0:00

By the way, in case you haven't heard, my brand

0:02

new book, Feel Good Productivity is now out. It is

0:04

available everywhere books are sold. And it's actually hit the

0:06

New York Times and also the Sunday Times bestseller list.

0:08

So thank you to everyone who's already got a copy

0:11

of the book. If you've read the book already, I

0:13

would love a review on Amazon. And if you haven't

0:15

yet checked it out, you may like to check it

0:17

out. It's available in physical format and also ebook and

0:19

also audio book everywhere books are sold. Hello,

0:22

Matt. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? Good

0:24

to see you. I was really hoping we could have

0:26

this conversation as a bit of a mini coaching session

0:28

where you helped me understand what it takes to get

0:30

from, let's say 10 to a hundred K a month

0:32

and then a hundred K to a million a month.

0:34

Let's do it. I'm looking forward to it. That's to

0:36

say it's an hour team meeting and about 45 minutes

0:39

of it is dedicated to issues, opportunities and

0:41

awarenesses. If you're not coming with any of

0:43

these things, I literally don't know what you're

0:45

doing. That is a good point. All you've

0:47

basically done is just like name systems for

0:49

each step of the process. And already it

0:51

just feels like I have way more clarity.

0:53

Inevitably, like the best people to sell are people

0:55

that are referred by an existing customer and your

0:57

best leads, your hottest leads are your referred leads.

1:00

This is just like mind blowing to me.

1:02

And I think for you too, one of your

1:04

big models when you think about anything new is

1:06

can I do this for the long term? And

1:09

the answer to that is hell yes you can. Hello

1:14

Matt, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?

1:16

Welcome to Dubai, Holly. Good to see you. Good

1:19

to see you man. Okay, so we have done

1:21

lots of episodes on this podcast so far, sort

1:23

of about the starting point of entrepreneurship, like how

1:25

to go from zero to for example 10K a

1:27

month. We had like your concept and your audience

1:29

and your avatar and your offer and all that

1:31

and your sales system and all that kind of

1:33

stuff. You

1:35

seem to specialize from previous

1:37

conversations that we've had and me being on your

1:39

podcast and the stuff you post on socials. You

1:41

seem to specialize in helping people get beyond the

1:43

10K a month point. Our

1:46

business at the moment is, we did

1:48

like five million last year and we want to get it to 10

1:50

million. And so I was really hoping

1:52

we could have this conversation as a bit of a

1:54

mini coaching session where you helped me understand what it

1:56

takes to get from let's say, 10 to 100K.

2:00

month and then 100k to a million a month, which

2:02

is the sort of kind of scaling that you seem

2:04

to help founders with. Let's do it. I'm looking forward

2:06

to it. Before we dive into that, can we summarize

2:08

your backstory for people who might not be familiar with

2:10

who you are? Yeah, so started

2:12

four different profitable businesses over the last

2:14

decade. First business was called

2:16

Bitmaker. We trained full stacks, offer engineers,

2:19

got them jobs at Shopify, Meta,

2:21

Google, trained over 2000 engineers

2:23

over a few years. And the company was

2:25

acquired by General Assembly. When they

2:27

came north to the border to Canada, which is where I'm

2:29

from, since then started a

2:31

couple other businesses. One more

2:34

recently, it's called FounderOS. We

2:36

help founders with proven systems to

2:38

scale their audience, brand, and community. And so

2:40

the general mission I have in life is

2:43

to really help 100 million founders accomplish their

2:45

dreams through proven systems, been

2:47

through the ups and downs, the valleys and the

2:49

mountains, you know, involved in building businesses, understand kind

2:51

of how hard and yeah,

2:53

just difficult it can be. And over

2:56

the years, I've learned that there's, you

2:58

know, there's systems and that success is

3:00

really an OS and there's ways to

3:02

build an audience, monetize, build a team,

3:04

hire on board. There's these are

3:06

all systems and the tighter those systems, I

3:08

think the stronger your business. And so, um, yeah,

3:12

excited to dive into some of those today. I'm sure to

3:14

help you get to that million a month milestone. Nice. Okay.

3:16

So, um, I first read the

3:18

e-myth revisited in like 2019. This

3:21

was two years into starting my YouTube channel. And

3:23

that was the book that really gave me the

3:25

first, like, like the terminology of systems. I

3:28

was like, like I'd had a business when I was in med school,

3:30

sort of 2012 to 2019 and

3:33

knew nothing about hiring. I was doing all

3:35

the admin myself and getting super overwhelmed. And

3:37

I just, I didn't even have the,

3:40

it's like in my, in my brain, there wasn't even

3:42

a room for like systems or like business or anything

3:44

like that. And I never really thought to read any

3:46

books about it. And then seven years later,

3:49

I discovered the email through visited. I was like, Oh my

3:51

God. Like I've been missing out

3:53

on so much valuable insight

3:55

by not having read books about this stuff

3:57

already. And that was the book that really told

3:59

me that. Oh, shit, I can delegate and I

4:01

can hire and I can sort of build a

4:03

sort of franchise model around my business so that

4:06

if someone else were to try and replicate it,

4:08

it's like what are the systems and the standard

4:10

operating procedures and stuff. And so

4:12

really, that was my first introduction to the world of systems. How

4:16

did you get into the world

4:18

of like the business as a

4:20

system? Yeah. So

4:22

like you, I'm an avid reader,

4:25

whether it's books like, you know,

4:27

Systemology, Emyth Revisited, Traction, you

4:30

know, Rockefeller Habits, the list goes on. I'd

4:34

be lying if I said it was just some like linear

4:36

process, you know, just from kind

4:38

of being in the mix of building businesses,

4:40

going through the struggles. Inevitably, anytime something went

4:43

wrong, I realized it was because we didn't

4:45

have it documented properly. We didn't actually know

4:47

what the smooth process for that thing was,

4:49

who the owner was, who was accountable for

4:52

it. And so after kind of, you

4:54

know, running into these blocks, making these mistakes,

4:56

you know, I eventually started to realize if

4:58

I could just have, you know, from the

5:00

starting point of a customer's journey all the

5:02

way through to the promise that we're looking

5:04

to deliver on, and then

5:07

through to referral, all sort

5:09

of systemized, all processed, selfishly,

5:12

it would just lead to a lot less headaches. And

5:15

I think one thing that we're both into

5:17

is like, aside from building businesses, I think

5:19

we love living vibrant lives, we love to

5:21

travel, we have different hobbies, I enjoy

5:23

playing paddle tennis and hanging out with friends and traveling

5:25

around. And so, you know,

5:27

the more my business is systemized, the more it's

5:29

just like a calm company, the

5:31

more sustainable it is long term, and the more I

5:33

can selfishly just go do other things in my life

5:36

that I enjoy doing. So yeah, that's

5:38

been a bit of my journey. Sick. Okay,

5:40

so let's say I were

5:43

to, you know, we

5:45

were to somehow end up doing like a one on

5:47

one coaching session where I was like, Hey, Matt, can

5:50

you help me grow my business? How

5:53

would we how would we go from there? Yeah,

5:56

so what business do you

5:58

want to start with, I guess? I

6:00

guess kind of my, I think of my

6:02

business as my content

6:05

and courses kind of thing. Sure. So

6:08

we've got kind of the YouTube channel. We've

6:10

got social media. We've got the podcast. We've got my

6:12

email list. And then the course

6:14

that we sell right now is our YouTuber Academy,

6:17

where we've got a $1 product, which is like a self-paced,

6:20

very quick course on how to start a YouTube channel. That

6:23

upsets people into a $1,000 product, which is a

6:25

self-paced course on how to kick-start and

6:27

grow your YouTube channel. And then we have a

6:30

YouTube accelerator, which is a more higher ticket, like

6:32

at the moment, $5K a year, but we're upping the prices depending

6:34

on when people hear this. And that's

6:37

like a 12-month program that has support from my

6:39

team and weekly office hours from my team, and

6:41

I do a monthly Q&A. And

6:43

we have like account managers, and we're working with ethical

6:45

scaling to build custom success for that. So

6:49

we have that vertical for products, i.e.

6:51

helping people start, grow, and monetize YouTube

6:53

channels. But we are about to

6:55

launch a productivity thing.

6:58

At the moment, it's tentatively titled Productivity Lab,

7:02

and we want it to be like a sort of 1-2K a

7:05

year community type thing.

7:08

Or the page is sort of like Peloton for

7:10

productivity, a community for ambitious entrepreneurs,

7:12

creators, and professionals looking to double their productivity, focus,

7:14

and consistency so they can do more of what matters

7:17

to them in work and in life. Where

7:19

the idea is like it would be, there

7:22

would be like a life cohort element where I would teach

7:25

a course in productivity for the first four weeks, probably

7:27

just as a one-off and then make that evergreen. And

7:29

then we would have 12 months where every day there

7:32

are Zoom co-working sessions. Every week there's a facilitated weekly

7:34

review, a monthly reflection, a quarterly

7:36

planning session, regular workshops on like vision

7:38

and goal setting for your personal and professional

7:40

life. Just something that can,

7:43

that's some sort of target at ads like yeah,

7:46

entrepreneurs, professionals, and creators who want

7:49

to, I guess, double their productivity. We're

7:52

in the process of like building that up to launch it probably

7:54

end of Q1, 2024. At

7:57

the moment, most of the business revenue is in the process. revenue

8:00

comes from the YouTuber

8:02

stuff. We'll probably

8:05

do about a million from our content arm,

8:07

a million pounds, so like $1.3 million, and

8:10

probably about 2.5 million pounds from the

8:12

YouTuber stuff. And we're hoping

8:15

to do at least 2.5 million

8:17

from the productivity thing or stuff. And

8:20

that's the sort of back of the envelope math that I'm doing

8:22

to try and

8:25

get us to 10 million. If any

8:28

of that makes sense. I love that. So appreciate

8:30

all the context and just your vulnerability too over

8:32

the years of just being open with your numbers

8:34

and allowing others to learn from sort of the

8:36

specifics. A lot of people I think are nervous

8:38

to just divulge the in and out. So appreciate

8:40

that. So first things

8:42

first, I think when we start

8:45

about think of systemizing a business, it

8:47

can feel a little bit like daunting and

8:49

overwhelming. And so I like to

8:52

use a couple principles to start off with, which is like

8:54

number one, the 80-20 rule. Like what's like the 20%

8:56

of the business we can systemize to

8:58

reduce like 80% of the headaches and

9:01

make this thing run pretty damn smooth.

9:03

And then the second aspect is

9:06

before moving on to anything new,

9:08

let's make sure that just the existing

9:10

foundation is running like a well-oiled machine

9:12

so that we almost afford ourselves the

9:14

ability, the time, the freedom to

9:17

either do it doing things we love or

9:19

building that next business arm to get yourself

9:21

to say a million a month.

9:23

Because the last thing that we want is

9:25

to start up this whole productivity lab side of

9:27

your business. And then right while

9:29

that's getting up and going, the other side

9:31

of the business just starts falling apart. And

9:33

now you're just burning it on both

9:36

ends and going crazy.

9:38

And I think it's oftentimes a recipe

9:40

for burnout. And so I think

9:42

to start with, let's just talk about sort of

9:44

that core journey

9:47

that someone in your existing business would

9:49

go through. So if we put yourself

9:52

in the actual customer's shoes, right?

9:55

So I'm someone that maybe

9:57

has first arrived on all these

10:00

YouTube channel because it showed up on

10:02

my homepage of YouTube, and I clicked

10:04

on a video. What's

10:06

that journey that that person goes through

10:09

from Oh, this only a dog dog

10:11

guys really interesting. And I love this

10:13

productivity video I've seen all the way

10:15

through to, you know, the

10:17

end of that journey. What's that kind of what's

10:20

one example of where someone would go?

10:23

Nice. That is, that's just a really, really

10:25

good question, which I've never once thought about. So thank you

10:27

for that. Just like thinking, I should already think

10:29

about this more. Okay, so what's

10:32

one example of the journey? One example of the journey, they

10:34

see one of my videos pop up on the homepage, they're

10:36

like, watch the video, maybe they'll I don't

10:38

know, watch some percentage of the video. And

10:40

then they'll like, okay, cool, close YouTube, forget about it,

10:43

move on to something else. And then because they've watched

10:45

a bit of my video, the next time they go

10:47

on YouTube, maybe the algorithm recommends them another video. And

10:49

so now they're in the sort of the

10:51

Alia doll ecosystem as it relates to the YouTube

10:53

algorithm. And they're watching a handful of my videos.

10:56

At some point, one of two things

10:58

will happen. Most

11:00

likely, they'll just continue

11:03

on as a regular viewer or whatever, but

11:06

they might see a plug for my

11:08

email list, which is like, hey,

11:10

I, you know, send emails every now and then every week,

11:12

just sign up to my newsletter, or

11:14

something. Unlikely, they might sign up

11:16

to one of four, they might sign up for one of our lead

11:19

magnets. We have a video that's gone viral this

11:21

year called how I manage my time with the Trident calendar

11:23

method. See you last year, where people enter the

11:25

email and then there's a little tick box, would you also

11:27

like to send them to the email list? And

11:29

then I think they get the template and it asks them

11:31

a few questions, hey, are you interested in like productivity? Are

11:33

you interested in this? Are you interested in growing YouTube channel,

11:36

kind of thing. Or

11:38

they'll happen happen to stumble across one of

11:41

my videos around how to start and grow

11:43

a YouTube channel. And within those videos, there'll

11:45

be a link to our YouTuber Academy, and

11:47

they might click on that to be like,

11:49

Oh, it's kind of interesting. So

11:51

either they'll end up directly going to the YouTube

11:54

Academy website, or they'll end up on the email

11:56

list, or they'll end up signing up to one

11:58

of our lead magnets, some of which are productivity

12:00

related. some of which are YouTube related, some of

12:02

which are random journaling stuff, just

12:05

because we thought, hey, might as well end up on the email list somehow.

