thinking that my total adjustment market isn't as big as it actually might be is specifically in the niche that I'm in. >> I have a few people that I can sell to, but I'm not exactly sure which service to sell. >> Uh, can you share more details about what how the structure is positioned with between them and the operators? >> How do you build your leadership team? Like what is that evolution from like >> I'm building new acquisition channels? So we're building a paid funnel now plus an outreach funnel. >> Most of my time is spent on marketing sales, generating new clients for the business and uh rolling out developing new services. You have to attack the growth element from all angles. Focus on like one key thing which you can become expert at, known for and then build from there. You just have you have to teach yourself to be patient on that. It's fine and you will get there. One of the first thing I think you should not be doing is you should not be like proofing people's work where it's they just haven't done it good enough. Like the tone is a bit mixed. I would personally do everything as in like you as in like you're talking to your ideal customer. As your job as a CEO, it's like you don't need to talk too much about your plans. I would just start doing them. Okay. I'm just here in the office and um this video today is all about running a team, being a leader, being a CEO. This is one of the favorite calls I ever did. You'll see me and about 8 to 10 agency owners and we're discussing essentially how to do that. They have some questions. I'm helping them. It's a live call, something that happens at Gemio because when we help business scale, I think you'll really like it. Check it out. It's about an hour long and look at any point if you feel like this is the type of stuff that you need help with with your company. What you got to do is click the link down below and book a call and maybe we can help you. Let's get into it. >> This whole uh session is about what you are meant to be doing. So, I'm just kind of describing some of the stuff that I'm doing for that reason. Um, so it's constantly like the opportunities are within your business, within your clients, within the market like that. That's how I kind of design my focus. Um, now, but I'm happy to obviously give context to a few years ago. Um, and what the focus was then, but ultimately the focus is on things that make money as I said in the course and my main uh, how I deise my time. Obviously as a small group today happy to make it as engaging as possible either about your role or if even if you wanted to discuss team or any issues or anything team you related um happy to um if anyone has anything to kick us off with um that would be good. So I can actually just before we start any can everyone just remind me how many of you out there today and um I guess from your own role perspective what are you actually doing right now as in like what's what do you focus on yourself that would give good context to this conversation >> yeah I can I can start uh the first question was how many uh people are in the team >> yeah Okay. So, we're about dozen people. Um, and my role is specifically so the goal is to automate um the customer inclusion channel which we've identified as AP being a a prime position. Uh, and currently I'm finding a tremendous success there as there's a ton of people that want to like build an MVP very fast and validate the concept idea. And I think we're much better than the what was there right now. And that's one thing. And the second thing is like for the people with content creators, I've I've actually shared a pitch for you as well. I want to close creator as well. So that's my role. So I want to close a creator and also like automate channel for like the commod for development and also like find a creator to partner up and profit sharing model. >> I jump in. number. Oh, sorry, Benson. Um, we are 16 people, number 17 joining Monday, 18 later this month. Most of my time is spent on marketing sales, generating new clients for the business and uh rolling out, developing new services, but I still spend a fair bit on basically account managing quite a few clients. Um but the person joining Monday will basically take over the majority of that role but for one or two. So um that's a big time step that's going to be given back to me. >> Um for us um 19 FT right now and then like a lot of you guys I think like focusing on bisdev um not so much in the day-to-day execution. I think we've done pretty good on that but still implementing a lot of stuff from what Sarah has taught. And then the third one is kind of focusing on more like the retention and upselling aspect of things. Um but you know I want to definitely implement like new I think we have good retention. I think it's just like the new blood like fusing it with the right the right blood right and new blood um into the business and stuff. So yeah >> um I could go next. So, it's just me and one full-time hire for my business specifically. Um, I'm also doing a building a business with a YouTuber who has a million subscribers. So, that's a different business where I'm an equal partner, but there we have around eight people that are full-time and then we've got a bunch of freelancers that we contract for my own stuff. I also do a lot of different services at the moment. So, I have partners for that in the UK. So we have copywriters based in the UK. Uh funnel builders based in the UK as well. And then I have my lead generation team that's based in India. I speak to one guy. He has his own five team VA setup. And then also an in-house designer but it's all project based because we built our relationship up now. So yeah only one full-time hire hire just me. And then I do everything right now everything from marketing sales to operations. So whether it's lead generation, client success, opt to the science, clients have been signed on. I just basically do anything and everything at this point in time with everyone that we work with. Um so it's all over the place at the moment really. >> Cool. Thanks. I guess where where can I give you guys the most value, right? Do you want to know more about Yes. focus for finding new opportunities, growth, more money, etc. Is it more being able to manage everything that you have to manage? Especially I guess for a bunch of you that have um um you know like say if it's 15 plus people or 10 plus people it's starting to get to the point of things