You Should DEFINITELY Get a Chief of Staff

0:00If you want to be an efficient operator, especially as a founder, you need a chief of staff. I believe you called it right. You still have a chief of staff or no? Amazing. How does it work out? And what did they do? Chief of staff is some Matt Moshari came up with this. So he wrote the book, The Great CEO Within. So he coached like Naval Ravikant. I think he coached Sam Altman as well. I could be wrong on that one, but he coached a lot of great people, right? So his rule is you can't work with me unless you have a chief of staff. And it's like, okay, so what's a chief of staff? So a chief of staff is someone that's not a glorified executive assistant.

0:33A lot of people treat a chief of staff like that. A chief of staff is someone that you can train up to be your shadow. Have them sit next to you, literally physically sit next to you for 10, 12 hours a day, like your entire work day. And they see everything that you see. They hear everything that you hear. Like whatever you're doing, right? They're shadowing you. And then they're helping you with the M &A stuff. They're helping you with bringing traffic. They're basically another you, right? And Mr. Beast is a good example of this he actually has like i think 20-ish people on his team that are all like chiefs of staff type roles and three people lived in with him for um i think they still live in with him right and they basically are are just eating up they're shadowing him seeing all his behaviors all his patterns and they're becoming a shadow of him and that's how i see my chief of staff and that's why i'm like well we need to build like an organization of chiefs of staff because they know how i behave everything i do and they know how i make decisions and it's such a high leverage role I think that everyone should have one.

1:28And so I got that idea from the great CEO within and it's been great. Dude, speaking of living with someone, I lived with my co-founder ages ago when we were much younger. He was my roommate. Who? Mike. Oh yeah. He lived in Vegas and we also lived in San Diego a little bit together. But he learned a lot from me over the years. That's how he became who, like Mike was great already, but being with you and shadowing you and seeing your mannerisms, like it rubs off. Yes. and he was already good at sales and operations because he they had a family business and he was self-running it but uh it did help i i would say you know looking back on it if we look at our business now a lot of the stuff we just do is aligned and it's because we live together for a good amount of time i want to say a good amount of time probably like six months that's a lot yeah and you know we put he picked up off on how i like things how i don't like things what i feel works, my risk tolerance.

2:24And then I've also learned what works for him, what doesn't, where he's strong at, where he's weak at, and vice versa. He was in effect your chief of staff to start off with, right? And like in the beginning, so this is a little story on NP Digital, but in the beginning, so Mike didn't necessarily want to become CEO. And then they tried to work through a couple of CEOs and then Mike eventually realized he has to become the CEO, right? Correct. And then that's how he figured everything out. But you can either hire a chief of staff that's, I've met chiefs of staff that are making like four or 500 grand a year.

2:51And these are really experienced ones. Right. And then, you know, they also have like, you know, big stock compensation, or you can find someone that's like a diamond in the rough that's younger. Um, and that, I think that's way harder. I think it's probably, you don't need to pay four or 500 grand a year, but you can hire someone that's been experienced chief of staff. And I think it'll take you a long way. Cause I spoke to a guy, um, I'm like, so what do you do? He's like, Oh, I do the same thing the CEO does. And then he's like, yeah, I'm focused on acquisitions right now. I'm doing this and that.

3:14And, um, I think if you can, one angle is maybe if you can't afford that, you can hire someone that's younger and then maybe hire someone that's a super experienced chief of staff as a coach and then pay them for like you know pay them for an hour of their time for like once a month or twice a month yeah if you had to pick the three biggest things that's helped you and your business from having a chief of staff what would be the top three things okay so starting a new service line that would be one um you know we fixed a lot of issues on our brand team well let's go back what was the new service line that you guys created?

3:48Ad Creative. Oh, cool. Yeah. And it's up and running. It's working well. And they did all of that or you had to do it? They did the vast, I didn't really have to get involved. Cool. What was the second one? The second one is, God, what was I saying? So, oh, so there are a lot of issues with our social side, like the posting and all that stuff, right? So we hired an outsource team, but there's a lot of blocking and tackling that needs to happen with making sure that, hey, how many shorts are we hitting out there like how's the reach how's the engagement how's the packaging for youtube all that stuff right we call that the brand team um we fixed a lot of issues there and that was largely due to the chief of staff cool and you saw more traffic from it uh-huh yeah all right that's the second one and then the third one i would say is just say overall um serving as my eyes and ears and disseminating how i think and how how like my general demeanor is throughout the organization because they're they're way more approachable than i am right because i'm the boss right like i understand that there's like there's a power dynamic right um but they don't there's that dynamic doesn't exist with others and so it's kind of like that you know they're the conduit for me yeah and i'm not asking how much you pay your chief of sap but in general because you've seen a lot of this data and you know a lot of people have them what does it typically cost for someone i think for i think if you want someone that's good you're probably going to be paying like an experience probably someone that's like 150 200 plus at least oh wow yeah so they're not cheap no um but yeah no it's it's been good and uh why are you looking for one no why not no you kind of have i mean you do have a situation where you have multiple assistants and um well they have two but but but i i do think mike is a very high level because the chief of staff eventually can grow into a c-level role and that's what mike became and then mike still works with you pretty closely I think, right?

