[110] Learning to Manage a Team / Launching a New Sales Strategy
Hey. Hey. Back at it. Bootstrapped web episode 110. Jordan, what's up, buddy?
Jordan Gal:Hi, Brian. I'm gonna apologize for my bad mood ahead of time.
Brennan Dunn:Oh, man.
Jordan Gal:I'm cranky.
Brian Casel:Is why is that? What's going on? Let's let's do a quick therapy session here.
Jordan Gal:Alright. Alright. Let's do it. I I'm actually getting some help on this from a Bootstrap Web podcast, listener, named Chris Ranzio.
Brian Casel:Oh, I know Chris. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. He's very, very good at organization, what he does. He's kinda he he he reached out to me a few months ago and was like, hey, I like the podcast if you ever need help on this sort of thing. And I didn't, like, dismiss it. Was just like, you know what?
Jordan Gal:I'm too busy for that. I'm too busy to get unbusy. And then at some point, like last week, I just hit a max of frustration and I just wrote an email to him just titled help. Nice.
Brian Casel:So we we just
Jordan Gal:spoke actually like an hour ago and he he's so I'm working with Chris. And so my frustration is around the fact that I do not spend a large enough percentage of my time on strategic important stuff. Just so much of my time just just gets just evaporates. It just gets burned away. And and it's like this very tricky situation because the company has the momentum of its own.
Jordan Gal:So we're it's not like we're standing still and we're like, gotta do something. We're, we're growing. It's just not fast enough, but it is fast enough that it keeps us busy. So I'm busy all the time. I just, but I only spend call it 10% of my time on like really strategic marketing things that push things forward and
Brian Casel:Yeah. Like building new stuff.
Jordan Gal:Building new stuff that that that outsiders, that strangers see. Right? I do a lot that our existing customers see and and deal with and read and all that, and they they're very happy because of that. But so so the way I look at it is we have the same person responsible for generating leads that's responsible for handling the leads. And that's that just ensures that you're not gonna be really good at at other ones.
Jordan Gal:So so combine that with the fact that I feel such a big opportunity with this new product that I'm I'm losing my mind because I'm like, okay, maybe I'm not happy over the past few months about how I've managed my time, but now I like refuse to accept it with this new opportunity. I'm not refuse to let it jeopardize. So that's why it's just been coming to the surface. Yeah.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I mean, think, and this kinda gets into what we're talking about here today and what my update for this week is, it's like, I think sometimes it's about developing a new role at the company for somebody else to take on, like like, actually, like a new job title that didn't exist before, whether that's customer success or or it's a sales role or it's a customer support or like whatever tasks. And and maybe it's like a mix of different tasks that you're currently doing that you feel like you should be doing, but really at the end of the day, at at a certain point after doing them for long enough, it's it's actually time for you to hand it off and start to focus on bigger things.
Jordan Gal:Right. Like, as I even heard myself speaking to Chris, I also spoke with Tim Connelly who's kind of a wizard at this stuff also. I just heard myself, like, just making excuses. It's just it's just excuses. So so what what I'm doing now is I'm trying two things, you know, to make it manageable and achievable.
Jordan Gal:Number one is I'm writing a list of all the things I do just to see and spelled out what am I doing every day because I'm doing like a 100 things during the day, but I don't have a good grasp of what they are. I just kinda have this sense of like, kinda feel everything and I I I have the best sense of what's happening in the company. So if if somebody pings us on the intercom with a question, I know that that person signed up about a year ago and had a bad experience in their onboarding. And so we should be like gentle with them. Right?
Jordan Gal:No one else knows that. And then you convince yourself that it's really important that you're involved because you're the only one that knows that. So it's all these like crazy web of excuses. So I'm trying to break free of that. So the first thing is to write down all the things I'm doing.
Jordan Gal:And the second thing is to block out time. Is what I've made this huge mistake where I go into the day and I say, alright, I have two different lists. I have an important list and I have a bullshit list. So I come into the day and I say, let me just get the bullshit out of the way so then I can focus on the important stuff.
Brian Casel:And then No. No. No. No. Do Right.
Brian Casel:The other way around, Get the important stuff done first and put the bullshit in the afternoon. That's why
Jordan Gal:But here's problem. I'm not big on mornings. My mornings just kinda fade away, which is a bad another excuse. So I always look at the afternoon and I'm like, that's my favorite time. A few hours in a row, no stress, put on a podcast, just like, don't have to stop for lunch, just chill out.
Jordan Gal:And so that's I've been trying to line up with my preference for the afternoon, and it has not been working.
Brian Casel:I you know, to be honest, I don't get the afternoon thing. I I know that some people I think they're a minority, but some people are night owls, and they get a lot of work done like late at night. That's definitely not me. I'm definitely, I think in the majority, which is a morning person. And I and I wasn't always this way, but I developed it a couple years ago.
Brian Casel:But now, like mornings for me are sacred. And I'm figuring this out now, like, I'm with the family and and two really small kids at home, like, the mornings are kinda dominated by, you know, I get breakfast ready for them and change the diapers and all that crap. But but, you know, as the sooner I can get into my office and working early in the morning, the better. Because that to me is like, I gotta capture these like four or five hour like morning hours before lunchtime because I I work like, not like hyper speed, not not super fast, but super efficient. That's when I'm gonna get the creative work done, the creative thinking, knock out the important stuff on my to do list, and then all of my like, literally set up my Calendly so that my appointments are in the afternoon and not in the morning.
Jordan Gal:Right. So I'm I'm starting to to attempt that that shift because whatever I've been doing doesn't work. So I think I'm gonna try to go toward toward that.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But Chris Ranzio, really knows his stuff. I interviewed him on the Productize podcast and I I don't think that episode has aired yet, but it's it's coming out, you know, sometime probably this summer. He's a smart dude. So Yep.
Brian Casel:Yeah. I'm looking looking
Jordan Gal:forward to work with him.
