recommend everyone read is called the E Myth, which I think stands for entrepreneur myth or something. It's an old school book. But the main takeaway I had from that book is when you're designing any new company, or it could be at any stage in your company, but you're trying to grow, you should really plot out sort of an org chart about how you would like it to look in the future. So for galactiefed, like, I have thoughts already on what will look like when we're 500 people. And I already have this visualized and mapped out about like, who are, what are the specific departments we'll need, what are the type of roles that will report into them and how do they all flow up to me? And I found that even if in the beginning, you know, you'll have a hundred person org chart and you know, 65 of those names will be your name because you're doing everything that's okay, I think from the start because then as you continue to grow, you can say, okay, from the very beginning I thought that we might need, you know, an account executive director or something like that. An account executive director flows into our associate VP of client success. Whatever. You know, you're going to design it in your own way. But it's helpful just rather than sort of arbitrarily grabbing talent randomly and putting them into the role as you need it in an organic way to really have a structured approach that is forward looking as you're doing it now, you know, for, for your friends and for your friend in Poland who's building his own agency right now and working with this, I would say it's not too late to do this process, to really sit down and see the structure of how you want things to look. I think every, every agency owner, I don't want to prescribe some sort of way to do things. Some people have, you know, pods where there's like one creative person working with two account managers. Some people have account managers to whom the specialists report in and those account managers report to directors. Some people have like sort of more, more flat structure where there's like a bunch of people reporting into one director. I don't want to tell you which of those is the best way to do it. Only you, based on the specific things that you offer to clients and the type of clients you service and how much you talk with them is going to know the right structure for that. But I think just being purposeful and being willing to change is really important as well. And making sure that you set as much as possible, like even positions like have a position for account manager, account executive, account specialist. Don't just have Jeff or Susan who like helps clients with this sort of thing. Like you need to have an even promotion path, especially as you try and grow the company. I would encourage everyone to try and build a promote from within culture as much as possible where folks can come in at an early level and they can look up and they can see their future. They can see that, you know, this person was hired in, you know, four years ago at a position like me, and now they're running teams and that could be me in the future. You don't want people joining and seeing, wow, my boss's boss was someone that was hired six months ago and I'm never going to get to a chance like to have a position like that.

Okay, very well. So for inspiration though, because you mentioned everybody's going to have their own way. Can you tell us a little bit or like shed a little light about how specifically you organize things at Galactic Fed. Like what kind of. Did you land on pods? Or is there any other, is there some other way you structure things?

Yeah, so we, we have three different main. I'll talk primarily about first about the client services department because that is by far the largest. You know, I want to make sure that most of the people on my team are the ones helping clients so that we can keep costs low and affordable for our clients. But we have three different verticals. One is pay media, so that's all of Google Ads, meta ads, TikTok, Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, Snapchat, et cetera. We have an SEO department SEO vertical which is quite large and quite varied. That could be traditionally a large component that was outbound link building. We're changing up a lot of what we do in SEO right now because there's lots changing with the new AI updates. But traditionally that has been a large outbound link building department along with content writing departments, along with more tech, technical, SEO, along with just some general deep thinker R and D type folks. And then we have a Growth Labs department which is our newest one. By new I mean at least 4 years old at this point. But so far this is a catch all for lots of other things that don't fit in paid media and SEO. So this is organic social management, this is outbound email marketing, this is Legion Services, this is web design and web development, this is creative development, this is lots of other things we do. I don't remember. You could look on our site over time. Again, speaking of the emyth thing, I've actually charted out the different types of departments that I would like to split Growth Labs into in the future once their revenue numbers justify it. I'd like to have a specific design vertical, I'd like to have a web development vertical, maybe even an email marketing vertical, a Legion vertical, et cetera. But this will take time and right now I want to make sure we have a more singular leadership there to keep things easy within each of those departments. We again, it can vary based on what specifically we're doing on pay media. For example, we typically have account specialists who are absolute operators in the channels they work on. So they may be really, really good at Google Ads, really good at TikTok ads, whatever that might be. We also have account managers or account executives who work directly with the clients. These people are also extremely good at the channels that they know. They're experienced marketers themselves, but they Also, they like talking to clients. That's something that they enjoy as a part of their work. They like that communication. We also have account, sorry, operations managers who kind of float in between them and help make sure that there's no missing pieces and, you know, might help bridge the communication between a client, what a client wants, and what account specialist is doing. We have accounts or account or sometimes just directors to whom the managers of those apartments will report into. And those are more typically across a wider swath of clients and maybe a more specific domain expertise. So maybe you'll have a director who is in charge more of the social ads side of things. So maybe in charge of all Meta, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, et cetera, a director in charge of more of the Google and search side of things as well. And then all of them will report into our VP of client success. Okay, so that's just an example of how we organize it. But again, it could be very different depending on the folks listening. How you want to organize your agency the way that I do it is not perfect the way that you want to do it.

