She kind of could see that I was taking things from the team and I was wanting to be successful. And I was wanting to hold up the trophy and be like, look at me, look how good I am. And I didn't really see that. And she said to me, um, give other people a chance to be successful. I'm like, oh, my ego's really at play here. Wow. And it's just like this insidious default running the show.

Welcome to the Agency Our podcast, where we help digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, and their communities. This week we are getting real with Simon Kelly, CEO and head of growth at Seriously Good Designer, and of course, part of the team here at Agency Mavericks. The truth is, Simon has been having some challenges leading his team. And I think this is a very common problem that most agency owners have. And I think in fact it's the reason that most agencies don't grow the team they need to get the agency owner out of the thing and off the tools. It's because leading a team, building a team and leading people is very, very hard. So today we're going to explore why it's completely his fault and what he can do to turn things around. We also discuss how to keep your team motivated beyond just giving them money, how to turn vulnerability into a strength, the concept of reporting up, why you should not be the solution to any of your team's problems, and a whole lot more. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us. The reason that your team is not performing, whether your team is a team of people that you've got working in the same building or whether you've got a bunch of freelancers working in an emerging economy, as they say, the reason that your team are not doing the job that you're expecting them to do is because you've hired people who haven't done it before. And then you are imposing your process on them. And people are never going to follow your process the way they follow their own. And so the whole concept is called self-determination, which is what I want to talk about on today's episode. And uh please welcome to the agency are my good friend Simon Kelly. Yo, thanks for having me on again, dude. Looking forward to this one. Yeah, me too. Um, so you we were talking in the green room that um you so why don't you just tell me what's the problem? What's going on?

Yeah, well, I mean, it's yeah, it's uh it's a problem with uh leading a team and uh building a team that performs to to a level that that I'm really happy with. And now my my team do crush it with a lot of things, but as we're growing and lots of things changing, there are areas where it's not so much. So, and I'm sure I'm not performing as well from their perspective as well. So it goes both ways. But it is to do with having like having a high performing team, one, as an agency owner, but then two, if you're a marketing manager working with an agency, how can you make sure that they're performing as well?