Brian Casel:Cool. So how about a quick update before we get into by the way, today's topic, I I just wrote an article about managing people, like learning to become a manager if you're if you're kind of a solopreneur or freelancer, you know, that takes a pretty long transition. So I just wrote a a pretty long article about that. It'll probably be published by the time this article comes out. So I thought we'd we'd talk through that a bit and I know that you've been growing your team and different iterations with your team at Cart Hook so we can talk through that stuff as well.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Yeah. I'm looking forward to that.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But before we hop into that, what are some quick updates?
Jordan Gal:So I think the the the biggest update that I can share that's kinda useful to other people is the the launch strategy that we're using. It's more of a sales strategy that we're using for for the new product and kind of the thinking around that and and and how we're setting things up. Right. The the situation we're in is that we we have a cart abandonment product. While the company is growing, it we have not been able to break through in any meaningful way to to capture, you know, a large portion of the market quickly.
Jordan Gal:Whether it's the fact that there are bunch of competitors, it's also a price thing. We're we're not the cheapest. We're not the most expensive. We're starting to kind of little get lost in the middle a little bit. So people that use the product are very happy and love it.
Jordan Gal:And that's great. We have very low churn. But for whatever reason, we have not been successful in kind of breaking through. So a lot of the reason we drifted toward a new product is because we want to go faster. We don't want this nice, you know, slow kind of climb.
Jordan Gal:So now that we have this new product that's unique in the market, it's the first time we've been in a position where we have something unique. If you want this, the only place to get it is with us. What I tried to really focus on for the past few weeks is how do we take advantage of that to grow revenue a lot faster than we have? And the conclusion I came to was the right way to do it is with webinars. And so I kind of went on this like education trip of of just learning.
Jordan Gal:You know, I'm familiar with webinars and I've done courses on them and I've done a few of them myself and I like them and all that, but I really wanted to figure out what are people doing now. So I I spoke with Tim Page from Leadpages. I've just been speaking to everyone I can get on Skype. I'm speaking with Keith Perhak. I think we're actually gonna hire him.
Brian Casel:By the way, let let me let me ask you about that because Sure. This is something that I constantly struggle with is just reaching out to people for advice. Yes. How do you do that? And I've done it from time to time, but like, my fear is that I know a lot of these people I'm actually friends with and it's not a big deal, but just in general, I just know how busy people are and to ask for free time.
Brian Casel:Like, how do you do that?
Jordan Gal:Well, I haven't really been asking for free time. I have been asking with the intention of hiring and that changes the conversations completely.
Brian Casel:What I mean, people who don't necessarily offer their time for sale, like other founders.
Jordan Gal:So yes. So that that just happens. So, you know, everyone has their thing, what they're good at. The networking thing is my thing. So I don't even know how to define it or explain how to do it because that it just comes in eight.
Jordan Gal:I'm not good at other things that people are good at. This thing is what I'm good at. So I I go with it. So I network like like a madman behind the scenes. So for example, how do I get Tim Page on the phone, or on Skype?
Jordan Gal:I I talked to Greg at systemly about hiring him to build out our webinar funnel and at the end of the call it turns out that we're not a good fit because he focuses exclusively on on Infusionsoft right now. So okay, cool. Great to speak with you. If you need anything, right? So we do the you know, we're we're we're buddies.
Jordan Gal:At the end, I ask, hey, man. I'm trying to learn as much as I can about this. You know anyone that I should talk to? And he says, yeah. Tim from Leadpitch is a good friend of mine.
Jordan Gal:Let me introduce you. So I say, of course, I wanna talk to Tim. And then Tim's, you know, kind with his time and jumps on the phone with me. And then as soon as we get off the phone, I think about what Tim was talking about and I send him whatever value I can and introductions I can to pay him back for his time.
Brian Casel:I love it. I I mean, I love that because what I've done in the past is just cold emails, which is is fine and sometimes success, sometimes not understandably, but what you're doing there is an introduction, asking for an introduction, but not just randomly. You're saying like, have this goal. I wanna learn about webinars. Know?
Jordan Gal:Yes. Who should I talk to?
Brian Casel:Who should I talk to?
Jordan Gal:Right. Who has done like a million webinars in the past year for a software company?
Brian Casel:Tim. Very cool.
Jordan Gal:So I so I've been speaking with a a lot of vendors, and you you learn a lot from vendors also because they they try to give you value in the conversation to show you that they know what they're talking about. So it's not like I'm cynically just gaining value. I'm I'm looking for the right person to hire. And so so, yeah, I you you think about what happens in a webinar funnel. You need Facebook ads to drive registrations.
Jordan Gal:So I'm talking to Facebook advertising people. You need copywriting for the emails. You need the webinar structure. You need the, webinar presentation. So so there's a whole bunch of stuff you need help on.
Jordan Gal:So anyway, to get back to the, the the strategy, what what I started to notice and start to hear people talk about is that a lot of these software companies are using webinars as a driver of revenue and the way they're doing it is by offering the annual plan as the only option on the webinar. So go to ClickFunnels, go to Leadpages, go to Samcart, go to a lot of software companies and you see on their on their pricing page $50,100 bucks a month, whatever it is. But if you go on to the webinar, they'll make one offer and that will be an annual somewhere between 500 and $1,000 for an annual plan and they'll stack a bunch of value as incentive to sign up. And you kind of only get that offer on the webinar. So it's like exclusive and time time sensitive and scarce and all that.
Jordan Gal:So that's kind of the the strategy that I saw people using. I'm trying to be smart and this relates to hiring that we'll talk about later. I looked at it and said, want to accomplish that. I'm not going to do that whole thing myself. I'm going to spend money wisely and hire the right Facebook person, the right funnel person, and the the last piece of it that I haven't found yet is the help me with my presentation itself.
Brian Casel:Okay. Actually, I I think I know a guy.