12:10

Then in theory, they will be post sign-up segmented

12:12

into, based on their interests, they

12:15

like productivity, they like YouTube, they like entrepreneurship. I

12:20

think we have a few buckets, which as I say, I'm

12:22

like unsure of, so I look into that. We

12:25

send them, I think, some nurturing emails

12:27

that have a pitch then, hey,

12:30

would you like to sign up for one of the courses?

12:35

Then hopefully, if they are completely going to YouTube

12:37

and they're like, actually,

12:40

I want to start a YouTube channel, they sign up to a

12:42

$1 course, which

12:45

gives them the option to upsell into the $1,000 course. I'm

12:50

like, at least team holding my hand through the whole process, and

12:55

then they might apply for our accelerator program.

13:00

Perfect. As I'm hearing you say all this,

13:02

it's easy to pull out

13:04

from that the core client journey

13:06

and maybe nine of the core systems that matter there. If

13:10

you can nail those, 80% of the battle is won. You

13:15

can't have a YouTube system, which you

13:17

know very well. Your

13:20

competitive advantage is right there. Thumbnails,

13:24

everything that you teach in part-time YouTube

13:26

Academy, like that

13:28

side you got down. The

13:31

question too is, where is that documented? I

13:35

think it's a notion, which is, I think, typically, knowing you, that's

13:40

kind of one of your hubs. Maybe

13:43

someone else. We

13:47

keep on trying to improve it, but it's hard bread

13:49

and butter and I'm very

13:51

happy with our YouTube system.

13:55

So, Tintin owns that, that's

13:57

documented a notion, that one's

13:59

down. talk a lot about lead magnets, right? So

14:01

each one of these different videos you

14:04

have oftentimes leads to something like a score app

14:06

page or a different landing page maybe in ConvertKit

14:08

where you're driving people then to that unique lead

14:10

magnet. If it's the castle method, you drive into

14:13

a castle method for free. If it's a Trident

14:15

method, you're driving to that for free. If it's

14:17

a different personality quiz or something around productivity quizzes,

14:19

you're driving that on the score app. So you've

14:22

got a bunch of these and it can sound

14:24

a little bit amorphous and sort of like, wow,

14:26

there's a lot of these going on. But

14:29

the truth is like, it's just a lead magnet

14:31

system that okay, the YouTube

14:33

video has been made. Are we driving them

14:35

to an existing lead magnet or are we

14:37

creating a new lead magnet for this thing?

14:39

So what is our lead magnet system? Where

14:42

is that documented? And who is the owner of the

14:44

lead magnet system? Yeah, so it's so funny that you

14:46

say that because literally as of about a month ago,

14:49

we moved one of our team members who

14:51

was previously on the podcast and had been working on the

14:53

podcast for like two plus years to

14:55

become the owner of the lead magnet system.

14:57

Because we were like, hey, Amber, we need

15:00

to take the email this really super seriously.

15:03

Amber didn't have much experience, but she absolutely smashed up

15:05

on the podcast over the last two years, super detail

15:07

oriented. Super

15:09

quick learner. So we're just like, all right, take these

15:11

courses, read these books, talk to these people and get

15:13

up to speed on how email works. And now she

15:15

owns our lead magnet system and has documented it in

15:17

Notion where we now have for the first time a

15:20

database of all of our lead magnets. And she's leading

15:22

the charge to be like, okay guys, what are the new lead magnets

15:24

we wanna create and why do we wanna create them? And like, what's

15:26

the goal of the lead magnets and

15:29

all of this sort of stuff. So we have, or

15:31

in the process of building out a lead magnet system. Great. And

15:33

then the one aspect there too that I think is useful is,

15:36

so all that's amazing, is then

15:38

what is the one core metric

15:40

that would determine that person's success?

15:43

So as an example, with lead magnets, you're

15:45

plugging these into YouTube videos. You

15:48

may know that, okay, traditionally,

15:50

when we've plugged that lead magnet

15:52

into strategic spots in a 15

15:54

minute video, we drive approximately 10%.

16:00

of viewers to sign ups for

16:02

that lead magnet. We

16:05

want you to improve that metric and get it to 13%.

16:09

That's a thing. And so

16:11

you may know what is your steady

16:14

state lead magnet conversion from YouTube video

16:17

and try and give them now a stretch

16:19

goal of now that you're solely focused

16:21

on this area, we'd like to

16:23

see that 10% improved to 13%, which over a year that

16:25

could equal hundreds

16:29

of thousands of newsletter sign ups. That's

16:33

a really good point. What

16:35

is the metric? A question I've been thinking about

16:37

a lot with a lot of areas of our business is what

16:40

is the metric that matters here? Because for

16:42

example, for lead magnet stuff and for the email list, we were thinking, so

16:46

we have like a weekly scorecard, which actually, I might

16:48

bring up the laptop and just do a screen share so we can bring it up.

16:51

So we have like a weekly scorecard where based

16:53

on the traction principles, we

16:56

have all these metrics week on week. And

16:58

one thing we don't really track yet, which

17:00

we are now starting to, is like

17:05

how many emails subs

17:08

came from which lead magnets and which

17:10

sources. We have all of those

17:12

in like some combination of Google Analytics, Looker

17:14

Studio, ConvertKit Analytics, they're all over the place.

17:17

But just getting them all in one place is like the

17:19

job for the next week for the team. And

17:22

then UTM linking all these lead magnets because our

17:24

social media people are also driving traffic to some

17:26

of these lead magnets. Because one thing

17:28

that we've thought about

17:31

is that, actually, I'm

17:33

curious to get your take on this, someone who subscribes

17:35

to Sunday Snippets, my email newsletter, versus

17:37

someone who is an actual lead. I

17:40

was speaking to Eric Patek,

17:42

I think, about this, and he was like,

17:44

his view on this was that a lead

17:46

is someone who's expressed explicit

17:49

educational intent in the

17:52

vertical of a product that you actually have. So

17:54

for us, it's like if they sign up to our

17:56

YouTube crash course, or our YouTube channel, School Card, all

17:58

that kind of stuff, makes sense. makes them a lead for

18:00

our YouTuber stuff. Or

18:05

if they've signed up to, for example, the

18:11

Castle method, which is a business thing, and

18:16

we don't yet have a business product, then

18:20

do they count as a lead? Do

18:25

they just count as a

18:27

subscriber? What's

18:30

the source of truth? The

18:36

second aspect is who's the owner, and

18:40

then what's the core metrics of success? We

18:45

have those three things for each of these systems. We're

18:50

moving in a nice direction. We'll

18:56

keep going down the flow. Who's

19:00

the owner of the newsletter? Who's

19:05

owning the newsletter calendar over the next bit? You've

19:10

also got the brand side that gets integrated, so

19:15

it can't just be this week-to-week scrambling per newsletter. Who's

19:20

the owner there, and what would you say is the core metric?

19:25

At the moment, the owner is Nadia, and

19:30

she sorts out the upload calendar, puts the sponsorship in the

19:32

thing, sends

19:35

me a Slack message, being like, hey,

19:40

here's the ConvertKit template ready for you to populate. Sometimes

19:45

it becomes not really a Sunday email, depending

19:50

on how busy I am. It

19:55

would be nice if we were a few weeks ahead, if

20:00

like Ali really doesn't want to do a newsletter one

20:02

week, but Nadia owns that system. The

20:04

metric, I mean we track subscribers

20:07

on Sunday snippets newsletter, we track open rate,

20:10

we track click through rate, but

20:12

we don't think like none of

20:14

these really have a target as such, because

20:17

it's also like my personal newsletter. And

20:20

so how should I be

20:22

thinking about like, yeah,

20:26

you're not recursing the newsletter, if that makes sense.

20:28

Yeah, I just think with any of these, you

20:31

know, it's part art, part science, right? So there's

20:33

no like, oh my gosh, this is the way

20:35

it has to be. And I've been missing out

20:37

all over these years, right? I think my personal

20:39

approach to this stuff is, you

20:41

know, if you have the data grade, if you

20:43

don't like, let's back and napkin it, like how

20:45

many newsletter subscribers have we gotten each of the

20:48

last, say three months? And

20:50

then what is the reasonable growth rate of

20:53

that to hit on a monthly basis, you know,

20:55

for the next year, right? So

20:57

that we have kind of targets and actuals over

21:00

the next year. And we know, okay, like, we're looking to

21:02

hit 12,000 in February, 13,000 in March, so on and like, where

21:07

do we get to? Because the

21:09

success of, you

21:11

know, the lead magnets and newsletters, and you're

21:13

obviously growing a lot on YouTube too. So

21:15

we should be funneling more people to

21:17

the newsletter over time, it shouldn't stay stagnant. Yeah,

21:20

that's a good point. Yeah,

21:25

so I guess a metric for Nadia could

21:27

be newsletter growth. But

21:30

Nadia doesn't really, she's

21:32

more involved in like the system for newsletter

21:34

creation, which is different to I think, everything

21:37

it would be Amber who's on the lead magnet system, which

21:39

would be more newsletter growth. Yep. So maybe for Nadia, it's

21:41

like, hey, let's just keep open rate at like 50%, if

21:43

we can, yeah, or something like

21:45

that. And then there's that. And then there's also things

21:47

like it could just be like, I like that you're

21:49

thinking about like smart goals, like specific measurable, actionable, realistic

21:51

and time bound. The other side too is, yeah,

21:54

maybe it's just that at all times, there's a

21:56

12 week schedule and

21:58

calendar that is made. And

22:01

they are the source of truth to always know

22:03

that there's 12 weeks organized, they're ahead of the

22:05

ball, that as we're planning

22:07

different launches and everything, it's very easy to

22:09

know that the newsletter stuff is

22:11

not some scrambling thing. We know exactly where we want

22:13

to plug these things into. So

22:15

it could be something like that. It could be open rates.

22:18

It could be a combination of these things. Okay,

22:20

cool. So we've got YouTube

22:22

system into lead magnet system

22:25

into newsletter system. Yeah. And

22:27

so we're shopping this with you. I think the next stage that

22:29

you may consider off the

22:31

top is now your

22:34

like lead system, or like

22:36

it could be called a couple of things. Your lead system,

22:38

it could be called like your low ticket product

22:41

system, your funnel system, any

22:43

one of these, you know, we could workshop around. This

22:46

is where now someone's seeing

22:48

the newsletter or seeing your

22:50

content and now kind of raising their

22:52

hand and becoming a lead and getting

22:54

now into one of the streams of products you have, whether it's

22:56

$1, $100, $1,000, whatever it may be. And

23:01

now as Eric had mentioned to you, like that's where we

23:03

start. Like these now people are leads.

23:05

So we're taking people from the broad audience of

23:07

YouTube. They've been in the newsletter, which

23:09

is still a pretty massive audience of people that just may

23:12

be interesting in all these thoughts week to week. And now

23:14

they're sort of raising their hand going, no, I actually want

23:16

to potentially purchase something from you.

23:19

And so it's that person that's managing

23:21

things like what are those low ticket

23:23

products? What are those email sequences? What

23:25

are the text message sequences if

23:27

there are any eventually? I don't think you

23:30

do that yet. And what

23:32

updates need to be made to the

23:34

existing low ticket products? And

23:36

what potentially new low ticket

23:39

products need to be launched?

23:41

Or are we considering launching? Which we

23:43

don't need to get into that too much. But follow

23:46

me so far. This episode

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So thank you so much Brilliant for

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sponsoring this episode. This is

27:26

just like mind blowing to me because all

27:29

you've basically done is just like name

27:31

systems for each step of the process. And already

27:33

it just feels like I have way more clarity.

27:36

The fact that you were just like, oh yeah, there's these nine systems. Oh

27:38

no, yeah, there's the YouTube system. I'm like, yeah,

27:40

there's the system. There's the, you know, the Leimack

27:42

system. Yeah, the system. Yeah, the system for the

27:45

incentive. I'm like, oh, just thinking of it as

27:47

a system, like

27:49

a sort of a system that's strung together with

27:51

other systems, just makes the whole thing feel a

27:53

lot less black boxy, a lot more manageable. So

27:56

that's just like knife on a sort of meta level. I

27:59

guess, okay. So for our leads system, this

28:02

is where it's not to get a bit muddy because

28:04

we have like Yakuba marketing guy. We have Gareth, our

28:06

product guy. We have Saf who is

28:08

helping, who's building our CRM. He's like our sales

28:11

and marketing RevOps kind of guy. We've just transferred

28:13

to HubSpot as of like a month ago and

28:16

are trying to use that to track

28:18

leads and stuff. But now we're running

28:20

into the issue of like, well, we don't

28:22

want to bring every newsletter subscriber into HubSpot because that's freaking

28:25

expensive. And like, what if

28:27

we bring everyone who's put their hand up into HubSpot? That's

28:29

still really expensive. Hmm, should we bang someone for HubSpot? And

28:31

we start to get into these ROI calculations. My

28:34

instinct is that we should just bring all the leads,

28:36

official leads into HubSpot. Um,

28:38

and I'm yeah, between

28:40

the Gareth on product, Yakub on

28:42

marketing, generally and Saf on like

28:45

sales and marketing RevOps. I'm not like,

28:47

I wouldn't be able to say who is the owner of the lead

28:49

system. Okay. Do you have a sense?

28:52

Yeah. Yeah. So it's

28:54

a great, you know, this, this comes up, right? Like

28:56

this is natural where as we get in, some of

28:58

them are super clear. Like YouTube, Tin Tin, obviously is

29:01

our guy. Yeah. And now we're into, um, more

29:03

like the funnel and we're a little bit confused there as

29:05

to who the person. That's

29:08

actually a great part of this whole sort of

29:10

thinking exercise, right? It's like, Oh, damn, like who

29:12

actually is owning that thing? And maybe

29:14

what we have right now is like a few different

29:16

stakeholders that are generally aligned,

29:18

but also are sort of sometimes swimming

29:20

in different directions. Yes. And are not

29:22

totally aligned in their thinking. So, you

29:24

know, that may be caused to like,

29:26

Hey, we need to create a

29:28

bit of a funnel system here. Let's

29:30

get everyone in the room. Let's determine who's

29:33

the core owner of this. And

29:35

then almost like the sub owners, maybe

29:37

of the more minute parts of it. Right.

