Crucial Takeaways From Our 6-Hour Whiteboard Session | Espresso Hour Episode 11

Boom. Welcome back to another episode of the Espresso Hour. And I have my espresso here, where the running joke is that this is going to be much shorter than an hour, because, as you can see, we're hyped up on caffeine. Cole, that was a good session we had yesterday, man.

That was a great. That was a great session. I walked away from that almost with a painful level of clarity where I was like, okay, great. There's nothing really to think about. I literally just need to go lock myself in a dark room for the next 18 months and build.

18 months. I think that's the right timeline to think about. Maybe 12. But I think, yeah, we emerged with at least elite clarity through July. So why don't you paint the picture of kind of what we sat down to do, and then we can deep dive into everything we talked about.

Yeah. So using this as a forcing function, slash crystallization for ourselves and then just sharing with everyone. So yesterday, we basically went into this whiteboard session. Me, Dickie, and then the third guy on our team who handles finance and helps on the HR side, Vib. And the goal of this was to understand the different verticals in our business holistically. What are all the different ways that we make money? And then who are the people that we need to hire within each vertical so that. And then achieve a couple goals. A, so, Dickie, you and I can get ourselves as much out of the work as possible. B, so that we have clarity over how each vertical makes its money, how profitable each vertical is, and where the levers are to push and pull. How many people do we really need? How do we make it more efficient? And then see, what was an interesting byproduct of the session that, like, I knew this was going to happen, but I didn't know it. Going into it is once you lay all of it out and you really map it on a whiteboard, it becomes very obvious where the levers are. Because I think until you do an exercise like this, it's very easy to just kind of lump everything together. You know, I have three different products. I have five different products. And. And you think about it. Or. Or most people just think about it like, I. My whole business makes this amount of money, but when you really segment it out, you go, well, actually, my time in this vertical is nowhere near as profitable or has as high of an ROI as this vertical. And so that was kind of a cool takeaway for us to see, and I guess so just to paint the picture for everyone, the. I think it's five, or there will be five verticals.

Even before that. I think we started with laying out the profit centers and for a while as we've been growing, like in the beginning we had one profit center, it was just ship 30. And then we added our Captain Stable membership. So we had two profit centers and that was still kind of one because really all it did was allow you to continue taking ship 30. But then that changed to become a bigger investment because we added more things to it. Now we've added the webinars in Async products. So that is as the price of ship 30 has gone up. So that's a third profit center. And then our fourth and eventually fifth. Fourth is now the Premium Ghost Riding Academy, which we're in our initial cohort for. And then the follow on back end to that is everyone who's going to join kind of the Premium Ghostwriting Collective or whatever we end up calling it, of a mastermind of people running ghostwriting agencies who want to scale those to 10, 30, 40, 50k a month. That's kind of our. We put that on the board first and was like, okay, if these are all the ways that literally as simple as how is money going to flow into our bank account, it is going to be in one of these five things. And we'd never done that. Like we had never really sat down and said we should probably look at all these different areas separately rather than just the business as a whole.

Yeah. So those, those different profit centers are very revealing. And I think like a great example is when we did that first paid webinar about ChatGPT a month ago, you know, and we wrote about this and everything, but you know, we made what, whatever it was 60 grand in, in three days from that and then we sold the recording thereafter. So, you know, net net, we probably made close to 100k doing that product. And what's interesting is in the short term you look at that and you're like, wow, that was really successful. Like that was really great. But then when we go and outline all these different profit centers and you actually look at it, it's like, yeah, in a three day period or a 30 day period, that's really great. But over the course of a year and in the context of our other profit centers, that one profit center of like the standalone $150 products is not as powerful of a lever as if we were to invest more time in some of these other areas. And that, that to me was the coolest takeaway is like it really Gets you out of that shiny object, instant gratification mindset where you're like, I made some money today. And then you think all of a sudden you need to shift your whole focus. And it's like, no, it can be there, but like, let's be clear about where the priority is.

Yeah. And I think that's a reminder to ourselves. Like, when we do those webinars, it's two or three days of work max, and we need to templatize it, we need to systematize it. And that way we collect that upfront provides a lot of value, but it's also something that you can bundle and rebundle and things like that that we've talked about for the long term. So then we said, okay, what goes into each of these profit centers? And I don't think we'd ever written this down. And so you have those notes in front of you. What were the five pillars or, you know, levers? And then we can walk through how we did that exercise. Because honestly, we should write this up as like a checklist or some kind of step by step thing and leave a comment if at the end of this you want that. Because I think we would have loved to have had this a year ago.