are happening and uh how do you stay on top of them? I know Sarah will tell you how to stay with them operationally from a work perspective. It's more even from a a mental perspective and a uh like your physical focus like what's in your calendar each week of what should be there. Um yeah, I guess I can take the conversation in many places, but would love to get some uh pointers from you guys so I can be helpful. >> I guess Derek, I think you >> No worries. No, I think for me uh you know I'm at about 10 people right now. Um mainly on the creative team like editors, designers and such. Um I've got my hands on everything. So I'm reviewing videos, account management, I have like a part-time helper there, but I'm basically doing everything. Um, I haven't really had a major need just now starting potentially like today to bring on somebody to help with like strategy and stuff like that. It's just a more bigger investment if that makes sense. I haven't needed it up to this point. But for me, the biggest value that I think and why I really invested in this course in the first place um to to learn from you especially Sean is for a while now I've been stuck in the cycle of I can't seem to break past this this same level of MR cuz every time I do something in the agency breaks that drops it. clients start leaving, not enough clients come in for the amount of team members I hired to service the clients that came or I'll break the level, hiring new team members, and then some will turn and it's just this continuous cycle. And so, I think for me, it's kind of a combination of all of those things where I'm okay managing those different parts of the business, but how can I get such an influx of clients in the door without turnurning others out where I can actually sustain the level of growth? And I think many of the other people here, you guys may have cracked that, so maybe this is an earlier on problem. Um, but I think that for me is is the big thing. That's the big big thing. >> I guess my first followup there would be where where's your time going right now genuinely? And I guess how much are you working hours wise, timewise? Um because yes to to jump up a certain level of threshold um it requires something. Um but anyway you could just tell me that as a >> Yeah, I mean I'm always on like Monday through Sunday if I'm not at my desk my phone's going off. I've got Discord open, Slack open, I'm always on. Um if I had to look at my business from the outside and say what am I doing that's holding me back? I think it's two main things. And this is something I was going to talk about in the one-on-one. Maybe others are experiencing this as well. Um, but it's, you know, thinking that my total adjustment market isn't as big as it actually might be. It's specifically in the niche that I'm in. Um, so looking at it, is my offer is it just not good enough, which is very well may be the case. It's just a commodity. People are turning out of it quickly, so it's not good enough to scale. That's one thing. And then the other thing is because of that mindset, which doesn't really serve me. And you helped me break that belief to the point where Sean, I've signed a new client every Friday for the last two weeks. That hasn't happened in ages. So like end of week, I've onboard. Like that's awesome. Since I've signed on here, it's freaking cool as hell. I've got onboarding today after this. So excited about that. But um you know the because of that, I don't think I'm doing enough outreach efforts, nor do I have the right system to get enough outreach. Like I'll be transparent, guys. Like I'm sending 20 messages a day manually. I want to be sending a thousand. My concern is there isn't enough people. If I send a thousand messages today, my market that's it. Like that there's not enough podcasts that don't that need clips that can afford our rates versus going to like India or the Philippines and spending 500 bucks a month if that makes sense. Um that's me personally. >> I think just just on that you have to attack the growth element from all angles. So I think we first discussed like you should definitely train a team sit them there and get them start doing the outreach because the outreach isn't about a thousand and we discussed it before right it's more about a tailored approach and going back to the same people again and again and just starting that cycle so then you'll be comfortable mentally internally knowing someone is doing it it's happening because the fact that you have to think if you do it is the first thing to solve because it just cannot be that because you'll never grow. You have to be doing what you need to be doing whilst that bare minimum is happening, that funment is out there seeding those messages. Then it's just everything else from there. What I would do, maybe we can work on this in one to one, is making that grand list of every single thing that you need to touch and feel and improve. Like even looking at your website now, it can be improved so much from a messaging point of view. It just says we help busy creatives grow their shows. It it just there's no upside on it at all. You should be talking about >> the benefit of cutting clips and reposting and what that can do for you and the whole thing should be built around the value proposition. Um that on average within three months x views happen and from that this many deals could happen or this much ad revenue can come that you know you are showing the person this the circular why. Um so the point is is messaging um can be worked on a lot you get more clients then it's just everything else like I don't know do you have referrals with your current clients um it's a whole list of things essentially to go through and trying to enable all of them. So what I would say your role as a CEO should be is like to enable things as in get it going get it from zero to one. I have a rule that if you're doing anything in gem flow, it's me or the leadership team because we've gone large now. Back when I was 10, 15 in like 2018, 19, I would kickstart everything myself. Every single thing I would get it from zero to one till I know this thing is now working and then I would try to hire someone for it and pass it on to them under my rules etc. But I would spend the time on most people make the mistake of doing like one thing at a time. I I would make a long list of every single thing that you need to do to grow and actually just do all of them, which is hard, but do