29:40

So let's decide on what is the

29:42

core metric there in terms of maybe

29:44

leads per month. Yeah. Right.

29:46

Let's determine who's like the overarching, like when

29:51

one guy is saying, Hey, we should do this and

29:53

another guy saying, no, no, no, no, no. Like we're

29:55

not using hub spot and pipe in those leads in there

29:58

yet. It's too expensive. We're doing this. Yeah. Who's the one.

30:00

that can just say, no, we're doing this, and it's not

30:02

you. And it's like that owner

30:04

needs to be able to say, hey, I respect both

30:06

these directions, but we're doing this. Nice. Yeah,

30:09

that would be so nice. Yeah. That would be a

30:11

breath of fresh air. So we need to kind

30:13

of, we don't need to solve that right now. But I think

30:15

in a room, you've got a great team, and you guys are

30:17

all super close, and you guys go on team trips every quarter.

30:19

So maybe this is a good topic for the next team trip

30:21

you guys run. So figuring

30:23

out who is owning this funnel

30:26

system. I'm

30:29

just going to think out loud here. Lead

30:31

magnets get

30:34

some people onto Sunday Snippets the newsletter,

30:37

but also get some people to

30:39

become leads by raising

30:41

their hand for a YouTube product or a productivity product or

30:43

whatever. To

30:45

what extent then would Amber, who is

30:48

our lead magnet system owner and

30:50

responsible for growing the email list generally, should,

30:54

to what extent would she be also then

30:56

in charge of the leads system? What

30:59

is the point of the lead system? What

31:03

I'm categorizing, let's just call it the

31:05

funnel system. To be clear, right? Those

31:07

people are then taking the people

31:09

that have raised their hands and are now leads,

31:11

and now they are now directing them to

31:14

the different products in our product

31:16

suite. So some of these people are determined to

31:18

be like for the $1 product, and they help

31:20

facilitate that through email sequences. Some people are determined that

31:22

they're right for the $100, the $1,000, the new productivity

31:25

lab product

31:27

you have coming out. There's this

31:29

whole sort of architecture of

31:31

different email sequences, hand raisers,

31:35

just kind of nurturing that goes on there

31:38

that people are responsible for on your

31:40

team. And that someone now, it's like,

31:42

OK, I've brought you that individual. Now you need

31:44

to now filter them to the correct product that

31:46

we have. And that's a whole other beast of

31:48

a thing. Yeah, OK, fine. So Amber's job would

31:51

be to put the leads into the system. And

31:53

once they are in the system, once they're in,

31:55

let's say, HubSpot, then someone else on the team

31:57

takes over and is like, all right, I can

31:59

do this. I've got this. And that person

32:01

is building out the email flows and

32:03

the if-then automations and all that stuff.

32:06

Exactly. Funnel them into the workplace.

32:08

All those ConvertKit automations that I think you likely

32:10

have. Okay, so there's probably an owner of ConvertKit.

32:12

Yeah, yeah, an owner of ConvertKit. He owns all

32:14

those things. He's absolutely sick of that. So he

32:16

would own the funnel system. Exactly. Nice. Exactly.

32:19

And then you said determine the metric

32:21

that matters. So presumably it's not number

32:23

of leads generated from weak because that would

32:25

be Amber's lead geometric. It would be something

32:27

else. What could that metric be?

32:30

I mean, inevitably I think that if they're doing a good job,

32:33

there's a level of like how many

32:35

of these leads are we converting to

32:37

paying customers? Oh yeah, nice. Right?

32:40

Yeah. these

32:42

email sequences filter people into

32:44

the right product for them. And

32:47

those people convert. And

32:49

if they, whether it's a conversion rate from

32:51

lead to product, could be one. Second,

32:54

it could just be straight revenue. Right? Just

32:57

doing a good job and their sequences are correct.

33:00

They're ideally getting

33:02

people monetized from lead to

33:04

transaction. Nice. Yeah. So

33:07

in our case, two metrics come to mind. One is

33:09

just straight revenue, but straight

33:11

revenue from products

33:13

that people could have just purchased with

33:15

a credit card, but also number of

33:17

sales calls booked for our high ticket

33:20

thing, which or number of applications received

33:22

for our high ticket thing, which

33:24

would also be like at

33:26

the end point of the funnel system, I guess. So

33:28

either they convert into revenue or they apply

33:31

for the thing. Yeah. And

33:33

what you could have too is just like an overall like

33:35

revenue number, but then be able to like double click into

33:37

that and see like, okay, where's this coming from? Right?

33:40

So it's like, oh, like how much of this is the

33:43

dollar product, the hundred dollar, the thousand dollar, so on and

33:45

so forth. Yeah. Man, this

33:47

is good shit. Okay. So the next one,

33:49

I think we're on number six, I hope, is

33:52

the sales system. Right? So

33:55

now you have people that are now been piped

33:57

into HubSpot. Some people have

33:59

converted. to a low ticket product which is handled in

34:02

the funnel system by your ConvertKit owner. Some

34:04

of them now are moving on to a high

34:07

ticket close

34:09

and are being passed to a salesperson

34:12

or whatever you may call it in your business to

34:14

then have a conversation with people and convert

34:16

them to sale. So who's

34:18

the owner of the sales system? A sales system in

34:20

your case may consist of things like who

34:23

owns the sales script, who's

34:25

ultimately in charge of the pricing of

34:28

that product potentially, who's

34:30

in charge of hiring more people on

34:32

that team, who's in charge of the

34:34

setters, people that may be setting

34:36

leads in other areas that we haven't discussed,

34:38

which not to confuse us but you get

34:40

it, and also

34:43

the person that's inevitably responsible for

34:46

running a well-oiled sales machine. Nice.

34:49

Okay. This is good. So at

34:51

the moment, it is unclear who owns the sales system.

34:53

So we have this amazing guy called Kevin who works

34:55

for us as a freelancer, as a sort

34:58

of sales closer. He took our YouTuber

35:00

Academy years ago and enjoys working

35:02

with our team and he's amazing. We

35:05

also have Saf who is our kind of HubSpot guy

35:07

on the sales and marketing side who

35:09

is sort of working with Kevin to build,

35:11

be like, hey Kevin, what are the fields

35:13

that you need to be populated? And

35:16

then Kevin's giving him feedback to be like, oh

35:18

actually, sometimes we've got a bunch of

35:20

unqualified leads, so how do we qualify them more before they

35:22

hit the sales call? All that kind of stuff. But

35:25

if I were to ask who would be responsible

35:27

for hiring another closer or for setting pricing and

35:29

stuff, it would be like, oh,

35:32

I don't really know, sort of Angus, sort of

35:34

Ali, sort of everyone. The sales

35:36

system does not have a clear owner. Right now. Cool.

35:40

Yeah. So what I would say

35:42

is this isn't that

35:44

uncommon, right? Oftentimes, I think people

35:48

like ourselves that are very like, we're

35:50

creative, we're into building like

35:52

beautiful things and serving people and

35:56

oftentimes are into like the content side of things. I think

35:58

at heart, like me and you are both artists. It's

36:00

oftentimes like that sales end of the business. It's

36:05

a little bit of an afterthought. It's

36:10

not like our innate default to go and be like, oh,

36:15

I'm going to build a badass sales team.

36:20

I've been there in my own career years ago. I

36:25

had every other part of the business running just

36:27

beautifully, but I realized it was best. I

36:33

had to get a good handle on that myself. Inevitably,

36:38

one of the core metrics it sounds like as

36:40

an overall business you're

36:43

looking to get to in 2024 is to a million a month.

36:48

A million a month is largely a sales thing. You're

36:53

great at product. You're insanely good at content. Inevitably,

36:57

that's going to be really damn important if we're going to

36:59

get to a million a month. Number

37:02

two, we got to have a badass owner of that.

37:07

I think you need to

37:09

have an understanding of it. Angus

37:12

needs to have a strong handle of that who's

37:14

your general manager. Inevitably,

37:17

someone on the leadership team needs to really know that in and

37:19

out so

37:22

that they're not just being told some BS by the sales

37:24

organization that it's

37:26

not that we need more leads, our close rate is

37:28

an abomination. It's

37:31

not that we need a bit more

37:33

closers. We

37:36

have the worst show rate ever. Only 20% of people are showing

37:38

up to calls. We

37:41

need to fix the show rate. I'm not just hiring more

37:43

and throwing more closers at a problem. That's

37:46

not the problem. You

37:49

need to have someone on the team, on

37:51

the leadership team that can understand the root causes of

37:54

what your manager is from my perspective, or

37:56

else you really risk the organization running away

37:58

from you. And

38:00

you see this a lot, like I think in terms

38:02

of the stage that you're at, and

38:05

not all the difference in the stage that even I'm at in

38:07

some of my businesses, is that you're

38:10

not gonna die because you don't

38:12

have enough business, you will die

38:14

because you get too much business.

38:17

And the whole thing just collapses in on

38:19

itself. Either the sales team

38:22

just becomes a mess and they're closing

38:24

the wrong people, or they scale too

38:26

fast, and then the next stage,

38:28

which will get to customer success and

38:31

delivery, that just falls flat on its

38:33

face, because you have more customers than you know what

38:35

to deal with, and it can be a reputation ruiner,

38:37

and everything can just fall flat. So

38:39

that sales piece, you think you

38:41

have a couple options. Either Angus

38:45

learns that piece, gets his own hands dirty,

38:47

and starts building that up himself,

38:50

or he just gets more of an understanding, and then

38:52

promotes someone from within to own that

38:54

piece of your business. Maybe it's the

38:56

closer sales guy that's been there to

39:00

be a sales lead. Or

39:02

you bring someone from the outside, which has

39:04

its pros and cons, to then own that

39:06

area. This

39:09

is very good. Yeah, so I realized

39:12

a couple of months ago that I had zero

39:14

handle on what sales even meant, and at the

39:16

time we had access to Cole Gordon's Closers course,

39:18

we took it last year, and

39:20

so I just sort of blitzed through a lot of that, and I was like, oh,

39:22

okay. I feel, I sort

39:25

of get it a little bit more now. Watched

39:27

a bunch of YouTube videos about it. Haven't read any books about

39:29

sales systems yet, although I know that there are some on the

39:32

market. So yeah,

39:34

in my own head, that's like a whole, a

39:36

bit of a whole of knowledge. Where

39:40

I know, for example, what a setter is and a

39:42

closer is, and speaking to some creators on this here

39:44

in Dubai, it's like, oh, you can do DM closes

39:46

as well, and DM setters, interesting. We're not really doing

39:48

that, and all this sort of stuff. Yeah,

39:52

definitely needs an owner. Do

39:55

you think, so

39:57

for example, Saf, who is our HubSpot, sales

40:00

and marketing RevOps guy at the moment, doesn't

40:03

really have experience with like building a sales

40:05

team as such, but has a lot

40:07

of experience with like, kind of the

40:09

RevOps side of things. Do

40:12

you think he would be reasonable to promote

40:14

into sales lead or is it for this

40:16

sort of thing just better to get someone

40:18

with experience or either promoting Kevin, if he

40:20

wants to join our team, uh, like

40:22

full time or bringing someone from the outside? Yeah.

40:25

So there's a lot of ways to slice the

40:27

pie here. I think

40:29

that I've seen both work successfully, both

40:32

like getting an existing a player and

40:34

then elevating them, which I think is

40:36

generally my default. Um, or

40:38

if you feel like you don't have the right

40:40

person internally for that, then looking to get someone

40:43

from the outside. I think the benefit from promoting

40:45

people within is number one, it's just a great

40:47

culture builder and people realize, Hey, wherever you start

40:49

in this company, isn't where you're going to end

40:51

up over time. Like look at, you know, Angus

40:54

started as a writer here and scripting with me

40:56

in my apartment five years ago and I was

40:58

running the whole operation. I'm sure that's a great

41:00

sort of thing that a lot of people are like,

41:02

Oh yeah, wherever I start, like, man, there's so much

41:05

career mobility here. So I generally like that. And I

41:07

know you're about that as well. And

41:09

so I would say that's where you'd

41:12

not probably want to default to. If

41:14

you determine that the gentleman that you

41:16

would consider, then fit for it, then yeah,

41:18

we need to look for someone from the

41:20

outside. I would still say that no matter

41:22

what route you go there, Angus,

41:24

your general manager still needs to get a

41:26

hell of an understanding over that system. Because

41:30

again, if the core metric of the companies get to

41:32

a million a month, like we need to make sure

41:34

that that sales system is down pat

41:37

and really strong. And it's, I

41:40

don't think it's something that you are going to

41:42

want to dive to into yourself, just knowing you

41:44

like as friends. And so I'd say

41:47

like Angus needs to get a good

41:49

understanding, go through some of Cole Gordon's stuff, really get

41:51

a good understanding of like how this stuff all works

41:53

as if he was almost running it. He

41:55

should be on the sales calls. He should be part

41:58

of making the projections. It

42:00

should almost be as if Angus is running it,

42:02

and so is this other gentleman. So you

42:04

almost get a couple people on what is

42:06

probably one of the bottlenecks right

42:08

now in the company as we like to scale

42:10

it. Nice.

42:13

Just for a bit of a sort of context

42:15

for people, and also for me, actually, this

42:17

is helpful. It's

42:20

only recently become apparent to me that

42:22

sales is a thing, because before I was

42:24

always just like, oh, you just, I

42:26

don't know, as a creator, you have a big audience,

42:28

you just make a product, people buy the product, like,

42:30

what, like, hop in a call? What the

42:33

fuck? Why would anyone need to hop in

42:35

a call to buy anything? Like,

42:40

why do you think, well, why do you feel that

42:42

sales is like, like first thing, what

42:44

do sales refer to and why is it so important in getting to a

42:46

million a month? Yeah, so

42:49

there's no one size fits all sales

42:51

model, first off, right? You

42:54

could run your business whereby

42:56

there is a very limited sales

42:58

function. And all sales

43:01

are just made through the funnel

43:03

system we talked about. And

43:05

the sales system actually is almost

43:07

in many senses eliminated, whereby just

43:09

all sales are happening online without

43:12

ever speaking to anyone. In

43:15

your existing system right now, you have some

43:17

more high ticket products that are, say, over

43:19

a couple thousand dollars. And

43:22

you've determined that having, you

43:24

know, someone that people can talk to as it's a

43:26

big investment in their life would be useful. I

43:30

tend to agree with that general approach. And

43:33

so, yeah,

43:35

they're, I think, it's

43:37

as follows. It's like, you're looking

43:39

to have a more high ticket product.