Totally. And also, too, like, I find it funny. I've been playing the entrepreneurship game for eight years now, almost a decade. And this had, this is the first time this had occurred to me. And I knew that we were going to jam on this yesterday. And so I, like, for the past week I had been percolating on this. And now in hindsight, I'm like, this is. So why, why didn't I do this six years ago? So the, the context point that I want to share is I think whenever you start getting into scaling and you and I have had these conversations, Dickie and I see it in like these group chats that we're in with, with other businesses, business owners and other entrepreneurs. Is like the first place that everyone's brain goes is, okay, I need to create an org chart. And when someone imagines what an org chart is, I think because of just the way that we've all been conditioned about business, your brain immediately goes to a very formal setting. You know, you're like, I need fancy managers. And then the managers have lower level employees and there's interns. And like, you imagine this, it's like, as much as we all hate on corporate culture, we all immediately go to thinking like it's corporate culture. And what was really revealing about this exercise is we Actually did not think of it like an org chart, where the org chart is kind of like this top down pyramid, or even if you do it more horizontally. We thought about it as literally what are the only core functions that we need in order to operate each vertical. It's not about who manages who, it's just what are the core functions and in order for at least, you know, we're digital product, education, business. Our core functions, we have five essentially in each vertical. And some verticals have all five, some verticals have three, but there's five options and there's sales, which is like a salesperson, literally selling people. Ship 30 doesn't have a salesperson, but Premium Ghostwriting Academy will have a salesperson. You know, high ticket versus low ticket fulfillment, which is, okay, you're selling, you know, ship 30, you're selling a 30 day cohort. You and I are getting on calls, holding the cohort. We are fulfilling on the thing that we sold. You know, so someone's fulfilling on the product, you have success, which is, think of it like accountability. So someone comes into ship 30 or someone comes into Premium Ghostwriting Academy or whatever it is. Someone has to be there to nudge people along, make sure they're doing what they're supposed to be doing. They're responsible for the success of the customer or student. You have operations, which is all the things behind the scenes, which is like everything that Daniel has been doing. So it's all the. I need infrastructure for this. I need an airtable CRM for this, I need an automation for this. It's all the piping, you know, and then you have marketing, which is. We have our email list. So we need emails, we need Tweets, we need LinkedIn posts, we need, you know, all the things that drive attention for all, all of these. And so what we did is we basically created a grid and we listed these five roles on the. Geez, I failed math. Yeah. What is that axis? Y. Okay, the Y axis, Right. And then on the X axis we list out what are our different profit centers. So on the X axis we have our standalone products, $150 webinars. You know, we have ship 30, we have captain's Table, Premium Ghostwriting Academy. And then eventually it's zeroed out, but eventually we'll have the mastermind on the back end of the. The ghostwriting. And so when you have this grid, then you just kind of fill it in and you go, okay, do we like one by one, do we need sales? Do we need a salesperson for ship 30? No, that vertical does not require a salesperson. Do we need fulfillment? Yes, that's you and me, Dickie. You know, do we need success? Yes, we're going to need someone there. And all of a sudden it shows you in a very objective way. I need X person. And this is really important. I need X person to do Y task in order for Z vertical to function, which is not like. That's not how most people think about hiring. Most people think about hiring. As I have a company or a business, I make money in a bunch of different ways. And you know what? I think I need a social media manager. And so they just bring on someone and then that person like arbitrarily kind of bounces around and does a bunch of random things.

Yeah. So I think the examples will drive some of this. Home of the way we went into this was like, let's take for what we have right now, all of our current team members, leave them off this board. And then once we had the grid, we started to fill in who currently is playing the role for each of those, right. So starting in the one off column, like sales, there's nothing there. There's no sales for a one off product fulfillment, it's us. We're the ones creating those products. Customer success for those, it's zero. Cause they're async operations was Daniel. Our first realization that across the board, Daniel did operations for everything. And so one of our takeaways, and we'll talk about those at the end, was like, we need a junior automation builder to work with Daniel to take things off his plate. And it's almost like. And then marketing, same thing. So we went one by one for each vertical and said, who currently is this a zero? Meaning we don't need anything for this. And so it's interesting to see which ones, like we don't need marketing for the captain's table because that is part of ship 30, right. Marketing for the one off products is our email list, etc. Etc.