all of them. It's like I need to improve my website. I need to do I need to hire my outreach team that sit there. I need to message every single one of my current clients and say to them, I'll give you this much money if you introduce me to X person. But before that, make a list of every single person they know that you could potentially sign and send it to them. Um, so yeah, so you know, that's the answer to um what you should be focusing on in particular if you're concerned about growth and getting to that next stage because if you were to sign five or 10 then then it would change it because naturally you may turn a few clients but there's just that much more. and take more chances. One thing that I did a lot as we were trying to scale is that I would take chances on clients that may not fit the criteria or they may want to not pay so much. I took the chance and some of them pay off. It's almost like a slight gambling way of thinking of it like the more you gamble the more things pay off. The more you're trying to protect your you know my someone's not willing to pay your fee etc. I feel as missed opportunities. So I would be more aggressive on that front. Yeah. Especially for you because I think definitely the market is too big and you can easily reposition yourself as like you're a distribution. You're a content distribution agency. You're not a podcast agency. What's it got to do with podcast like it's video? You're just cutting it. That's if I was you that thing I'll do tomorrow. I'll repurpose myself a content distribution agency and go full force that if you have a long form piece of video which is more than five minutes you can come work with us and we're going to clip it and post it for you. Then what I message you in the DMs about I would then have the services built out like that where like that's standard posting on one account or we can count that for you. Maybe we'll launch 10 Tik Toks for you launch on 10 at the same time because we know that's going to get you more views or we can do cross channel that we can do it every single channel. Um you know Facebook are doing monetization now. Snapchat's doing monetization now. An easy business model for you is to say I'm going to post on Snapchat. I'm going to turn monetization on and I'm going to make you money because they'll pay you for views. Snapchat is paying the highest out of all the platforms right now for views. There's just so much opportunity like >> Yep. Yep. I think I think you're 100% right. >> I think a lot of people might resonate with this. Um my biggest takeaway is if I look at it holistically at my on my business, all the things you just mentioned, I'm in the process of actually doing. One thing that I beat myself up for as an entrepreneur is I want the result today, but it might like I I said this the other day. I was like, I I overestimate how much I can do in a day and I underestimate how much I can do in a week to a month because the change from 30 days ago, if you would have talked to me 30 days ago, it would have been completely different. I thought my business is going nowhere. I've signed four or five new clients, right? So, it's it's drastic difference. Um, but no, you're absolutely right. So, I appreciate that breakdown. That's it's really helpful. I think that I would say you have to just secretly be um you have to be patient, mentally patient and you've got to be okay with the fact that someone else is winning and you want to do this thing. You just have you have to teach yourself to be patient on that that it's fine and you will get there. Um and that's a massive thing. I it happens to me all the time and I beat myself over it where we're currently launching a it's going to be our first like public facing essentially like creative monetization product that people will be able to sell courses communities all that so essentially like what a Kajjabi or a circle or whatever is today we're basically making competitor of that to launch it publicly and um I want it live tomorrow but just you know that that is a fine line um of obsession or being upset or not feeling good enough versus like accepting that it's just these are the steps to go through. But that's why it really does help. I do this a lot like spend time looking back on my goals, looking at the numbers and then saying actually this is a great place to be right now and more is coming versus feeling like I have I'm not doing enough to grow the business. It's a very natural feeling to have that feeling. I I I actually take time out to sit and just think um and do nothing. Sounds weird like no music, no nothing. Just like sitting and thinking because you kind of fix your mind when when you're doing that. Anyway, we'll move on. Sorry, send a message. >> Hey Tim, how's it going? >> I think the first thing Hey. Yeah. The one of the first thing I think you should not be doing is you should not be like proofing people's work where it's they just haven't done it good enough or you've had to go in and fix something that someone else it was someone else's job basically. That's the first big thing you shouldn't be doing. And that happens. It still happens to me, right? I'll get I'll be reviewing some new thing that's about to go live and I'll have like some mistakes in it and that just can't happen because you know the process should be fixing that. So I think that's like my number one where your time shouldn't be going. Um that's probably my biggest one I would say. Um next question is sorry team the way we forecast that is basically I mean if you were just doing it last night um first foremost like base principles you got to figure out like how much physically it's time it's taking to do x amount of work within the business and you got to genuinely do that. So in my product team where we like design and sample and make products for people we do time tracking. So within ASA we have like extensions and we literally time track to understand if as a product designer that it can't be taking on four hours to do this like you know um these cuts for this client. We have to get true understanding of cost because we do that basically out of pocket. don't charge for that and uh so we truly need to understand the cost of it and then when you get in a position where you have multiple people in the business you can very easily start to see like who is actually slow and that's a genuine thing of people being slow um we've had a lot of those problems in the past where like