43:43

With those products, we know that oftentimes people

43:45

want to speak to someone because they have

43:47

questions. And the

43:49

salesperson, I don't think in either

43:52

of our cases and what we're running needs

43:54

to be like a sales salesperson. I think

43:56

maybe whether it's us or others in the

43:59

audience, when they they hear sales, oftentimes they

44:01

think it's like, oh my God, this person

44:03

is super aggressive, just trying to persuade me.

44:05

Maybe that person's unethical, like just telling

44:08

me lies, when really, I think, especially

44:10

in what we're doing, a

44:13

lot of the people that you're selling are

44:15

people that have followed your journey for years. They

44:17

know you, they know what you're about, they trust

44:19

you, they even know what they're about to

44:21

buy. They just need someone to kind of answer

44:24

some questions, help them get a little bit of

44:26

a deeper understanding on how the community works and

44:29

what the process will be from kind of

44:31

start to finish and then make the purchase,

44:33

right? And so I think

44:35

why sales is important is because

44:39

you've got all of these warm

44:41

leads that you've generated through the lead magnet system

44:43

and you funnel them to the right product now

44:45

through the funnel system. And now

44:47

they're at that final step. And

44:49

we wanna make sure that all that investment

44:52

that you've made in your content, which I

44:54

believe is like upwards of 150K or so

44:56

a month, that

44:58

we need to make sure that that investment pays

45:01

off in spades, not just so

45:03

that, Ollie can live the lifestyle he's

45:05

hoping for, but because you've got a team of

45:07

12 people that we've gotta feed. We've

45:09

got other products that we wanna launch. We

45:11

wanna continue to invest in these existing products

45:14

that you've made. And we

45:16

can't do that unless those sales in

45:18

that area are carried through from

45:20

hot lead through to close.

45:23

That's how I see it as important, not just for

45:26

the end customers, so that their questions

45:29

are handled and they can find themselves in the right

45:32

product that's meant for them. It's

45:34

also important for us as a business to

45:36

make sure that we're then able to use

45:38

the profits from those sales to reinvest into

45:40

people, the product, and back into the processes

45:42

and systems of the business to make sure

45:44

this thing runs like a well-oiled machine. Nice.

45:47

That's great. Yeah, the other thing that I

45:49

found really nice about having sales

45:51

as being like a thing and yeah,

45:53

A, I think I immediately had that

45:56

like kind of gag response to

45:58

the word sales just because the word sales feels. a bit

46:00

like a dirty word. And

46:06

then I realized, oh, actually, it doesn't have to be like that. It's

46:14

also been really helpful in terms of expectation

46:16

setting. Previously,

46:19

we were allowing people to buy the 5K product just

46:21

on the website. And

46:23

so some people would buy it through the website, but then because they hadn't actually

46:26

spoken to someone, we

46:28

had an expectation around what to expect from the thing. And

46:34

we realized actually making everyone apply to join the accelerator.

46:38

And then it allows us to kind of say no

46:40

to people because there were some people

46:42

who just had wildly unrealistic expectations. Like

46:45

I'm a total beginner. I'm 50 years old. I've never used a computer in my life. And

46:50

I want to be able to quit my job within three

46:53

months by starting a YouTube channel. Either we have

46:55

a conversation to real-life expectations or we just say, sorry,

46:57

I don't think this is the right fit for you. Whereas previously,

46:59

we would have got those people in just through the

47:02

checkout link on the website. And now they're in.

47:04

And now our customer success girls are like, ah,

47:07

okay. Alice has wildly unrealistic

47:10

expectations, but she's already in

47:12

and now it's a bit awkward.

47:14

And so we found that actually the expectation setting is also

47:16

a really useful part of the

47:18

sales process. Yeah, no, exactly. I think a

47:20

lot of these sales folks are actually

47:23

more like kind of product specialists or

47:25

strategists, right? Making sure that the right

47:27

people get to the right product. And

47:29

if someone's not right for this or they

47:32

have the wrong expectations, either get

47:34

to a common understanding as to whether it's right for them

47:36

or not, or just turn them away. If

47:38

it just doesn't make sense and it's not the right fit

47:40

because we don't want someone coming

47:42

into anything that we're creating that just

47:44

doesn't seem aligned with the general mission, the general kind

47:47

of flow of what we're trying to create. So

47:49

yeah, the next system then after that

47:52

is your delivery system, right?

47:55

Now you've sold something to someone and

47:57

you've made generally some of the best. some

48:00

sort of promise as to what they can

48:02

expect from joining the product that you've created.

48:05

And so now we need to make sure that

48:07

the actual customer success side of things and the

48:09

delivery is down pat. So

48:11

that now when they're in, they want to stay in and

48:13

they're super happy by the end of that experience that they

48:16

want to be upsold maybe to something

48:18

else you have. Or when you release Productivity Lab,

48:20

this new thing that you're about to drop soon,

48:23

they're eager buyers for that because when

48:26

they signed up for the existing thing

48:28

that you sold them, they

48:30

were blown away in terms of

48:32

the value. And so anything new you launch

48:34

must also be worth joining as well, you've

48:36

kind of kept that promise and then some

48:38

for them. Nice, cool. So we've got Alison

48:40

who's in charge of our customer success system.

48:43

She has an amazing team underneath her working on

48:45

that. Our

48:48

like accelerator clients are super happy. We have

48:50

a tiny, tiny refund rate. We've got like

48:52

ridiculously happy customers, which is amazing. And we're

48:54

working with your friends at Ethical Scaling to

48:56

help systemize the customer success

48:58

side of the business and figure

49:01

out like, depending on is someone

49:03

a complete beginner, a

49:06

non-complete beginner, intermediate or advanced YouTuber, like which path

49:08

they need to be taken down, what are the

49:10

key touch points and milestones along that path. A

49:13

big realization from this whole process is that we have way

49:15

more beginners than I thought we did. And

49:18

therefore, actually, where I'm thinking, hey,

49:21

we're talking about systems to scale a YouTube channel, actually a

49:23

lot of our people have not even started because they're held

49:25

back by limiting beliefs and imposter syndrome and fear of talking

49:28

to the camera. And so we were

49:30

like, oh, okay, we actually need to zoom

49:32

into the beginner end of the thing to

49:34

really dial that out. Because I'm very

49:36

experienced with like helping someone scale a YouTube channel, but

49:38

like for a complete beginner struggling with emotional issues, I'm

49:42

actually not the right person to be talking to

49:44

them. But

49:46

whereas our customer success girls are amazing

49:48

at that, like they love that accountability,

49:50

the support. So we're like

49:53

zooming into that and really like dialing the customer success

49:55

system. Question on this front. We

49:59

have, for example, $1,000 self-paced course

50:01

and our $1 self-paced foundations course

50:03

and our like $27 like templates and

50:06

stuff at the moment improving

50:09

on a self-paced product Feels

50:11

like it doesn't have a clear owner because customer success

50:13

feels like it's for the accelerator Which is a high

50:16

ticket thing that has loads of things But

50:18

like that more like product side of things That's

50:21

just like improving the core things that are part of

50:23

the funnel system the end products of the funnel system

50:25

We've got Gareth who's a head of product I

50:27

guess that he could sort of be in charge

50:30

of like where does improving

50:32

on existing self-paced stuff fit into

50:34

this system? Yeah, I in

50:36

my own brain see that as part of the

50:38

funnel system a bit So you have the owner

50:40

of the funnel system They're driving people to either

50:42

leads for high ticket or selling them direct to

50:45

these low ticket offerings Yeah, and the product guy

50:47

that you just mentioned would sit under that person

50:49

less likely So this person's orchestrating convert kit

50:51

sending them to the right things. Yeah, and then

50:54

with those low ticket offerings The

50:57

improvements of those are creating new ones that

50:59

product I sits under the funnel guy And

51:04

so Yeah, that makes a

51:06

lot of sense on the customer's side It

51:08

makes sense that you have a couple different

51:10

journeys It doesn't surprise me that you have

51:12

more beginners than you thought the reason being

51:14

is that well you're creating this massive audience

51:16

on YouTube, which is your primary lead funnel

51:18

to all of your products and It's

51:22

just natural that there'd be more beginners in

51:24

something than advanced people. No, it makes a

51:26

little physics Yeah, but there are beginners people

51:28

haven't started YouTube than people that have yeah,

51:30

it just makes sense that yeah Hey, there's

51:32

quite a lot of leads on

51:34

that side So yeah, you're right You could have

51:36

you should have a couple pathways there in terms of

51:38

the product to make sure that there's people that are

51:41

you know Not started

51:43

YouTube yet are getting certain experiences and then those

51:45

that are starting and scaling YouTube

51:47

get it sort of a different experience and maybe

51:49

probably skip a couple of the for intro modules

51:51

as an example. Yeah, and So

51:54

from there, yeah that

51:57

area very similar to how we just

51:59

map Though your overall business

52:01

system. It's almost

52:03

like the customer success journey has it's

52:06

own journey. yep in system to it.

52:08

If so, as a customer now have

52:10

you when I'm in the program. What

52:13

are all of the different touch points

52:15

I get along that journey? right?

52:17

Now when you map it out it could

52:20

actually surprise you that there's maybe like Cd

52:22

regularly my of the intro email the onboard

52:24

and call the first module than his exercise

52:26

a complete and so on and so foil

52:29

and then the question is okay now this

52:31

thing is mapped out. whether it's on a

52:33

whiteboard miro notion, google docs doesn't matter, just

52:35

wherever or to be kind of simplify that

52:37

so that maybe there's a lot of touch

52:40

points and he gets a little confusing and

52:42

we may be wanna just like condense it

52:44

slightly that obviously the value oftentimes of these

52:46

educational resources like. You're building is getting people

52:48

from where they're at to where the look

52:51

into go as quickly as possible. So been

52:53

kind of reduce the simple father's steps and

52:55

then make them more delightful. We've. Created

52:57

a great product will be my more delightful.

53:00

So. I think say you get of seventy five,

53:02

eighty steps down to sixty right and we're like

53:04

okay, these are the core parts of the journey.

53:09

Know. The

53:12

Power of Moments As a book by Chippendale

53:14

he's ah the same authors as much are

53:17

made to deck and they talk about. It

53:20

when someone looks back on a experience

53:22

in their life, it's often times these

53:24

sort of peak moments. That

53:26

they really remember. And. So after

53:29

we'd gone and shown those maybe

53:31

sixty course steps that make up

53:33

an amazing part time you tube

53:35

or academy or amazing youtube accelerator.

53:38

We. Want to go and then look at like

53:40

me? be that journey go okay would or maybe

53:42

a few of like the key moments there were

53:45

going to kind of break. the scripts were going

53:47

to double down on that when they look back

53:49

on their experience inside of this. Container.

53:52

This product this educational experience.

53:54

Whatever. They

53:56

are just like wow that was something else.

53:58

So. Well maybe it

54:01

was. Ah, I'm getting their

54:03

first you tube video reviewed. By

54:05

a customer success person in a really

54:08

cool way. or maybe was at a

54:10

graduation call. They. Were on. That was

54:12

a great celebration. Or maybe when they published their

54:14

first three youtube videos, they got a surprise in

54:17

the mail from you guys. Or.

54:20

I don't know something but sorted and look at

54:22

those things and go okay. We're going to like

54:24

spice up these key moments a little bit and

54:26

go from, you know, maybe this being like an

54:28

Ada to tend to and eleven at a ten

54:31

midterms of just delight. Arm. And.

54:34

Also then just going and filtering as touch points to

54:36

like. One. Thing.

54:38

That I think is really, really important to

54:40

think about is. A lot

54:43

of the time when people purchase something and absurd new Been there

54:45

in your life. You. Buy that thing and

54:47

there's a slight sense of buyers remorse if.

54:49

I. Personally like for some reason, why buy

54:52

clothes afterwards and like food and I want

54:54

to buy this. The. These clothes that

54:56

are no like limit the wrong decision but we

54:58

have a girlfriend with great style that like better

55:00

about you Definitely the reds yes and I got

55:03

it either I thank you think it's but it's

55:05

a natural thing in humans as to feel like

55:07

that little bit of uncertainty and so I like

55:09

to think of that on boarding call that they

55:11

have. As. The goal of

55:13

the Onboard and Co is to deliver. A

55:17

to X r O Y on their

55:19

initial investment in the program. So

55:22

say they invested five thousand. How in

55:24

the initial call you deliver? Ten thousand

55:26

dollars of value be up to instantly.

55:28

They're like oh my God. This intro

55:30

call itself just paid for this entire

55:32

program us, not to mention whatever else

55:34

always got planned here for the rest

55:36

of this experience. Yeah, we just completely

55:38

smash any. Possibility of

55:40

people being like this wasn't worth it right?

55:42

And so that legally example of the I'd

55:44

have liked been a with that for success

55:46

system. Once you get the initial part down

55:49

pads we simplify the system. We have an

55:51

owner of it, it's documented than giving it

55:53

another scrub way through to delight. And.