Jordan Gal:There we go, Brian.
Brian Casel:Unfortunately, I don't know his name off the top of my head. Otherwise, I would promote it here on the podcast. But I spoke to him through the productized course and I met him at MicroConf Europe. And he specializes in presentations and coaching you on how to give a good presentation.
Jordan Gal:There there we go. Is is he from Ireland by chance?
Brian Casel:I don't think so.
Jordan Gal:Like in in the fitness industry? Anyway,
Brian Casel:I've gone
Jordan Gal:I've gone deep on this whole thing.
Brian Casel:I'll find his name. Hopefully, we can include in the in the show notes. So, like, where are you at in in terms of the process so so that we can give listeners like an update maybe next week or the week after? Like, it's like
Jordan Gal:Sure. Yeah. Right. So here's like the inside look at it. So it's the May.
Jordan Gal:I want to run a webinar. So you gotta be realistic. Right? This stuff takes time. So I say to myself, I wanna run the first webinar in a month.
Jordan Gal:What do I need to do between now and then to make that successful? So the first thing I think to myself is, yes, I need to build out the stuff. You need the Facebook ads. You need the landing page registration. You need the thank you page.
Jordan Gal:You need some videos. You need email content. So we're we're hiring strategically for those pieces. The other thing you need is a great presentation. One of the key parts in a great presentation is proof.
Jordan Gal:You just want you don't wanna just say this thing is amazing and that because I say so. You want real numbers. And so what we're doing now is we are onboarding our first pilot customers and I'm building the presentation basically with those slides blank in the hopes and anticipation that the early customers were going to be able to use those numbers to say this is how much they have improved. So we're getting pilot customers on board. The other thing we're doing is actually just sent an email to audience ops, to my rep there.
Jordan Gal:And I said, hey, Kat, we are we have a Shopify specific product launching. I want Shopify specific content. And so I've I've I've asked right now, I'm getting blog content that's very specific to Shopify. I've also reached out to a different writer to write two Shopify specific articles so we can start running Facebook ads to just promote that so we can start pixeling people for retargeting now. Right.
Jordan Gal:Right. Why wait for a month? Why not promote blog content now that's just value based and then get them on retargeting audience and then be able to a month from today when we start running ads for the actual webinar itself, we have this, you know, a custom audience of a thousand people who have clicked on something that's very specific to Shopify. So it's everything in anticipation. So, okay, what can we do now that will make it more successful in a month?
Brian Casel:Awesome. And, yeah, I mean, speaking of audience ops, you know, that's great to hear that you did reach out. I was actually gonna ask you about that, you know, with the new product launch. And that's something that we're doing now to like, trying to do a better job of reaching back out to our customers every couple of weeks to get an update on what's happening in your business, what's new coming up. You know, we're setting up a system of like quarterly calls instead of just the initial kickoff call.
Brian Casel:We're gonna be rolling that out pretty soon. But Yeah.
Jordan Gal:That makes sense. And and I might have glossed over that, but the the the point of that is to be able to promote content on Facebook through ads and be able to show it to your to the audience that you wanna go after. And when they click on that, hit your landing page, hit your blog to read the post that sets the pixel so that they can be added to a custom audience that you can advertise to later. That's a little more Yep. Detailed.
Brian Casel:Very cool. Yeah. Any other updates?
Jordan Gal:No. That's it. I I think the the last remaining piece of of that is the the math behind it. The the reason people do this, the reason it's attractive is because you can make if you spend, let's call it $5,000 in Facebook ads and you get registrations down to call it $5 per registration. So for a spend of $5,000 you get 1,000 registrations.
Jordan Gal:Out of the 1,000 registrations, if you use retargeting properly and have good emails, you can get 40% of the people to either attend the webinar or watch the webinar after the fact. And if you can convert about 10% of them, you take a look, a thousand registrations, 400 people see it in one form or another. If you can close 10%, that's 40 people. If you sell the product for 500 to $1,000 on the low end at $500 times 40, that's $20,000. So you spent $5 on ads and brought in 20 ks in revenue.
Jordan Gal:And of course, a year later that, you know, a lot of those people are going to stay as annual customers. So so that's what I saw is that's what we need to do instead of growing by 2 or $3,000 in MRR every month, let's grow by $1,520,000 in revenue, a lot, a lot faster. So that that's, that's why it's, that's why it's enticing. And then the, the bigger picture of that is if you can get, if you can work on it for a few weeks and get your webinar to convert anywhere near 10% and you know you can make money on it, then you can go to the affiliates and say, will give you 50% if you promote to your list. And then that way you can get hundreds of registrations without spending money on the ads and only paying for the 50% of the revenue that comes in.
Jordan Gal:So that that's how you can build it in house, get good at it, and then go to affiliates to and in that in that way, companies like ClickFunnels, Leadpages, that's how they make millions of dollars a year selling software through through webinars.
Brian Casel:Yeah. That's I that that's awesome. You you laid it out perfectly. And, you know, webinars is is one of those things that it's I've I've done webinars for various types of product launches, like, you know, between product product ties and some things in audience ops. It's on my list to start a routine of monthly webinars for audience ops to, you know, to to drive, like, new clients, but also just general educational workshops, you know.
Jordan Gal:Right. It's funny you you mentioned the word routine because that's as soon as I decided to pursue the strategy, I said to myself, how do I take choice out of it and make it a routine? And what I came up with was I'm gonna hire someone, spend the money on it to build a webinar system that that forces me to run a weekly webinar. So it's like I'm hiring vendors to put me into a box that I have no choice.
Brian Casel:So, like, you you just spend all this money on it. Like, you've you've gotta run it.
Jordan Gal:Right. Not only that, but, like, everything runs. The Facebook ads run. The landing page says this Wednesday. The emails go out after Wednesday until the cart closes on Saturday night, and then web the Facebook ads run again starting on Sunday to promote.
