One of the most helpful SOPs we created was how to ask for help. And that was actually inspired a little bit by Troy. And that stopped the team having to ask me really I would consider dumb questions where they haven't gone that extra mile to do a bit of research, to challenge themselves. It becomes very easy for someone to come to you and ask what the answer is, then it does to actually try to figure it out.

Welcome to the Agency Hour Podcast. If you're a web design and digital agency owner looking to create abundance for yourself, your team, and your community, this podcast is for you. Today we're joined by Thomas Amos, founder and CEO of designbox.co.uk and the newest agency Mavericks coach to join our Mavericks family. Thomas joins us from the London, England area, and in this episode, we discussed the real value of documenting SOPs and how to stop being the person who does all the things. We also discussed where to start with creating your SOPs, how Thomas used SOPs to recover from a horrific burglary, and how he used Star Wars to incentivize his team. This is a really great conversation that will help anyone who is stuck on the tools. I'm Johnny Flash. Stay with us. Hey Thomas, how's it going? Nope. Yourself? I'm doing great, man. I'm so excited to get to chat with you. Uh this is just this is just gonna be awesome. So um for those that don't know, you've been you were in the Mavericks program before you were Mavericks coach. Um tell us about where you were when you started. I I want to hear the back to the beginning.

Sure. So um yeah, even even pre-Mavericks, I think I was in uh the WP elevation. Okay. And so we kind of got to a point with that, and I'm not gonna lie, I was looking looking around and Mavericks came up, and that wasn't the right time when it first came out. But we kind of got to a point that in our business where I could vision where I wanted the business to go, but there were just so many things to do that it just felt like it was never gonna get anywhere. So, like you know, when you're just so busy, you've got so many hacks to do on your day-to-day, and there's so many different things that you want to achieve, I just feel like they're never gonna happen. So I kind of knew that I needed some form of accountability, and knowing Troy's programs and seeing what you guys were doing on Mavericks, they were kind of constantly coming up with answers to things that we knew we had to do. So it was kind of a no-brainer really to join Mavericks for me. Just because, like I say, I I knew what I wanted to achieve, but I just didn't know what to do first, how to do it first. And yeah, just for me, I think it it was just getting things in line of what's what's important and seeing other people in the same sector having the same problems and the same challenges, and then also seeing people that have overcome them is quite inspirational. So, yeah, it's a massive, massive help for me.

Well, and when you're when you're so busy kind of running the rat being the rat running in the wheel, you don't have time to document how to do things, you don't have time to get more team members, like right, you're just so busy doing all the things. And I it's funny because I just came from a coaching call with an with someone who is in that position, right? They're doing all the things, they're they're burnout, they need help, but they don't have time to document, they feel like they have to have it all perfectly documented before they hire someone. I'm like, no, you don't have to do that, right? Um, so and then what was your what what was the experience like once you were in the Mavericks program as a Maverick, uh, and kind of how some of that stuff started to change?

Well, I think the biggest start of change was when we did first flight plan, and on that flight plan, I think with you, Johnny. I remember just writing down the things that were really obvious, like how many hours are you spending on your business a week? And to me, like there was a level that felt so normal of being incredibly overworked, and you were I just remember you going, Wow, that's that's a lot of time, like you need to cut that down. And me thinking, I I don't know how I don't know how I'm gonna cut that down, I don't know any other way because if I don't do it, you know, we're not gonna pay the bills. And so for me, like the game changer was doing the flight plan, um, but also doing the GPS as well to work out what was very obvious that we needed to focus on within the business and prioritize that a bit better. There were areas that I weren't we weren't even looking at in the business that um that straight away we couldn't see the benefit right now, but as soon as we started to work through the program, that that was a massive help. So yeah, I think the biggest the biggest thing was for me was the flight plan and the accountability in that because that that kept me focused on on the on the road.

Yeah. And I know, and you come in kind of with like a deer with a in a headlights, you know, you're trying to like figure out what to do, and then it's like someone points out something, it's like, oh, that's so obvious, but like you didn't you couldn't even see it because you're like it's like when you're in the middle of the forest, you can't even see the trees because it's just you're surrounded by it, right? Um and so yeah, I think and then and then one of the things I really appreciated about well, lots of things actually that I appreciate about you, but one of the things I appreciated about you was just how you took massive action, you shared as you had things that you guys were doing great that you shared with other mavericks in the program. I think that's one of the the big values, right? Is kind of learning from each other, and you really kind of like grabbed on to the SOPs. Like, talk about that a little bit.