I had someone slow till I had someone better and obviously the better person even if they might be more expensive in salary they were actually cheaper in the output and if you're not measuring that or aware of that it becomes a Um, >> sorry, just to add on, so you're getting them to click on a on a button on a sauna, like a plugin, and then they start the task and they click end kind of thing. So like a hub staff or something like that. >> Yeah, pretty much. I think the one that we used or still used, I'm just Google it. >> I think it's called Harvest. >> Harvest. Okay. >> Yeah, Harvest. like a time tracking tool for Asana. Um that's an extreme example. Obviously, nobody wants to be there doing time tracking on the team, but we've done that in a particular example of like because they are either designers and editors. It's very easy because you are like picking up a task and editing. >> So, it's very you can track that stuff. You can cost it very well to be like >> one YouTube short costs me $97 to edit. You can actually get to that level of understanding. And with all this stuff, like there's no 100%. It's just getting a gauge. Um >> because that's one of the challenges like we're trying to figure out like resourcing and like because we can always do more for the client, but we don't track that. We have an like kind of like a hey set plan and we do whatever they kind of let us know like an unlimited per month what based on number of hours and then we let the team let us know. But it's been hard to kind of scale that. Um cuz we're doing good right now, but then I don't know how much we can add in terms of like clients and new blood. Um versus like >> Yeah. >> How well do you manage like the people that work clients their time and where's that going? Where I found the most white space I guess blank space in in our business was just that. So someone has like eight clients they say they're always busy till we got them to really um use the sign up properly because you have all your tasks in a sauna but then they like I'm doing other things like what are those other things then we really got like into the detail you start to realize like actually you have like hours free every day so you can have more clients you can do more things like you'll find um you know space within your team it depends on how you are managing your like how do you know what everybody's doing outside of tasks that are like actual tasks like the middle space of their days that becomes an important thing that's for your managers to be on top of like personally. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Okay. That makes sense. I don't know if anyone else hasn't said. Do you guys like at a client level ever look at profitability? >> No, we went over that with uh James last Friday. It was very interesting and I'm going to apply that. It's it's an interesting thing. We I we have on a company level P&L but not uh customer or yeah customer >> basically when you when you do that you'll start to see the where where clients are taking the piss and you have to go to the clients and trying to fix the service level because it's gone too far now you'll notice where your team has space because these clients you actually don't do that much for and so just to answer this question of like how do you allocate team resource it's like it comes from that base if you do all these steps you'll start to realize like this one person clearly has capacity in the team. But then what I would do is going back to Derrick is saying there's all these things to do. We do this as a company. We like okay here's the things we need to do to grow. Who is free? I asked this question on Thursday night to my leadership team. I was like okay we've just come up with like six things we need to do. Go and find out who's free who has time because people have time because someone's client is away. Something has a big project. Someone doesn't. Whatever. Whatever. there is time. The number one hack of like this question sheet is that I always try to forget people's roles and if something needs doing if you and if you find someone that has time you be like you're going to have to do it and that takes some use to some people won't like it some people will leave your business like yeah I'm just a copyriter what do you mean like yeah but as you have time this week I want you to sit and do sit on LinkedIn and find me 10 companies that are like this or do something else like this. So again going back to I'm bringing it back because the thing was like how do you grow and there's so many things on your plate but you can disperse those things to get people going and you should see people in your business as like you can use them for your own benefit ultimately the business benefit and it's okay to do that like the rules you know people are very stuck on like job description title that's my role I'm not going to do nothing else um we do that all the time like my editing team we were doing a shoot and edit Last week we needed new locations and stuff because the location fell through and the editing was like teams like you know it wasn't so heavy like all right start looking for locations start calling up places start doing this and that cuz this needs doing um so just drilling that into your team would be very useful I'm just going to move on now I guess overall margin depends on the agency um margin I would say you want to be around at least 30% net profit but it depends if you are knowingly spending money to grow then that's okay. So you know there's obviously like genuine profit from your actual service delivery but then naturally you'll start to spend some money around that to grow. So I would I would understand your true service profitability and then outside of that if you're spending money to acquire clients, if you're spending money to do other things or launch a new service, I would identify and track those things separately. So versus looking at a general overall margin because it doesn't really mean anything. So I would have margin for my service and then I'll have other things I'm investing in and what return is going to come when from those things. then yeah overall you can have a margin but that that's the way I would look at it from a business perspective ask any questions we can leave our reading >> um I could go there so I'm at this point now where I have a few people that I can sell to but I'm not exactly sure which service to sell. They have different