Jordan Gal:And so it's like, you just you have no choice, man. It's the whole system around you just pointing toward sit in this seat for two hours and give a presentation.
Brian Casel:Yep. I love it. It's cool. So we'll definitely get an update on that over the next couple weeks and kinda follow that through for sure.
Jordan Gal:But Unless it goes really well, which case I'll never talk about it.
Brian Casel:And then it's like, become a super secret. Yeah. Cool. So some updates on my end. This week, I'm just doing a hire like, an interviewing frenzy of new employees for audience ops.
Brian Casel:I'm basically interviewing for two open positions right now, which I mean, by the time that this podcast publishes, these positions are not gonna be open anymore. But, you know, I've already kinda narrowed down the applicants, selected about five or six people to invite to interviews for each position, then holding those on every day this week. So those two positions are project manager and editor. And the things that I'm thinking about there are just growing the number of project managers that we have. So as of today, have two.
Brian Casel:We have Kat and Claire is our newer one. She's she's been on board for a little bit more than a month. We're gonna bring on two more. So we'll have a total of four and Kat's gonna be shifting into a slightly different role in inside Audience Apps. The the goal here is to you know, because our client list keeps growing and we need to reduce the number of p of clients that each individual manager manages.
Brian Casel:And it's not even so much an hourly thing, like, it's not like too many clients means too many hours. It's just too many things and too many balls in the air to to to manage. So trying to grow that team. And then the editors, like, we've been having the writers also do editing of each other's articles, but now I'm gonna have two dedicated editors So that the editing piece is like a just one person's job and the writers can just focus on the writing. So that's that's happening as well.
Brian Casel:I think that'll kind of clean things up in our process quite a bit. And, you know, it's just a challenge to kind of hire for two positions at the same time and like I spent all of last week just filtering through applications, but you know, getting through it now.
Jordan Gal:So what's so the driving force is is what is it that's telling you? We need new people, we need new roles.
Brian Casel:Well, for project management, well, really for all of it is, we've identified a few new bottlenecks in our production process that weren't necessarily there before. Like, things run perfectly smoothly when you're at ten, fifteen clients, but once you get to 10, like twenty, thirty plus clients, the wheels start to fall off a
Jordan Gal:little bit. Right. So just capacity and
Brian Casel:Capacity, things are being turned in a little bit later than we than we need. Little details are getting missed sometimes. And for the manager's point of view, it's just too much to to keep track of. That should help. And then the other thing project management related is I'm trying out Flow as a project management tool.
Brian Casel:That's at getflow.com. And I really like it. It's a tool that's been around a few years and it's gone through a few different redesigns over the years.
Jordan Gal:I I used to use it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. But I think the current iteration of it is really nice.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's a that's a MetaLab product
Brian Casel:that was
Jordan Gal:acquired by somebody cool I spoke to at some point. Someone in in the South that they, like, they acquire a few of these SaaS companies. So it's it's originally a MetaLab product and now now owned by someone else.
Brian Casel:Yeah. So what I like about it is that it's completely to do list based, but it has and this is the only app that I've seen this combination. It has Kanban layout built into it. As everyone knows, I'm like big on Trello and Trello is still super central to what we do in audience ops. You can view your to do lists in Flow in a Kanban style layout, you know, which is just like Trello, you can kinda move them from side to side.
Brian Casel:So between that and just the fact that now we have a larger team with different people and different roles. So as I said, have a couple of managers. We now have a marketing tech person on board who who manages some PPC campaigns for us. So he's got stuff going on. And one of our managers also does content strategy, and we're overhauling our content strategy for clients.
Brian Casel:And we're doing all these like internal projects right now that we need basically a dedicated PM tool to manage. But before this, we didn't really have anything other than Slack and email and Trello. And we didn't really use Trello for project management. That's really just for managing our production line of articles. So so I'm trying out Flow.
Brian Casel:I think it works pretty well. It's it's really good for collaboration. It it even has we're not using this yet, but it has like a chat feature built into it, which essentially is Slack built into Flow. And I don't think that we would really ever leave Slack at this point. And I don't think we would really leave Trello either, but I think the option is there.
Brian Casel:If we if Flow really starts to to stick, you know, beyond just these internal projects, then then I could see us, you know, potentially flipping the switch and and kind of moving everything into it. The other the other thing that's going on is, as I've talked about before, this year, a big initiative is to launch the audience ops training product. And this is gonna be like a flagship training product for folks who wanna build a content marketing team in house, like a content marketing department inside your company. And so I'm just taking the very first steps of this. And the very first step is to create a survey, which I've created and I'm about to launch probably by the time this goes out.
Brian Casel:So you can check that out at audienceops.com/survey. And what this is is I've got like a video message from me just talking through it for two minutes and then a bunch of questions. And my goal here is to understand, alright, like I I kinda give you an overview of of what we have in mind, like what's gonna be included in this training program and who it's for and how you would use it. But the questions are around like, alright, which parts of this sound useful? Which parts sound redundant or or you wouldn't make use of?
Brian Casel:You know, here's some idea on pricing. What are your thoughts on the value proposition? I'm trying to get some some actual feedback from folks. And then based on the responses from this survey, I'm gonna then reach out to to people who filled it out to get on calls and dig in even further, maybe record a few calls so I can listen back later. And like, that's usually my my number one starting point when I'm just beginning a new product is get something out in front of people, send it to my list, send it to the audience apps list, and, start getting real feedback rather than and I get it out of my own head and get it out of, just brainstorming mode and start to work off of real data from people.
Jordan Gal:Right. So before you jump into creation, you're saying, let me make sure I get it right. Yeah. Instead of assuming, oh, you know what everyone wants, they want, you know, the exact step by step process, maybe that's not what they want. Maybe they want more something more strategic or theoretical.
Brian Casel:Yeah, and I'm also laying out like a list of the topics that would be included to figure out what should we actually produce in terms of educational content? What should the format be? And should we include one on one training, group training? Should we include, you know, I don't know, video, audio, all that kind of stuff. So so again, that's at audienceops.com/survey.
