How to Win in Hiring According to Agency Leaders

0:28All right, so we have a little treat for you. opening up the floor to some wins for the week. Anybody would like to share their wins? New clients, success, progress, anything?

0:43I had told you all I would give you some, I'm sorry, I still have a cold. I would give you some feedback on that virtual marketing hire that was the company that AOA had recommended. and the process went really, really smoothly. They were great. They found us a rock star. First one that they had us interview and everybody fell in love with her. And then my team was like, wow, it feels weird to hire the first one. Should we have them give us a couple more? And they gave us a couple more and the first one was the one. So we hired her a couple of weeks ago. I think this is week three and she's doing amazing.

1:23So yeah, all good. Wow, congratulations. What is she doing? She's doing a lot of execution. You know, she's doing she's writing some content. So doing some stuff like case studies and doing some email marketing. But, you know, our language is pretty specific because we're in the property and casualty insurance space. So you not only have to understand marketing and verbiage and all that, but you have to learn insurance. And I mean, she's just adapting so fast. So it's cool. Yeah. Where did she end up coming from? What country? She is also in the Philippines. We have others that are in the Philippines.

2:05And my goodness, be careful who you hire in the Philippines are because their power is out all the time. Yeah. But this gal is in Manila. And so she shouldn't have the same power issues, hopefully. Yeah. And, you know, it was funny. the original pricing for her. I think they told us that we probably have to pay like$12 an hour. And then they found her and came back to us and said, okay, she's$7.50 an hour. And we were like, okay. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. That's fabulous. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So I wanted to take a second to tell you about the agency owners association. So this is a agency peer group ran by my podcast co-host Neil Patel and myself, Eric Su.

2:49And these were nine and eight figure agency owners respectively. And what I will say is at the end of the day, you want to learn from people that have been there, done that. If you want to grow your agency to seven figures, eight figures and beyond, this is the group for you. And we bring in other agency owners to speak as well. And it's a great peer group where you can help each other out. And you're going to learn how to acquire more clients. You're going to learn how to take yourself out of the day to day and to build the business of your dreams. And the cool thing till November 30th, we are holding a special price and you can apply at marketing school, the aisle slash agency.

3:19And the great thing about it as well, if you try to get into group, there's a seven day free trial, right? So once November 30th hits, we're going to increase the price by$200 per month. So right now you're getting it at the lowest price possible. So go to marketing school, the aisle slash agency to learn more, and we'll see you inside. Similar story. Um, we hired three people this week, um, starting today, actually so it's been kind of a crazy day um but yeah with similarly we we're using um kind of a recruiting firm out of uh north macedonia which is um just north of greece near albania bulgaria and that area the peninsula across from uh italy and um real i mean the first two like you anita um interviews were like we're looking for a design lead uh so someone in-house that could oversee um all the design projects that we have been from logo design branding to just the make sure the brand guides are implemented you know through our social media projects and throughout the customers brands and um that yeah she she's uh her English is amazing like you you know she's got better English than some um you know people live in America that are working here um and highly educated she's been drawing and in art since she was young, but she went to like a special art school, a high school kind of thing, then university.

5:03Now she's doing her master's and we're paying$9 an hour. And they, the company we're working with, they house them. So this is in Skopje, it's called, it's like the, the main city in North Macedonia. So they actually have like a really nice office there. And then, And so they have generators power, you know, all the time. They have a place where people come and work. So they get their own cubicle or nice working environment. And they provide the computer as well. Wow. And that's all included for nine bucks an hour. Wow. Yeah. And so that was, yeah. What do you do about security, Kevin? So we use Google Workspace.

5:50so everything goes on the google drive the company google drive um if somebody does something wrong we can we just change the password on their email and they have no access to anything basically yeah um but um they sign we have a really if you're i can share what i do i have a really good onboarding um kind of thing where we have it's more to put the fear of god in them that it's not like a real legal doc it's real actually plain english but it's a non-disclosure non uh you know confidentiality agreement and um we you know we we have a whole onboarding process that just talks about security how you know we do things we like we all passwords and stuff are like a google sheet so again we just take somebody off the google sheet they have no access kind of thing And so security is a concern and something that we promise our clients, especially if you're dealing with clients, lawyers or insurance.