Yeah. So welcome, Simon's team, who are no doubt listening to this episode of the podcast. He's all about to get slapped. No, no. Um, so so here's here I I read this in a book a hundred years ago, and it really resonated with me. The three things that motivate human behavior, particularly when you're talking about staff, in order. The three things are a cause they believe in, a leader they respect, money. So let me give you some examples. We know that people will give up their weekends to go door knocking to, you know, spread the good word of the good lord or hand out pamphlets for how to vote for your, you know, the party that they support at the upcoming election, or to collect money for a charity, right? These are people who are giving up their time away from their friends and family and their social life and whatever it is else that they could be doing to volunteer and go and door knock to raise awareness or raise money for a cause they believe in. They're not getting paid. In fact, they'll be out of pocket because they'll be paying for their own petrol, their own mobile phone usage when they're out on the road, whatever, right? Parking, you name it. Uh, the second uh thing is that we know that people will follow a fearless leader into the dark. And if you have a look at WordPress, that really blew up from 20, you know, 10 through 2015-16 was this real kind of emergence of the WordPress platform. A lot of that was because we were just following the benevolent leader, Matt Mullenwig, into the dark. Now, a lot of us have gotten a bit wiser and we're not following him into the dark anymore because I think he's a bit lost. He doesn't know where he's going, and that's become apparent. However, uh also the open source nature of WordPress was a cause that we believed in. We believed that code should be free. By the way, during that period, very few people made money doing that, right? Very, very few people who were building WordPress websites following Matt and the open source uh movement were making any real money. In fact, very few are still making money out of it. Most are not making money, and that was referenced in the latest survey of WordPress Professionals, which I think we spoke about. Uh I spoke about that last week on the podcast with Adam Silverman. I basically told everyone if you're not making enough money, you should sell your agency to Adam Silverman and let him figure out how to make money out of your clients, because most WordPress professionals, uh, in air quotes, um, uh consider themselves full-time and consider themselves a growing agency, but are making less than 50 grand a year net income, right? So, yeah, they're not agency owners, they're they have a job and it's a horrible job and they're a horrible boss. So my point is that when we start to grow a team, I'll talk about clients hiring agencies in a minute, but because it's a similar, for me it's a similar um uh philosophy. When we hire, the biggest mistake we make when we hire team members, and I've done this myself, just ask Ray Milladoni and Simon Kelly about this experience, is you hire someone based on, first of all, you hire someone based on availability, not ability. That's the first mistake that most people make. Now, you and Ray did have some ability, absolutely, right? But there was no formal recruitment process when I hired for those roles, okay? So that was the first mistake. And what happens is then people end up in a role that they've never done before, or they end up in a role where they've done a bit of it, but they've there's a rapid learning curve. Okay. And then we, as the as the employer, become a community college where we're training people how to do a job that we're actually not very good at. Because if we were really good at it, we'd be hiring people to do other things in the organization and we would just stay there. I would never hire someone to come in and take over hosting the podcast from start to finish. I know Johnny Flash does some episodes in the States where we have guests in that time zone and I want to have a sleep-in. That makes perfect sense. But I wouldn't say, hey, let's just get someone to come in and host the podcast because I think I'm pretty good at it and I really enjoy it. It's my sweet spot. So what happens is project managers are a great example, right? If if you're a technician, a designer, a developer, a copywriter, whatever, you grow your business, you hire a project manager, chances are you are a terrible project manager, you hire someone who's also a pretty bad project manager, and then you try and teach them your half-baked process. Everyone is set up to fail. Right? The idea is to hire, and I'll talk about um the cause and the leader that they respect in a minute. The idea is to hire people based on their ability, hire people who have done the job before, give them everything they need to succeed, get out of their way, let them teach you their process, have them document that process as part of their job, so that you gradually build out your playbook on how to run your agency. And then you can brag about how good your process is to your clients, knowing that you you're not the one doing it, that you've got this amazing talented team who are doing it. Now I think the mindset as a business owner, the big shift that you need to make as a business owner is you need to play dumb. You need to go, okay, my role as a business owner is to take on the risk of owning a business. Right? If you if your agency screws up to a you know colossal degree and a client comes after you and sues you, they're not going to sue Jane, who works in the Philippines as a project manager, or Sarah, who works in the office as a paid media buyer. They're gonna sue the owners of the entity, right? Agency of Mavericks Proprietary Limited, owned by a trust, and the trustee of that trust is myself, right? So they're gonna come after my trust, or they're gonna come after me if someone's gonna sue my company. I'm taking that risk every time I open the doors to our company. Every day I come to work and I hire staff, I'm taking that risk. That is my job, is to take that risk as a business owner and in and to be uh remunerated for that risk, I get to share in the profit that the company makes. And in my case, it's 100% profit goes to me because I'm the only shareholder in the business. I've had business partners in the past, at the moment I don't, and I can't imagine having business partners in the future unless somebody acquires the thing hook, line, and sinker, because I don't like having business partners because I'm a control freak. So I take I I'm happy to shoulder the responsibility of the risk. I'm also happy to take all the profit. Okay. Apart from that, my job as the CEO of the business is to not run out of cash. Right? The only other job I have is to make sure my team have everything they need to do an amazing job. I do not need to know how anything else in the business works. I do not want to know how anything else in the business works. Yes, I'm still involved in little bits and bobs, but you you it is impossible to grow a self-managing uh autonomous team while you are actively working on the team and being the CEO. And it's and I'll give you the example. If you're in Australia and you've watched and you're older than 25 and you've watched AFL football over the last 25 years, you will have noticed that 25, 30 years ago, the coach was sometimes the captain and he was on the field taking marks, kicking goals, he was the Reichman or the full forward, and he was also the coach, right? Well, they stopped doing that because the coach, if he's on the field, he can't see what's happening, and he can't see what the opposition's doing, and he can't implement a strategy because he's in the trenches getting punched in the face dodging bullets, right? So as the CEO of a business, your job is to not run out of cash and to make sure your team have everything they need to succeed, including engagement, happiness, reward, a sense of meaningful work, comradeship, you know, belonging to something meaningful. That's your job. Your job is to not worry about who's committing to GitHub or whether we're using Photoshop or Canva. Who cares? That's not your job. Your job is to, in fact, your job is to say, I have no idea how any of that works. Someone else needs to solve that problem. Okay. Now, the final part of this uh rant is that when you hire, the first thing you should be doing is selling the vision of why your company exists to new recruits and continuing to sell that vision to your existing team. Which is why when we get Simon Major sends me a testimonial, a screenshot of an email from a client, a podiatry clinic out in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, and says, Hey, we have 12 podiatrists working here. They're all fully booked three weeks in advance. You guys are amazing. We love everything you've done for us. And Simon sends a screenshot to me. I share that screenshot with the whole team here and say, Yay, you're doing great work. When I get personal DMs from clients saying, Jane or Yassi, our client success managers, are absolute rock stars. I love working with them. They're giving me so much structure and accountability. I take those screenshots and I put them in a public channel in Slack, right? That's my job, is to let people know they're doing meaningful work, that we're rooting for the underdog. There's a cause here that we actually believe in. Agencies are a great distribution channel for abundance. We help agencies succeed. They help their small business clients succeed. That keeps families, communities employed, wealthy, healthy, happy, right? That's why I get out of bed every day and have been for the last 15 years in this business. So I'm selling that vision to the team and new recruits and making sure the business doesn't run out of cash and clearing the obstacles and making sure everyone's got what they need to succeed. Apart from that, the business, its job is to deliver a profit for me as the shareholder because I'm taking all the fucking risk. Right? So apart from those details, I don't know what plug-in we use or where it's hosted. I couldn't give a shit. Go figure it out. Because if I have to start figuring that out, someone else needs to make sure we don't run out of cash and someone else needs to sell the vision to the new recruits and the existing team. Right? So to answer your question, first of all, hire on ability, not availability. And second of all, with your existing team, continue to sell the vision of why SGD exists. And it's not to build websites, it's not to do SEO campaigns, it's not, it's none of that. You've got to find a bigger vision that people can get out of bed for, right? The other thing I will say is um you your team need to report up. You don't go chasing your team for numbers and metrics. Your team report up to you, right? So your team have to know, they have to be able to go to bed at the end of the day and go, fuck, I did a great job today. And I know I did a great job because I can point to something that shows I'm doing a great job. You and Eva taught me this when we came back from Santa Monica, uh, San Diego in Feb 2020, and we just had a great event, closed a bunch of new clients, and I said, Well, we've just had one of the worst quarters on record, and you're like, Well, hang on. So we've been playing basketball all day and shooting three pointers and slam dunks, and we feel like we're on fire. And five seconds before the final bell goes, you pull the curtain back on the score board, and there's no chance of us winning. That's really deflating. I was like, holy shit, you're right.