55:55

as a peak moments and then maybe

55:57

giving that intro sequence another scrub through

56:00

to make sure that the onboarding call in it

56:02

is just an absolute banger and people are blown

56:04

away. Nice. Oh, that's

56:06

super inspiring. I love that. Yeah,

56:09

I can already think of a lot of different things that we can

56:11

do just on that call that

56:13

would help people get that experience of delight. It's

56:16

like, oh, shit, this is

56:18

already really good. One

56:20

thing that I'm kind of thinking as we're talking through

56:22

all this stuff is that on the

56:25

one hand, I'm like, damn, this is a lot

56:27

of work. But on the other hand, I'm like, it's

56:29

so good that this is a lot of work because

56:32

we are actively doing a lot of this work and

56:34

actively finding ways to do this and like the

56:36

more time that passes, as long as we're just focused

56:38

on improving these systems over time, the more of a

56:41

moat we build around our own business where

56:43

for someone to compete with us on this, bloody

56:45

hell, that's going to be odd. Like, my goodness. Yeah,

56:47

I imagine someone listening to this and thinking, you know,

56:51

this idea of starting like a YouTube 12 accelerated

56:53

12 month program seems kind of funky, like let's

56:55

make it happen. And I'm like, okay, good luck. Yeah.

56:59

When we talk about too, with folks like yourself that

57:01

are looking to get from, you know, say 500k

57:04

per month to a million a month.

57:06

Yeah. There's a couple of frames that I often

57:08

have experienced when I do this exercise in my

57:10

own businesses. Number one

57:12

is you've got amazing people

57:14

in your business, folks like

57:16

Tintin, Angus, and yeah,

57:19

the other folks I've met on your team,

57:21

like are just next level, right? So while

57:23

this may seem a little bit overwhelming to

57:25

you, I think this clarity, this structure may

57:28

actually feel very enlightening and just really, yeah,

57:30

nice for them, right? Because now they're like, oh, I own

57:32

this area. Yeah, I've already got most of these things around

57:34

me. I just need to kind of package it up. Yeah.

57:36

Which leads to the second thing, which is you've

57:39

been running this for quite some time. When

57:41

I'm building these out, I generally try

57:43

to default to copy and paste versus

57:45

building something that new. Yeah. Like

57:47

this process that you're about to implement and

57:49

systemize in this, it's probably more of a

57:51

process of simplifying and eliminating than it is

57:53

like creating some new stuff. Yeah. Maybe there's

57:55

a couple things like in the sales system

57:57

you mentioned, like there's some stuff there. potentially,

58:00

but most of those other areas are just

58:02

like, oh yeah, let's just amalgamate what we

58:04

got and sequence it all, right,

58:06

and just put it all there and clean

58:08

it up. But it's not anything like

58:10

net new you really got to build. Right?

58:13

So yeah, getting back to the

58:16

customer success side, I think there are generally

58:18

three core metrics there to consider.

58:21

Number one is

58:24

if and when you have something that can

58:26

be upsold to someone, that

58:29

team is almost like a back end

58:31

sales team. So if they're

58:33

doing a really good job, the people that join

58:35

the YouTube accelerator would be super stoked to then

58:37

join the productivity lab you start as an example.

58:39

So customer success becomes a profit center rather than

58:41

a cost center. Exactly. It

58:44

should be a massive profit center if you're doing it right. Oftentimes

58:46

if that division is working properly,

58:49

they are doubling your revenue and

58:51

more than doubling your profit. Because

58:54

you already have this whole infrastructure and then

58:56

they're just adding more revenue to the existing

58:58

infrastructure without adding much more costs. So

59:02

upsells, number one, the second

59:04

aspect is testimonials. So

59:08

just keeping those testimonials great, your

59:10

landing pages, I'm always inspired by the testimonials you

59:12

have there. Yeah,

59:15

it's awesome to see like where people start and then

59:17

you got the cool graphs as to like where they

59:19

are now. They should be responsible for getting say each

59:22

of them, say 15 of those a

59:24

month. But they're doing a good job, they're

59:27

recording where people started at and then they're

59:29

like tracking their growth over time whether it's

59:31

people that they're working with now or the

59:33

alumni of the program and making sure that

59:35

we constantly have a fresh batch so when

59:37

I scroll through your landing pages, it's almost

59:39

just this endless scroll of graphs at the

59:41

bottom of just like overwhelming social proof that

59:43

you can also be using in your funnel

59:45

emails as well. So they're constantly getting all

59:48

these new fresh ones versus people constantly seeing,

59:50

oh, I keep seeing the same testimonials

59:52

over and over again, say two years down the road. It's

59:54

like, no, we want a fresh batch constant because that stuff

59:56

is the best content possible for things like your

59:58

lead magnets and your funnel. system. And

1:00:01

then the last thing there, not

1:00:03

to overwhelm you, but just things I've learned, I'm just sharing

1:00:05

it in case it's useful. Is

1:00:08

your referrals. Right.

1:00:10

So inevitably, like the best people

1:00:12

to sell are

1:00:14

people that are referred by an existing customer.

1:00:17

And your best leads, your hot list

1:00:19

leads are your referred leads. Right.

1:00:22

So making sure that these, this customer's success

1:00:24

team in the interest of making them a

1:00:26

profit center are ideally asking

1:00:29

people at strategic moments in time, which you

1:00:31

should map out inside of that client journey

1:00:33

map, where they're going to ask

1:00:35

them. Right. And so that each month, whether

1:00:37

they're on a one-to-one call or maybe they're in a group call

1:00:40

and at the end they're just saying, Hey, you guys got a

1:00:42

lot out of this. We'd really appreciate it. Do you just dump

1:00:44

an email into the chat of someone that you think would get

1:00:46

a lot out of this. We'd love to go and give them

1:00:48

a free resource that we've just created and see

1:00:50

if they're interested in hopping on board like the rest of

1:00:52

you. Assuming you've got a lot out of this, we'd appreciate

1:00:54

it. Yeah.

1:00:57

One, as you're saying, there's a thinking, one of the things that

1:00:59

holds a lot of beginner YouTubers back

1:01:01

and actually pro YouTubers back is the fact that no one

1:01:04

around them is doing the thing. And

1:01:06

I think everyone has a, at least one

1:01:08

friend who they think this person should probably

1:01:10

sell a YouTube channel. And so

1:01:12

like, I think an individual's chances of success are

1:01:14

way higher if they can also bring in a

1:01:16

friend and have a friend to go through the

1:01:18

process with, because now it becomes a social activity

1:01:20

and not just an individual thing you do on

1:01:22

your own computer. So I think there's something

1:01:24

around there. Similarly with productivity lab, yeah,

1:01:27

referrals, I think is something I haven't really

1:01:29

thought about just yet, but definitely

1:01:31

something to think about. Yeah. And so I

1:01:33

think we're on the final two systems now. So

1:01:36

let's roll up our sleeves. So the

1:01:38

next one is your finance system, right?

1:01:41

There, it's things like making sure that

1:01:43

we're collecting the cash. If

1:01:45

you have things like payment terms for what you're doing,

1:01:47

we want to make sure that we're modeling out the

1:01:50

business over the next year. So if our goal is

1:01:52

to hit a million a month, we need

1:01:54

to forecast, you know, when are we going to hit

1:01:56

that? And then each month, the older view, are we

1:01:58

on track, off track? What were our actual. versus

1:02:00

our forecasted revenue. Home

1:02:05

run that I've learned over time is, again, I think we're

1:02:07

similar. We're

1:02:10

artists, things like sales and finance sometimes can take

1:02:12

a bit of a backseat because

1:02:15

we're just busy creating

1:02:17

and doing that side of things. I

1:02:20

think that's okay and you can actually kind of turn that into a

1:02:22

strength. I

1:02:25

get a text message from the different

1:02:27

CFOs of the portfolio companies I run

1:02:29

and they send me what's our monthly

1:02:31

profit this month, what's

1:02:35

our monthly revenue, what are the monthly

1:02:37

expenses. What

1:02:40

were we at last month in those areas? What

1:02:47

are we at based on projections? What

1:02:50

does it look like we're going to make this month

1:02:52

based on what you're seeing so far? If

1:02:55

you were to give me say three to

1:02:57

five implications of the financials, what

1:03:00

do you think I need to be most focused on over the next

1:03:02

week? I

1:03:06

don't need someone just to bubble up numbers to me. That's

1:03:10

one part of it because I can then

1:03:12

discern implications of things. I

1:03:15

need you to then look at these numbers and let

1:03:17

me know what are you seeing that I

1:03:19

should be aware of. An example of what

1:03:21

they may be seeing is they're looking at the metrics and they're

1:03:23

like, 63%

1:03:25

of people are showing up to a

1:03:28

call. We agree that there should be an 80% show rate for calls. They're

1:03:33

looking not just at the P&L metrics but also

1:03:36

at like the auto metrics. Oh, interesting. They

1:03:40

should be able to see everything. What

1:03:45

may have happened there is that you looked at end of

1:03:47

this example, like

1:03:50

revenue wasn't right and then was able to then go a layer deeper and

1:03:52

versus just saying, Matt, make

1:03:54

more revenue. It's like, no, what's going on here? I'm

1:03:58

able to then look at the metrics and dissect what's happening with revenue. There's

1:04:00

enough calls being booked. There's enough leads

1:04:02

coming in. Oh, the show

1:04:04

rate looks off. Yeah. Okay,

1:04:07

Matt, the show rate's off.

1:04:09

We wanna get it to this. I know we're implementing

1:04:11

these things right now. You

1:04:13

know, again, it's not necessary that the CFO has

1:04:15

all the context on what we're existing lead doing

1:04:18

in the business to impact show rate, but now

1:04:20

can at least point me in the right direction

1:04:22

to say, hey, this

1:04:25

revenue thing's important to us. This show rate thing looks

1:04:27

like it's the bottleneck right now. Go

1:04:29

and look at that and go fix that area. And

1:04:32

now at least I'm like, okay, over the next week, when

1:04:34

I get that on say a Friday afternoon, my

1:04:36

personal goal generally is like, before

1:04:39

I sign off, before the weekend, I

1:04:41

instigate and start the action

1:04:43

plans and let the owners

1:04:45

know that, hey, I've seen this area that

1:04:47

I think is a bottleneck right now, and

1:04:50

I want you to go into next week knowing that like we

1:04:52

gotta fix that thing. So basically

1:04:54

I know right away what something stuck, and I've

1:04:56

been, had it fed to me like just, hey,

1:04:59

these are the areas I'm seeing. And before I

1:05:01

sign off for that weekend, I know, okay, those

1:05:03

owners that I trust are aware of this being

1:05:05

a bottleneck in the business. And next week, Monday

1:05:08

morning, maybe even over the weekend, depending on the

1:05:10

kind of weapon you bring on board, they

1:05:13

are executing that thing with full force and

1:05:15

eliminating that as a bottleneck of the business. Sick,

1:05:18

that's great. So yeah, so someone

1:05:20

owning the finances, owning projections, owning cash

1:05:22

and bank, and added bonus is

1:05:25

owning that CEO scorecard text message, I think

1:05:27

that's like me and you should be getting.

1:05:29

Yeah, so Angus definitely owns that system and

1:05:31

works with our fractional CFO and also our

1:05:33

accountants and stuff. Great. And has

1:05:35

recently started sending me like a weekly

1:05:37

Slack message at the end of the

1:05:39

week that has like all the

1:05:42

different areas of the business, went like red, amber, green

1:05:44

in terms of concern level and just a quick description.

1:05:47

But month to date

1:05:50

finances is not on that list right now.

1:05:53

And so the only handle I ever get on finances

1:05:55

is every month when the management accounts

1:05:58

come through and just gives a little bit more. of

1:06:00

a Loom presentation on it kind of thing, but they were

1:06:02

for the previous month. And so I always

1:06:04

feel like I don't really have a handle on what

1:06:06

our finances are looking at right now, because

1:06:09

it's always like a month out of date based on

1:06:11

management accounts. So I love this idea of like a

1:06:13

weekly, as part of the weekly message, just like, Hey,

1:06:15

what are the key, what are the key fanatometrics? And

1:06:17

what does that tell us about what we need to

1:06:19

do? Yeah, exactly. And so yeah,

1:06:21

I like the idea of like, red, yellow, green, sort

1:06:24

of going on, the next step to that would be,

1:06:26

so what do I need to do? Yeah, like, if

1:06:28

you were in my shoes, you were the CEO of

1:06:30

the business. Like, what do I do now that this

1:06:32

is a yellow, or this is a red, like, what

1:06:34

do we need to do? And if

1:06:36

they can then serve that to you too, and also

1:06:38

like what they are going to do, so that you're

1:06:41

almost just like, yeah, it looks good. Yeah,

1:06:43

that's what Angus does at the moment, he'll be like,

1:06:45

you know, this area is a yellow, but actually, it's

1:06:47

fine, because we're in the process of hiring this person

1:06:49

or there is a red. And

1:06:51

what we're doing about it is we're having a meeting on Monday with

1:06:53

this person, this person, this person to get together and figure out why

1:06:55

it's red and blah, blah, so often

1:06:57

I'm just like, I'll just keep

1:06:59

making videos, you guys carry out because it's under

1:07:02

control. And surprise me, cuz Angus

1:07:04

is a beast. So that's great. So yeah, the next,

1:07:06

in the final system, and I want to just caveat

1:07:08

this as saying, I'm sure there's a lot of people

1:07:10

that are looking at all this and going, what about

1:07:12

this system? And what about that? And what about that?

1:07:15

That's probably the case, I'm sure there are some things

1:07:17

that are being missed here, right? But I do think

1:07:19

that when we've outlay this thing, we've caught about 80,

1:07:21

I mean, I don't think of anything that we missed

1:07:23

here, something like this is 100% of

1:07:25

what we're trying to, we haven't really talked about our social media

1:07:27

system, but we can, but I've kind of felt that under the

1:07:29

YouTube, more or less. And then yeah, that's like your pillar content

1:07:31

that would be filtered to the other platform. So exactly, though, like

1:07:33

there's these little, my new things, we

1:07:35

can get to those. Let's just at least, we really

1:07:38

got this nailed. All that just becomes, yeah, like a

1:07:40

little bit of, you know, stuff that we just also

1:07:42

got to fine tune, but we've got a good amount

1:07:44

of like structure in place here that that's

1:07:46

not going to become overwhelming. And like the core of

1:07:48

the business isn't going to fall apart. So

1:07:51

the last one that I see for you, which is

1:07:53

cool that your team is working on this over the

1:07:55

next week or two is your dashboard system. Yeah. Right.