requirements, different problems that I could solve, help solve. Um, but essentially, yeah, I just don't quite know where I want to head as a service, as a business, cuz right now I just work backwards from the client. So, I figure out, okay, this is the person or business that I want to work with, and I'll do whatever it takes to get make that happen. And what that has now led to is just me offering a lot of different services to different people. But is there is there a certain thing that you would do normally to get to the point of like this is >> well community building is something that I've been focusing on that's something that I love um and it's got a lot of different elements to it from filling communities to maintaining them to monetizing them and so that's something that I have been focusing on. Yeah. If it was me, I I would focus on like one key thing which you can become expert at, known for and then build from there. It's very easy to sit and think of different services. It's very easy to sit think of different things or or you could potentially I would say go and win 10 contracts and then try your best in doing that. Whatever you know you end up winning the most in naturally would be your best suited thing. And I I would go for that. I wouldn't think about it anymore. If you know, if you have some people and you have an idea what to pitch them, I would start pitching them immediately um and not not be so concerned. I I literally do that to this day. If I meet somebody and I see the opportunity, I've talked about that previously, I'll immediately be selling them that exact thing that they need in that moment. Um think like elevator pitch. You have three minutes to impress them. and what are you selling? You're probably going to say community building, then that's it. Go for it. Become amazing at that versus like seven other things or figuring out which is my I see that a lot with new agency owners today. People are so confused with like what's my offer? What's my service? Which plans do I really want? And people are stuck trying to perfect that because they don't want to build something they don't want. And it's like it just real life just doesn't work like that. like you if you have a skill you'll be found out very soon if that's true or not once you have actual clients once they're paying you you'll start to become a deeper expert in that one thing two things three things and then you scale from there like you got a couple of guys here like for that if that's Google ads for Paulo if it's clips for Derek if it's DTC design right like it's very natural it's personal branding for Sam like it's very natural that you pick up a skill and you get better and better at that so if it's community I would go all in on that turn that to a level of success, then start to flip other things around it service-wise. So, you you're proving your hypothesis on one key thing and actually doing it and stop, you know, chase the money is what I would say. >> Cool. Thank you. >> I have a question. Anyone else has anything >> not really related to the current topics, but you mentioned slightly in the previous call about um the prime deal. You were talking about long pole and KSI potentially like I mean not potentially it's not like you were competing with the the guys that pitch but you missed the deal and you were like talking about the details of the the deal structure. Do do you know more uh can you share more details about what how the structure is um positioned with between them and the operators? Um not really but what I would say is mostly they are KO and are minority shareholders and the other guys um gave them uh a million each upfront and they had a letter of intent from I believe it was Walmart or maybe Target one of them that they would buy the stock if they were to produce such item and I believe that was the reason they signed the agreement. It wasn't the cash, it was the letter from uh the retailer um saying that they would place an order and >> Yeah. Interesting. So, you think that was the biggest reason for like that big push because both creators I follow them like they didn't push anything as aggressively as it did with Prime like from the get-go before it was a billion dollar company, right? So like what do you think was convinced them that to push the to push it so aggressive? >> I think that's definitely possible with lots of different uh creatives today because you just have to tell them why and educate them to the potential and what are we trying to do and in this situation they they're partners and they had retail distribution already. So obviously it started off well and the the idea of com combining two creators with the history and stuff. So I think there was lots of stuff they announced it so well they pretended to be a third bite but it wasn't there's so many elements to why that led to being such a success in the initial days. Um but yeah I would say the deal is uh not something that anyone else can do. You need to have a lot of funds to be able to do a deal of that nature. Um and >> and specifically for them more in general like what like is there a contractual obligation to creators to promote the number of times they promote it or the volume or the way they promote it? >> We have it too. Yeah. >> Okay. >> So the truth is any people that trying to compete with us today, they'll go in, they'll invest all the money, they'll have no guarantees on promotion. Two months later, the creator will forget about it, pretend it never happened, and the company's there with no money, spent all their money, paid all the wages, made some app, and uh and they're sitting there crying. It happens every single day in the industry because people think that some unicorn something is going to happen if a famous person or creator is going to do X, but it doesn't really work like that. Uh sorry, I just realized you had another question here then. Um what does your role? I think for me the difference has been between um the different stages is I think firstly now I can like you're not actually worried anymore. What I mean by that is like the the chase of signing clients and doing the delivery I've officially outgrown that the business is going to work. It is working and it is okay. That's like the biggest thing of like I guess the end or say the success you know is that that worry goes out is out my mind now because the business is good enough that it's going to keep trading and it's going to