Yeah, yeah, understood. Okay, so thanks for sharing a little bit of inspiration here and I'm sure if somebody's got more detailed questions about the way you run things, they can look you up on LinkedIn, for example, I think.

Happy to chat with that. I'm very open to chat with anybody, obviously any clients and anyone who agency owners who wants inspiration or tips or advice. I love helping people out in the space. It's a big world. I think we can all win here.

Yeah, yeah, I think so too. Not meaning to let you go just yet, though. There's a couple more things I'm curious about primarily. Okay, let me structure this question so that you can take it in your own direction. But you know, like looking at the whole ops machine of Galactic Fed we mentioned thus far, I think just one tool, just ClickUp. So I wanted to ask either in terms of specific tools or maybe processes that work like tools, what do you think are the key elements of this machinery? So you can either recommend a tool that you're reliant on or you really appreciate, or maybe there's something that you've kind of built in house that works well for you. What's in there in that machinery?

Yeah, so we discussed it a bit, but putting the pieces together, typically the main communication day to day that we do as a company is on Slack, as when we're chatting with each other, when we're giving an update, maybe like, hey, Having a question about this client, that sort of thing. The way that we organize projects and tasks and expectations and Deliverables is within ClickUp. So we have very standard sort of processes for how we build things within ClickUp there often within ClickUp we will link out to Google Docs, Google Sheets. We don't really do slides much, but if we had to that as well. We're a big G suite organization here and that's where this sort of ongoing evergreen living documentation exists. If it's something that's sort of too long to just document in ClickUp and we want it to be accessible to everybody, we'll make a Google Doc for that. We have a really kind of structured process for how we design things on Google Docs and explain things and make sure that the information is clear enough from. So I don't want to like, you know, we try to keep things simple. Obviously we have, you know, some other tools we use for different departments to operate on specific ad platforms to operate for our hr. I don't know, we pay people with deal and gusto. You know, we, there's, there's all sorts of tools and technologies we use in different parts of the organization. But I think I want to help the listeners most just understand again, I think the way you design it will be unique to yourself but for us at least sort of a slack communication with a ClickUp task management with a G suite documentation is what's worked for us.

Yeah, yeah, I feel that and I actually love that answer now that I think about it because it's. It shows that you can use tools that are, I don't want to say simple, but like customizable, scalable and run a very big business on top of them. And that makes perfect sense to me. Okay, so I have a couple more things I'm curious about. I have a question that's kind of going to be a little bit out of left field just to get your take on it as a digital nomad. Before that one though, tell me about one thing just because I'm curious about your opinion here. Tell me about one thing that in your opinion ages no leaders should stop doing.

I mentioned it already about the just making their own personal brand. The biggest part of it. I would recommend people ideally not make their last name their domain or something like that. I think building a real standalone brand that can operate well is good. I think though, if I had to choose one thing it would be. I've seen lots of agency owners that really will prioritize whatever client that whatever the client says to the detriment of their team. And don't get me wrong, like, the reason that we're all existing at this company, the reason you and I are chatting today, Kuba, is because we get really great results for our clients. And that's, that's the thing that I care about. But at the end of the day, to be honest, we've had some clients that were kind of abusive to my team in the past that were rude, that didn't understand, that said slurs, that said all sorts of bad and nasty things. And I've seen situations, it makes me sad to say, but with other agency owners where they kind of like laugh about these things and they're like, oh, like, whatever, this is just what you got to do. Like, we're dealing with clients. And I think that, you know, the first, the first approach, unless they're saying slurs are being like, truly bad, should always be to try and chat with the client and be like, hey, you know, when you say these things, it's not really appropriate or it's not, it's not productive. And if necessary, I always tell the team, I'm happy to chat and have. Step in and have this conversations myself, but I think there's times when you really need to choose your team over the clients. Like, I've. We've fired clients before who, who just aren't working well with us. Even if they're paying us good money, it's just not worth it. Like, I don't want to stress my team out. I don't want to. I don't want to hurt their mental health. I don't want them working crazy, crazy hours all over the weekends in the middle of the night just because a client asked them to. That's not what I'm building here. I want to build corporate detox, right? I want to build a company where people enjoy and have a good time. So I would tell agency owners, stop doing every single thing that clients do if they're a rude client. If a possible client's listening out here, obviously we prioritize what you guys do. That's why we're doing here. But it's a give and take and we're all human and we all just want to make the best relationship possible.

Excellent answer. I love that. Alrighty, so I feel like I got a lot out of you in terms of how you're running Galactic, Galactic Fed. Love that. So here's my last question. And again, this one is a little bit out of left field, but here's what I'm thinking the person I'm conversing here right now, I mean you're very much into the digital nomad lifestyle. You've got a sizable company all remote. And I feel like that is somewhat contrary to what some of the largest companies in the world are doing right now. There's this whole return to office movement, right. More and more companies are deciding to do that, or at least we hear stories about it every day. Every day. I'm not sure what the exact trend is, but you know, some companies are saying to their teams, come back to the office however many times per week, etc. And I just wanted to get your take on that. Where do you think this trend is going in terms of remote versus non remote work, post Covid, et cetera? What do you see here happening in the future?

