How to be More Productive and Maximize Efficiency Through Delegating with Aaron Kemmer: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation! JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire! Brought to you by the HubSpot. podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Hustle and Flowchart. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives, and we'll be breaking down how to be more productive and maximize efficiency through delegating. To drop these value bombs, I have brought to Aaron Kemmer and the EO Fire Studios. Serial tech entrepreneur Aaron is the vice president and co-founder of the remote hiring service Magic, and the co-founder and chairman of the in-space manufacturing company, Made Space Inc.

0:35Today's value bombs, Fire Nation, having a great team is key to success. Freelancers and virtual assistants help you get freedom in your life and business. And communication is essential for all businesses with teams and oh so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Aaron and our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lanz is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented.

1:10The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Aaron, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with? Hey, what's up, Fire Nation? Yeah, so I think a lot of things about being successful is it's all about team, in my opinion. You know, you can think it's, we often like to put the, you know, the entrepreneur or the business person, you know, kind of on a pedestal and it's, you know, kind of all about them like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs.

1:57But the thing I've kind of seen about all of these guys that they've been able to do really, really, really well is handpick a really, really kind of good team. And I think with Magic, it even starts with, it's always started with a good team. We started with a big group of eight founders, which for a company that's big, for a Silicon Valley startup that's super big, Often it's like two to three kind of founders. But around the idea of Magic is actually, can you scale up your team? Can you delegate more and more work to a team? And can you get a really good team kind of fast? And so that's kind of how we started with Magic and the idea there.

2:42Can you get a team as early as tomorrow or the next day? Yeah, team is definitely, I think, the thing to success. Well, I love that because it's definitely how we found our success. And I also love the title of today's episode, which is, you know, Fire Nation is how to be more productive and maximize efficiency through delegating potentially to that team. So let's just break it down because Aaron, all we have is time and how we use our time is everything. So break it down for us. How do you know when it's time to delegate projects? Yeah, I love that. One thing I often quip about time is you only get like 28 ,000 days in life, right?

3:26So you want to really optimize those 28 ,000 days. And behind me on my wall, I have a piece of paper that has a little circle for each of those days showing that you could fit each day on one sheet of paper. So not a lot of time, and it really goes by quick. And I think there's that famous quip like, you and Bill Gates have the same amount of time, you know, right? But the one thing that you can do is maybe buy more time by, yeah, by delegating, you know, and I think a really good time to start doing that is before you think you should or before you kind of get, you know, kind of overloaded because when you delegate, you need to make sure you have the time to, like, train somebody, coach them, you know, build out a little of a process.

4:16And it's hard to do if you're completely swamped working 80 to 100 hours a week, you know, for instance, which many, many entrepreneurs kind of have. So one of my entrepreneurial goals is usually like get the ball rolling. I love to like kickstart something and then try to hand off to someone who's like even better than me, at least at that specific kind of project or skill set. Magic right now has got like a few hundred people. I've had a few other companies that have kind of reached this size as well. And usually when you get to a certain size, I'd say way before that, it's maybe, I don't know if it's a half a dozen or a dozen.

5:01If you have a really important aspect of the business, you want to have at least like one person focused on that one singular goal that you kind of want to accomplish. And so it's a really good time to start delegating. So it's like, I don't know, if you're trying to grow the top of funnel of your business, you probably don't want, if you've got like a dozen people in the company, you know, your admin exec focused on like top of funnel, scheduling emails, you know, calendaring, all that kind of stuff. You want like one person kind of focused, you know, on that. So, but yeah, definitely before you get overloaded, I think is a really good time to start delegating.

5:39One thing that I love Fire Nation to kind of use as an analogy here is a lot of people are like, well, you know, I just would love to have a tree here. And it's like, well, when's the best time to plant that tree? Well, if you want the tree there, it was 20 years ago. But, you know, the second best time is today right now. So if you want to start maximizing your time, if you want to start, you know, having more freedom in your business, And if you want to start working on your business instead of in the business, like the time to start building these things is now is today. And that's where I would love you, Aaron, to walk us through the process of actually being able to hand off a project once you have this delegation system in line while ensuring, by the way, that it gets handled properly because that's kind of a key aspect of this.

6:23John, you're so right about planning the time ahead. If you want to really maximize a team, you almost got to think about not if I hire the team now, how much of an impact are they going to have on this quarter, but next quarter or next year? Because it's almost like a funnel that it takes time to kind of spin up before they really hit their stride. You know, business is like a marathon, right? I like to think of it in terms of, you know, almost like five to ten year kind of cycles to really, really make, you know, kind of big things happen. So giving the time to build up a team and have the team hit their stride, I think, is important.