Brian Casel:That's about all I got in terms of updates.
Jordan Gal:Nice, man. What you what's your thinking on the timeframe for that course or info product? What are we
Pippin Williamson:gonna want?
Brian Casel:My goal is to have it launched by the end of the summer, beginning of fall. Maybe it'll be sooner, but, you know, I don't wanna speak too soon. It's it's like we we haven't done anything except for create this survey so far. So and I and just given my schedule, because this is gonna be a big focus for me to be working on and a couple of people on the team are gonna be working on it. But again, I'm I'm getting back to a normal, like, working schedule now and we're in the new house and we've got baby a at home and I'm trying to figure out how productive can I actually be in a given month?
Brian Casel:Yeah. Because like now like, my previous months have been all over the place in terms of productivity and now I'm trying to figure out like what's normal.
Jordan Gal:Right. What's what's Given the new situation. Right. What what can I actually expect?
Brian Casel:Yeah.
Jordan Gal:Would you consider a boot camp type thing? I think it'd be more methodical than that, you know. You know what, some people do is they they sell it before they create it and then they you just use that momentum as the Yeah, I'm thinking about Week three, week four.
Brian Casel:I am thinking about doing some sort of pre sell, but I don't know the timeline of that yet. We'll have to have already created at least the outline and a couple of the lessons, so that we know the template of how a lesson would be created. Like, let's say there's 20 lessons. If we've created one or two and they're good You have your format. Then we have our format, then I can do a webinar and like pre sell it and say it's opening up in thirty days and then just hustle for thirty days to get the other 18 lessons done.
Jordan Gal:Right. Get get released once a week type of thing.
Brian Casel:Yeah. The other thought that I I had was to do something that I I know Justin Jackson has done this in in the past is is do just a paid webinar, maybe a series of paid webinars. For a lower price, just come in for a live training. It's it'd be like a light version of of the type of training that would be in the course, but just selling seats to that webinar would be a good kind of first step to validate our people willing to pay for this and and get their feedback on the content. I'm I'm kinda up in the air on what that's gonna look like.
Brian Casel:We'll we'll see how that goes. I'll I'll keep folks, you know, updated through the summer as as we get rolling on that. So, you know, maybe maybe we'll just spend a few minutes on this topic that I I finally got around to writing a new article on on my personal blog after, I don't know, how many months of not writing. But but, you know, it was one of those topics that it it kinda flowed out really, really fast. And whenever whenever that happens, it's it's like whenever I I get an idea, like, I'm probably, like, in the shower or something, get an idea for a blog post.
Brian Casel:It's like, better just, like, go downstairs and write this thing before I just get too busy to write anything. And and the thing goes away. So I just did that earlier this week.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. So what's what's the what's the impetus? You you just been thinking about hiring in general lately?
Brian Casel:Yeah, I've been doing a lot of hiring in general and the team has been growing and as I've talked about there are new roles being developed in the team. And I've just gone for like audience ops this year has gone from zero to we have 17 people on the team now, some full time, some part time. And so working title of this blog post that's coming out in the next couple days is from solopreneur to managerpreneur. And it's kind of in response to a question that I receive repeatedly over the past year or two years from readers who say, how how do you go from working solo to to managing a team? When did you hire and and manage your first employee?
Brian Casel:And how did you learn how to do that and and and where to find them? And, you know, I get a mix of these types of questions. So I want to write like a an in-depth guide to kinda do a blanket covering of my thoughts on this. And I think a lot of this kinda stems from people are afraid to manage other people. So I've found that.
Brian Casel:And I found that like becoming a manager can be like an objection to launching a business that's bigger than just you. There's a lot of freelancers and consultants out there who they're used to being a freelance designer, making a pretty good living and they wanna start a product business or they wanna start a productized service, but the idea of hiring employees and managing them is just they're turned off by that idea before they even get into it.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. I'm trying to, you know, why why? What what is that? No one really wants to do all the work themselves forever unless it's, you know, something that you really enjoy doing and that's what, you know, God bless. You do whatever you want.
Jordan Gal:I I
Brian Casel:think that, I I've been in this boat myself too. Like, back when I was solo freelancing, before that I had been working at agencies. And I didn't necessarily enjoy having bosses or going to meetings or being in a company and going to meetings and things like that.
Jordan Gal:So Right. Maybe it's bad experiences that people are
Nathan Barry:taking
Brian Casel:I with think once you're on your own self employed, you start to associate managing people under you with what it's like to be managed. And they are not the same thing.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, or lack of freedom or something negative that they're bringing to it.
Brian Casel:Yeah, and so what I wanted to do here is, the other thing is you don't become a manager overnight and you don't become a good manager overnight. It takes a lot of time, but also many several levels of managing and managing different types of employees and contractors and you can kind of start to get your feet wet and at every one of these levels, so I've laid out about six levels. At each of these levels, there are certain aspects of becoming a manager that you're you're going to learn as you go once you reach this level. And that's really the purpose of this article is, you know, it's a learn by doing process. So let me just kinda start start rolling it out here.
Brian Casel:I'm calling level zero, not level one because sorry. Someone's at the door. My dog's kinda freaking out. But the so this is level zero and it's called managing subcontractors. And I call it the level zero because it's this is like before you have a product business.
Brian Casel:This is still when you're consulting or you're freelancing and you have projects like client projects that you can bring in a subcontractor on. A prerequisite for this is like you've projects with enough of a budget and scope to allow for subcontracting certain parts of the project. And then some of the essential management skills that you would pick up at this level are, you know, you can learn how to budget and profit margin. So no longer is it a 100% profit going to you as a solo guy, now it's, you have to figure out, okay, these are my costs for my for for these contractors and this is how much I could take home. And then also like setting deliverables and deadlines and and and kind of managing that for a coworker that that takes some getting used
Jordan Gal:to as well. Right. Right. Okay. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:And that's is that the same thing as like like if I hire a freelancer to create, you know, an an ad for me, you know, like an ad, you know, ad creative, like, okay, here's just a job, here is money. This is here's the instructions give you back what what the end product is.