We're shooting three pointers in a hockey game. We're like, oh, we're not even playing basketball, right? So I'm high-fiving Eva. Yay! And then Troy's like, uh-uh. I'm like, oh what? We're playing football in the guys.

Yeah, sorry guys, wrong feeling. So that's exactly right. So so the team have to be able to point to things. Individual team members and the team have to be able to point to stuff and go, we know we're doing a good job because of this. And I go, Great. Thanks for telling me. I'm busy not running out of cash and selling the vision and figuring out who we need to hire next. So and talking to JV partners and investors and right? That's my job. And speaking at events, I'm going up to Sydney at the end of May to speak at the high-level SASPreneur event. She says, I've been miscast. Well, putting bums on seats is hard work, man, filling a room with people's hard work. I've been miscast in this role, but anyway, I'm gonna go up and give it my best. Well, I'm not a SASpreneur, I'm an agency guy, right? I'm gonna go up there and tell them all that selling high level as a SAS is a hard slog and that 90% of them are gonna fail and they should pivot and become an agency instead.

So you think this is your shortcut, but it's actually not the road that you've done.

The high level guys know that that's what I'm gonna talk about. So they've booked me, so you know. Yeah. Yeah. So game on. So that's what I do, right? Now, if I have to worry about, you know, which fucking theme we're installing on a WordPress website, well, who's doing my job? You know what I mean?

There's this book that I've just like partway through, the AI driven leader, and it's the guy who was the face of the, you know, the one thing, Gary Keller. You remember that book? Yeah, yeah. So he this this guy, I can't remember his name, the author, he took over the one thing. Like Gary hires this guy to to to be the face of this and to commercialize a part of the business because Gary was off doing his own thing. And this guy was saying to Gary, okay, cool, I need some feedback on this. He's like, mate, if if you need me to do your job, then you don't have a job. So you need to not need me to do the work that you're hired to do. And that to me was like, whoa, right. Yes. Wow. That's such a that's such a big move to be like this is the out that my thinking of this, and I'd love to know what you think. My thinking was like, here is the outcome for you. Here is the outcome, here is the line, here are the boundaries, and that is it. And there's no lack of clarity there. Like, go.

And I don't fucking care how you get over the finish line as long as you operate within the values of the business, right? Which is why values are important. Something that no one ever does, but values are important, right? So we know when it's right to fire a client and give them a refund, and we know when it's right to hold firm, right? We know because we know what our values are. Without asking you, they don't have to say, like, you know what?

I know the values of the company, not Troy will think I'm a good person.

So let me give you a scenario. Someone comes to you, I learned this from my buddy Mike McHenry, who's been a great mentor of mine over the years. He says, uh, he said to me, you know, uh a staff member comes to you with a question, they ask you a question, and if you are responsible for answering their questions, you'll notice that they all leave at five o'clock and you'll still be in the office at eight o'clock doing everyone's work, right? So he said, Here's how I answer questions. Someone comes and says, Mike, I've got a problem. Great. Before you tell me what the problem is, do you have at least two solutions that you're thinking about? No. Good. Fuck off and come up with two ideas and then come back when you've got two ideas and you're confused. Okay, so they come back, Mike, I've got this problem. Great. Have you got two solutions? Yeah, I've got two ideas. Great. What are they? Okay, idea A is I could do this. Idea B is I could do this. Okay, what do you think we should do? Well, I'm leaning towards idea A. Good idea. Go do that. Now piss off. Get out of my office. Right? He's like, you have to remove yourself as the, I call it, everyone's got everyone's got an emergency loop in their brain. They're like, shit, I've got a problem. I'll go and ask Simon. He'll fix it. Simon fixes it and I go, great. Simon just helped me close the emergency loop. I no longer have an emergency. The loop is closed. And Simon was the conduit through which I achieved peace of mind. Because I no longer have a problem because Simon helped me solve it. Well, guess what happens the next time that person has a problem? Yeah. They go to Simon.

Exactly. You're forming, you're part of that habit loop now. Correct.