keep delivering. Secondly that means um you can start to think more strategically more about growth more about how to push forwards and um so that's a great place to be mentally. The hard thing with that is then you have big ideas and your team is busy doing the work, you have no one to help you deliver those new ideas. So it's an interesting challenge that as you have more cash in the bank, I find myself in a position um where you know we are growing monthto month cash in the business is growing monthto month like our bank balance is growing monthto month and it is almost like what do you do next? And that's where my job comes in. My pressure comes in and focus. I guess where it was before was um when I was in the stage where most of you guys are at I was chasing the money for sure as in checking the clients trying to sign the bigger clients. What I started to realize was and I can only advise you guys to do the same is understand the type of client that you like working for. The type of client that gives you the most return. Ideally people that and everyone has their own understanding of that depending on your um industry. I started to seek those out more and more and more and I started to just plant way more small moves without talking about it too much. So, one thing I would say as your job as a CEO is like you don't need to talk too much about your plans, I would just start doing them. The most weirdest ideas you have in your head about how to create business. Like I would just like, okay, I'm just going to go and do it versus like turning to my team and trying to convince them this is the next thing I want to do. I that's what I used to do. When I started to fully focus on me and my ideas, it started to grow. Um but yeah, what I would wish I could avoid would be um just probably like um the detail of some of the client stuff, going overboard for clients. Like I think I've done way too much for clients than I should have. You'll never really get the benefit for it. And uh so I wish I focused more on my business's goals. What happens in a client facing businesses which all of us have you start to achieve your client's goals for them as part of your service delivery but you can easily forget about your own business growth I have this my team now I have to tell people off to be like you know you can't keep calling the client every day that time you know you need to spend on growing the agency or growing the business or doing something else but like Yeah, but I'm just trying to like, you know, help my client. What am I meant to do? They they needed something. So, I have to call them. I have to do this. I have to do that. So, just getting that line drawn. On my wedding day, I was doing customer service for one of my clients because I was so like, I have to do this. It has to be right. I can't it up. And that worry of messing it up and what's going to happen and will I lose the client. So, like I wish I just had a better understanding of that earlier. And I was left scared, which I'm sure some of you guys feel at times, right? That how if I lose two clients, I need to get two more. If I've just hired two people, I need to get more clients. Like this thing that you feel yourself in. I was really worried about that. And I wish I wasn't because I because it, you know, yes, it turned out to be great, but it always would have been because most of you guys here are trying to do things which are at the forefront of call it digital, online, etc. and there's there's too much opportunity that if you're remotely good at what you do, it's going to be okay. And I think um yeah, I guess that's what I would tell myself if I was talking to like the 2019 version of me. Um the other thing I would say is uh if you are having an amazing period in your business, you should also recognize that's always not going to be this good. But in 2019 like everything we were touching was gold and then we have gone through a little bit of harder time. So just also know that it's not always so easy as well. Um because I've felt the both of that where it's been really good and not so good. >> Thanks for sharing that. That's um valuable. >> Tim, as you have a larger agency, I guess what's what's your focus right now? >> What do you focus on? Um, so we we just launched a new website, uh, which was a project that I oversaw. Um, and now I guess I'm I'm building new acquisition channels. So, we're building a paid funnel now, plus an outreach funnel um, next to everything that we do content wise. Uh and besides that, my job is pretty much um everything around marketing and sales. Um because I'm together with my dad and also Matis, our VP revenue marketing. So we share a lot of the accountabilities um which helps I guess. But for me it's mostly like everything that's around networking, branding, sales, marketing, also recruiting, every like all sorts of growth topics pretty much. And then we have Mus that takes care of all client delivery. So I pretty much don't have much to do with that. Um and I think it also helps if you have a co-founder or something that that's building the company with you together to split the two. Um because the more focus you can get, the better. I think the more you move forward. Let's skip the website. Have a look. All right. >> It's it's a it's a soft launch, so there's more pages coming every week. Uh but we wanted to go live ASAP just with home and contact page. >> My only one point would be is um the tone of voice. It's a bit mixed. It says your growth and then later will say we believe in education at scale that's why we do this. Then it's like our CEO like the tone is a bit mixed. I would personally do everything as in like you as in like you're talking to your ideal customer throughout. >> That's just my initial >> Yeah. Where where do you see that? >> Just reading some of the copy. Yeah, >> I just like things like in 2004 B2B buyers know exactly what they want and how they want to buy and that doesn't include like it's a bit general. I would do it more towards the person you are trying to sign. >> That's just observation. >> Yeah, understood. >> Might be worth having a talking video as well. Um, it would be interesting to like split test. You got your trailer if you had like a talking video of you saying, "Hey, what's up? This is what we do. This is how it works. Here's some case studies." >> Like again, you're talking to the person before getting on the call with them. >> Be interesting to see. >> I