7:07So, but going back to the question of, like, what's, you know, the process of handing off a project? You know, for me, I, you know, I love to think about starting with the goal. My team even calls me the goal digger a lot of times because I love digging goals. Not gold, but goal, G-O-A-L. So what's the objective? What are we trying to accomplish with this project? And try to make it as clear as possible, like a smart goal. They say specific, measurable, attainable, those things. and once you have kind of an objective sit down with the person that you're delegating to and often try to like give your potential path to success on how to accomplish that project if they're a smart person you shouldn't have to lay it out in a micromanaging way or black or white but you should at least like say show that there is a road to where the goal is and here's some ideas on how to succeed.

8:15But it's not the only way. And then, you know, kind of let them, you know, make sure you have somebody that's capable that you kind of trust for this specific thing and then kind of let them, like, roll with that. And so after you set the goal, then lay the potential path to success. Then having regular check-ins and good communication, like keeping the channels open. Even if it's, you know, just over, you know, hey, you can Slack me at any moment or email me at any moment Or, you know, I like to do like weekly, you know, quick weekly one-on-ones or touch bases to help de-bottleneck things and make sure we're kind of on path or maybe we even have to adjust the goal.

8:55So, yeah, that's usually my step process. But I think the most important one is starting with a really, really, really clear kind of objective. Now, if we're being honest, COVID kind of made everybody at one point some type of remote worker. People that never thought they would remote work in their life, that never thought they would know what a webcam is, all of a sudden were being forced to work from home or to work not in an office for a set period of time. And of course, some of that is changing back to more normal now, and in some cases it's not. But let's talk about that. Let's talk about remote work specifically.

9:28So in your experience, how can we as entrepreneurs, as businessmen and women, how can we leverage remote work to get more done? Great question. You know, Magic is a remote work company. We were before the pandemic, you know, people in multiple countries, you know, dozens of cities all over the world. and a distributed workforce means you can kind of hire from anywhere and so COVID has shown that you can work remote and so many people are using magic to hire like a remote team right now and they could you know spin up you know whether it's you know hey let me get a virtual assistant or a marketing person or somebody who's good at sales or somebody who can help handle my customer support, people are able to kind of spin that up.

10:31And they're hiring a lot of times people in the Philippines. And so when you do that, when you're hiring overseas, you can have a 24-hour kind of operation. So when you're logging off, someone else can log on. so I think that's a really useful use case that people are using magic for hiring a remote team but I think the benefits of having and leveraging a remote culture if you lean in you can work almost anywhere for at least a period of time

11:08and so can your team and that really gives you a lot more options of people to hire Right. Instead of just being secluded to like, you know, you want to hire the best talent. So the top 10 percent in a given city, you now have the top 10 percent worldwide. And that's pretty, you know, that really, really opens up your pool to get a really, really solid team, which is, again, I think the most important thing to success. A lot of important things to think about here at Fire Nation, especially when you're looking to put together a team. And that's actually one thing that we're really going to be focusing on when we get back from our break, because I really want to talk with Aaron about freelancers.

11:46I want to talk about virtual assistants. I want to talk about what is the difference between the two and, of course, how we can use them to become more efficient, plus other important topics and tactics and strategies in this area when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Being a small business owner comes with a lot of challenges, especially now. It seems like everyone is working with smaller budgets, shorter timelines, and sky-high expectations, and that can make growing a business feel pretty painful. Thankfully, HubSpot can help. HubSpot just announced dozens of major product updates that'll make impossible growth feel impossibly easy, like Breeze, a suite of new AI-powered tools that deliver personalized insights to level up your work, plus AI agents designed to automate your work for you.

12:31Sounds pretty great, right? and Breeze Intelligence, which gives you the richest, most comprehensive picture of your prospects and customers, allowing you to serve them at a whole new level. Add to all this, re-imagine marketing and content hubs with new ways to create breakthrough content, updated features to generate better leads, and support to help up-level your marketing and revenue forecast. And you've got HubSpot's all-on-one customer platform. Get ready for growth without the growing pains. Visit hubspot.com slash spotlight to see all the updates. So Aaron, we're back. And as I kind of teased before the break, I want to talk about freelancers.

13:08I want to talk about virtual assistants, but I really want to have you first distinguish what is the difference between a freelancer and a virtual assistant? And then once you've done that, how are they helping us become more efficient? Yeah, great question. So freelancers, the way I kind of think about them is you can contract them to do any part of your business that you need kind of done. So big use cases of how people use magic. Starting at the top of the funnel, can we hire a marketing person or a social media person or a freelancer to kind of do that to manage like Facebook or Instagram or even Google?