You're enabling behavior. It's like a it's like a baby. A baby cries, you pick it up, baby cries for the rest of its fucking miserable life because it wants to be picked up, right? I'm still learning. Don't cry because no one's going to pick you up, you idiot. You're 52, you're 51 years old. Maybe loud yourself. Maybe try louder. 100%. Why do you think I podcast, right?

Oh, I need some help. Somebody give me some love. Words of affirmation.

What if yours? Correct. Is it affirmation? Words of affirmation. 99.9% words of affirmation. You could punch me in the face as long as you tell me you love me. Oh, that's great, wonderful. And slap me again. Thanks very much. Getting some mixed things up. But the words solidify. So uh so dot, you know, so what happens is you've got to remove yourself from their emergency loop. So you have to let them know I'm not a part of the solution here, right? And so what happens then is they usually come and they go, Oh, I want to bounce some ideas off you. No, no, don't bounce ideas off me. One, I'm really bad at doing your job. If I was better than you at doing your job, you wouldn't be here. I'd be doing your job. I only need three project managers in in this business. I've got two who are really good, and I've got you who ask me questions every day. Hmm. Who do you think is getting a promotion? Not you. Go and figure it out. Now, the best update, the best input, and the best feedback that you get from your team is when they say, Simon, we finished third in this project that we were running. We didn't quite nail it, but here's why, and here's what we've learned, and here's what we're going to do better next time. Or, hey, guess what? We nailed it. We got across the finish line. We finished first. Here's why. Here's what we did, here's what we've learned, here's what we've put into the knowledge base, here's how we've all improved, here's what we're doing next time. You go, fucking great. I'm busy not running out of cash. Right? Well done, team. Go you. Don't come to me and ask me, I'm not going to help you get across the finish line. I cannot help you get across the finish line.

I think that's such a key thing. It's like outcomes, finish line, like we've talked about in kind of different language, but like, do they know what that finish line is rather than the process to get there? And so even when when working with the team, when working with clients, like we just had an amazing testimonial from a client. They're like, we like new website launch, we're doing some SEO with them. They're like, we we haven't, um, we haven't, we're getting less leads, they're much higher quality, and we've been uh inquired to apply for for tenders, and that's never happened. So, like, you know, I hate to tell you guys you're doing a good job because he's such this client is particularly like, uh, I don't want to always congratulate because then people get sloppy. But he's like, this has changed the game for us. And he's not talking about the details beforehand, he was talking about the details. Our previous agency did this, and we want to change this on the blog post, and this one's not quite right. Getting so specific into like how the sausage is made, but then outcome achieved, finish line. He's just like, Well, whatever you guys are doing, just you know, go for it.

Yeah. So let me talk about the client agency relationship in a second. But before I get there, I just want to I just want Talk about this outcome with your team. So we have a we have a dashboard and full transparency, you can go to um what's it called? Scalable, whatever Ryan Dice's new business in, right? He's got this free spreadsheet. It's fucking confusing and complicated. But anyway, we took it and we I watched all the training and paid the money and we simplified it for our business and we're rolling it out for all of our agencies. And the CEO dashboard essentially is what are you've got what's called evergreen metrics. Evergreen metrics are things that you should always be looking at in the agency, right? So in in our world with the agencies that we mentor, it's revenue, it's recurring revenue, it's gross profit and net profit. They're really the four numbers that you should always be looking at. Now, in addition to that, there are some numbers that you might focus on for a quarter. So you might focus on employee health or NPS or there might be something around, you know, answering support tickets, improving your, you know, your post-project support, whatever. They are what we call flight plan metrics that you focus on for three months to improve one part of the business. Okay. So what we do is we put them on a spreadsheet, a Google spreadsheet tool that we've designed that we've built. And the team are responsible. And I learned this from my brother who works at a large nonprofit in Adelaide. And he's like, oh, dude, you can't go chasing your team for metrics for numbers. He goes, No, no, no, no, no. You spend your entire life like changing nappies and, you know, filling up kids' drink bottles and wiping their nose. You can't do that. You have to empower them to be grown-ups. Here's your number. Here's what you're responsible for. You get to fill this in every Monday. This cell has to be updated every single Monday because I'm going to look at it Tuesday morning. And I want to see, I look at one thing on my spreadsheet. There's a column that is red, yellow, or green. And that's our traffic light system. So I look at all the red lights, and the next thing I do is look in the comments. If there's a red light and there's no comments, I go shout at someone. Why the fuck is this light red and why aren't there any comments? What are we doing? We're just going to fly into the side of a mountain and nobody knows why? Great. We've got 400 people in the cabin and they're all going to explode, right? And nobody knows why. This is unacceptable. So the light's red, but we know why. Excellent. Here's a yellow light, we know why. Here's a green light, we know why. So my job is to look at it and go, hey, we've got lots of green lights. I can go play golf. Or I can go not run out of cash or find another JV partner or think about who we're going to hire next or whatever, right? Hey, we've got a lot of red lights. I start asking questions about the comments. And if there are no comments filled in, now we have a problem. Now, the person whose job it is is to fill in the number and write the comment doesn't have to be the person who's responsible for achieving the number. They just have to be responsible for making sure they know where that number lives. It could be in Zero or QuickBooks, it could be in Asana, it could be in one of our internal tools that we've built, it could be in our survey feedback dashboard. They need to know where to get the number and where to log it. And they need to know whether or not we're on track or off track for the month. So they go, cool, we're at the first of, we're at the end of the first week of the month and our call volume is way down. So we're we're a red light, right? And the comment might be, I don't know why, because I don't work in marketing, but we're way off track. And then I go, okay, shit, we are way off track. And then I go ask someone in marketing what's going on. Right? I have no fucking idea what we're doing in marketing to increase call volume. I have a high-level idea, right? But I'm not in the, I don't push the buttons. I can't come in and save it. I literally cannot dive in and save a project. I don't know how to do it anymore. So that's the mechanical piece of how that works is to have that. It's the cockpit. You have to look at the needle every Tuesday morning and go, we're flying in the right direction. Everything's good. Altitude is good. We're on track, or shit, we're going to hit a mountain so we can course correct, right? And that's updated every week. Now, the mentality around this as well is that you have to trust your team and you have to let them fail. It's the only way they learn. You have to you have to watch them fall over and get a blood nose and go, wow, that must really hurt. What are you going to do differently next time? Right? I can't fix your nose. I'm not even going to wipe the blood off your face, sorry. Go and clean yourself up, get back in the ring and don't get hit. Right? Because I'm over here not running out of cash, remember? Right? Because if we run out of cash, there's no one in the corner to give you a drink in between rounds. So my job is to help you, but you've got to get in the ring and take the punches and not get hit and throw the punches. I can't do that for you. Right? And it's the same when clients are hiring agencies. Clients need the problem with most clients is most clients think most clients know a little bit and they think they know more than they actually know. And so when a client hires an agency, it's like they've self-diagnosed on Dr. Google and they've gone to the doctor and said, Hey, doctor, I've got this little bit of a rash and I'm sure it's testicular cancer. You better cut them both off. And the doctor says, Well, why don't you just let me be the judge of that? Well, hang on a second, doctor. What brand of stethoscope do you use? Where did you go to school? And the doctor says, get out of my fucking office, you idiot. Right? You need to go and have your head checked. What are you doing? I'm a doctor.