Yeah, there's. Okay, so great point. So a couple takeaways to pull from that as well. So some things that we noticed that, like why this was such a helpful exercise and what I would pass along to anyone listening, this is what you should look out for. So when you do this grid, you know, and we saw on the ops column, Daniel's name is in every single vertical. The takeaway is, okay, that person, that team member is essentially maxed, right. And so you should immediately look at something like that and go, I have the same name showing up in every vertical across the business. Super high switching cost, right? Because you're constantly changing the context of which product am I thinking about High level of responsibility because you have to monitor like five different systems or five different products. You don't, you can't ask that person to do more. Or you know, we see this with, with other courses and course creators and like the types of businesses that are like us, they hire someone and then if you did this exercise, you would see their name across every vertical. And that, that should be like a red, like a flashing signal being like that isn't. That's a, that's going to break eventually. So you need to find a solution for that. A second really cool takeaway for me of where this goes for us, Dickie, is when we do this exercise and in certain boxes where we say it's us, like we're doing the fulfillment, right. The follow up takeaway is, well, that's a really huge bottleneck, right? Because how, how many more verticals can we add? Where us is in the fulfillment or us is in multiple parts of those. Right. So the two questions to ask are if we are filling in us in multiple of these roles, the first question is, well, which one of these roles do we really not need to be doing? That's what we need to focus on getting on someone else's plate. And then second is once we're down to, you know, it's us, we only have one piece left. It's us doing the fulfillment. We've gotten everything else off our plate. You can see how the final step of like fully getting yourself out of the business is, well, how do I shift this vertical or how do I build a vertical where we aren't responsible for the fulfillment? That's where the ultimate scale comes from.

Right? Where you are then operating fulfillment teams for each of those verticals. Right. That is just a higher level of leverage. So, so here, let me share, I'm going to share screen real quick on just if anyone's interested in seeing this grid. This is exactly what we have here. So we have our one off products ship 30 captains table PGA PGC and so we just went through and started filling in our names. I left all the names and things off there just so people could see. So you can recreate this for your business, right? What are all your different profit centers? Then list your team members below that and start to fill them in. Then you're going to quickly see who is over capacity. Right? So rather than creating an org chart, you just create, okay, here's Our current team, right. What roles are they all playing? And then where do we need to add roles? So I get like, that took us to our next step, which was immediate takeaways on where the bottlenecks were for taking our next steps. So do you have that on that piece of paper or do you want to talk about it?

The thing to point out too is, you know, people talk about this in start in startup ecosystem all the time is in the very beginning you're probably going to bring on generalists. You know, you, me and Daniel played all of these roles for 18 months, basically. And then each person you hire, think. Think of it like the more people you bring on, the less like potent your. Your team is. Because now you're. You're starting to get out of general generalized skill sets and you're getting more into specialized skill sets. So as we keep growing, in theory, we should see less names in multiple buckets and eventually it's one name in one bucket. Right? Because that one person needs a more specific skill set and needs to dedicate all of their time to that. And so that's the other interesting thing is like filling this grid in day one versus after a year versus two years versus three years, you know.

So anyone listening just to clarify that you should have one vertical and more than likely in the beginning it's going to be all you. You will be the sales, the marketing, the fulfillment, the success and the operations. Right. And in terms of how this all started in the beginning, like, so let's go back to ship. 30 is an accountability Slack channel, right? $50 90. Got your money back. That was me across the board. And then it was Daniel doing the operation side. And then you added in on fulfillment. And then we never had a sales team. Right. And we kept that single vertical as everything. And now we're able to say, let's make a new vertical, add a column to this thing. What needs to go in here? And with the ghostwriting academy, we did all of it. We did sales, marketing. Daniel still did operations. And then we brought on Katie for success. But for the most part, like, we only recognize that because we knew we couldn't do it ourselves because of the other verticals we had. But if we were doing ghostwriting just from the beginning, we would have done success too. So I think that will drive the point home for people of listening is like, which one should you try to hire for first 100 operations? You should, with any new thing, have. And you can have what we have with Daniel of like operations across everything. So that is clicking to me now too, of this shouldn't be a grid. When you start, it should be a column, right? You should have one product until you're doing a million dollars a year. And you should probably play all those roles and have a very small team around you helping with those roles. And then you create a profit center and say, okay, you could probably play all those roles for two things, you know, three, probably not. And that's kind of been our hiring flow. So it would be interesting to look at that grid over time. And I'm sure in 10 years we'll look back at this grid with a lot of things. And that's what's cool. It's very expandable.

