Effective Leadership in Agency Management

0:28All right, so we have a little treat for you. I told Austin this, I was just kind of hopping in. I have to run to like a, it's, I'm going to be traveling for about 33 hours soon. So, so it's, it's a doozy. It's three flights, but I have a couple of things. And then Austin, I'll flip it over to you. Cause I know you have, you have an agenda for this one. I met with some things top of mind for me last Friday. I was in DC meeting a couple of my, my team members there. And so I go on these walks with, with, you know, if you get to see your people in person, I like to go on these like one hour walks with them.

0:58And so by the end of it, you're at the end of it, you're really sweaty and everything you've got a good workout in. But, you know, I just talked, I was talking to one of my lead strategists. I was like, okay, so one of the questions I always like to ask is what can the company do better? Right. Like, what are we doing right now? That's really stupid. Like, what can the company be doing better? Right. And everyone has an opinion at the end of the day. And what I'm looking for is I'm looking to discern signal versus noise. And, you know, you get a lot of gold from those conversations. I think we don't spend enough time talking to our people.

1:29I don't think we spend enough time talking to our customers. That's another one. We're not close enough to it. And then what happens is you get further and further away from the business. And I was just doing a podcast live with Neil. And you do a comparison of the Starbucks CEO and the Nike CEO, what the differences were between them, the new ones versus their predecessors. and the big thing was that the Starbucks, the previous one, he worked at McKinsey for 19 years. Okay. And the previous Nike CEO, he worked at Bain for 20 years, right? So these large management consulting companies and okay, well then now the new CEOs, one guy for, for Starbucks, he was at Chipotle, he was at Taco Bell and he's been in food and beverage for 19 years.

2:14Nike, the guy worked for Nike for like 20 years or something like that. Right. So there, there's a lot to be said about industry experience, but a lot of these people, they also talk a lot to their customers. They're always in the trenches, right? There's this Brian Halligan post that he just put on LinkedIn about all his leadership lessons from HubSpot, right? And I really recommend reading that one. And I think there's one piece in there where he just talks about you have to be there in the trenches. I think his whole piece is like getting coal on your face, right? If you're a miner, you got to be getting the coal on your face, right?

2:42To really understand what's going on there. So, okay. Number one, what can the company be doing better? And then the number two thing I like asking is what can I be doing better? Right. Um, what can I be doing better as a leader? Um, you know, one of the responses I got was like, okay, you know, staying closer to, to people ops. I'm like, okay, great. I should pay attention to that. Right. Which leads me to the third question. Third question is what should, what should I be putting more of my attention on? What am I not doing enough of right now? Because the job of everyone here is we're spinning a lot of plates right now.

3:11And some plates are starting to wobble and we kind of have to like, look at, look at it from a free safety angle and then, you know, hone in on it and solve that problem. Right. But sometimes we forget about, Hey, like maybe some people are seeing some things that we, we, we aren't seeing and we ultimately, we don't know what we don't know. So that's the third question. I'll drop these in the chat. And then the fourth question is where do you need more support? Like where can I be more helpful? Cause oftentimes our people are overwhelmed and we just don't know. And what happens is they get so overwhelmed and I'm sure some of you have experienced this or you're for sure going to experience this.

3:43you're so busy doing your thing. They're stacking on more and more client work. They're trying to please you. They're trying to do all the things they're trying to do extra. They're trying to go to extra mile. They get burnt out and they quit. They don't even tell you there's no like two week notice sometimes when this happens. Right. Um, and that's a very jarring thing. So it's better to kind of get ahead of it. Um, so that's always a question I like to ask. And ideally you're doing this with your direct reports probably at least once a month or so. Um, and so again, I'll drop these into chat, but I, those are the thoughts that I had kind of going into this call.

4:09And I wanted to share this before I, before I jump in a couple of minutes. Um, but Austin, I'm going to turn it back over to you for your regularly scheduled programming. Right. Thanks Eric. No, that's really helpful. Um, and we'll be looking forward to those in the chat. Agency owners. If you want to grow faster, my partner, Neil Patel and I, we are hosting live agency owner workshops in Beverly Hills, and you're going to learn how to get more clients. You're going to learn how to take yourself out of the day to day. You're going to learn how to recruit the right people. And you're going to be hanging out with like-minded people such as yourself.

4:40So if you want to learn more, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you on the other side. So first thing for the people who are just coming in, welcome in. We were just having some celebrations. We acknowledge Kevin, we acknowledge Marcos for having a great month and referring people in. So what I would like to do, I actually put together a poll slash quiz just to see what the needs are for the group today. So let me pull that up. And you guys should see this here. Do you guys see the poll coming up? Okay, cool. So what's most important for you on today's Hangout?

5:24And then based on that, we can either stay collective as a group and have like an open topic discussion, or we could break out into breakout rooms and have smaller, like more in-person one-on-one or one-on-two discussions. So we'll see what's going on. And then the second question, can you share your feedback on today's call after it ends? Just like Eric was just saying, your feedback is super important for us to continue to develop the group. So there's just a quick three-question survey. Two of them, I think, are multiple choice. So that's really helpful when you give your feedback there. So I'll wait for everybody to answer here.