Is this the truth story?

No. I can't tell you the story about when I went to the doctor last because this is a family time slot. Uh no, the doctor, you don't ask the doctor where they went to school or what brand of stethoscope they're using, and you don't tell the doctor, I need a prescription for this medicine. The doctor makes those decisions. The doctor does the diagnosis and the doctor writes the prescription. Right? And your positioning as an agency needs to be the same as the doctor. Right? So the the pride of this call this morning with um one of our partners in the States, and I said, the problem with most agencies is they're too scared to push back on clients. The problem with most clients is what you have to realize is clients don't know what they're doing. If they did, they would have already done it and they wouldn't be on the phone with you in the first place. Right? So they don't know what they're doing, they know what they want, but they don't know how to do it. They don't know how to get there. Otherwise, they would have already done it. So your job is to help them figure out the plan, otherwise known as strategy, to get them what they want. Which is why we're such big believers in digital roadmaps, paid discovery and growth plans. Your job is to help them put together the strategy to figure out what they want. Right? They don't know what they want. Your job is to help them figure out what they want, put together the plan and get very clear about the outcomes. If they start asking you what tech stack you're going to use and how many plugins you're going to use, or, you know, like do you use AI to do the creative on the Facebook? Like they just don't trust you if they're asking those questions.

If they're micromanaging the process, they don't trust you to deliver the outcome. Correct. And that's the same with team. It's the same with agency. If you're getting super involved, if the if your team or client or your agency are crushing it with results, you you just are like, oh, cool, great. But if not crushing it. One less thing I have to worry about. Yeah, exactly. But if not crushing, I'm I'm noticing this with myself and and our team. If we're not delivering the outcome somewhere, we start to go into the process. But but it's like that's gonna be 10x the amount of work to go into the process rather than being like, do we know what the outcome is? Do they know what the outcome is? Can we align on that first? It just seems like such a basic thing, but it like kind of slapped me in the face as we're talking about.

Like you and Eva thought you were doing slam dunks, and I'm like, we're supposed to be playing ice hockey kids. Yeah.

Yeah, we're trying to get cash here. I'm like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We're trying to actually make money.

The biggest problem with communication is the misunderstanding that it's taken place. Right? Because I I guarantee you've had conversations in your head with team members that you've never had with them. Yeah.

And James says to me regularly, I mean, I've said it so many times to them. I've said it and they just keep doing this. Yeah. You're gonna are you gonna try something else in in on NLP, as you know, I've studied that a bit. It's like there is uh no such thing as um bad communication, just inflexible communicators. So yes it's on the communicator, not the recipient, to be flexible. Correct.