One other like crystallization point I want to share because this, this has been really helpful for, for me and for both of us too, is when you think about hiring someone again, I think most people default to generalism. So they go, I'm going to hire someone to do a bunch of random things. They almost come up with things for the person to do. Whereas the question to ask I think is what is the real lever? So in that vertical and then in that specific role, like what is the real lever that you need the person to push and pull that has the impact? And a great example is ship 30 vertical marketing. There's so many things that we could just make up and say, like we should go hire 10 people to do quote unquote marketing for ship 30. But if you are really disciplined about it and you're really honest about what is the lever? There's really only one thing. It's like newsletter. Justin's like primary role is write the newsletter, you know, and I think being able to slow down and go this vertical, there's one action I need a weekly newsletter. This newsletter is what drives the subscriber engagement and growth. That subscriber list is what leads to the majority of our customers. Like that one thing, that's the skill I'm hiring for, that's what I'm compensating for, that's what I'm holding accountable. And like that level of clarity across each role I think is so helpful versus just hiring a generalist and being like, fill your time, do a bunch of stuff.

You look at this stack and say, what are the highest revenue generating activities for all of these and for us, like, that has evolved over time. And wherever you find your name on something that is not the highest revenue generating activity in that vertical, you want to then find the lowest revenue generating activity in that vertical and replace It. So as I look at it, like, operations will always be the first success, customer success will always probably be the second. Like, you will continue to do the fulfillment, the sales, and the marketing, but you'll have someone to take care of the operational side. And then you'll have someone to guarantee that as you take on more students or more clients or more whatever they're getting answers to their questions for from there, I would say more than likely sales. That way, you're off of sales calls because you could train that in the highest leverage way. And then you're still doing fulfillment and marketing. I think always the last one you want to give up is marketing. Marketing, at the end of the day is just creation. And if you're going to continue creating, like, I think the very last step, and I'm seeing it with. With what Cole Gordon's doing with his team is like, he's been doing marketing up to 30 million, right? But he got himself out of all the other verticals, so it's cool to kind of see that. And I hope anyone listening can kind of apply this to their own business and say, which one of these? Because it just makes it so crystal clear. Like, for us, we now know the bottleneck for PGA to scale was we took every single sales call, so we can't do that. We know that that means two sales reps. So immediately hiring for that, we know that fulfillment, we want to do more than two calls per week, and we would become the bottleneck for that if we were to do it ourselves. So we need a fulfillment coach. We have a success coach. We have operations. But we then saw that marketing. We have so much material, we could have one specific person go, I'm going to create a hundred tweets and Twitter threads of everything from this ghostwriting material and take care of the marketing, run the newsletter for that. And the way we're looking at it is having one person do fulfillment and marketing for the ghostwriting academy, right? So that was where we started to say is, how could we have one person play two roles? And that's okay, but you can slot them right into there and say, you're doing these two things. And then, same thing with Daniel, seeing that he was doing operations for everything. We're bringing on a junior automation builder and saying, hey, you're going to handle the operations for this vertical only. You are going to, during ship, 30 cohorts, handle all the operational uploads and things like that. And it just creates such clarity of, like, what are you actually doing here? Rather than people Just on the team. Like, I don't know, I'm just kind of here. I'm, you know, the social media intern or something like that. It's like, no, you're doing this.