6:01Got about 57%. Someone put no. No, absolutely not. That's fine. Hey, you know what? It's an optional poll. I didn't see the third question. I apologize. Oh, there's just two. Okay. There's just two. Ginger has to leave early. That's okay. Thanks for letting us know. Let's see. 11 out of 14, we're still missing three people. I don't think I'm participating in this. There we go. I don't see it on mobile. I'm not sure if it's not popping up. Okay. I wonder if you swipe. uh mayhaps mayhaps no sorry okay no worries no worries okay so we got most of the results in um so networking about half of you said we wanted to network about half of you said we wanted to solve a specific challenge okay so this is good and then about 30 said learning about a new tool So let's start there.

7:03Let's start about solving a specific challenge. So I can't see who responded to those, but let's start there. And we'll have about 10-ish minutes per person to see what challenge you want solved. And if we can solve it in faster than that, then we'll move on to the next person. So raise your hand. Allian wanted a specific challenge. Okay, who else had a specific challenge that they wanted help with? Rebecca? Okay, who else? Who else? Anybody else have a specific challenge that they like solved? Adam? Okay, let's see. Matt? Okay, got it. Cool. Awesome. So let's go in order. If you guys remember what we did last time, there was like, I put a timer up where there was two minutes and then we had 10 minutes to address the challenge.

7:52That was like a hot seat format. this will be a little more, a little quicker, I think. So I will put like a five minute timer up and if we can get the challenge solved, or if we wanna address it moving forward and extend the time, we can do that as well. So let me do that. Let's see here. Thanks for participating in that little quiz slash survey thing. Let me pull up the apps and we'll get a timer going on. I was super excited for this call today. I was like, let's go. It's Friday. Okay. So, Alian, let's have you go first. I'm going to start the timer of five minutes. And the goal here is to solve the challenge.

8:40Challenge means the problem that I'm facing, right? Yeah. Okay. Right. Thanks. So, to have a bit of context here, I was listening to Alex Ormosi the other day and he said something interesting which caught my mind and he said that you should aim to sell the goose if you want to sell your business and you want a big cash, sell the goose and not the eggs. So the goose keeps producing the value while eggs are just a one-time result. so it made me think maybe a kind of marketing agency is like an egg maybe and uh you get revenue from services but to really uh so marky if if you see that marketing agency is kind of egg uh my question is uh have anyone here or maybe eric uh have you ever thought about um have you ever get have you ever got any shares or equity uh for your services uh before and uh if yes how did that work out and uh if not why not uh why not have it and why is that because i marketing agency is good but uh sometimes we want to equity uh we want a big cash so how to get that yeah so two things.

10:02I disagree with the point that the agency is just an egg. I think it's the goose and the egg. So the reason for that is because one, if you can get your cash flows up, I think anybody here can get their cash flows to a million dollars a year in profit. That's already great. Maybe you get to two,$5 million a year. So, okay, that's an exit every single year. And then if you want to exit your company, let's say you're doing 3 million in profit, you might be able to sell it at like a 10X multiple or 15X multiple, right? So that's 30 to$45 million. So you get an exit every year and then you get an exit on exit.

10:33So that to me is a goose and an egg. You have a great cashflow business, plus you can exit on a great multiple. Sorry, maybe on 3 million, it's more like an 8X multiple or something, but still 24 million is a lot of money. So that's the one thing, right? The second thing is I've tried taking equity in the past. Neil has tried taking equity in the past. It becomes messy. And usually all of these are lottery tickets and they don't really amount to much at all. Right. And I'm pretty sure David here has taken maybe some equity and stuff, but it doesn't work out well. You're better off just charging a retainer.

11:05Maybe there's some profit share. Maybe there's some bonus component to it, but you start to make it too complex. Again, I would just look at all of these things as lottery tickets. You know, all the angel investing I've done in the past, you know, all these investing in all these funds or whatever. None of them have panned out yet. You know, some of them are doing really well right now, but still like if I have to wait 10, seven to 10 years or whatever it's, it's, you're better off just focusing on your core business, I think you start to get too cute with all these different things. It doesn't work out well, right?

11:34Because here's the thing, Ali, and let's say you take equity in this company. Okay, what are they going to give you? Like half a percent or something. And then, okay, you know, maybe they sell for like a hundred million or something like that, right? Great. In that case, let's, one, you're probably going to get diluted, okay? So maybe you get diluted down to like$3 million or something. In the United States, okay, you have to pay capital gains tax and all that, right? And like, what are the odds that they're going to sell for like, you know, a hundred million? What are the odds that they're even going to give you 5 %?

12:02Let's say they give you half a percent or whatever. Okay. Now it's half a percent, 500K, right? Oh, and then now it's like, what do you get after all the taxes and like all the dilution and everything like 150 grand or 200 grand? You're better off just charging them. So yeah. Okay. Right. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where framer comes in and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design-first, no-code website builder that lets anyone ship a production-ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours.

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14:48and now back to the episode can i can i just add to that real quick you know i've done this about five times they're all really good investments um but every time you perform and i performed on everyone because hell or high water i was going to but in the end they resent it they just want to pay when they can afford it they just want to pay you what you're worth and they don't really appreciate all that work you did because now they expect it and um so in the end it ended up we end up breaking up and i like washed my hands of it because i could sue them but they were it was just not a fun relationship and right um they don't they you know because it's a commodity in the end it's just really you got to be a hero and a zero every month and so um yeah anyways that's my opinion.

15:44Dang. Okay. Good insights. And it sounds like this is like a conversation that can be continued into the, into the group. Yeah. Cool. Cool beans. Yeah. Thanks for the, thanks for the question. A lot of comments here. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. I'll read all of them. Yeah. I got to run to the airport. So good seeing you all. Austin. Good job here. Keep, keep it going. Keep it going. See you guys later. Thanks, Eric.