13:55Can we hire somebody to manage ad platforms? So not just posting on the social media platforms, but can we manage a complicated advertising campaign to draw in more and more users to whatever your business or kind of product is? And so you can hire freelancers to do that or you could hire somebody kind of full-time, kind of in-house. you can hire freelancers to do the next phase of the funnel maybe you need to design some ads you've got an advertising platform but now you need to design really good looking ads or videos to kind of draw in people so you can hire freelancers to kind of help with that or designers to do your logo or your website and then maybe you need some freelancers to kind of handle the next part of the funnel so maybe you're selling, you know, you need to hop on the phone with a user to kind of sell them and to explain to them what your product is.

14:55And so you could actually delegate a lot of that to a freelancer too. That's what people use kind of magic for, you know, as well as like, can I, can I have somebody hop on a sales call, you know, and sell to my user? And then after you sold them, then maybe you need to handle the customers on the other end. And so often like with very, very new businesses. It's the entrepreneur that's doing all this. They're building the top of the funnel. They're selling the user. They're designing the ads. They're handling the customer support complaints. But as you kind of scale, you kind of want to hand off some of that stuff to freelancers to kind of be more efficient.

15:29Me in particular, I'm a serial entrepreneur. We started Magic years ago. Before that, started a space company, a healthcare company. And so I've always needed to kind of hand off as much as I can to kind of, you know, freelancers. But then I also like to have a VA. And so a VA is a little bit different than a freelancer. A VA is, you know, it's almost like your assistant, you're like right-hand man or woman to kind of help you out with anything kind of random. So it's like sometimes it's, you know, calendaring, you know, can you help me with my scheduling? Because I've got a very busy scheduling or traveling.

16:09I just spent the last month traveling all over the US. I was in 15 different states. I used my VA to help book flights and hotels and change flights and hotels. I needed to change six times. Rather than calling up the airline myself, my VA did that. When I start new projects in the business with magic, it's easier to spin up a freelancer especially before you know do you need a full-time permanent role for this exact project it's a lot easier to spin up a freelancer if you're launching a project let's say you need a team for the next three months so you want a marketer, a VA, a designer I've used magic to do that many times and that allows you to kind of do what I think is a really really important thing in business which is experiment until you get some traction so experimenting is you know is how you how you find out what's going to get you the most success and so you know with freelancers you can kind of experiment a lot more knowing that if it doesn't work out you know you don't have a you know a large runway and team you have to kind of pay for if it doesn't work out.

17:31And so it gives you that freedom to kind of really experiment. So Fire Nation, that's really what you're trying to build at the end of the day is freedom. Freedom within your life, within your business, within what you're managing, with the products and the services that you're giving to your customers and clients. That is what you're driving towards. And I just want to do a little side note here, Aaron, because I was kind of wondering what was going on with your Skype photograph. But now that you mentioned that you had a space company, I'm like, oh, that's a spacesuit. That's totally a suit that could go into space.

18:02So it definitely describes and explains a lot there. So that's very key. And speaking of which, communication. Communication is key. And you've talked about this a couple times, but I really want to laser focus right now on communication, why it's so important. And most importantly, how can we communicate effectively? Like how is that going to help us with this team building, with this remote work, with these virtual assistants, with these freelancers? Talk to us about communication. Yeah, man, communication is the most important thing across all businesses with teams. And if you want to get to a certain scale, you're going to need a good team.

18:45And our space company was called Made in Space. Me and Mike, one of the co-founders of Magic, kind of started that. And we built the first objects made off planet Earth with that company and won a few awards. And it was really cool. But definitely, definitely could not have done that without an amazing team. And so communicating with that team and all teams has been really important. And my communication style has probably evolved over the last decade or two. I remember 10 years ago, it was like easiest for me was in office, pull an employee kind of to the side. now it's almost like what you want is whatever is going to give you the fastest way to make decisions is probably the most important thing for communication and so now it's all done over slack or telegram or some other kind of chat where you can like quickly kind of answer any bottlenecks or you know any any problems that people kind of may have And so speed, I think, is really, really important.

19:57And so one thing I've found when you get to certain sizes of a team, speed kind of can slow down because if you have a good team, they're, of course, all going to have really strong opinions. and sometimes if you have a team that has strong opinions and they disagree, which is very, very common in groups of people, you kind of need to figure out a fast way to kind of de-bottleneck the disagreements. And so one thing we came up with was what I like to call the color system. The color system can really help when you have large groups of people disagreeing and you need to make some decisions pretty fast.

20:39And so let's say you have like a group of four or five, six people or more, and it seems like one or two people might be strongly against a decision you as a leader are trying to make. I mean, you maybe feel bad making that decision kind of without getting them to say, you know, I 100 % agree. The color system is kind of meant to kind of design kind of around that. So there's four colors. There's green, which means, all right, I love this decision. Let's kind of proceed. There's red, which means I hate this decision and in no way proceed. I'm really against it. And then there's yellow, which is kind of like I'm in the middle or I could see the pros and cons.