5:39Him and I work daily. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. It's just like, for me, I don't like hiring tons of people that I have to work with. It's not that, you know, I love people. I don't want to manage anyone or have anyone. You love people, but you don't like managing people. Correct. And I don't want to have anyone that reports underneath me or that I'm responsible for. I know that's a lazy route and people are like, oh, you're not going to make as much money if you do it this way. I don't really care. You're just playing to your strengths, right? like i don't like doing it but like you know i also like the freedom and flexibility yeah i'm not having any direct reports yeah because in a vein you are look when you hire people you are working for them like yeah i don't care what like you are working for them right and the more people that report to you the more the the problem with people that report to you sometimes and i'm grateful for it i'm i love helping people but oftentimes they'll drop the monkey off on their shoulders they'll drop it in your office.

6:37So we're in the office right now. And then somebody else will come. They'll drop off their monkey for you too. And all of a sudden, your room is full of monkeys running around and then you have to solve all the problems, right? So that's what happens sometimes. Yeah, and I love not having to do the stuff I don't want to do. Like for example, we do annual planning meetings. Oh, you don't go to that? Yeah, I've never been to annual planning meeting. And they get budget reviews and they're like, yeah, we got the budget for the year. I don't know if they even send me the budgets. I know them. Don't get me wrong, but like even every month I get a financial review of the business and how it operates.

7:11And it's really thorough and detailed. But the first sentence is either a good month and we're on track for the year or a bad month and we're off and why. I literally just read the first sentence in two. And if it says we're on track, I ignore the rest and I just move on. Well, I don't want anybody to think that listening to this, that Neil doesn't pay attention to business because he does. Like he's looking at everything every day and he's constantly like talking to people, a lot of people every day. and so just because he knows the numbers already. Correct, I know the numbers before the reported on the monthly, I'm like, this isn't hard to see.

7:44You can log in and you can see the bank accounts and you can roughly figure out from a cashflow if money's there or it's not. For me, I focus on the things that are gonna move the needle, right? You only have so much time in the day and we talked a little about this on stage at an event we were at today in which people look at, oh, this is cool. Let me do organic social, which is funny enough where most people spend their marketing time. But you look at where they're getting the ROI and it's a totally different place. It's coming from paid ads and SEO and other channels that aren't as sexy. It's just like focus your energy on what's going to help you move your bottom line.

8:20And if you can't as marketers, you're really just wasting time. And I think that's what Eric and I not have – we've known this for a long time, but we've been really practicing this for many, many years and just focusing on is this actually going to have an impact? If it's not cool, move on to the next thing. 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. And 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.

8:53If 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. And the great thing about it as well, if you try to get into group, there's a seven day free trial, right?

9:18So 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. Focus is really hard guys. Like, I'll just say, I think myself included, Neil included as well. It's been a very difficult struggle. But I think the number one reason, and again, going back to the dinner conversation yesterday, I think the number one reason we see most entrepreneurs not reach their potential is because largely due to a lack of focus. And what's interesting is Eric and I have both had the lack of focus issue.

9:52I think we're amazing at focus now. but our personal lives have went from being very stable and focused to the chaos part that we were having within our business we shifted it to our personal life yeah and our business is more focused sporkous yeah so i don't know like by the way some people just gravitate towards chaos um and maybe that's an entrepreneur thing like you're okay with chaos right um so i don't know like i used to switch ideas all the time now i switch cars every few months yeah this is really terrible yeah yeah so neil has this thing where he changes his mind like very rapidly probably more so than anybody i know and now it's changed over into real life yes and in business i'm really steady dude when he first moved to la there's like this house over here which i get this house over here this house over here and now it's like this house and it's like let's add this upgrade over here and then i ended up buying tons of houses and then selling all the ones that we didn't want at losses and i was like that seems more like a headache to me than any see what's interesting to me is the personal headaches are way tougher for me versus business headaches.

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12:36No issues with versions or miscommunication, whether you're starting from scratch or using one of their templates, Framer lets you focus on design while handling the technical side for you. Animations, responsive layouts, search optimization, and all the things that matter. Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at framer.com and use code MS to get your first month of pro on the house. That's framer.com, promo code MS, framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. like when you do when you switch all these houses or whatever i'm like how the hell do you deal with all that one i don't deal with it so i have i have a decent amount of staff uh on the personal side who helps or contractors whatever you want to call it like um you know we have a we call it owner's rep uh it's called real consulting they deal with everything related to house maintaining checking seeing if it's right oh doing construction oh buying a new property yes snow, all that kind of stuff.

13:33But what I found is my business life, I used to change my mind a lot, didn't have focus. I have laser focus now in business, don't change mind as much. I've seen growth in that. Personal mind, flip-flop on houses one too many times and cars. It is a pain to deal with the personal stuff, but the growth in the business makes up for the pain and the personal. I would say this too. You also need to surround yourself with people that focus and people that are more grounded and people that are stabilizers because we earlier mentioned that founders introduce risk. And so when Neil mentions he wants to expand into China, you need someone to kind of talk him off the ledge a little bit.

14:09I need the same thing too, right? And so in that case, like that focus thing, by the way, that's an exercise that you need to practice. It's like working out. You got to do it every day because in that scenario, like that expansion thing, that is like, sometimes you can expand too rapidly, right? But when you have a conversation like that, you'll dial it back. And so you do need to surround yourself with people that will help you focus. It's not just like, oh, we became laser focused all of a sudden. There's a 60-day moving average there, and you need to make sure that you're constantly doing your curls and doing your shoulder exercises or whatever.

14:38That's right. Yeah. That is it for today. Again, from Frankfurt, Germany, this is Marketing School. And don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and go to marketingschool.io slash agency if you want to join the Agency Owners Association. And we'll see you tomorrow.