6:53So, you know, you can't put handcuffs on people, but definitely protocols are important. I learned the hard way on the years ago, but I've been really, you know, I have quick keys that I can shut off things very quickly. Yeah. Nice. Well, congratulations. That sounds awesome. Thank you. And then one more hire. We had a, we had a growth hacker. So same process, um, hired somebody could just do everything like they, they know coding, they know, but they're client facing. This guy's been a mark, you know, a marketer for eight years, nine years, really more of a senior guy again, 10 bucks an hour.

7:37and yeah he's uh he's almost a strategist i could put him in like operationally in charge of teams he's managed teams of 20 30 people you know but he um the the economy there is kind of suppressed because of the corruption in the government so you know paying them like 10 bucks an hour you think that's cheap but that's a really good they have some doctors who are working for them because they make more money as marketer than a doctor, you know, kind of thing. And so that's anyways, I'm really enjoying this North Macedonian market. I've hired in the Philippines and it's hit or miss, you know, kind of thing.

8:17And they're getting more spoiled, in my opinion. You know, they're just expecting more and more and more. So this is kind of a new thing. I'll keep you guys posted. But yeah, I'm excited. We've hired most of our Philippine employees through a gal that I met in a mastermind group. And she does an amazing job. She finds them for you. I think she does charge like twelve hundred dollars to find them for you. But she'll bring as many people as you want until you find your person. And then once you find them, they're yours and she's out altogether. other, but she also trains them, um, not obviously on, um, things that are marketing specific or things like that, but she trains, she does like some mindset training and team building stuff and that kind of thing.

9:02So she holds onto them for the first couple of weeks. Um, and then they have a community where, um, you know, they can still interact with their peers and that kind of thing. She's built something pretty beautiful. I like it. Um, and we've had really good success hiring through her as well, but they are not marketers. They are more admin people. So we've gotten, I think three or four of them through her, but haven't, haven't found the marketing people. So, yeah, that's a really good point. I think that community, like that's why we did it through this group as well. Yeah. Is they have their office, they have developers there, they got other people.

9:37So they're all working for American companies and they work our East coast hours. And that's the other thing Philippines they're 12 hours difference time zone so they're working night shifts a lot of time to work our time these guys are only four or five hours difference and so yeah and so I was going to mention one other thing with that is um yeah we don't we can't buy these employees these are like rent rentals and it's like uh so but it's if someone has to leave we can get them replaced there's no additional uh recruiting costs i've done that before too where i paid like 1200 bucks to get someone to find us but this is all included they provide the laptops the technology everything to the employee and local uh you know benefits uh take out taxes do it right so um that that's another thing just for everybody's you know if you i'm going to put the resource uh in the school.

10:41Austin asked if I could put it there. So I'll do that. Thanks guys. And I'll do the same for sure. I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host agency. So NP digital. So Neil Patel digital, what they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you can just go to mpdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode. Nice. Is anybody else looking to make like strategic hires before the end of the year? I'm thinking about it.

11:21Okay. Yeah. It kind of seems to be like a hot topic. What are you thinking about Rebecca? I, um, so I'm listening hard on these ideas and, um, I need, and everyone here knows what I don't have to explain it to you. I basically need a customer facing project manager type person who can run the stuff. It's my superpower. And that's what I've always contributed, except I'm doing all of the sales right now and other things. And so if I'm very successful on sales, I'm going to make the wheels fall off the bus with project management. So it's, you know, it's, I'm in a different place than a lot of you.

12:01But anyways, that's what I need to hire and I know it because we're right there. We're running out of hours in the day. When I was growing my agency, Rebecca, that was the biggest hurdle for me to get let go of. And now I have two project managers. One's in the U.S., one's in Argentina. okay and um they both are fabulous the one in the u.s i'd have to pay like 30 bucks an hour right the one in argentina i pay i think uh seven dollars an hour and she's got 12 years experience not pmp certified but she's very strong project management i don't care about pmp i mean yeah i know we don't need it it's a whole long story yeah yeah so yeah anyways yeah anyway it can help if you yeah like brainstorm off i've hired in pakistan india i don't those pakistan i like prefer more than india for technical um yeah things more like that side um south america they're in our time zone i know so they their english really good argentina the the again the economy has been so inflation and stuff our dollar goes a long way there so you can get somebody 1200 bucks a month that you'd pay 5 000 bucks a month easily here right you know kind of thing and then i'm trying this uh north you know more eastern european only because i want people starting earlier than a little bit earlier on the east coast time so that they're ramping up so by the time we come online they've we got a bunch of stuff going already yeah no that works really well i'm west coast and so it's eastern europe sometimes a tiny problem so i definitely want to Oh, your West Coast.

13:52Yeah. Yeah. OK. Yeah, I know. So, yeah. But I do want to talk to you. So South America, I've messed around with some of the outsourcers down there and that was more for tactical stuff. And I have better luck with that in the U.S. in a lot of ways. you know i can yeah yeah yeah but the account management um so how i definitely do want to talk about how you found your argentinian resource yeah i'll bug you that thank you and if anybody else has questions we can talk on school you know more too okay thank you sir appreciate it a lot so yes austin i'm thinking a lot about this this is occupying my mind because i'm getting in the way now and I wasn't before.

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16:57No, man, what are you thinking about as far as like strategic hires? And then I would definitely want to see what other people are thinking about too. Yeah, so a couple things. We had a couple wins, let's share. One is, so I had a conversation with Scott earlier this week, and he did some things for some SEO work. We might just do some white labeling work with them. their team. So that's really good. Um, uh, particularly with this, uh, financial advisor that we're building an SEO profile for. So that's, uh, I think that's going to help really a lot. So I'm really excited about that. Uh, another win was we got a, a new client, basically an old client became a new client.

17:39So that's, that's a huge win. Um, we did their website, I don't know, five years ago now and now it's like, they're looking for a refresh and rebrand and everything. So it's going to be a pretty substantial build for us. Because of that and some of the growth, I'm looking to potentially hire because I'm kind of getting into the technical weeds way too much than my capabilities are and probably my own technical knowledges. So I'd like to be able to hire somebody to kind of like manage, oversee, project manage essentially the technical parts of it. maybe even become do a little bit architectural design on some projects so that I can focus more on business development and growth and you know more more typical marketing activities I remember Scott was talking about or maybe it was Kevin who mentioned that Scott was good at this talking about like what are those called the knowledge cards what did you go yeah is that what he was helping you do because I remember you talked about that on the last call Newman Yeah, that's what he showed me.

18:47And so I pitched it to a potential client, and they're super excited. I actually pitched it to a couple of investor friends of mine too and entrepreneurs, and they're all really, really interested. I mean, these are probably projects that would probably be worth like$50 ,000 to$100 ,000 each. Wow. For getting that Google profile like... Yeah. For some investors and some entrepreneurs, it's worth a lot for reputation of their business, reputation of themselves, and how they present themselves with investors and customers. Oh, yeah. So that's representing like a high profile client and not necessarily like a business, right?

19:30Yeah. Okay, very cool. Is anyone else working with like, like high profile, like influencers, let's say, or is it mostly like businesses that you're providing marketing services for? Mostly B2B, right? Ours is businesses, B2B for sure. And Austin, I don't know if anybody else would be interested, but maybe we could hear more from Scott about what he's doing because I'm not familiar with what no man's talking about. Yeah, that'd be cool. I can actually reach out to Scott and see if he would be willing to maybe post something in school about kind of his thought process of what it looks like. Yeah, that'd be awesome.