So, you know, having kids teaches you that you have to be very creative about the way you communicate. What like the other day, you know, Goldie's just like she just doesn't want to get dressed to go to Kindy, and I'm like, I just need you to fucking get dressed, right? And she's five, and I'm looking at her and I'm like, you know, like there are times I actually said to both my kids the other night when they were just driving me nuts, and it was a bit of a joke, and they did laugh at it, thankfully. Um because if they didn't, my wife probably would have slapped me one. But um they were just driving me nuts, and I looked at them and I said, you know, I reckon you would both fit in the microwave at the same time, and they both just cracked up laughing. You have those moments where it's like, I if you weren't my child, I would kill you right now and eat you, right? Um uh did I just say that out loud? So with Goldie, it's like I just need you to get dressed, and she's like, that's a you problem, not a me problem. She doesn't care, right? Good luck with that. And so I said, correct. And so I said, Who's gonna who's gonna win the dressing game? And she bolted to her room as fast as her little legs could carry her so that she could get dressed before me, so that she could win the the dressing game. There's no prize for the dressing game. She's never asked for a prize for the dressing game. She just likes to know that she beats me. So gamifying it gets her to like she will she is ignoring me. And my by the way, one of my greatest wounds from my childhood trauma is not being heard, right? Which is why I'm still in therapy. It's probably why I'm a podcaster, not being heard. So when my kids don't listen to me, it's just like pouring salt onto my oldest wound. It's like they're not listening to me. They don't respect me. I'm in the bottom of the food chain here. I'm going to kill them both. And if you gamify it, so who's going to win the toothbrush, who's going to win the teeth brushing race? They both run to the bathroom and do what you tell them to. So you have to find a way to motivate your team about what is important to them. And I'm not saying you have to gamify everything. But first of all, if you've got team members who don't believe in the vision of what you're trying to create with the business, well, that's the first thing you need to address is what is like, why does this business exist? Why are we here? Why do we do what we do? Apart from, you know, making revenue and keeping people in jobs, why do we do what we do? And I'm very clear about my abundance mission and my abundance statement. That's why I do what I do, right? I've said it a hundred times. Uh, then you have your values. This is how we make decisions. These are the beliefs and what we believe in that govern our decision making. And then you have your mission. This is what we're doing over the next 12 months in order to bring that vision to life. And the values are like guardrails that keep our decision making within the certain parameters of you know what it is we believe. And apart from that, just get out of the team's way and let them find their own way across the finish line and then let them brag about how great they are at doing the thing. Fucking unreal. That's great. Well done. Because, you know, I I haven't got a clue what you do, but good job. Excellent. Just keep doing that, right?

I I regularly like um voice chat with um Jen Sikowski, one of the one of the coaches. And I was talking about working with the team and talking about some um some things that I really wanted to achieve personally, but like it was like I was she kind of could see that I was taking things from the team and I was wanting to be successful, and I was wanting to hold up the trophy and be like, look at me, look how good I am. And I I didn't really see that. And she said to me, Um, give give other people a chance to be successful. I was like, Oh, my ego's really at play here. Wow. And it's just like this insidious default running the show. It's very lonely. It's very lonely at the top, right?

Which is why, you know, I mean, it's why people join our programs because they want to hang out with other CEOs and other agency owners who, you know, their teams don't give them any gratitude. Your spouse stopped listening to you years ago. It's very lonely at the top. And your job, I remember I I think it was the fuck, it was the CEO of Spotify, I can't remember, um, was they rolled out this rewards program where the team could reward each other with virtual rewards in Slack and then you could redeem those rewards for like a movie voucher or an Amazon voucher or whatever, right? And the company paid a certain amount per month for those rewards. The CEO didn't get one reward token in the first 12 months they rolled it out. He's like, there was something like, you know, 400,000 rewards distributed throughout the year, and he didn't get one of them. It's like, well, because that's not my job. Like, no one's gonna like it's lonely at the top, it's thankless, and your job as a leader is to accept responsibility when things go wrong, even when your team colossally fuck up, you need to accept the responsibility for that because it's your business and you employed them and you trained them and you let them, you let the dogs out. So it's your fault if they go rogue, and your job is to elevate your team and congratulate your team when things go well, right? That's the sign of a of a true leader as far as I'm concerned. And the other thing I will say is that every single, I mean, and you've witnessed this in our organization, every single time uh I think my best leadership moments have come from when I've been very vulnerable about the fact that I don't know what I'm doing, I need help, um, you know, things are not going the way I planned. And, you know, I put my hand up and go, I'm I'm I'm I really need some help here. And the whole team unifies within 24 hours. Everyone is unified and working together. So vulnerability, true vulnerability, is a very scary place to inhabit as a leader. And and it was, I mean, and I I'd been doing it for a while, but I really leant into it when I discovered the Brene Brown um talk that she did. I don't think it was a TED talk, I can't remember what it was. Was it like a Netflix special or something? When she um A Call to Courage was the name of it. And she said something that was so obvious and simple when she said it. But as a white Anglo-Saxon male born in the early 70s, raised in the 80s, I was conditioned that, you know, boys don't cry, men are strong, we don't talk about our feelings, we're not, there is no bl there is no forum for us to be vulnerable, right? And when Brene Brown said to put your hand up and say you're scared is one of the bravest things you can do. Because you know that there is a big chance you are going to be ridiculed or people are gonna take advantage of your weakness and your fear. And so that's an that's an incredibly courageous thing to do, is to put your hand up and say, I'm scared. Right. And as a man, if I want to demonstrate courage, then putting my hand up and saying I'm scared is one of the bravest things I can do. So again, in in the context of the you know, white Anglo-Saxon male grew up in the working class suburbs of northern South Australia in the 70s and 80s, a signal to all the other men that this is actually a sign of strength, not weakness. This is I'm being brave and courageous by doing this, and in fact, you're being weak by not admitting your vulnerabilities, right? You're hiding behind bravado uh and and and the macho kind of image by not admitting your vulnerabilities, because admitting your vulnerabilities is fucking scary. It's easier to be a bully than be vulnerable. And as a leader, my personal opinion is that bullies are playing a very short game and vulnerability is the long game. And so if you want to empower your team, you know, be vulnerable, truly vulnerable. Tell them that you don't know what you're fucking doing, tell them that you're scared, tell them that you're frustrated and ask for their advice, ask for them, how do I fix this? How do we as a team fix this? Right? And if you show that vulnerability, just something that you know Matt Mullenwig could probably learn a little in recent times. He's definitely in his villain era. If you show a bit of vulnerability, your team will follow you into the dark.