Yeah. Notice those, those generalists. Whenever a company is feeling a crunch, those are the ones first to go to, you know, because it's like, why? Well, because you didn't have clarity over what they were doing in the first place. I think this might be specific to our type of business, but I do think that it's applicable to a lot of other types of businesses too, which is thinking about the marketing function as someone who's scaling the person who's doing the fulfillment. So when we say fulfillment, that means we are the ones who's creating the product, which is. And the product is literally the education. It's the curriculum, it's the. It's the intellectual capital, it's the thinking, it's the whole. It's the whole value. Right? And when you hire someone for marketing, or at least the way that we're thinking about it in an education specific business, their job isn't really to. To come in and like, do their own thing. Their job is to take the curriculum that we have created. You know, so I. I've spent however many hours creating this ghostwriting curriculum and then hiring someone for marketing should go. I'm going to take that curriculum and I'm going to break it apart into a million pieces. I'm going to turn that into a thousand tweets. I'm going to turn that into 500 LinkedIn posts. I'm going to turn that into 100 Atomic Essays. I'm going to turn that Into 10 different email courses. And this is where it's cool. We're going to have this compounding effect with PGA where we're training the writers that will probably end up hiring, you know, or at least some of them, which is one of the biggest opportunities I see as ghostwriters, is to do that. It's to go find someone who has created a high amount of intellectual capital. Could be an education business, could be a CPG company, could be a SaaS startup. And you go, you've already done all the thinking. My job now is to break it apart into a thousand different assets. And if you, as a ghostwriter can get really good at that, I can say the same thing a hundred different ways. That's how we're going to autopilot our marketing. That's how other founders autopilot their marketing, because I already did the hard work. Of thinking about the thinking. Right. So I need a ghostwriter or I need five ghostwriters to go. You already did the highest leverage, most valuable piece. You thought about what you wanted to communicate. Now my job is to go communicate that a thousand different ways.

Okay. Have you heard of a timestamper?

Like someone who does that in YouTube videos?

So, okay, that's what I thought too. But I've recently heard about this. So basically it's a single role who works with video editors for, like media companies. And so Hormozi and all these other guys have timestamps. What they do, they're like 20, 22 year olds, like in college. All they do is binge watch all of your content and timestamp the areas that they think the content team could turn into viral clips. So they're not doing any of the. They're not doing any of the editing. They're not doing any of the. It's like, all I'm doing is, hey, from 12 seconds to 14 seconds, there's your hook. And then from 18 to whatever. And then they are hired for that specific role. So it was so cool to see, like, okay, these guys broke down viral clips into a timestamper and an editor because the editors were doing all of that and that was not their best skill set. So they could be editing the whole day because the timestampers spend all day. And I was like, that's the craziest thing I'd ever heard. And what you just said about like finding the points of intellectual capital, it's almost like ghost writing could have a timestamper where it's like, this is what you should turn into a thread. This is what you should turn into a thread. You know, it's like, I play this role and then you have the actual writing repurposer working full time on the writing itself. That I think we could definitely, as we think about marketing, there could be two.

Wow, I didn't know that. That is fascinating. That's a whole new lens. And this. So a little bit of a tangent, but just like to connect these dots. So much of the ghostwriting academy, I think is going to be about belief breaking. And for me, this is. This is one of the biggest beliefs to break is as a writer in the beginning. I was just working on this last night. This is great. So as a writer in the beginning, most people who have a lot of knowledge don't have the time to write. And a lot of people who have the time to write don't have a lot of knowledge. And the example I used is when I, When I was 26, still working my 9 to 5 job, I was the number one most read entrepreneurship writer on Inc. Magazine. And I was still working a 9 to 5 and had never started my own company. So how is it that I was the number one entrepreneurship writer? Well, I had a lot of time, right. And all the people who knew how to build companies didn't have the time to write. And so the thing to think about with, with ghostwriting is like, this is why, when people are like, I have an issue with ghostwriters, it's like, why the value is in the, it's in the knowledge, it's in the thinking about thinking. The value on, on the barbell is not actually in the writing. And so that's why your goal as a ghostwriter is to start by, you are providing the writing skill and you're pairing yourself up with someone who has the thinking skill, someone who spent 10, 20, 30 years building frameworks for themselves. And as you get better and better at acquiring your own know you're going to move out of the tactical writing and into the thinking. And so for us, you know, if I have, hey, over the past 10 years, I've created all of these writing frameworks. Once I distill those frameworks and put them out of my brain into a Word document, it's really low leverage for me to then go take all that thinking and go, now let me go say the same thing a thousand different ways. That's the piece that's actually easy to hire for. And so again, this might be more specific to an education business, but if you are an education creator or founder or whatever, you should think of your time as my best time is spent creating the thinking. And then once that's done, it's like it falls, your ROI on your time falls off a cliff and you need to go find people to help you scale that thinking.

