An Important Agency Lesson I Learned Far Too Late

Hey there everybody, it's Matt. In this video, I'll be going over a lesson that I learned way too late, which will be how to properly train employees. I know lots of people struggle with this, so let's get started. So this is an important lesson that I learned way too late and I think that most people never learn and it is that a lot of people struggle with employee training. And the overall lesson for the spoiler alert is to treat employee training, onboarding, etc. The same you would do for client onboarding and client results and stuff. It's almost as if you have one operation system for actually doing the work and one operation system for, you know, getting the employees trained up to do the work. It's very, very important to understand this once you get to a certain point, and I don't know where that point is, but let's just say 50k, a hundred k per month, it's usually the employee training and hiring that holds people back because you can get to those numbers with one or two good hires and then, you know, a few more assistants. But to get past that, you're going to need to be able to trust your team to work more or less autonomously and still provide the results that they need to get. The further and further you get personally from operations, the lower the quality of work gets. And this is one of the top three things that really causes agencies to fail or get a bad reputation more than any other things where when the founder was doing it, the work was very good. When the founder hired their first employees, the work was still pretty good. And as they keep hiring and hiring and hiring and more and more people go beneath and the bigger the chain of command gets, the quality of work gets lower and lower and lower until the point where it's no longer a agency that sought out for where it was an award winning agency doing award winning work. When the founder and the first few employees are doing it and then it just goes downhill. And this is in many ways inevitable, but in many ways you can mitigate this by having an employee system like I'm going to do. And this is just what works for me. There's a lot of different ways to do this, but this is how I do it. So take what you want and discard the rest. There's going to be no like BS here. This is what I actually do and I will show you because I'm actually in the middle of building out the employee training right now for a thousand X leads, which is my new important lesson, is that even if the person should be qualifying like they have had 10 years experience or managed however much in ad spend or whatever metric they're bragging about. You still have to train them. And a lot of people, including myself in the past, simply figure that this person has this experience, they should know how to do this. But this is almost never true. And even if they do know what to do, we have to train them in a way that fits with the way that we do it at our company, with the culture, the systems, the standards, all of that kind of stuff. And if we don't do that, like we can blame them, but it might be their fault, but it's our responsibility. So we really need to have all of this stuff dialed because even if they have the technical ability, they don't know how it works in the context of our company. And that's what we need to get across to them. We want to have an automatic system that we can just plug almost anyone in and outside there. At the end of the system will pop out an employee that fits with our culture, our own systems, our own way of doing things, etc. So this is usually referred to as labor and labor leverage. So if you can get good at training people in a way that I'm suggesting you have a very, very scalable business model. Because labor is one of the things that always holds people back. And it's one of the biggest constraints, especially for service based businesses, whether that's online or like a restaurant for example, or a landscaping business, all or service based businesses. And the reason why it's such a constraint is because typically these businesses, they're not tech companies that can pay someone 500k a year to, you know, screw around. They mostly are going to have to deal with in an agency like a 60k year, maybe an 80k year employee, just because the margins can't handle more than that. So you need a system to find, hire and train employees to be able to scale. And you need a system that you can hire someone for, you know, 60k a year and get 150k a year of value from them. Like that is in a nutshell, what you want to be doing. So I have a little process here that I follow. It's not anything revolutionary, but it's works for me and it works very well. So step number one is you want to create a kind of like a, you want to treat it like you're actually creating a course. So you want to do that for every single role. So at a thousand x leads right now I'm currently Building this out. So for example, we have an assistant role, a cold email role, appointment setting, closing, customer success manager, video editor and graphic designer. So in Kajabi, or basically whatever platform you want to use, you'll have an individual thing for every single role. And then inside the role, you're going to have basically every single task that they would have to do. So if we go back to this, you know, when people get onboarding and we hire someone for cold email, for example, for the first one to two weeks they should be going through this course. And the reason that it's a course is because you simply don't have time to teach people one on one as you grow. That might have been fine when you had zero or one or two employees, but when you're getting to 10, 20, 30, maybe even more, you know, you need something that's more automatic. For example, like this. Courses are very popular for a reason because they're a way to get all of the relevant information in a structured format without missing anything. And I really like it too because you can kind of sell, if you do a good enough job, which you should be, and you're going to have higher standards for your employee training than anything really. You can sell these for 9, 97, I don't know, maybe even more. And you can get that extra revenue stream that have a course that having a course provides and it's just very, very good. The next thing is that you want to have different assignments or tests. So after they're done with the course or as they're going through it, you want to have a minimum of three different assignments or tests for them to prove that they're actually learning. So for a cold email here, assignment number one is writing cold email scripts. And then as I'm going through this, assignment number two is probably going to be exporting a cold email list. And assignment number three is probably going to be like making a great cold email offer. So these should be standardized and planned out and you only need to make these once. But you can really see how someone thinks and where they're at based on the results you get from these assignments. It's just one of the most important things when you're hiring employees. Number three is you want to have a daily five minute meeting for the first 30 to 60 days. And this could either be with you or their direct superior. This is very good for instilling proper standards and roadblocks or removing roadblocks and just getting them up to speed fast. Like the difference, Because I've tried both the Difference between having this meeting and not is like two to three times as fast as learning speed. And I think that is because, if I had to guess, you're answering questions, removing roadblocks. But it's also kind of like a little form of accountability where you're telling them what they should have accomplished and what they should be bringing to each meeting and they have to fulfill on it. It's a very clear roadmap. It's just, you know, just so good. In five minutes, if you're hiring even, you know, six employees at a time, you can do these in 45 minutes a day and just get twice as much value out of each employee. So it's not a time expense or it's not a waste of time. You're actually getting twice as much value from your employees. The final thing that I always do, especially when hiring, is at the end of every day, they're going to fill out a Google form and they should link, you know, proof of their work, ask questions, let you know where they're at. This is also an excellent form of accountability because it makes people work harder. They have to fill out a form with exactly what they did and, you know, they don't want to fill out a form and say, I barely did anything today, they're going to work harder. And a lot of the hidden sauce or hidden, you know, thing that you need to do with people is motivate them to actually work. Because if you're not actually motivating them to work again, it's their fault, but it's your responsibility, it's your company and just having like this course to get them up to speed so they can't say that they didn't know or that they are stuck having these assignments so you can actually see like what kind of results they're doing. What you need to coach them if they're going to make it. Like these assignments are very good indicator of if they're going to make it or not. To me, in my experience, having the daily meeting can just make sure you're around and you're like you're watching them type thing. And I say that kind of joking, but kind of not. When you have this five minute meeting, you know they're going to be prepared for it or they should be. And if they're not, we just fire them. Like realistically, if they are not able to get go through this system relatively autonomously and without problems, they should be fired. And that's just it. This is a great system to train people, but also great system to weed out people who are not going to make it so you don't waste your time or theirs. All in all, it's not complicated. It's a four step system. But just because it's easy to understand doesn't mean that people do it. Common knowledge, I guess you could say, is not common practice. And if you do this, and you probably want to set this up like six months, maybe even a year before you actually need it, you are going to be able to scale your agency bigger than you ever thought possible. If this video was helpful, let me know in the comments and I will see you in the next one.