Brian Casel:Absolutely. Because because that's like project based, right? Like you can bring someone in for a start and finish. But I think the difference is when doing client work, you already have the money coming in or you've signed a contract where you know this project is $20,000, I'm going to budget 10,000 to hire a designer and developer on it and I'm gonna make a $10,000 profit, that's clear cut. That's for someone who's never worked with a team before, that's I think a good first step if you're in that freelancing consulting game.
Brian Casel:If already running a product business and you decide, okay, I'm going to budget $5,000 for this, that's still like an entrepreneurial venture. Like, I'm gonna invest this to see an ROI down the line, but there's still a little bit of a gray area in terms of what that's gonna be.
Jordan Gal:Okay. So that's level zero. What's what's one?
Brian Casel:So level one, you have a product business that's launched and you're starting to have a need, I call this managing a part time assistant or a customer support role. So the prerequisite here before getting into this management level is you've got to identify a few repeatable weekly tasks that can make up this person's job. And again, this is part time, so they don't have to be a full time employee, they could be five, ten hours a week. And just find five to ten hours worth of tasks that consistently happen every single week, week in week out, all year long for your business that that you're currently doing that you can delegate to to an assistant. Maybe this is a tier one customer support type of role, maybe it's a virtual assistant, an administrative assistant, a bookkeeper.
Brian Casel:These are the kinds of examples of this type of role to start kinda delegating. Essential skills that you would pick up at this level, learning to delegate repeatable tasks so that you're just not doing all the, like, mechanical repeatable work yourself. And then and then also, like, since this is not a project based, this is ongoing. So at this level, you're going to learn the management routines. So training new employees, running a weekly or biweekly payroll, daily or weekly meetings, if that's your thing.
Brian Casel:They don't necessarily have to be your thing. Me personally, we don't do weekly stand up meetings or anything like that in Audience Ops. You can kind of figure that out. Evaluating employee progress. So like, again, these are things like if you've never done them before, kind of have to get used to them, but the only way to do it is to hop in and do it.
Brian Casel:Then the next level up, which I'm calling level two is managing a part time creative role. So again, it can still be part time, it doesn't have to fill up forty hours a week, but a creative role doesn't I don't necessarily mean creative, like they have to be like a designer. What I
Jordan Gal:think Like of non standardized, non manual repeatable process?
Brian Casel:Yeah. I I think of a creative person as like somebody who produces assets for your business. So those could be like design assets, like visual assets, they could be develop developer who creates functionality, helps build an app or features. It could be a salesperson who closes sales. It could be a marketing person who produces leads.
Brian Casel:Like you're adding value to the business in some way.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. This is really tough because I find right at this level is where it's more work to get them set up and manage and give them wireframes and ideas. And it's not like here, go do this project. And based on your previous history, I know that you know how to do it. So here's some info and go do it.
Jordan Gal:This all of sudden becomes like, okay, now I have a to do item on my list that I need to get done for them to get started.
Brian Casel:Well, yes and no. I mean, I think that it is a high it does take more work and more preparation to bring in this type of person, whatever role they're in. If you personally are a designer and you're hiring a designer, then you already have the knowledge and experience of like, how to evaluate designers, how to give them a project to work on. But if you're not a designer and you're hiring a designer, then hopefully you're hiring someone who knows how to ask you the right questions and get the right information from you so that they can do a a killer job. I I think an essential skill that you would pick up at this level is how to manage creative output without micromanaging.
Brian Casel:And that's really tough. Like for me, if I'm a design like, I come from a front end design background, hiring a front end developer. I used to have a huge problem with that because I would be like, you're not using the right h one or h two tags or whatever. It's like, you know, who cares? Like, I'm not the one doing that anymore.
Brian Casel:It's their job to do it, you know. And the other thing is it would be like managing a creative process, whether that's using GitHub or, know, Trello or, you know, making even though it's creative and and things are are happening creatively, you still wanna have a standard step one, step two, this is how we produce stuff in in the business. And then level three, this is something that I'm kinda just learning this year is managing your first full time employees. I I've had full time employees before, like in Restaurant Engine, but this is the first time that I have US based like w two employees, which if you're here in The US, it just adds a whole level of complexity.
Jordan Gal:It's it's a terrible thing that hiring someone full time is like, that's basically what you want to avoid for as long as possible, which is unbelievably stupid and perverse that that that's the incentive structure, but it really is a very large level of complexity being added on into the business.
Brian Casel:That is absolutely true. And I mean, it I've been in business on my own for what, eight or nine years, and it's only now like in the ninth year that I've actually taken that step to hire w two employees. Even though I've had full time like people overseas and things like that. But this year, it just made sense to take that step with some US based contractors who were essentially working forty hours a week. So kinda have to go that route.
Brian Casel:Prerequisite to get to this level would revenue or funding to support the cost of hiring a full time employee, obviously. But the essential skill that you'll pick up is figuring out all the HR systems, which is a huge pain in the ass.
Jordan Gal:And taxes and corporate and requirements and workers compensation insurance. Exactly. What do you use? Do you use benefits or something like it?
Brian Casel:I use Gusto. Oh, yeah. Formerly Zen payroll and Yep. And that is a huge help and I can't recommend it enough. Yeah.
Jordan Gal:But there Still still have work to do.
Brian Casel:You still have work to do. And and when I when I first signed up for Gusto, I thought that Gusto takes care of everything a 100%, and I thought wrong. Yeah. You know, like, I
Jordan Gal:did the same thing. I don't know if you've had any bad experiences. Right? I I've gotten, the $8,000 bill from New York state in the mail that like made me lose a night of sleep.