1:07:57

And so all of

1:07:59

these areas, areas have owners and have

1:08:01

metrics, maybe one metric, sometimes

1:08:04

a few. And we need to

1:08:06

have a core source of truth whereby we

1:08:08

can measure their performance and

1:08:10

that we can easily in a snapshot see

1:08:12

the health of the business. So

1:08:15

that when we're looking at that, you could

1:08:17

just be on your phone on a Friday, on

1:08:20

a beach chair in Thailand and just

1:08:22

sort of like look at your phone,

1:08:24

scroll through these metrics, get your CEO

1:08:26

scorecard and understand, okay, the

1:08:29

finance team or Angus is telling me, hey, these are

1:08:31

the things you need to be focused on and this

1:08:33

is what we're doing about it. And you're like, cool,

1:08:35

go for it. And then you're also able to see

1:08:37

a snapshot of the core metrics across this entire system

1:08:39

and go, okay, cool, we got cash in bank, things

1:08:41

are moving nice. We're above projections

1:08:43

for the month, awesome. And you can sleep at night knowing

1:08:45

that like you have a nice picture of

1:08:47

the business. And I think between having a

1:08:49

good team in place that's owning their

1:08:52

areas, getting your CEO scorecard and having

1:08:54

your CEO snapshot, you've kind of

1:08:56

got a well-oiled machine. And so the core

1:08:58

thing now that we've outlined each of these steps of

1:09:01

the system is that we know now the core metrics

1:09:03

that determine the success of those pieces. And let's just

1:09:05

make sure that's all captured in the dashboard. Sick.

1:09:08

This is our... Actually,

1:09:13

I wonder if we can, yeah, you just want to have

1:09:16

a look and scroll through. So the idea

1:09:18

here is that we have a Big

1:09:20

Ease sheet, which is sort of like the big

1:09:23

numbers that I think I care about, which seems...

1:09:25

It's on 6.0 because we've had so many iterations

1:09:27

of me trying to figure out what are the

1:09:29

metrics that matter to me. And

1:09:31

then for each person or each area of

1:09:33

the business, we have their own sheet where they input

1:09:35

the metrics for that week. And

1:09:38

some of them feed into the bigger... sort of my

1:09:40

view scorecard, which is like the Big Ease. I think

1:09:46

at the moment... I

1:09:50

don't know. It's very rare

1:09:52

to actually get feedback on this because no one

1:09:54

ever shows what their internal scorecard

1:09:56

looks like. So I don't know if we're doing a good job

1:09:58

or what are the... What are the quick wins? We

1:10:19

have all this data, we're tracking week on week. I'm

1:10:25

not really sure what are the

1:10:27

core metrics that matter. I'm

1:10:30

like, oh, but it doesn't cover all of it, and

1:10:35

I start to get into a bit of, I

1:10:41

can't be bothered to look at

1:10:43

the whole YouTube scorecard, if

1:10:46

that makes sense. First

1:10:51

off, I think this is in

1:10:53

a solid state. I

1:10:56

have some more

1:10:59

nuanced feedback to it that

1:11:02

is nothing overly drastic. The

1:11:07

couple things I'd say is, so

1:11:11

you got this tab, the Big E 6.0, which

1:11:14

I love. Minor

1:11:16

change that I would personally make, maybe

1:11:21

it's just how my brain works, is I

1:11:23

would invert it. I go and see, is it

1:11:25

going up or down? I

1:11:29

look across the sheet and I can see that

1:11:31

pattern, versus

1:11:34

looking down. That

1:11:39

way the rows could be eight metrics or 50. It's

1:11:44

easy to scroll down and see, okay,

1:11:47

these are the rows, versus

1:11:49

scrolling to the side of a sheet. It's

1:11:52

just invert those. It

1:12:00

sort of felt like we had to do a lot of

1:12:02

horizontal scrolling to see the pattern. Okay, but as I'm saying

1:12:04

that like that would have been solved by just having a

1:12:06

graph. Yeah, we're just

1:12:08

like hide some columns over time.

1:12:10

It's like, okay, like we have like all 2023 and

1:12:12

24 now. Oh,

1:12:14

but it's a new year. We'll just hide 2023 for now. So

1:12:17

we can just see 2024 and if we so

1:12:20

need to we can unfreeze those column. Yeah, that's

1:12:22

good. Okay, interesting. Yeah, that's just how my brain

1:12:24

works. It's not like the biggest thing ever, but

1:12:26

I think it kind of leads into number two,

1:12:28

which is. It sounds like you're

1:12:30

still in a stage of understanding what are the

1:12:33

metrics that matter. We just went

1:12:35

through all of these core systems. And

1:12:37

so I think it's about now going

1:12:39

into those core systems and understanding, you

1:12:41

know, YouTube. It's subscribers and watch time

1:12:43

lead magnets. It's you know

1:12:46

conversion rate and email signups

1:12:48

lead system is conversion rate

1:12:51

and you know,

1:12:53

revenue, you know sales is revenue

1:12:55

customer success is upsells reviews and

1:12:59

referrals. Yeah, so on and I think

1:13:01

then we kind of look at it and it's like, okay. Well,

1:13:03

what else is missing? Oh, I'm

1:13:05

a bit weird and I also love to see views per

1:13:07

week. Cool. I've been in there. Yeah. Oh,

1:13:10

I actually just also love to see team size. Sure.

1:13:12

I had that in there too. And

1:13:14

so now you kind of have all these rows of

1:13:16

all these metrics that you want to see in the

1:13:18

big East 7.0. And

1:13:21

I think then

1:13:23

like most things in life, you

1:13:26

know, sometimes we want

1:13:28

like a quick like light bulb moment for things like

1:13:30

this. I think it's very similar to like people that

1:13:32

want a product idea to come out of the blue

1:13:35

or are hoping to figure out their niche out

1:13:37

of the blue. I personally believe that things like

1:13:39

this are more of a process of refinement

1:13:41

over time. Hence why this is the big East

1:13:44

6.0. Yeah, right. So hopefully on your rows now,

1:13:46

you've got like a good amount of metrics that

1:13:48

like this feels good. It might be too

1:13:50

much, but it's pretty easy to see it. Like,

1:13:52

you know, maybe there's between 15 and 20 math.

1:13:56

And then over time, you're looking at this every week,

1:13:59

maybe a couple times. a week just to feel

1:14:01

like get into it a bit, fuel out Biggie

1:14:03

7.0 and how it resonates with your brain. And

1:14:06

then if you're like, okay, this metric actually

1:14:08

don't need this, so just don't then just delete those rows. And

1:14:11

then suddenly you get to like, hey, maybe like

1:14:13

the 10 core metrics that are needed to understand

1:14:15

the health of the nine core areas of your

1:14:17

business, and you're in a good spot.

1:14:20

That's how I would do it personally. And I

1:14:22

don't think, and the good news is like, I don't think

1:14:24

you're far off of that at all. I think you have

1:14:26

the metrics here, just like you

1:14:29

need to refine the systems. You just need to kind of

1:14:31

double check that you are measuring the right thing per area.

1:14:33

And you're welcome to send me this over when you completed

1:14:35

it. And I can just give you my sense on like

1:14:37

the documentation, the metrics, all that good stuff.

1:14:41

And then, and then from there, when you agreed

1:14:43

on it, just input those core metrics into the

1:14:45

rows, the dates, week by

1:14:47

week into the columns. And

1:14:51

then yeah, and then you can also if you really want to like

1:14:53

with each of the metrics label, like who

1:14:55

is the owner of each of those, so that

1:14:57

if you see for some week, it's off, you

1:15:00

know, if you really wanted to, you could ping that

1:15:02

person or I think in your case, it's much better

1:15:04

just try ping Angus. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, already people like

1:15:06

the people who own the metrics are putting a comment

1:15:09

in the Google Sheet anytime a metric is off. Yeah,

1:15:11

either very positively off or very negatively

1:15:14

off, they're just leaving a comment to be like, this is because blah,

1:15:16

blah, blah. Okay. Yeah.

1:15:19

Question. Should every metric have a target?

1:15:22

I think so. Yeah.

1:15:25

Whether that's in like the main dashboard, like the

1:15:27

seven point out, I'll leave that to you. I

1:15:32

think that you could have an area

1:15:34

at the bottom of it, which is just like forecast. So

1:15:36

you have like actuals, you know, this

1:15:38

eight metrics, and then below that you just have a

1:15:40

section that just is like your forecast. Yeah. For

1:15:43

the years that you really wanted to, you could just like scroll

1:15:45

below, see how we're doing. Yeah. And

1:15:49

then for like, for example, we have like a

1:15:51

weekly target with conditional formatting that

1:15:53

makes it go red anytime. I love that. Yeah,

1:15:55

that's great. I would do that. And

1:15:57

then we can just sort of see at a glance, be like weekly shorts for users

1:15:59

under target. Do we care? Well, no, because we're not

1:16:01

really doing, we're not really okay. I'm

1:16:03

not sure what's going on. Cool, whatever. That

1:16:06

kind of thing. But also, email open rate was like

1:16:08

10% lower this week and last week compared to normal.

1:16:10

What's going on there? That requires some zooming into that

1:16:12

kind of vibe. Well, it's interesting, right? I think that

1:16:15

you bring up your YouTube metrics there, not

1:16:18

knowing a lot about you, but know a decent is like,

1:16:20

I bet you that area of your business is probably one

1:16:22

of the strongest. So it's like your color coding

1:16:24

and that works well. And that gives you a lot of

1:16:26

data to then look into things like imagine you could have

1:16:28

that level of detail with every single part of

1:16:30

your business. It would all be insane. Yeah, that would be

1:16:32

great. So yeah, I think if that's working for you, the

1:16:34

color coding, I would double down on it. Nice.

1:16:38

And then one thing that traction says, for example,

1:16:41

is any time a metric is off for like two

1:16:43

weeks in a row, it automatically becomes an issue in

1:16:45

like the weekly team meeting and stuff. Like

1:16:47

what's your take on that approach? Yeah, I think that's a

1:16:49

good way of doing it. I think, yeah,

1:16:51

your team meeting cadence, having

1:16:54

a weekly team stand up, ideally with like the

1:16:57

core owners, like the core leadership team, and don't

1:16:59

want it to be too big. Want it to

1:17:01

be, I don't know, I just kind of like

1:17:03

that Jeff Bezos, two pizza rule, like to

1:17:06

keep it to that. And so, yeah, maybe six

1:17:08

people in that meeting, you know,

1:17:10

we start off with maybe going over wins from the

1:17:12

past week that people want to share. And

1:17:14

then ideally leaving like around 45 minutes or

1:17:17

sort of the meeting to awareness

1:17:19

issues, opportunities, right? And

1:17:21

ideally people after maybe

1:17:23

having the team go through the scorecard

1:17:25

and just see what's well, what's not

1:17:27

going well, or just pulling any of

1:17:30

these red or yellow areas into sort

1:17:32

of opportunities section of that meeting so

1:17:34

that the majority of the meeting is solving

1:17:36

the bottlenecks that we're seeing and working

1:17:39

through it together. Awareness issues and

1:17:41

opportunities. That's like a, can you kind of zoom into

1:17:43

that and how do you think of the

1:17:45

difference between these three things? Yeah. In

1:17:49

terms of awareness, I think it's spending

1:17:53

time as a team,

1:17:55

making sure that, hey, maybe there's something that we have coming

1:17:58

up in four months. That's not really an issue. issue.

1:18:00

It's not an opportunity, but it's like something

1:18:02

that we should start talking about and be

1:18:04

aware of because it's coming down the pipeline

1:18:06

soon. Maybe Ollie's taking a

1:18:08

month off for his wedding. And we should

1:18:11

be planning for that now because it's coming

1:18:13

up quite soon. Yeah. Or, you

1:18:16

know, there's a launch of this new product. And we got to kind

1:18:18

of like start thinking about that now, right? So it's

1:18:20

good for that kind of thing. Issues

1:18:22

are just like, yeah, we're looking at the

1:18:24

metrics. There's something that has been read now

1:18:26

for two weeks, we've got to address this.

1:18:28

And so that would be an issue. And

1:18:31

then an opportunity could be, hey,

1:18:33

something's been in the green for four

1:18:35

weeks, it's growing like crazy, who

1:18:37

knew it, but as fast as YouTube is

1:18:39

growing, our LinkedIn is blowing up. And we're barely

1:18:41

doing anything there. It seems like a big opportunity

1:18:44

that if we pay more attention to LinkedIn, we

1:18:46

can 10x that platform as

1:18:48

an example. So opportunities is kind of

1:18:51

like, hey, are people seeing any big things

1:18:53

that we should be paying attention to?

1:18:55

Because I think if you pay attention to any

1:18:57

one of these things, you're missing out. If you're

1:18:59

only paying attention to opportunities, well, what if something's

1:19:01

blowing up in the business, right? If you just

1:19:03

pay attention to issues, your leadership meetings quite tend

1:19:05

to be quite kind of negative, problems up in

1:19:07

the whole time. And there's where's like the positivity

1:19:09

and optimism to them. And then awareness is like,

1:19:11

okay, yeah, maybe we've dealt with issues,

1:19:14

and we've seen some opportunities. But like, where's like, the

1:19:16

broader awareness, maybe the bird's eye view of

1:19:18

like, what's coming down the horizon that we

1:19:20

should just also be aware of? Man, like

1:19:22

just those three words is ridiculously helpful. And

1:19:24

the reason it is really helpful

1:19:27

is because traction uses the word issues. And so we were

1:19:29

using the word issues for like two years. And

1:19:31

then we were finding that everyone was like, well, I just not

1:19:33

really an issue. So I don't really want to bring it up.