also thought about that. Um, but it's super hard to to split test because >> what are you need? I mean you need a lot of I think a lot of traffic and also a lot of um inbound requests so that it actually makes sense to split test I think for agencies. Um but yeah I think another better version would be to also have people moving in the in the video and and people explaining stuff. For example me walking through the office or some kind of thing like that would be like the V2. Um, yeah, but we did that video in just like two weeks before the launch, so it was quite hectic, but I wanted to have a video. I think it's it's a good way to go. Yeah. >> Yeah. Start. >> Anything else? Anyone wants to jump into? How do you find um because something that I've been through is I guess like people being scared of you versus like working with you versus um working for you like how do you feel like you are today and where do you think you need to improve Um the reason is cuz I think I've learned a lot. My style I think has really helped me um keep people and I haven't lost anyone. No one has left left Jumper has worked here more than two years. Whoever's been here two years, they've never left. So it's like once you're in, you're in. And then my main leadership team now is five years. What I would attest to that is my CEO style because basically I'm not a CEO. So earlier just before this I was on a call normally and I I've sat on other people's calls to know how people are. You get on a call and you know as a CEO you be like right guys so where are we give me update or tell me tell me where we are and people feed you information. I've always been the type to like I lead it myself even the conversation or the session. If I'm jumping in in a session, let's say it's a design session, I I wouldn't just sit and listen in. I would be right in the conversation of the session itself. As in, if there's like 20 screens being presented to me or some creatives presented to me, I'll be the one saying, "Oh, why is this one like this? What's this? Oh, by the way, I like this. Let me show you one. This looks like this." that I'll go straight in to add value and become part of the team and trying to help like help as much as I can because when I've sat in other people's generally across the board it's normally like you're turning up to be presented to and sign something off and that's been the number one reason cuz the lot the people that like working I guess with me is because we feel like we're building something together and I let people have that feeling um to which by like I don't know many places where I've managed to like keep the basically main people and I've given equity to my leadership team and like you know we really it's like in it together feeling which has made it so much better because you don't need a co-founder because you have like a bunch of them in um and over time you know that's obviously a great thing to have but yeah would love to understand >> oh sorry I got a prompt on that I was just like uh as I'm thinking through like how do you like I don't know if this is answered by module already but like how do you build your leadership team like what is that evolution from like you know Sarah and James getting equity and like how they prove their worth and continue to and everything like how do you I know that's a big question but I honestly I would promote within I would never hire I would look at who is the people around you that actually doing the things that need to be done they may not do it so well they may not be the best in the market nothing like that I made that mistake of and I do talk about one in the videos which is I had an amazing team but I was like what did these guys know? They're like young, you know, I've taught them everything. I need to go and get real experts out there. And I went and hired and paid $250, $300,000 salaries. Hired them and I realized I actually knew nothing about how we work, our industry, and the actual things that matter. They had lots of context, lots of great experience. I just couldn't apply it to what we're doing. Um, so I I spent almost a million dollars to learn this thing that I'm saying, I 100% look around you and think out of the 12 people that you have, 15 people that you have, like who are the people that you cannot lose and whoever those are, I would start to think of them in that way because you have to in your first 10 hires is your main people is your at least couple of main people and you have to develop them. So, I would go all in with them as in like I would build personal relationships. I'll go out with them. I will take care of them. I would do everything you need to do to make them your soldiers basically that no matter what they will be there and they're going to help build your business essentially for you with you. Because it's very hard, right? Because you're saying you want to find really good people that not going to go and start their own business, but they're going to help you build your business, but they're almost as good to start their own business. And that's a hard thing to find. So you can if you train someone up to be like that, then they will stay with you. Then you'll have to offer them some sort of equity. Um and they'll understand. But I would actually I'm not scared about talking to my guys about like if they were to leave, what are the options? What would they do? Rather than not talking about that topic, I would talk about it to your main people. So they mentally realized actually you're right. Like my team is quite young. I was like, "Look guys, do this with me for 5 years. When you leave, you'll still be 28 and you would have been part of the Gemflow mafia that exited Genflow and you can go and build a whole career after that." And they're like, "Oh yeah, like I don't need to like leave and start my business right now and get all the success and a million followers and everything that everything everybody wants right now. If I just wait, I can do it in five years time." Oh yeah. and then mentally got accepted the fact that over the next 20 years I will still live my dream of having my own business and all that stuff but let's let me do it after I've learned so much that I'm learning here and it's risk-f free for them they're getting paid and they're on the upside um when the business sells so it's just I would really work strategically on um the core relationships and actually developing those relationships yourself