Brian Casel:I haven't been stung like that yet.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Which was wrong, but I still lost a night of sleep.
Brian Casel:Yeah. The challenge that I've had is is we're fully remote and I've got US based employees in States. In California and West Virginia currently, and pretty soon there'll be a couple other states. So every time I hire someone from a different state that I haven't hired from in the past New filing. I have to register my business in that state and, like, develop or like establish quote unquote a business location in that state.
Brian Casel:And West Virginia in particular has been a huge huge pain in the ass to deal with. And I they they literally don't have people manning the phone lines. And the only way to to like complete the registration of your business is to talk to someone. I mean, I like literally one hour waiting on hold.
Jordan Gal:Yeah, it's the worst the worst side of business. If I ever need a productized business, it be to do this because I know how much
Brian Casel:it hurts. And you know what, I think Gusto has done this as well as you technically are a company can capably do it because At scale. Like what they do is, okay, I say in Gusto, I have an employee in West Virginia. They're like, okay, you need to tell us this employee code or whatever this address, and then you need to go register your business at this website. Here's the link and you need to follow-up and register on this other West Virginia website and here's the link.
Brian Casel:And they've had that information laid out for each individual state. But it's still like you have to go over there and and like once you click that link and you're in their government website system, it's like a whole other world.
Jordan Gal:Right. Then you're on your own. Then you're like, okay, cool. Now what do I
Brian Casel:do? Right.
Jordan Gal:Yeah. And and obviously the so that's a large pain in the ass. The other one is is the cost of a w two employee. It just totally changes the math. It's just like if if you're trying to pay someone, call it $5,000 a month, I mean, it's gonna cost you $8,000 a month.
Brian Casel:Yes. But if you're going from like like what I do with audience ops is they transition from being a freelancer to a full time employee. And there's generally an understanding that if you're going from being a freelancer to a full time salary position vacation time and that kind of stuff built into it, and the consistency and reliability of having a steady paycheck all year long.
Jordan Gal:Right. The take home number goes down?
Brian Casel:Yeah, the take home number goes down and they're no longer paying their own self employment taxes.
Jordan Gal:Right, you're just shifting it in effect, you're shifting the tax burden from them to you.
Brian Casel:Yeah, but there's there's no doubt about it. There there are higher costs for for my business than than hiring freelancers, even paying freelancers at a higher rate. That is what it is. But the benefit I think and what I've learned is the benefit of having a consistent employee who is dedicated to audience ops versus a freelancer who is juggling audience ops with other freelance opportunities. That's a huge benefit.
Brian Casel:And I've had freelancers have to drop out because they took other gigs or developer gets too busy or those are real problems and it's kind of a pain to keep hiring and rehiring when you can just hire a few people full time and and get them dedicated. Of course, you know, you you wanna have the consistency of revenue to get to that level. But the the last two levels, I'll just kinda like combine them here. It's really like managing managers. Well, alright.
Brian Casel:So like one level is like managing managers, which is I talked about it. Like, we have managers and and also like creative leads. So like product owners or technical, like like a chief, like a like a CTO or something.
Jordan Gal:With with a team
Brian Casel:under me. A team under Under them. I think the key thing that you'll learn that I've been learning here is like my my role as a manager of managers is to really coach them. Like I just coach them on how to be better managers with the people underneath them.
Jordan Gal:As opposed to getting involved in their day to day.
Brian Casel:Yeah, like my whole goal when I hire managers is because I don't wanna be managing the day to day, you know, details of every single client and all the things that are going on and the ins and outs. That's their their like their role is to manage the deadlines with writers and manage the revision requests and all and all these things. But, you know, there are little issues that pop up and there are ways to be a a better manager of people and and and management style. And it's not that I dictate, you know, that you should this is how I would do it and you have to do it how I would do it, but I try to coach them and and help them be a better manager in their particular style. And this also kind of applies to like, I have a salesperson now.
Brian Casel:I'm kind of coaching him on how to be a better salesperson. I'm listening into his calls and and and kind of coaching him that way. And like, it's not like he'll he's ever going to speak exactly the way that I speak to people. But I can I can coach him on like, well, I I would have approached this question a little bit differently or something like that?
Jordan Gal:Yeah. That's such a funny reflex to to see that, like, in in real time when how they answer and how it's different from how you would respond, and you kinda just have to be more and more okay with it.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And it's you kinda put your fist in your mouth a couple of times in the beginning because it's you get especially if you've been doing all the sales yourself, as most founders do for a while and to hear somebody else representing your company to potential new clients, it's like, So it's been several weeks of of training him and listening to calls and you you do start to see a clear improvement. You know, he gets more confident, he he gets you know, the answers just kinda roll off, whereas before there's a lot of ums, I'm not really sure, you know, so it's definitely getting improved. I think the final level, know that you have more experience in this than I do at this point, is managing executives, that that's kind of how I put it, but this could be like managing partners or promoting an employee to equity holding positions. Like for me, I'm a solo founder and that has its challenges and but I I think it it it I I work better in that way, but I still seek out kind of side project partnerships like you and me are partnered on this podcast and I do conferences with people.
Brian Casel:Like for you, you have partners in your business. So the idea, like how do you think about managing partners and collaborating at that level?
Jordan Gal:It it swings from being really easy and natural to being, very challenging. And there's so many things wrapped up in that because we're we're a small company. There's it's a team of three people. So inevitably, become very close. And when you become very close, everything gets personal and your friends and you know everything about each other's families, what you do on the weekend and you're posting pictures of your your kids in Slack and and and that familiarity breeds a cohesiveness and like a a great culture.
Jordan Gal:But what it also does is it is it makes it challenging to confront. It makes it challenging to, push. So so it goes back and forth. So I I I find myself sometimes I I end up critical of myself. Like, I need to be more of a manager, a little bit colder in the approach.