Yeah, the important nuance at the end there is it's still valuable to get those ideas back out there, but you are now, it is no longer as valuable for you to do that distribution. Right. So it's still, you need it done because you need to be continuing to feed the algorithms and getting your ideas out there, but you are not creating net new ideas. And so the opportunity cost of not creating net new ideas so that you can distribute is high. And so figuring out how to and I mean, this is really a reminder to ourselves because I literally wrote seven atomic essays today about my writing routine and things I've said 50 times you know, but that's the patience is where this comes full circle. It's like you will have to play that role for a long time, more than likely. And that's okay, right? You just have to recognize eventually you are going to try to kind of break yourself out of that one.

Yeah, no, that's. That's a great point. And like, and not feel away about it. Like, I feel like event people are going to be like, cole, you use ghostwriters. And I'm like, for a lot of different functions in our business, yeah, we're going to use ghostwriters. But the nuance is we're not using ghost thinkers. Right? I already did all the thinking, Dickie. You already did all the thinking. Now we need help. Just like if you give a really great speech, you give a TED Talk, and then you hire two video editors to chop it apart into a hundred different shorts, it's still you. It's your thinking. You're just getting leverage on the thinking. And I feel like that belief break for so many people, that belief break for other founders is going to help them scale, and that belief break for ghostwriters is going to help them realize how many people they can help, because everyone has that problem.

Hmm. I'm obsessed with this Timestamper idea though, because I think you could apply it for writing too. It's like, hey, I went looked at all your stuff and here's 50 ideas just based on that. I actually don't do the writing, I just source the ideas. And then you could provide that as a service. Like, hey, I'm not going to do the writing for you, but I'm going to go through all your stuff and say, here's your 50 best concepts that you should repurpose. So if someone wants to do that for us, reach out, because I think that'd be pretty cool. And again, there's a agency idea, Hey, I just go through all your content and show you what you should repurpose, right? I did 10 for you. Here you go. Want me to do 100 for you? I'll do the rest for X amount. So some up and coming hustler's gonna hear that and go send a hundred cold DMs and make a ton of money, hopefully.

Oh, just. Just to say that job opportunity differently. You're a 22 year old, go pitch the person that you love watching on YouTube and you'll literally get paid to watch their content. Right. What an amazing opportunity. And I think a lot of people might hear that and go, that's Ridiculous. Nobody's gonna do that, I guarantee. I guarantee you. But you already said people are already doing it. So go create the job you want.

That's right. So I think this will be helpful for people. Just on the hiring funnel we created too, was recognizing that, yes, we have all these roles that we potentially want to. Reading this book. Who by? I think Jeff Smart. Oh, it's over there. But definitely the best and most tactical book on hiring that I've read. It's all about creating a hiring funnel. And so we now have a repeatable process where we create a scorecard, we source applications, we figure out what are our job opportunities, sourcing channels, so tweeting things out, writing to our email list, referrals, all of that. And then you have a page to capture all that attention. Then it's a group interview, one on one interview, and then hire. And so we're able to if we wanted to because we spent, I think Daniel and I spent like four or five days building out that pipeline and infrastructure and it's now, okay, we need a ghostwriter. Boom, new funnel created. We need a Success coach for ship 30. Boom, new funnel created. And that's going to help us have a repeatable hiring process. That, that was such a blind spot for me a month ago. It was like, oh, we need to hire these four roles. That's like a completely different thing for all four. No, you create like you're selling something, a straight up funnel drive traffic to it. And the click for me is like, if you have a role to hire for and you don't have 25 potential people who are willing to fill that role waiting for you, you are way too late. Because by the time you need it, you needed to be able to hire them tomorrow. And so that's been an aha for us is like, we're not going to make these sales reps or success team or automator hires right away, but we're going to start the sourcing process tomorrow, right? We're going to tweet it out, we're going to have a job page, all of that. Because we want to operate, they call it in this book, having a stacked bench, right? You want to call players in right when you need them rather than going and having to kick off this process way further down the line.