and then giving them the things that they need in their life for whatever reason I've had to like sponsor whatever move countries or someone to move city um other things would be like gift this that like you have to take care of people is is what I would what I have I guess done then I did some strategic things as like going away we did was back in we went to LA and stayed there for six weeks in a house and that completely changed everything because they saw how I work TV you were like once work's finished it's that was the first time they saw that oh this don't and how we need to be and we have to get an office in LA and we know nothing. Let's start from scratch. So when people see you do things like that, okay, where do we start from? Let's make a list. Let's go to everything a warehouse. Let's do all the viewing. Let's do this. When you show someone how to build something up from the ground up, then the belief comes and then next day they're doing it themselves. And that's been like the thing. So I would I think if you honestly want to build a bigger agency which is worth selling one day, you have to start investing your time and effort into some key people um early on and develop those relationships. One of the obviously Kim you obviously do with family slight difference but otherwise you're trying to create that in another way essentially. That's what I would do. Well, we also have that. I mean, yeah, my dad and me, we founded it, but still we have a couple people that also have shares in the company that have been there from the early days. So, 100% agree with you. I think um if you want to build a big agency, it's all about the people. Like at some point you can't do everything yourself and you just need people that are even better than you in some specific areas that can execute um on a very high standard and also have the the drive to to make things better to take full ownership because I think that's really hard. So they think about your business like you think about your business. I think if you get people to that point I think then you're winning. You know, I I the question that you asked in the channel, Sam, so the profit share is a great way to get people to be on the same side as you. And when I did that, it changed everything. Before it was like people are trying to fight for pay rises for the team. They're trying to always say we should be spending money here. We should be doing this. They they were always against the business goals strategy in some way. There's always some personal agenda. the moment I changed it that whatever your thing is, we agreed a way that this is how we're going to calculate profit for what you do and this is how you get a percentage of that. It completely made everyone on the same team. Um before I would have so many problems like oh I had one guy who was like I feel like we should charge this client less because I feel like we're doing them over by because they're paying us too much. It's not right because the other client pays this much and we're doing less for him but they pay us more. Like you know you're like what are you talking about? The goal is to make money here. That's good. It's good if you're doing zero work and getting paid. Ultimately that's the best client. Um but to bring them on side once they get the money everything changes. Uh so I would advise as much as possible in the whole business to do um people's bonuses based off money they generate with the clients they keep something around the performance in that detail. Uh it'll change everything versus normal salary because the hardest thing agency is everyone is just chasing the next role. If someone is executive, they're chasing senior. Someone is senior, they're chasing manager. And then you are essentially a stepping stone in their career. And you don't want that >> ultimately. >> Are you compromising every single person in the company? >> I would say every uh manager above or full-time staff in some capacity. Obviously not any like international um like extra I guess let's call it support staff that like doing things. No, but the any key commercial roles. Yes. >> How do you do the logistics? Oh, sorry. >> I don't know. >> How do you do the logistics of that? Is there is it is there a module on that or did you share that like in terms of like >> um you know like agree like uh leadership team slashmanagers get x% based on the number of clients because of generating X or something. >> Yeah, I put some in Slack if you check u as in a quick framework of what we do at different levels. >> But you I haven't done a video on it. I will be making some new content on some of the topics we've been discussing. Uh that's one of them. You got to devise that yourselves. So if you sit and say here's the levels in the business, how do I do it bottom up? Like even down to the outreach people that we have in like Philippines and stuff we doing to them if they hit the if they hit the right if they find enough qualified leads, they'll get a bonus. So like depending I I try to incentivize as much as possible with money. It's the number one driver of anything else. Um, always find a way to incentivize like a customer service like how good the tickets are, they'll get extra bonus. So like everyone has some incentive, but money is key in that. Yeah, I would definitely separate it though. So it's not a blanket. You could even separate it on people once you really get to know people like what's going to drive this one person because like I've got one girl, she's amazing. She's a creative brand manager. You know, I know she wants to travel and just have that feeling of like, you know, she's doing well meeting creators and traveling. It's like, okay, I know she wants to do that. So, like, you know, we I'm we're letting her go and see her clients in person and spend a week with her, spend two weeks with them, go to Paris Fashion Week, stay there for two weeks. In her mind, she's like, "All my days, I'm living my dream. I'm in Paris Fashion Week for two weeks. I'm at the Prada. I'm at Dishu. at that show. She didn't care about herself. She didn't care about that She explained what the thing is of people and like doing that. I've got a call as well now. Um but yeah, hope that's helpful. Um discussed quite a few things on your own roles, but start making the growth moves. Don't ask anybody and start doing the work. Awesome. We'll see you in a minute. come through. Thanks guys. Have a good day. Thanks. Bye.