I think that's what leadership is, isn't it? It's stepping into the unknown, being one of the first. 100%. Yeah.

Leadership is vulnerability as far as I'm concerned. It's it's it's vulnerability. I mean, because vulnerability is courage. I mean, that's there's just I mean, there's no other way to I mean, dude, you've seen you've seen me in that in that state, right? And you've heard me and you've you've read the posts and you've you know seen me fall down with exhaustion after a four-hour live stream back in at Revolver Creative. Like, I mean, you've seen me, we've seen each other go through that, right? We have been through those moments. And our bond now is, you know, we we have such a great friendship, such a great professional relationship, but also such a great friendship because we've seen each other through those moments of vulnerability where we haven't been at our best and we've stood by each other because we believe in the common thing of what we're trying to do, you know. And we also see our talents and we see that we're good people with good hearts and good intentions who fucking make mistakes.

That's it. You know? And you mentioned before about like the bully side of things. I think it's like the bullying for appearances. It's like this appearing successful versus being successful. And I don't mean like you've got a Porsche or something like that, but successful in whatever the hell it is you're trying to do. Like it could be anything. It could be working out at the gym, it could be losing some weight, whatever that is, whatever success looks like. And and truly being that, like I I encourage and and feel really inspired by people that are not the complete, you know, Adonis look and they're crushing it at the gym, but those people who it would be so hard to actually show up. Maybe they're they're quite overweight and they're they're smashing it, they're going for a run, and it looks freaking hard. It doesn't look perfect because that's vulnerability, that's courage. That's that is so much more difficult than already being born into looking fantastic or being fit in some way. It's like you're you're going through some shit in order to make that happen. And saying, like seeing us, seeing each other go through some shit and come out the other side, but still standing there, not being like, I'm gonna jump in the trunk real quick, I can't handle this. Or sometimes jumping in the trunk and being like, all right, I'm gonna spend 20 minutes in the trunk. Like, I'll be back, but I I just gotta I'm I'm head in sand for just a little bit. Give me that. I'm coming. Totally fine. Let's go.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I think one of the problems is because we're all, you know, digital, digital whatever, you know, we live online, is that fuck man, social media is just so toxic. Like we all we see is the highlight reel of everyone else's perfect life. That's it, right? You know, I don't know if you've been following Dan Norris's posts recently about his his exit from Black Ops, which is the brewery that he started with B Mates in Berlin. I mean it's an absolute fucking shit show. Like it is, like watching your favorite pub burn to the ground. And he's posting it, he's putting it all. It's like it's really funny. I read one of his posts this morning and I'm like, dude, I feel like I know Dan, and I've messaged him recently just to make sure he's okay and he is, but I feel like messaging him going, dude, why don't you just take a photo of you and your dirty laundry and stick it on Facebook? Because that's what you're doing. He's airing all of his dirty laundry. And it's really interesting that I find it's it's like it's a, it's, it's, it's real. It's the truth, right? I'm not sure that I would be brave enough to do that, right? And what 99% of what 99.9% of what you see on social media is just everyone's highlight reel. And also you've got to remember the algorithm is filtering the content to just give you what it thinks you need to stay engaged in the platform because the longer you're in the platform, the more chance you'll see a fucking ad and click on it, which is how they make their money. So you've got to understand, it's like you're not, you know, first of all, what people post on a social media is not real. And second of all, you know, it's a sl it's a it's a slither of their life. And second of all, the algorithm is just gonna give you a slither of what's posted, right? So you're seeing, you're seeing the world through a very particular, it's worse than mainstream media, social media. It's more slanted and more biased than mainstream media, right? Like it you watch left-wing mainstream media or right-wing mainstream media, at least you fucking know what their agenda is, right? At least you know which political party they're aligned to and what their what their commercial reality is and what their commercial model is. And you go, okay, well, I can watch this because I know where the money is, right? Social media, it's like, well, it feels independent, but it's not. You have to remember, social media companies make their money by selling your profile to advertisers, right? That's why I don't have a Google speaker or an Alexa in my home. I've got a Siri, I've got an Apple speaker, but I don't use it. But if I was going to have a smart speaker in my home, it would be Apple, even though it's probably the dumbest smart speaker on the planet. And Siri's pretty thick, doesn't really do anything, but I would just go, Apple, play me, you know, hey Siri, play a fucking song for me, right? Like that's basically all it can do. Because I don't want, I don't want it to know everything about my personal life and sell that data to advertisers, right? And we certainly don't want that around the kids, which is why we don't have smart speakers in the house. That's why we don't have a smart home, right? So you have to understand that what you see with all these people posting all this shit online about how great their team is and how we're crushing it, it's all bullshit. It's all bullshit. Like, don't look at that and compare yourself to what you see on social media. That is the fastest way to get depressed. Or anxious or both.