1:19:35

And it's not really an issue. It's a small thing. And I

1:19:38

don't want to call it an issue. And then our issues list

1:19:40

would be like basically zero because people didn't want to bring things

1:19:42

up because technically not an issue. And then

1:19:44

we were like, all right, no one's bringing up issues. So

1:19:46

let's rename issues to awarenesses. So

1:19:49

now we then over the last year, we've been calling

1:19:51

them awarenesses. And now Angus is still like, guys, please

1:19:53

fill out the awarenesses before the meeting crickets.

1:19:56

All right, we've been through our awarenesses. Any other awarenesses?

1:19:59

crickets. No one seems speaks up because

1:20:01

it's like, Oh, is it really an awareness?

1:20:03

Is there a way we talk about the

1:20:05

message? But just framing as awarenesses and issues

1:20:07

and opportunities where the metrics are automatically issued

1:20:09

if issue a fight. Opportunities

1:20:12

gives me a chance to be like, Hey, I

1:20:14

just spent two days in Dubai with Matt and

1:20:16

with Erica. And like, Oh my God, there's real

1:20:19

opportunity for us to use many chat to set

1:20:21

up Instagram closer DMS, all kinds of things like

1:20:23

let's talk about that. Like that gives

1:20:26

me an outlet to do that. Whereas it's not really an awareness.

1:20:28

It's not really an issue. And so I wouldn't normally bring it

1:20:30

up and it would just sort of be in my mind of

1:20:32

like, Oh, someone should be thinking about this, but like, I don't

1:20:34

want to bring it up to the marketing guys because they were

1:20:36

busy and I don't want to hang it. He's very busy. Just

1:20:39

gives me a nice outlet. So I love that framing of awareness,

1:20:41

issues and opportunities. Yeah, totally. No, I. Yeah.

1:20:43

Something I'm in the same position over the years. Like,

1:20:46

yeah, it was issues, opportunities. And I heard it, awarenesses

1:20:48

through Daniel priestly. Oh yeah. Yeah. He thought he told

1:20:50

us about where it is. And we were like, Oh,

1:20:52

but I didn't feel like enough stuff. Like, all right,

1:20:54

let's just mush all these things together. And at least

1:20:56

you can't, nothing can get missed. I feel like if

1:20:59

you got all those three, yeah. And do AIOs. Yeah.

1:21:01

I just need to A E I O U. Who's

1:21:03

doing that? Yeah, exactly. It's a bit much. No. And

1:21:05

I think the other thing too is, um, everyone

1:21:08

has their own style and things. My

1:21:10

style is just my style, but you know,

1:21:12

on those meetings, because let's just say it's

1:21:14

an hour team meeting and about 45 minutes

1:21:17

of it is dedicated to issues, opportunities

1:21:19

and awarenesses. If you're

1:21:21

not coming with any of these things, I

1:21:24

literally don't know what you're doing because

1:21:26

if you are working at the company and

1:21:28

you don't see any issues anywhere, you

1:21:31

don't see any opportunities anywhere and you're not aware of

1:21:33

anything that we need to know about, like, are you

1:21:35

working? Yeah. Right. And I don't need to be an

1:21:37

asshole or anything like that is a good point. But

1:21:39

it's like, you know, with all due respect, like, you

1:21:42

know, we're all weapons here, we're like a players. We

1:21:44

have, we are here for a reason. We are leaders

1:21:46

for a reason. And so as a leader, if you're

1:21:49

not seeing anything we can improve anything

1:21:51

that others should be aware of or any

1:21:54

opportunities on the horizon, guys, like, what's going

1:21:56

on? We're better than this. And

1:21:58

so I think it's just that kind of like. Like, guys,

1:22:00

like, let's do this thing. Like, we

1:22:02

have big ambitions here, and this is not a

1:22:04

million a month team. A million a month team

1:22:06

doesn't sit here with crickets for an hour, wondering,

1:22:09

hey, is there anything anyone should be aware

1:22:11

of or any opportunity in this business? So

1:22:13

like, let's do this thing. Like, we got

1:22:15

some big goals here. We're all jamming. We

1:22:17

got our big meeting in Morocco or wherever

1:22:19

you guys are going next in your quarterly

1:22:21

meeting. And it's like, let's, the

1:22:23

same level of camaraderie we have when we're in person, let's bring

1:22:25

that to these meetings and come with some real implications of stuff

1:22:27

everyone should be aware of, and let's get after it. Mate,

1:22:30

I'm going to clip this and send it to Angus because Angus has

1:22:32

this frustration every week where he's like, I keep telling people to fill

1:22:34

out the awarenesses and no one's doing it. Like, what the hell is

1:22:36

going on? Yeah, I would tell them not to show up if they

1:22:38

don't fill it up. Yeah, nice. Yeah,

1:22:41

I mean, like, just straight up. It's like, we're not,

1:22:43

this is not a spectator sport. This is like, this

1:22:45

is a sport you're on the court. Yeah.

1:22:48

Be active, right? We're not going to show up to

1:22:50

the basketball game just to sit on the sidelines. This

1:22:53

is the leadership meeting, and the leaders of the business

1:22:55

should be being active in these meetings and actively bringing

1:22:57

up stuff. And if anything, hopefully you and Angus can

1:22:59

kind of sit back there while other departments are sort

1:23:01

of sorting through things they need to

1:23:04

be aware of, and you guys are just kind of

1:23:06

moderating a conversation versus the ones just feeling

1:23:08

like you got to pull stuff out of

1:23:10

others. And I've been there before in companies,

1:23:12

and it's no fun as a leader because

1:23:14

you feel like you're just kind of putting

1:23:16

on this charade every week and kind of

1:23:19

like, it's very performative because you then

1:23:21

just sometimes feel like you've brought your two issues or

1:23:23

opportunities, and now you just have to pull more out

1:23:25

of the hat because someone else has anything to say,

1:23:27

right? So, yeah. Nice.

1:23:31

One thing I'd love to get your

1:23:34

take on. So at the moment, Monday is

1:23:36

sort of our meetings day in that we have a team,

1:23:38

an all-hands team meeting, which is like all 14

1:23:40

of us. And

1:23:43

then we also have a commercial team meeting, which

1:23:45

is like the six or so people who are

1:23:47

in the commercial team, plus Angus, plus occasionally me.

1:23:49

And then we have a content squad meeting, which

1:23:51

is like the six or so people in the

1:23:53

content team and me. So

1:23:55

it's like, in each of

1:23:58

these, in like the team meeting. There's

1:24:00

like team-wide awarenesses and issues and stuff. And

1:24:05

the commercial meeting, it's more stuff related to

1:24:07

the commercial side of the business content team,

1:24:09

more stuff related to the content side of the business. And

1:24:15

it feels like a lot of meetings because all of

1:24:17

Monday is basically taken up with meetings. And

1:24:20

we also do like a nine-day fortnight, so every other Friday is off.

1:24:25

Just where everyone gets on a Zoom call with a

1:24:27

pen and paper and just thinks with

1:24:29

a few journaling prompts about their business and a level-up

1:24:32

hour where it's like the objective of

1:24:34

that hour is to take a course or read

1:24:36

a book about something, whatever. So it's like Mondays

1:24:38

are gone, Wednesday afternoons are gone, every

1:24:40

other Friday is gone. That

1:24:42

leaves us like two days a week to actually do

1:24:44

the work. And then some people have office hours with

1:24:46

the accelerator students and like Tintin films with me every

1:24:48

Tuesday. So he's like, I basically just got Thursdays to

1:24:50

do my work. What's

1:24:53

going on here? What's your take? Yeah,

1:24:55

so first off, it's

1:24:57

great that you're just aware and have the

1:25:00

self-awareness and you've obviously got a good relationship with

1:25:03

your team to kind of understand what

1:25:05

feedback is being bubbled up here. People are saying,

1:25:07

oh, I only have like a day or half

1:25:09

a day to really get into what

1:25:11

I've got to get into. And you may

1:25:13

actually be seeing some sort of side

1:25:15

effects of this in those leadership meetings

1:25:17

where people aren't bringing up much, maybe

1:25:20

because they're not actually getting

1:25:22

really into things enough to then

1:25:24

have much to bring up potentially.

1:25:28

I would personally make

1:25:30

the following changes. Number one, my

1:25:33

only meeting day would be on Tuesdays. I

1:25:36

like Tuesdays because people are coming fresh off

1:25:38

their weekend and Mondays are

1:25:40

sacred. You're like fresh. That is

1:25:42

scientifically your most productive day of the week.

1:25:45

You've just like been able to like rest

1:25:47

your brain and chill. Don't slam people into

1:25:49

meetings. Let them just work because

1:25:52

they got all this pent up motivation and juices and

1:25:54

they're ready to go. Let them

1:25:56

just rip, right? Leave like

1:25:58

a Tuesday afternoon. for

1:26:00

like the meetings, right? And I

1:26:02

would sandwich all of your meetings as a CEO

1:26:05

into just my Tuesday as best I can, right?

1:26:08

And so the team

1:26:10

huddle, the leadership meeting, your commercial meeting,

1:26:12

whatever, that's like Tuesday afternoon. So all

1:26:14

of your team now has the

1:26:16

first day of the week to slam

1:26:18

through stuff, all that first half day

1:26:20

on Tuesday to also get

1:26:22

through it. And then they sync on

1:26:25

Tuesday now that they've, you know, had a lot of stuff

1:26:27

they could churn through and then are able to kind of

1:26:29

like discuss with the squad. I

1:26:32

would try to look at, okay, Tuesday afternoon,

1:26:34

let's say that's from noon till 5 p.m.

1:26:36

back in Afghan, there's like five hours there.

1:26:39

Anything that can't fit into those five hours, we're

1:26:41

gonna try like two months of deleting it. You

1:26:45

know, you don't need to be that strict

1:26:47

per se, but like, what would that look

1:26:49

like? And what stuff then gets removed? Level

1:26:53

up hour, you know, there's

1:26:55

one world where it's like your culture

1:26:57

values this stuff, you only

1:26:59

bring on people that are constant learners, all

1:27:01

that, you don't need to designate an hour

1:27:03

for these people to do that potentially, they

1:27:05

just do it naturally. They read before bed

1:27:07

or they learn, they're going through a course

1:27:09

on the side or whatever. So maybe you

1:27:11

just determine, like we're gonna just remove

1:27:14

that. There's some other

1:27:16

items there that you may determine are not

1:27:18

like the core meetings that like, we're

1:27:20

like, okay, we're gonna try two months off

1:27:23

these and let's all revisit guys, you know,

1:27:25

from March one to May one, we're gonna

1:27:27

delete 50% of our meetings and let's

1:27:29

revisit what ones we then wanna

1:27:31

put back, if any, come May

1:27:33

one. And if there's none that need to be

1:27:36

put back, then why put them back? And

1:27:38

at least now things are

1:27:40

simplified, you don't need to be on as many,

1:27:42

people hate meetings, right, and I think too, it's

1:27:44

like, hey, in lieu of us removing meetings, if

1:27:46

you feel like there's things that people need to

1:27:48

go, or need to know, sorry, we

1:27:51

have a squad channel or a team channel inside of

1:27:53

Slack, and just send a loom to

1:27:55

people. And ideally people are just

1:27:57

using asynchronous platforms like loom to... avoid

1:28:00

having to have everyone all in one room because

1:28:03

meetings are pricey as well. Not only on your

1:28:05

time, on your energy, but like if you literally

1:28:07

look at the people that you have in that

1:28:09

meeting and you give them all an hourly rate

1:28:11

of say 250 bucks an hour, you know, you're

1:28:13

maybe spending like three, four grand on a meeting

1:28:15

where you're just trying to pull stuff out of

1:28:17

people and you know, they could

1:28:19

just be doing a lot, especially if your team's saying like,

1:28:21

Hey, I feel like I don't have a lot of time.

1:28:23

Like you can imagine the things that they want to get through

1:28:25

if they weren't on meetings, they clearly

1:28:27

want to crank on some stuff that is kind

1:28:29

of quickly like piling up. So I would just

1:28:32

give them the space just to get that stuff

1:28:34

done, give them the mental piece, the ability to

1:28:36

kind of get through that and keep it all

1:28:38

kind of minimalist in terms of meetings. So the

1:28:40

ones that they are on, it's like, this is

1:28:42

very important and it's important that you come prepared

1:28:45

because we only have two a week. Yeah,

1:28:48

that's good. Um, what's

1:28:50

your take on like a weekly sync

1:28:53

meeting and then a weekly rip-off of the week meeting type

1:28:55

thing? Or do you just do like one, one meeting a

1:28:57

week with like the team or whatever? Yeah.

1:28:59

Yeah. Um, so in

1:29:02

all the companies I run, I like to have a

1:29:04

writing first culture. It,

1:29:06

a lot of that is selfish. Like I just don't

1:29:08

want to be on a lot of meetings. If I

1:29:11

can be on one meeting with a leadership team a

1:29:13

week for 45 minutes to an

1:29:15

hour, that's good, assuming that everyone's a player

1:29:17

is there and they know what they're doing, like there's no need for us

1:29:20

to be meeting a lot. You know, Jeff

1:29:22

Bezos said, you know, communication is chaos. If

1:29:24

people are always having to communicate with one another and

1:29:26

be on so many meetings, like something's wrong, right? You

1:29:29

probably don't have clear systems. People don't know what area

1:29:31

they own. They don't actually know what they're doing. So

1:29:33

they're just trying to communicate all the time and be

1:29:35

on a million meetings because at the core, they have

1:29:38

no idea what they're doing. Right. So if people have

1:29:40

core metrics, they know what they're doing. It's piped into

1:29:42

a dashboard. Like all that area that we started talking

1:29:44

about is nailed. People should

1:29:46

then just be able to go do deep work each day,

1:29:48

just to make sure that the issues and the opportunities they're

1:29:50

seeing in their area are taken care of. And

1:29:53

so how I approach things is you have that. Yeah,

1:29:56

you could have your Tuesday leadership meeting from

1:29:59

there. I personally don't see

1:30:01

a need for like a team-wide meeting every week.