Yeah, good question. And don't have time to talk about this probably on the pod, but I actually have written a book and I'm working on a book about remote work and the digital nomad movement and this sort of stuff because I'm very passionate about this area. But to address your question, I think that there's reasons, there's types of companies that I think don't make sense to be remote. That's totally fine. I think any high tech manufacturing, I think that, I don't know, there's lots of things where an in person situation makes sense. Obviously from the range of a dentist office, I don't really think that you're going to go remote anytime soon there. But there's also some tech stuff that I think does make sense to be in person. That said, I think there's lots of sunk cost fallacy and cognitive dissonance here with leaders who have built really great companies in person and they know a playbook for how to do things and they see the possibility of going remote as a deviation, a wild deviation from all the success and all the learning that they've had about what it means to build a remote company. I think I could talk about too. People have leases with, with office spaces. Companies like Google have invested billions of dollars into building really great fun offices with these corporate food plans and these sorts of things. And I think that that has a big part of it. I think it's a lot harder for a leader to, to visualize parting ways with that when, when you've invested so much of that time and resources into, into building that sort of culture that's based on this place. But I think it really is more than that. I think people are just a little Bit afraid to, to take the leap and to try something different. And don't get me wrong, I think that there is nothing that can replace in person communication in some ways, like, you know, the relationship you can build sitting in a room with someone is irreplaceable. But I think at the same time, there are unique advantages and disadvantages to building a remote company. And I think that you need to think about which one's more valuable to you. For me, the ability to hire the absolute best talent for the job that I need right now, wherever they might exist in the world, really makes a difference. Like not just having to only hire people in the San Francisco Bay area who happen to be looking for jobs right now for the specific thing that I want to do. If I was doing that Kuba, I would make a lot of sacrifices. I would be like, okay, you know, of the people we've interviewed, here's who's good? Whereas now our recruiting team is able to say, of the people who exist, who's the best for what we do. And I found that that's allowed us to build such a sharp team, to hire faster, to do well, to move faster. And I also think, like, the world is moving in a place where people, you know, I've been remote since 2016 or something. Like, I've. I've loved. I've been saying forever that this is going to be the future. Post Covid though, people are finally getting it. I think a lot of the leaders, if you look at them who are saying the return to office, saying this is important, I think their age is a bit more advanced than the folks who are building remote companies right now. I think that again, they have this cognitive dissonance with not being able to understand that this, this is a different way of doing things. I really believe that the future will be much more remote when the younger generations are in charge of running companies and they've had that experience, worked remotely, they saw that they were more productive. They saw that maybe they were introverted and they did well in a remote environment where they didn't need to feel on all the time. Maybe it was a woman or a person of color who felt that they were disadvantaged in an office because they were constantly getting sized up. Who now feels that they have a better opportunity to make an impact when people aren't looking at their physical appearance all the time. I think there's just so many different opportunities for remote work that people haven't really explored. And I'm really excited to see what the future of that looks Like I see.

I'm really glad I asked. That was great. And I feel like I kind of read an excerpt of your book in a sense. Sure, sure. Yeah. Because that was awesome. Thank you so much for sharing all of that. I felt like I was drinking from a firehouse today when it comes to insights from you. So thank you so much. And now definitely let the watchers and listeners know, like, where can people follow you? Kind of what are you cooking up right now? But who you're looking for, either in terms of talent or clients, how can people connect?

Definitely. Well, thank you all Agency Journey podcast listeners for joining us today. Fans of Zenpilot, fans of ClickUp, fans of Galactic Fed, first and foremost. You know, I'm very open, I'm very accessible. I run my company, galactic fed. We're Galactic Fed.com if you need help running really great marketing campaigns or building your next website or getting more customers, whatever it may be, please check us out blackfed.com if you're looking to build your career in marketing and work at a company that treats people the way that I've been talking about today, please hit us up as well. We're always hiring, we have lots of careers, we're growing as a business and we love to consider you on a personal level. Check me out on LinkedIn. I like posting there. I'm trying to share more content and thoughts both on obviously the agency side and also on remote work, digital, nomad leadership, that sort of stuff. I am working on a book that'll be coming out soon. You can check updates on LinkedIn or on my personal website@zackboyet.com thank you guys. Thank you everyone for listening today. I appreciate you taking the time and I hope this has been useful.

Thank you, Zach. This was a really packed episode and I'm really glad we had a chance to chat. That is it for this one, everybody. Thanks for coming on Agency Journey for joining us here today. Definitely follow Agency Journey, rate us on the podcast platforms, follow ZenPilot on YouTube and go to ZenPilot.com for all of our resources. Not going to be too long winded about it. I can always record that and append it later. So Zach, thank you so so much again for coming on the show and to you watchers and listeners, we'll see you next time. Bye bye.

Thank you. Bye Sam.