Yeah. On the on the hedonic treadmill. Right. Why, in some way. It's like never enough. You know, like the gap or the gain. Uh-huh. Yeah. Like as in the gap, I'm I'm I'm seeing this and I'm never there. I'm not quite there. It makes it feel like crap, like how far away you are from the horizon. Versus looking back 90 days, being like, oh my God, look how far we've come. That's awesome. That feels fantastic. Yep.

So I don't know if any of this is helpful, but you know, I think the the cliff notes are, you know, as a leader, cast the vision, make sure everyone is aligned around the vision. They understand the values which govern our decisions, make sure everyone's clear about the mission and what the outcome looks like and what the finish line looks like. Give them all the tools and resources they need to succeed, and then just get out of their way. You know, they have to swim the laps at the end of the day. You can coach them and lead them as much as possible, but they have to get in the pool and swim the laps.

I love it. Definitely a call to step up and lead rather than get out of the way, I'll do the work.

Yeah. And and and just remind people the meaning of what it is they're doing and also offer them professional development pathways. Like if you, you know, here's where you could go over the next three years, right? Let's get this right. Let's do this. Let's build this. Let's add this value. Let's become a linchpin in the business. And then you can elevate and you can step into this role. You can have more responsibility, you can have more autonomy. So people just want to know that they matter at the end of the day.

What I love about that is one, you've got the selling the vision of the agency. Like that's one thing. And that can be a bit of a nebulous thing that I think people procrastinate on getting getting right because that's what they're trying to do is get it right. And they're like, oh, I don't really know how to do that. But what you're kind of saying here is like selling the vision of the future for the individual staff member as well. Like here's what I see as possible for you. Like and them being excited about that, like, oh hell yeah. Yeah. That vision for me sounds freaking amazing. It just so happens that that fits perfectly in with the vision for the company.

Yeah.

Now we're alive.

Well, well, listen, as a leader, the definition of a leader is that you you walk into the unknown and you have people who trust you enough to follow you, right? And so those people are your clients, they're your staff, they're your business partners, they're your investors. And if you don't have a clear vision about where you want to go, and you're not willing to walk into the unknown to get there, then you're not a leader because like well, what are we doing, Simon? We're just walking around round in circles? Like, what are we doing? I don't know, we're just hanging out. That's not leadership. What are we doing? Well, we're going over here, and here's why. Because this is what I believe, and this is what I think's on the other side of the unknown. And I'm willing to walk in there first and get eaten by a fucking grizzly bear. Right? I don't think you know what I mean? I don't I don't think I don't think they're in there, but let me go find out. And and you know, this is why we should do this. That's your job is to sell that vision. You know, Steve Jobs was one of the greatest vision casters of our time. Yeah. So you've got to you constantly gotta be selling the vision to your clients and your team. Because people want leaders, they want to follow someone because leadership's hard. Most people aren't most people just won't do it. 99.9% of the planet won't lead because it's hard, because it requires you to be vulnerable for all the reasons we've spoken about.

Awesome, mate. Well, I feel like we should probably wrap up at this point. It's um, I mean, I could talk about this for a lot longer and I look forward to future convos about this. Thanks, dude.

This is yeah, this has been fun. Thanks for bringing this uh to the to the to the table. Yeah, mate, been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to the Agents Howard Podcast and a massive thanks to Simon for joining us. I'm really looking forward to hanging out with him again at person at our next live event in uh Bali in a few weeks. It's called MavCon. It's completely sold out. You'll have to keep your eyes on the social for the video and manage your FOMO. All right, folks, remember to subscribe and please share this with anyone who you think may need to hear it. I'm Troy Dean, and remember the cigarette lighter was invented before the match.