1:30:04

I know that Brian from

1:30:07

the co-founder of HubSpot, I think he talked about it

1:30:09

as they're building HubSpot, which is now a

1:30:11

multi-billion dollar company. They would have like

1:30:13

one team-wide meeting a month. So I personally

1:30:16

think you can leave those kind of all hands meetings

1:30:18

to like once a month. I don't think you need

1:30:20

them every week. But what will happen

1:30:22

through a little redundant with the leadership meeting? The leadership

1:30:24

meeting should be like, we're on the same page, now go. And

1:30:27

in their respective areas, they could run like

1:30:30

a department meeting that you don't need to

1:30:32

be on because they're aligned with the general

1:30:34

thesis of what's going on in the company.

1:30:37

So yeah, so I would delete that. And

1:30:40

then in terms of the end of week, I personally like to

1:30:42

just see, and this is something you could

1:30:44

help create or any of this could create for everyone, is

1:30:46

like I want everyone to give me

1:30:48

a thorough end of week update. So I

1:30:50

want to know if you're say customer success, give

1:30:53

me a detailed breakdown of who are the key

1:30:55

people you spoke to this week, who did you upsell

1:30:57

this week, who got, you know, what were the testimonials

1:30:59

you got this week, give us like five of the

1:31:01

best ones. What are some opportunities that

1:31:03

you're seeing? What are you working on next week? I

1:31:06

don't need to have a meeting with you. I don't need to do whatever. Just like

1:31:08

give me a detailed thing so that on Friday

1:31:10

or maybe on Sunday, because I got really tired on

1:31:12

Friday, I just take an hour over breakfast and I'm

1:31:14

just like scrolling through or maybe on the back of

1:31:16

an Uber, I'm just scrolling through the end of week

1:31:19

update channel in Slack. And I'm just able to see

1:31:21

everyone's end of week. And if I want to, I

1:31:23

can comment under it. Or if not, I don't. And

1:31:25

it's not, by the time I'm even seeing that, their

1:31:28

manager has seen that. So it's gone through a couple

1:31:30

filters. And I feel like it's

1:31:32

much more thorough if someone's writing their update than

1:31:35

just updating on a meeting. Like you've really had to

1:31:37

think about it. You've had the time and space to

1:31:39

write what's on your mind. And now

1:31:41

I'm just kind of reading through them whenever I want. Yeah.

1:31:43

So I think we do a good job of end

1:31:45

of week updates in like a nice notion database and

1:31:47

blah, blah, blah. At the

1:31:50

moment, the end of week meeting is like either on Friday or

1:31:52

on a Thursday, depending on if it's a 90 fortnight. And it's

1:31:54

like kind of more of a

1:31:56

vibey, personal and professional wins. And like someone in the

1:31:58

team is giving a presentation. something they've learned and

1:32:00

stuff. I'm

1:32:06

not sure how valuable this is, but

1:32:11

I think it's a little bit too many

1:32:13

meetings, and

1:32:32

we're trying to simplify the company. Is

1:32:41

there anything you think we're missing? How

1:32:47

can we still ensure that the culture is maintained with

1:32:50

the removed meetings? And

1:32:56

then just experiment with reducing a bunch of them for two

1:32:58

months, see

1:33:01

how that goes, survey them again at the end.

1:33:05

I think the area where people get mistaken sometimes is

1:33:21

when you have a great team, it's

1:33:26

not like you're having a meeting or

1:33:28

they're doing nothing. They're

1:33:31

in deep focus working on

1:33:33

core areas that

1:33:36

they know need to move forward

1:33:38

in their collective workload to

1:33:40

push the business forward. So

1:33:45

then being in their flow is one of the most valuable things you

1:33:48

can get out of anyone. So

1:33:50

breaking that flow for a meeting, you

1:33:53

better have a damn good reason to do that. You

1:33:57

can get more than getting back situated after. and

1:34:00

getting back into the flow. And

1:34:05

so it's just very costly. And

1:34:10

more than anything, I think it's better

1:34:12

to just free up people's time and

1:34:15

allow them just to focus. What

1:34:20

are your thoughts on like Manager one-on-ones and Cadence

1:34:22

of those and stuff? I

1:34:25

don't see any issue with that. In

1:34:30

your book, Feel Good Productivity, and in a lot of my own

1:34:33

sort of child in air with this stuff, I don't

1:34:35

know how you see it. I think we see it very similar though, which is

1:34:37

like, I

1:34:40

know in my life, my greatest happiness comes and

1:34:42

it's proportionate to the amount of flow I get

1:34:44

in my life. The amount of time I just

1:34:46

get to do my thing, I get

1:34:48

to work, I get to be creative, I

1:34:50

don't have a lot of distractions. I get

1:34:53

to just live a nice open calendar day

1:34:55

and do my thing and your team's no

1:34:57

different. And so the more that we can

1:34:59

just allow people to embrace whatever flow looks

1:35:01

like for them without interrupting them too much,

1:35:05

I think you're just going to get a better place and

1:35:07

there's a culture oriented with that as well. Just

1:35:10

happy people in flow working

1:35:12

on what they believe is important

1:35:15

is, I think, a good healthy culture too. While

1:35:18

we're here, one other thing, I mean, one of many

1:35:20

things I want to get your take on. So currently

1:35:22

as part of our YouTube accelerator, which is our 5K

1:35:24

a year 12 month program thing, we

1:35:27

have like everyone, all of our students are

1:35:29

in a Slack channel where we've offered like

1:35:31

unlimited support and so they ask questions. And

1:35:34

we've basically said to everyone in the team that, hey, everyone

1:35:37

in the team spend 15 minutes a day in

1:35:39

the accelerator Slack, like responding to questions and stuff,

1:35:42

which students won't be valuable because now all these

1:35:44

team is responding to them every 24 hours in

1:35:46

Slack. Everyone in the team also

1:35:48

has their own weekly office hour for the accelerator students. So

1:35:50

we have one that Tintin does for YouTube, one that Saf

1:35:52

does for video, one that Dan does for website. And so

1:35:54

as we end up with like sort of

1:35:56

10 potential office hours a week that students

1:35:59

can join. basically unlimited for the whole year. It

1:36:05

seems like not a lot, but getting everyone on the team to

1:36:07

spend 15 minutes a day just looking at the accelerator

1:36:10

slack and replying to questions is a thing that takes

1:36:12

them away from their core thing. It's

1:36:15

always a thing that feels like, guys, come on, let's respond

1:36:17

to the accelerator slack. I've

1:36:20

been thinking, is there a better

1:36:22

way to be able to deliver good customer success? I'll

1:36:25

have the students' questions answered, but without our team having to

1:36:27

go into the slack every single day to answer the questions.

1:36:30

Any thoughts come to mind around that? I'll

1:36:33

give you a quick thought experiment. If I

1:36:35

told you that you're making

1:36:37

a YouTube video, you've got to make a YouTube

1:36:39

video a week, and you're spending 15 minutes

1:36:42

on that YouTube video every day, what do you

1:36:44

think you should change? What would you change about

1:36:46

that process? I would do it

1:36:48

all in one go, like once a week. What

1:36:52

I would do is I would assign, say

1:36:54

I have 10 team members, I

1:36:57

would give each of them, each of them get a

1:36:59

day a week, just one day a week. Tintin

1:37:02

and Angus are Mondays, and

1:37:04

so on, like Tuesdays, Wednesdays,

1:37:06

they each just get a day. They're

1:37:09

not answering it all day. They just go in there for 20

1:37:11

minutes, 30 minutes that day. They

1:37:14

have a little calendar thing, and oh, this is

1:37:16

my day, so I spend 20, 30

1:37:18

minutes that day answering my sort of questions

1:37:20

that are in there and whatever, and just

1:37:22

answering the general stuff coming through. And

1:37:25

then, hey, if some question comes through

1:37:27

in the community that's relevant to them, yeah, maybe

1:37:29

it doesn't get answered until the next Monday. But

1:37:32

that's just like the sustainable way to do this, right?

1:37:36

Because inevitably,

1:37:38

too, I think what all of the students

1:37:41

in the program are paying for

1:37:44

is beyond having their questions answered timely, which

1:37:46

this would still allow you to answer most

1:37:48

of them timely. They're

1:37:51

also paying for your team to progress very

1:37:54

fast in your given area of

1:37:56

mastery, and then to share

1:37:58

those lessons with them. And

1:38:00

it's hard to become a master in what you're

1:38:02

doing if you don't have time to focus

1:38:05

and to be in flow And so

1:38:07

if the team's constantly feeling oh, I'm in meetings. Oh, and

1:38:09

then I need to go into the slack Oh,

1:38:11

and then as an afterthought, maybe I get to keep on

1:38:13

perfecting my craft Then they

1:38:15

never really get to go as deep in their craft

1:38:17

as they get to go or they could go and

1:38:19

thereby they don't have as much insane

1:38:22

deep learnings to share with the community as

1:38:24

they could if they had Tons of time

1:38:26

to go really deep and then yeah Just

1:38:28

a couple times a week they're assigned to

1:38:30

answers and stuff in slack and they're there

1:38:32

as well So I would just kind

1:38:34

of batch it the same way you would do anything And

1:38:37

I think everyone in the community will understand that

1:38:39

because you're teaching them batching with YouTube and then

1:38:41

you're also Applying that level

1:38:43

of thinking and psychology to how you

1:38:45

guys are dealing with the community as well. Nice.

1:38:48

That's great Great idea.

1:38:50

Yeah Anything

1:38:52

else that comes to mind around things that we should be thinking

1:38:54

about in our quest forget to go from five million to ten

1:38:57

Yeah, so I think that

1:39:01

one mental model that's useful when you

1:39:03

do this stuff, so you

1:39:06

know, you may start going through this system

1:39:08

and you're implementing

1:39:10

this whole flow and everything that we spoke

1:39:12

about and Sometimes

1:39:15

it may come up like damn. This is so

1:39:17

much work Like why are we even doing this

1:39:19

thing? Like I just want to move on to

1:39:21

this productivity product that we want to launch as

1:39:24

an example I think that

1:39:26

when you're building this stuff out a

1:39:28

useful mental exercise to consider is you

1:39:31

are Building that product now when you

1:39:33

do this Because you

1:39:35

are basically going to replicate

1:39:37

this entire flow for that

1:39:39

product You're just gonna change

1:39:42

some minor things. So like one

1:39:44

of the most complicated things we brought up I think that

1:39:46

we're like the stickiest for you were like the funnel system

1:39:48

and the sale system Yeah, once we

1:39:50

nail those perfectly for what you're already doing Then

1:39:53

just kind of you know changing the sales script

1:39:55

for the new product. It's not that much work

1:39:58

and making sure that that owner is also so

1:40:00

ready for it, it's not that bad. Once

1:40:05

you take that funnel system and we then, okay, this is the existing one, oh,

1:40:10

we just got to add in two more flows now for productivity

1:40:12

stuff. Okay,

1:40:15

that's not that bad. So

1:40:20

it's kind of like you already are building probably like 70% of

1:40:22

that new product and

1:40:25

by getting this thing right and making this thing strong

1:40:27

now, you've

1:40:30

built like 70% of that new thing and it will be

1:40:32

that much more sturdy, sustainable. And

1:40:35

I think for you too, one of your big models when

1:40:37

you think about anything new, and

1:40:40

can I do this for the long term?

1:40:42

And the answer to that

1:40:45

is hell yes, you can if all of this stuff is formidable

1:40:47

and strong. Yeah, weirdly, I guess it's another word, but since finishing

1:40:50

the book and

1:40:53

a newfound interest in

1:40:55

diving in and building and perfecting the systems

1:40:57

and stuff, because I think

1:41:00

before, even up until

1:41:03

a few months ago, while Book Mode was

1:41:05

still going on, it really felt like every

1:41:09

month for the last seven years

1:41:11

of doing this thing, I've sort of

1:41:13

been running a little bit

1:41:16

faster than I can, than

1:41:18

is comfortable because it's sort of,

1:41:20

when you're starting a YouTube channel, it's sort of like,

1:41:22

oh shit, we need to get this thing working and

1:41:24

then things start working. And

1:41:27

it's like, oh shit, I've got to stay on top of

1:41:29

it for it to keep working and then it keeps working.

1:41:31

And it's like, okay, cool, got to make

1:41:33

money now, got to hire the team.

1:41:36

And this is sort of like frantic thing

1:41:38

because my mental model was, I am a YouTuber and

1:41:42

YouTubers don't last very long. Whereas

1:41:45

I think what I've realized now is, no, I'm an entrepreneur, I have

1:41:47

a business. And

1:41:50

I can see myself doing this literally forever. And

1:41:52

it's now hard to fathom a world in which, like

1:41:54

previously I would have said, oh, but what if the

1:41:57

YouTube channel dies over time? I

1:42:00

mean, if it's at risk of dying over time,

1:42:02

we will see that based on the numbers. We'll

1:42:04

pivot. We'll have the strategy. We know everyone in

1:42:07

the world who is good at YouTube. We'd

1:42:10

have to really screw things up royally for

1:42:12

a major area of the business to just die suddenly. And

1:42:16

even if it does, we've got

1:42:18

the systems for everything else to be able to have

1:42:21

another system for Legion. And now

1:42:23

it feels like, oh, we're actually building a

1:42:25

business that can survive years, if not decades, rather than, oh,

1:42:28

shit, I need to make the next video for the algorithm, otherwise my channel

1:42:30

is going to die. And just that

1:42:32

sort of reframing from, I'm a YouTuber to

1:42:34

I'm an entrepreneur and this is a business.

1:42:36

Yeah, no, I think that's, I mean, yeah,

1:42:38

profound. I mean, I think we

1:42:42

can go and work on all the systems in all of this area, right? But

1:42:44

if we don't have like a core identity for ourselves

1:42:47

that matches like what we're trying to create, it

1:42:49

can lead to a lot of like disarray, right?

1:42:51

And so just thinking that you're a creator and

1:42:54

yet any moment this whole thing could collapse, it's

1:42:56

terrifying. Yeah, I get into really short term thinking

1:42:58

like, should I maximize all my sponsorship revenue because

1:43:00