Jordan Gal:And then sometimes I just think, you know what? This is this is how I wanna run my company and this is how I'm gonna run my company instead of just being so critical about what should I be doing? You know, it's like, that. This is what I'm doing because this is how I wanna do it. So it's not like it's the worst thing in the world.
Brian Casel:Mean, I like that thought too, because I like for me, there are a lot of things like I have a big team now and I for a while I felt like I should be having weekly meetings with my team or daily meetings.
Jordan Gal:Or at least your managers or something like that.
Brian Casel:Yeah, but like I don't do that. And like the few times that I've tried to do that, it's like, we're just not that productive on this weekly meeting, you know? So
Jordan Gal:Yeah. Sometimes the goal isn't productivity though. Right. Sometimes the connection I attribute our resiliency in the past year. Ben first joined, man, we hit a fucking tech nightmare.
Jordan Gal:Like three months in, we just went from like 20 customers to 15. We had a bunch of big ones and our system just exploded, man. Everything fell apart and we were emailing hundreds of people incorrectly and that was tough to go through. And then we hired Rock and he rebuilt the whole system and everything improved. Then we got this idea for the Shopify thing and we went through this whole giant rollercoaster of a nightmare of being rejected and then being accepted all this other stuff.
Jordan Gal:We came out of that. We're we're crazy about each other. We just have a great time and we consider each other really good friends. So if we didn't have that cohesiveness, we would not have come out nearly as strong and and confident in the future even though we've had setbacks. So so that's hugely important.
Jordan Gal:So I I think I try to pick my battles. I try to say, this really, you know, I like have the conversation with myself before I have it with with Ben or Rock or or either one. If I'm unhappy about something, instead of just coming out and being like, this is bullshit. Why isn't this getting done? I like have the conversation with myself first.
Jordan Gal:Like, am I doing what I'm supposed to be doing? Is this like fair for me to criticize this? And if I come to the conclusion that, yes, I have a right to be frustrated about this and it needs to be addressed kind of out loud instead of just kind of behind the scenes, then I'll do that. And because that's relatively rare, when when I do it, it's kinda, like, serious.
Brian Casel:Yeah. It's this is worth a conversation. So just the conversation in itself means this is important.
Jordan Gal:Right. Right. So it's like, okay, you know, we try to, we have fun and everyone's like pushing each other without pushing. Everyone wants to do well because the other person is pushing forward and working hard. But then every once in a while it's like, you know what, let's escalate this into, okay guys, we need to talk.
Jordan Gal:This is a problem. This isn't getting done and this is falling behind for some reason and that's not okay. We're not ready. We need to be ready. So, yeah.
Jordan Gal:So it's kind of like a pick your battles thing.
Brian Casel:Yeah, for me, I like to write things out first. And sometimes it's just like an internal note for myself, just like, let me get all my thoughts out in written form. Because if I write them out and then it still makes sense, like writing it out for me, makes me think through it in a logical sense so that like, in case somebody else is gonna read this, like sometimes I write it out in a really long email before, like, even if we plan to have a call or a meeting later in the day, I'll write all the thoughts that I wanna get out ahead of time in an email to that person. So that it's like you you get what I wanna talk about. Once we get on the call, it's really just about answering any questions about it, you know.
Brian Casel:I I just find that like I I tend to ramble a little bit on on the meeting and not get the message through unless I write it first.
Jordan Gal:Right. It kinda forces you to organize your thoughts and it makes you go slow. You you can you type a lot slower than you think.
Brian Casel:Yeah. And you can go back and edit and things like that.
Jordan Gal:So Right. Right. Yeah. Cool. I yeah.
Jordan Gal:I'm I'm curious on on your end, right? So so the objection from a lot of people that I don't wanna be a manager, there's validity in that. It it can be not so much fun to just manage people all day and never like Yeah. Do the do the thing that you originally were interested in.
Brian Casel:Well, think my whole goal in doing this episode and writing this article is to push back on that because it's not like you're managing them quote unquote all day. The whole point of bringing people on is that they're gonna work all day or however long you're hiring them for. And you're only technically managing them a small fraction of that when you're having the meeting or when you're giving them the task or when you're writing the email. Of course, there's a whole lot of responsibility that comes with managing and you have to develop these people skills and have a lot of patience and deal with the ups and downs of it, but if you are gonna grow anything beyond just yourself, beyond just selling your time for money, you have to learn to manage people in one form or another. Obviously, productized service is gonna be very people heavy, most of the time.
Brian Casel:But even if you're doing a pure SaaS, completely software based product, you're still gonna need people, whether it's customer support, development help, design, marketing, you know, you've got to learn to work as a team. There's just no way around it. And I've actually come to a point where I enjoy managing and I stress from the responsibility of it, especially with the team. This is the largest team in my experience so far. So but the fact that I can I was in the hospital a couple weeks ago with the birth of my daughter, so I'm completely off the grid for a week?
Brian Casel:And my business is running and signing up new clients and delivering work and things are not exploding. The only way that happens is if I have great people and they are happy enough to work for me and went with me as a team. And and I I I I enjoy that. Yeah. I I think it's, you know, it's it's good to That's get worth to that
Jordan Gal:it. You know? Cool, man. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing the article when it comes out and that's it. Good to catch up with you.
Jordan Gal:I hope the webinar explanation was helpful and Yeah. Shout out to Chris Ranzio and
Brian Casel:Cool, man. Cool. It was a good one. Alright. Talk next week.
Jordan Gal:Alright, man. Be good. Later.
![[110] Learning to Manage a Team / Launching a New Sales Strategy](https://img.transistorcdn.com/LDB_Cv9bHAA2vtoSPkZCpkdHPF6fAqfl7PL-PG7_c-M/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:800/h:800/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9jMjkw/MDYxZDQ0MWIxYTUw/NTMzMGI2NTExZWMx/MWQ1Yi5qcGc.webp)