21:29You know, let's go either way, you know, whatever decision you want to make, leader. But the really important kind of innovation here is the fourth color, which is orange, which means I really don't like this decision, but, you know, I'm okay kind of proceeding. and what you'll find like when you're everybody's worked for teams and groups of people have definitely seen like you've worked with at least one or two people that are strongly against the decision and you'll find you think that they're red meaning you can't really proceed with the decision and which means you're bottlenecking you know you know uh you know streamlining and making fast decisions um but really oftentimes they're they're orange and they just want to communicate that they disagree it's like i don't agree with the decision but sure you want to go that way let's kind of go forward.

22:16And so what I often recommend to entrepreneurs or business people is if you're managing a team a lot and you need to make decisions and you want to get team buy-in, do a temperature check, get their colors. And 90 % of the time, you think that you have people blocking you and they're red, but they're really just communicating that they don't agree and they're completely fine kind of proceeding. And so I think that that, you know, is an example of tying into the most important thing with communicating effectively, which is like speed of communication and making those decisions. I love that kind of color coded way of going about things.

22:56Fire Nation, I think that you can definitely use that as an idea to kind of spur you on to something new, unique and different, or that will work for you and your team. But, what's important is what is something that is going to work to effectively communicate, the keyword being effective, because that's where so many people struggle is there's just this gap and there's so much waste when you have this gap and understanding of what needs to get done and it all comes back to lack of clear, concise, simple communication. And Aaron, what I want to do now is have you share the one big takeaway that you want to make sure Fire Nation walks away from our chat here today because I know you have some killer tips on increasing productivity and efficiency.

23:37So maybe give us your best one for this. Then share with us how we can connect with you, with of course Magic and everything else you have going on in this world, any call to action you have, and then we'll say goodbye. Love business, being a serial entrepreneur in many different industries. So many different tips I could give. I think when it comes to efficiency, I think 80-20 is talked about a lot. You know, what is the 20 % that gets you the 80 % of results? And what we at Magic started thinking about years ago was what we would call is the 80-20 of the 80-20. So that's like the 64-4. What is like the 4 % that gets you 64 % of the results?

24:27Because 4 % of work for 64%, that's actually great. But then we were like, okay, what's the 80-20 of the 80-20 of the 80-20? Or what's the 1 % that gets you 51 % of the results? It's like, all right, you can do one thing and it gets you half the results. And so that's often what I think about is like, what is that one thing that can get you 50 % of the results? Or what's that one thing you can do to zero to one, you know, a project, an idea? And then you can kind of like, you know, get a, you know, test the waters and get something rolling. And then once you've zero to one, and once you've got to the 50 % of the results, that's probably a really, really good time to start thinking about delegating or bringing on kind of a team.

25:17and in general, if you think about like 0 to 1 or the 51-1, again, which is the 80-20 of the 80-20, 51-1, it'll get you moving fast, which is really, really important in business in the 21st century. And then once you've done that and you've got like an idea that's kind of 50 % of the results, It's a really good time to start bringing on that team. And then using Magic, I think, is what a lot of people have started to do to build a team fast. You can add team members. Again, you come to Magic, and you can find out at getmagic.com or add us on Instagram at magic. and you go to Magic and within two days, we'll get you a team member of whatever you need or whatever you're trying to scale, whether it's that salesperson, that marketing person, that virtual assistant, aka a VA, customer support people.

26:22If you're at the point where you're seeing some traction and you're worried about scale, you can book a free consultation with us. We can kind of help you out, kind of see where you could delegate what would be a good place to delegate some of your business to and kind of learn about that. And yeah, for the Fire Nation, awesome group of entrepreneurs. I'm going to give you guys 10 % off. Boom. Just type in Magic Fire into the promo code. But yeah, you can talk to us for free and we can help coach you guys on delegating. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

27:01And you've been hanging out with AK and JLD today. so keep up the heat. Head over to eofire.com, type Aaron, that's A-A-R-O-N, into the search bar. The show notes page will pop up with links to everything that we've been talking about here today. And one more time, Aaron, give us that URL and magic fire promo. Getmagic.com, G-E-T-M-A-G-I-C.com and type in magic fire, all one word. Love that. Aaron, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value bombs with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation. Today's value bomb content was brought to you by Aaron.

27:44And Fire Nation, what can 3 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs teach you? How about how to achieve financial freedom and fulfillment? My first traditionally published book, traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success. It's revolutionary. It's a 70-step roadmap and it will lead you to the lifestyle that you've been dreaming about. This book took me 10 years of accumulating the genius of the world's top entrepreneurs, and you can get it all in one place when you visit UncommonSuccessBook.com. I will catch you there or on the flippity-flip side. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolfe and Nathan Lance, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

28:28Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts.