The New Top Podcasting App in Town, and How to Structure Your Company to Have No Direct Reports

0:00Kieran tweeted this a couple weeks ago, Kieran Flanagan from HubSpot. So YouTube is now the biggest podcast platform in the US and people watch 400 million hours of podcasts per month on YouTube. The biggest challenge to growing a podcast was always built in distribution. None of the existing podcast platforms solve for discoverability. YouTube solved this. So I think we can talk about some things that we're doing with this right now. I've talked a lot about overlap and overlap has gotten better now. There's an agent, an actual agent that will watch your channels, all the videos. you'll watch all the videos from my channel and it'll come up with the short form clips it'll come up with the mid form clips and it'll come up with the long form clips and they're all actually ready to be posted it's better than any of the other of these agents that I've seen and so especially for our this is a 90 minute recording session it's perfect for these how good is it though?

0:48it's really good like I'm not even joking see Neil just rolled his eyes but when I say good I've tried all the other ones I've tried Opus I've tried all these things right this one is really good as good as paying a human? I think it's better than a human and finding the right moments. Because I found so many moments where I did an interview with Gary Vee or Seth Godin and all these people. Or let me rephrase, if it was you doing it, are you saying it's better than you actually taking the time to find the right moments? I think so, yeah. Because I'm not a detail-oriented person. You are. And so I get frustrated by doing that, right?

1:17But I'm like, dude, I'm like, how do we not find these moments? These are good moments. Yeah. So I'm like, dude, it's pretty close. So I'm beta testing it right now. I said, hey guys, I would talk about it if it's actually good. I'm talking about it here because it's actually good. I don't mind just watching the whole thing in frame. And then I'll just leave comments every section where I think. See, that's how you work. I can't stand the details. That makes sense. Yeah. No, and that is true. If you're not a detail-oriented person, using these tools or AI agents to help you out is great. And even if you are detail-oriented, it doesn't mean you won't miss stuff.

1:49By the way, I think the detail-oriented piece ties in with how to structure your company to have no direct reports. because Neil and I, I've mentioned when we do this personality test together, his detail orientation is like 99%. Mine is like 6%. But he has weaknesses. I have weaknesses as well. So because you have a structure that's similar to Dharmesh from HubSpot where he has no direct reports, you started your company with no direct reports as well. So is there anything special you did to have that set up? Honestly, yeah. I didn't pick any structure. I just had no direct reports and I didn't want any direct reports.

2:25Remember, it was you, me, and Mike in the beginning talking about doing it together, but you had never established that in the beginning that you want to know direct reports. So when you started it with Mike, did you just say, hey, Mike, I don't want to deal with direct reports? No, I just never had direct reports. So he consciously made a decision for you to not give you direct reports. No, I just never put anyone underneath me, even if I hire him. Even today. But don't a lot of people are like, oh my God, I want to work with Neil, though. I want to work with Neil. No. No? No. Okay, so it just worked.

2:57People are just like, yeah. Because when we first started the organization, I was living in Vegas. The company started in San Diego. Right. By Mike. Yeah. Well, Mike was living with me in Vegas at the time. And I'm like, dude, go down there and go create it. So he moved back home, which San Diego was his home because there was a lot of agencies there. And he went to go and create the agency. And as we hired people, like for example, Salo's been with us for ages. He pretty much runs marketing. I never had. He's Brazilian. He's Brazilian, but I never had him report directly under me. Was he with you since the beginning?

3:29Uh-huh. I didn't know that. Yeah. Day one. Actually, he predates day one. That's so interesting. Because we had NPD Brazil before we had NPD US. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Oh, and same thing with Marina then? Marina, my assistant? Yeah. We had many Marinas who worked for us. The last name starts with a T. I have no idea. The marketing one that helps you with their events. Yeah. Yeah, her last thing starts with the T. I think she's been with us for a year or two. She's one of my assistants. I only have two assistants. My point is, you look at Dharmesh Shah, his thing, when he told Brian Halligan, the CEO of HubSpot at the time, he said, look, we're going to start this company.

4:12I'm going to have no direct reports. That's my rule. I'm going to work on what I want to work on, and then you're going to give me resources when I want them, but I want no direct reports. And I think that's worked out, because even now he's working on the forward-thinking things, like agents and things like that. And same for you. You get to work more on strategy. You get to work on marketing. Those are the things that you enjoy. So I think it's not like you consciously did it, but it just kind of happened. I think for Dharmesh, it was a lot more intentional. But I think, again, this comes down to whatever works for you.

4:39And I've seen it work beautifully for Neil. Well, no, I've always never really had direct reports at any of the organizations. I've always chose not to. Kissmetrics, same thing? Yeah, so there's a video of Neil once. Kissmetrics did a meeting. This is one of his analytics companies. They raised some venture funding. And I think you guys did a retreat with employees, right? And you're just sitting in the corner with your laptop working. So yeah, that's just how Neil rolls, I guess. I love being an individual contributor. I love getting stuff done. I don't like managing people, so I never have people underneath me.

5:12And I don't know what title they give me at NP Digital. What do you mean? It says CMO in your email. Does it? Yeah. No. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Dude, he doesn't even know his own title. Yeah, you're right. It's his chief marketing officer. I don't read my email signature. But I'm not really the CMO of the company. No. It's just a title I have. And Salo does not report into me. You will reach out to the top people to get things done. That's how you roll. In any department. I don't care if I'm supposed to be in that department. I will meddle wherever I want to get shit done. And I bet you a majority of the time, even 51 % of the time, people try to talk to you and try to stop you from doing it?

5:57Hey, Neil, you need to let us do our work. This is what you hired us for. Let's actually rephrase it. So when we started the organization, I would jump in, do whatever I want, when I wanted, and people didn't like it. They still don't like it today, even if they won't say it to my face, but I know they don't like it. Yeah. But if you look at like, yeah, but if you look at today versus when we started the organization, call it seven years ago in the United States, I know what to meddle with. And I know what not to meddle with much more than I did when we started off. So for example, um, we want to make some changes in a specific region.

6:42and I was talking about this with my co-founder a year and a half ago I right away started meddling and I created chaos because because I don't have direct reports I also don't know the full picture every single time so it can actually be really detrimental for me very disruptive yes very disruptive yeah so now I tend to go to the person who would know the full story and I'll give them my take on it and I'm like, if it's very important, I want it figured out right now. If it's not important, I'll be like, here's this information. You can do whatever you want whenever you want because it doesn't affect our bottom line that much.

7:17So don't care. I don't want to waste any more time, but here are my thoughts. If it's something like marketing or sales or something that's a problem, I will just go metal directly and I will not get anyone's permission. But if it's related to people and moving them around or terminating or any of that, I go through others and I don't mess around because I usually don't know the full story. But if it's just getting something done, like revamping an ad campaign or sales close ratios aren't good enough, or something's off any, like those kinds of things, I will just get involved in the business, listen to recorded calls and try to figure out what people are doing wrong.

7:52And with AI now, like my co-founder, Mike, he's very similar to me. There's AI tools that will show us a sales call or we can listen to it. If it's in Italian, it, you know, puts it out as English and it's not perfect, but it's good enough. So that way we can critique what's wrong with the sales pitch and how people can fix it. Dude, so one important thing you said, I think people can take away here is you basically, let's say, for example, if I find an article I really like, sometimes I'll just drop a link. I'll just say FYI, right? That means read it if you want. Sometimes I'll say like, highly recommended that you do something about this, right?

8:28Or sometimes I'll say like, hey, I need you to do this. And so this is interesting because the things that Neil really understands, like sales and marketing, plus it also affects his bottom line, he's going to get involved and say, hey, this is what I want you to do. But when it comes to people, you probably defer more than anything. And you're probably not going to make any recommendations on people. And so one, Neil's playing to his strengths here. I will if the people suck. Yeah, Neil has a big problem, especially if it's sales or marketing related to your bottom line. Anywhere in an organization.

8:56If someone's just terrible at their job, I don't care. but I'll have someone else deal with it so I think one, this goes back to playing to your strengths again and I just hit a time limit on X yesterday, remember when the fire alarm happened we were on that call what I wanted to mention is the things that we're talking about listening to sales calls for example or listening to internal meetings you and I don't have time for that all day but imagine if there's an AI that's listened to all the feedback that you've given after watching the meetings and they've been trained on you that's all going to happen And I have a friend that's coming out with something.

9:31I won't reveal it yet because I think it's in stealth. But he basically said, look, I'm going to give you something where you don't need to install anything new. It'll just look at how engaged people are. So if you have a designer on your team, how often are they logging into Figma and making changes? How often are they sending emails or being active in HubSpot or whatever? And that's not exactly perfect, but we're just saying that there's a lot. Jamie Dimon earlier talked about Zoomers, for example. You can't tell who's active and who isn't. And there are, he even said himself, this, the CEO guy I talked to, he's like, look, there's a lot of people that brag about taking Fridays and Mondays off and being on the ski lift during a call or whatever.

10:04And they brag about it as if it's a, it's cool, but it actually is toxic to the entire organization. Right. Cause other people find out about it. Right. And so he's like, we need to have something where we can track people and gamify the entire organization. And he's going to let me test it. If I really love it, I'll let you know. And I don't even know if you roll it out, but I just love these things. because you basically like you get to gamify, you get to see leaderboards and things like that. And I think that's where the future of work is going. But I think this is where you and I are different.

10:32When you're talking about the AI agent, listening to all the meetings and all that kind of stuff, that's where I personally shine because I'm very detail oriented. And I do have the time and I will listen to a lot of those calls. How many hours are you listening per week? A lot. But it's not necessarily on a weekly basis whenever there's a problem. So if there's an issue with sales, I will spend eight hours, 10 hours a day, whatever I need to do to just solve that problem because I know it's going to impact our bottom line. I look at things as what is the biggest issue that's holding us back from growing?

11:06And I will just go in there myself. And if I had to listen to the calls or be in on the meetings, I will, and I'll work on fixing them. And then once the ratios and the numbers are good enough, I just move on. It's not like I'll go back and listen to tons more sales calls unless the ratios or the numbers drop. And I can see there's a glaring issue. If that's the case, I will jump back in. But if not, I'll go on to something else. Do you sometimes have to repeat solve this problem after you listen to eight hours of calls? Maybe six months later, nine, 12 months later, you find yourself solving the same problem again?

11:37No, because if I do, that means I have the wrong person and they'll be switched out. Yep, there you go. Sounds bad, but... I don't think it sounds bad. That's business. I think this is great because I think a lot of operators listening to this, I don't say you can just magically have no direct reports. A lot of people listening, especially founders, you're going to have direct reports and you're going to be operating. But if you can free up your time and just focus on the highest leverage things, I actually think that's better for your business. 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.

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13:45Shopify lets you easily create email and social media campaigns to reach customers wherever they are, whether they're scrolling or strolling. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into a deal with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school. Shopify.com slash marketing school. It could be. I think it depends on the person. I think some people are amazing at managing, building culture, and leading. That's not me. Yeah. I think what I'm saying is for someone like you or someone like a Dharmesh, for example, or even Elon, for example, where he jumps around solving things, I'm actually best for that, which is why I'm looking for someone that can take on more of the day-to-day stuff.

14:32So you just need a CEO. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. I'll tell you a story after this, after we finish recording, but continue. I have someone for you. I don't. I'm messing. I wish I did. Dude, you're getting my hopes up, man. I have this one over here. This guy tweeted this. He says he knows nothing about ads. So he used OpenAI Deep Research all week to help him start using Google Ads. And this is interesting. He said, the campaign it helped me create is driving$600 a day in less than five days on a very small starter budget. Every day I give new data to O1 Pro, iterate and numbers go up. It's crazy.

15:06So look, it's$200 a month for it, whatever. I think we're going to hear a lot of these stories and it's probably not that good, this campaign. but what is amazing is it got going for him where someone 10 years ago probably would be stuck so deep research have you tried it? no you pay for the$200 chat GPT right? yeah it's so good it's like I had to do research on the ABM space right for Carrot and then it showed how much they all charge how much like I would have paid like a couple thousand dollars for this report how much do they all charge what's their go-to-market strategy what are their weaknesses right now you know what's my biggest weakness right now you know what are the what should we be attacking, right?

15:43And it's like 80%, 90 % accurate because it's missing context. And I'm just like, wow. I just prompted it and it gave me 20 ,000 words and it took like 10 minutes to get there. How good is it going to get in like a year or two? That's true. And what's funny is you said last time we were recording this, I should try it out. And you're like, I bet you won't try it out. Yeah, well typically you need to hear from me a couple of times before you try it. So this is only number two. So you need to hear it like seven times, I think. Also, I need something to use it on. Yeah. And because I just focus on solving problems that are usually related to marketing and sales, there's probably good use cases for it, but I haven't run into one that I did.

16:22If I position it around M &A and AI and how it'll affect your business, and then you inserted all your numbers in there. But I would more so have my team do that. My problem with M &A, I don't really spend much time on M &A. I spend time where I talk to founders and try to help convince people to sell to us. That's actually not that many hours. M &A is such a slow process I do not do well with M &A I'm not saying you should I'm saying this is like an exercise with it to get your foot in the door to actually want to use it that's what I'm saying I'm not saying you love doing M &A stuff I'm not a detailed guy I don't like looking at all the stuff but I'm just saying I'm trying to find different exercises for you to actually use it I would have my team use it the people who run M &A like Carlos and then get back to me I more so really do limit most my time to marketing and sales.

17:14Like that's really my core focus. By the way, when Neil says that, it's not like he's actually in the accounts implementing unless he's creating content, for example. But he's actually listening to calls. He's calling people and he's pushing things through. And fixing whatever issues I see. Yeah. But oftentimes that requires a phone call or requires communication with people. And so I think when we say, or when Neil says marketing, it's more than just traditional marketing. Correct. Like if ads aren't working, I will just go into the campaigns and figure it out myself. Yeah. And I'll just figure out how to run it.

17:47And people are like, you haven't run an ad in a while. It's okay. I'll figure it out today. And I will figure it out that day. It's not like these campaigns are that, these platforms are that complicated. You know, I've done better than you guys in less than six hours. And it's a Saturday. And yeah, the team doesn't necessarily like. Oh, that also pisses people off too. Yes. I'm just really direct. I'm just like, this is what you did wrong. Here's how you can improve upon it. And people will come to me and say, Neil, this is what you're doing wrong. And this is what you could do better. And when they tell me that, I'm like, thank you.

18:18You're right. I appreciate this. So now I can improve going forward. I don't take that as bad. I do like, when people tell me I suck, I'm like, great. How do I get better? Yeah. You don't get pissed at those things. You get pissed at other things. Yeah. Speaking of AI, you have in here, is Accenture's$1.2 billion in AI revenue or grift? Oh yeah, I knew you'd like that one. So this guy, Rohit Mittal. Mittal? Is it Indian last name? Yeah. Okay. Accenture has$1.2 billion in new bookings related to generative AI. And it has 69 ,000 people working in data and AI. 69 ,000 people who don't know anything about AI are helping the largest US companies with navigating the fast-changing AI world.

18:59One of the biggest grifts in the world. So I'm looking at the report. They're highlighting their report here. We had another milestone, approximately 500 million in revenue, 1.2 billion in new bookings. So I don't know why he's calling them a grift, but here's what I can say. I interviewed two or three people. I paid them for their time at Accenture. And I said, so if you're a CEO, what would you do? And one person said, this is interesting, because he closed 40 million in bookings around AI this year. I'm like, what would you do? He's like, well, if I was a CEO, I would make sure that everyone understands what they're talking about with AI.

19:31I'm like, what do you mean by that? He's like, we're not trained on a lot of these things and a lot of things that we're selling. So I'm like, oh, so this actually aligns with the story I'm getting behind the scenes with these people that I'm just trying to learn more from. It's also easier for him to close, for her to close$40 million worth of revenue with the Accenture brand. Yeah, he doesn't think the music will stop. Yeah, he doesn't think the music will stop, but he does think that there's, It does feel like they're kind of, what he's saying is like, it feels like it's kind of error. So anyway, not my words.

20:05Dude, time will tell. We should talk about what to do about imperfect attribution. So earlier we talked about poopy attribution from the YouTube video, right? That's example of, it's hard to track. How are you going to track when someone's sitting on a toilet, right? Maybe you can. But then also we had someone that was a former single grain client come in for Carrot, the account-based marketing software. and that's hard to attribute because that original customer came from seeing me when I was just walking around at Sastor. This was a long time ago and they became a client for years and years, right?

20:38And then he just happened to hear about it and then he told his director of marketing. So these things are really hard to attribute, right? And then with Carrot, this is interesting. This is using Carrot to market Carrot and we had a lead come in in December. They got on a demo call and then they ghosted us, right? We're like, okay, they're probably not interested anymore. Then their CMO saw a personalized ad, and then their VP of marketing saw a personalized ad. And they both forced him to get back with us. And then after, he went from negative 50 interest to positive 200, maximum interest. But it's just hard when you have...

21:15I know as direct response marketers, we like to have perfect attribution. But the question is, what to do about imperfect attribution? Because we live in an imperfect world. I just spend a portion of the marketing dollars on imperfect stuff. So take, you can pick whatever percentage you want. We're probably around 30 to 35 % of our marketing dollars goes on stuff that we can't really track. It's imperfect. But the way we look at it is those platforms have eyeballs and a portion of those eyeballs we know would be our customers. The way I look at it is the, I don't think it's Ogilvy that said this.

21:51I think this is somebody that knew Ogilvy, but you remember the quote around, I know advertising works. I just don't know. I know 50 % of my advertising works. I just don't know which 50%. That's a good call. I've never heard of it before. Yeah. So that's what it is, guys. If you guys have any other questions, let us know. And that being said, go to marketingschool.io slash agency if you want to grow your agency faster and we'll see you tomorrow.