Yeah, that's a really good point. Especially as you know, I think we're both pretty confident that PGA is going to scale pretty quickly. I mean, the way that it's lining up, I imagine it's probably going to scale Pretty quickly. And so when you're in situations like that. Yeah. By the, like the moment you realize you need it, you're like, I needed this last week. And so if you don't build these hiring funnels, what happens is you basically take yourself out of the building mode and re. It's like reinventing the wheel every time. Whereas if you just have these set up, then you go, okay, I have the people ready. I've probably already narrowed it down. I kind of know who, who I'd be interested in hiring. You know, hiring is crazy. I remember when I was building my agency, we had a nine month period where I was hiring two to three full time employees every single month for nine months straight. And it was insanity. I mean, I, I hope we don't end up doing that. I mean that was like way too much, especially for the size that we were at. But it definitely taught me a lot about how when you like all of a sudden when things start really growing and you really need somebody, it's like, I need them now, it's not, I need them in a month, you know.

Yeah. And so we're ahead of the curve and I'm. It's fun to do these weekly episodes because in three weeks we probably have a handful of these roles hired for people get to see us kind of move pretty quickly like that. And it's fun to see the, the growth of the pod. So I hadn't looked at the podcast growth numbers in since we started and it was scaling up and up and up until like when we were doing interviews all the time and then went back down. But now February was our highest month ever and then we're on track to double that again this month. So I think if people are enjoying this, we really appreciate comments sharing it with other people. So if anyone's in the education space or a digital builder looking to either write or build a solopreneur type scalable business, share this with a friend because we really appreciate that's the number one way that these grow. I think we want to get back to doing some Q&As and interviews though. Over the next couple of weeks and months we're going to have a handful of our friends. I think Justin Walsh will come back on Get Dan Ko back on. That'll be fun just to do mix it up a little bit because I do like these jam sessions. But at the same time I think we want to continue doing some Q&As and things like that.

But I think the only thing I want to throw out there. I mean, we're going to have this hiring funnel set up, but shameless plug because we're definitely going to be looking for someone on the ghostwriting side to be able to essentially take all the thinking, internalize it, work with me on the fulfillment. So being able to answer people's questions and, you know, help them go through the curriculum. And also someone who is excited to go through that curriculum and write about ghostwriting, to ghostwrite about ghostwriting all day, every day. And so if that's you, you know, reach out to me, let me know. That's definitely one of the next big roles that we're going to be looking for. And I think that person, that person is going to get 10 years of knowledge downloaded into their brain very, very quickly. And so I'm excited to whoever that person is, excited to work closely with them.

Yeah, I guess the full rundown is we're hiring two enrollment advisors who will be sales reps for pga. We're hiring a fulfillment coach that you just talked about. A. If you are a no code specialist who likes automations and building, we're going to hire for that as well. And that's it in the near term. But who knows over the next three to six months where we'll be if we're kind of ramping things up. But I feel so confident in the fact that we are hiring for such specific things that there's no way we are over hiring. Right. Because these are all roles that need to be fulfilled and we are probably going to do most of them to start and then we will have clarity on exactly what we are hiring for. So overall, it's just in time versus just in case. And we've operated that way for the most part for the entirety of this. And I don't see us changing that at any time as we continue to scale.

I agree. We're at a really cool inflection point. I'm excited to see how this year goes.

Yeah, me too. All right, so next week I think we talk about how we think about marketing for Ship 30 cohorts. So the next cohort starts April 1st. I think we can talk long term of the idea of creating a free digital writing group and having thousands and thousands of concentrated digital writers in one group where we do the occasional live stream. It's like a hub of all of our content easily findable in one place and allowing kind of beginners to start to network with one another, get to meet other people. I think that one is like so painfully obvious now that we should have started it a year ago and it would have been compounding at a huge rate. But that's the thing. You still find these good ideas and you start doing them. And then I think we can workshop some Twitter content too, that we're thinking about, some threads and things like that as people get a little bit of a deep dive into how we think about sharing our curriculum as content, repurposing things we've done in the past that clearly have worked and people found valuable. So that'll be a fun thing to do next week.

Cool. All right. Next week will be a marketing masterclass.

There we go. So we did hiring. We've done sales, we've done everything. That's it for this episode. Thanks for watching. If you're listening, please subscribe. Leave a five star review on Apple or Spotify. If you're on YouTube, throw a comment, throw a question about marketing in general and we will get those answered for the next episode. And lastly, share this with a friend. Tag us on Twitter, tag us on Instagram, send it to someone. It's the number one way it helps us grow. And we will see you all next week for the next espresso hour. Have a good one, y'. All.