Yeah, so SOPs, I'd never heard of standard operating procedures. I didn't know I didn't know what they were. It sounded so obvious when people were asking what what the process was for onboarding a client. So in my head, I had been doing some form of processes. We'd been creating processes or templates in clickup of how to put a website live. So there was a basic level there, but I never respected the fact of how much value that was to my team. Because again, when I when I come into Mavericks, I had all the hats, and the reason why I work so much is because I couldn't let any hats go. And the only reason I couldn't let any hats go is because I had no processes. So without having to do it for them or almost show them and while doing it for them again, it it always fell on me. So yeah, so that came about on my flight flight plan, and I thought, yeah, do you know what we've got some clients right now and my guys have no idea how to onboard them. So I just thought, well, I'm gonna I'm gonna try and list this out so that I don't have to do this anymore. And there were also some times when we had processes that I hated doing. So if I could offboard that to the staff, then uh that was a big win too. So so yeah, it it it started off as just something very basic, and I just slowly saw the benefit bit by bit to the point that it became an obsession where we'd created a little database in clickup, and I think at the time we had like 15-16 SOPs, and we were like, could we just process everything? Like, would this be mad enough to just sit down and process every part of the agency to the point that someone knew could come into the business and have everything laid out to the point of how to answer the phone, how to ask for help, everything you can imagine. So um we thought let's just do this. So we we went ahead, we we created a bonus scheme for our staff to kind of give it a push. Because being completely realistic, I tried to me being the guy that's doing all the things, I wanted to do all the SOPs because there was a way that I wanted things to be done, and I had to let that go because otherwise we wouldn't we wouldn't have been been able to create such a database of processes. So I shortly realized that the best way of doing this is to get the guys that are doing the job to do the processes so that I know how they do it, um the new people know how they do it, and we can all learn from each other.

And what would you say, if I could interrupt there, what would you say for someone who's the the the only rat in the wheel, or maybe there's one other person in the wheels running with them, and they they have this pressure that they feel like they have to do all the things themselves. Like, what would you say? How do you how do you slow down enough when you're running that fast to do some of the SOPs when you don't really feel like you have the time?

Yeah, that's that's understandable because you can't just sit there and write 500 SOPs, it's not logical. The easiest way that we found to do it was either to record yourself doing it while you had to do it. Because there's no point creating an SOP for something that you might not have to do for a year. Yeah. So the logical answer is if you're doing something right now, are you going to have to do it again very soon? Then record it. Or just spend 30 minutes after you've completed a simple task and just write a little checklist on how you did it. So that's how we started because it was more logical. Yeah.

It might have meant an extra 30 minutes in a day trying to cut video recordings if we were doing videos, or just talking while you're working and you're going a little bit slower because you're trying to explain it all and show the things, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But I would probably say as well, like there are times when you're trying to write an SOP and then you're figuring it out along the way. They're they're very difficult times to write an SOP because the honest answer is you're gonna waste loads of time trying to go back and re-record something you've just done. Yeah. So it is something that you know, if you feel like you've done it more than once, you've got a bit of confidence, then that's the best time to do that as an SOP. So, yeah, not just me, after after I kind of offloaded that, my team would sit and and do that themselves.

Yeah, and along this journey when you're doing these SOPs, I remember when you're in the Mavericks when you know, in the middle of this journey, talk about uh there was a break-in in your physical office. Talk a little, give us the quick story there, because I just think it's so interesting in how these SOPs then played into that.

Yeah, so one morning I got a call from the business next door to us that we've we now have their office, but when when they were when they were taking over London. Yeah, we've taken over the floor. Um, yeah, so John John gives me a call. It's about 6 30 in the morning, and he's he basically rung up and said, Tom, someone's broken in. They've kicked your door, they've kicked your door down. And I remember at the time I it didn't really settle in. I just thought, what does what does that mean?

Hmm.

Um so it didn't really hit me until I walked in and everything had gone. Uh we had so we had eight members of staff, I think, at around around eight at the time. All the Macs had been taken. Oh my god. All the monitors had been taken. Wow. Uh there were some screens that were still there that had been dropped or smashed, so they they'd been left. Uh everything you could think of keyboards, mouse, headphones. A member of staff had his own headphones in his drawer, they got they got taken.

Oh my god.

And NASDAQ with all of our files. They tried to take the telly off the wall, but luckily they failed at that one, and the coffee machine, which was the most important thing. Um yeah, the funny thing was they tried to carry out the coffee machine and someone hadn't cleaned out the tray, so that clearly poured all over them and then left that where that was. So uh a little part of me got my own back there.

But the feeling that you have when you see that, I mean it's just like it's like a a punch to the gut, right?

Yeah, and it's you just feel helpless because I had an alarm system, it all went off, but they'd gone. They'd done exactly what they needed to do, they got in really quickly, they clearly knew what they were doing. We had no idea who it was. I don't think we ever will. And you just feel helpless because everything that I'd worked for for five years had just been taken overnight, and so yeah, it's it's gutting to be honest. And yeah, so we'd lost about I think there's about 30 grand's worth of equipment close to that, but there wasn't just the damages on the equipment, the equipment can be replaced. There were there were projects we had that morning a branding project that we'd been working on for three months, and there was a nice big chunky bill ready to be paid for um after the presentation. All that work had gone.

Oh my.

So three months on a branding project, completely gone. And it was backed up on a NAS drive, but that's as far as it went.

And they took that, and they took that, right?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

So oh my goodness. So you so you're so you you have this this unbelievable just crisis in your business that you you didn't, you know, nobody wishes for, and you found yourself in the middle of. Um, and thankfully you had already been working on some of your SOPs. Like, so how did that play into like how what you did next after that?

Well, I think with every failure or problem in a business, it's important to think, how do I not have that happen again? So, first thing that we did in the business was we had to look at preventing that to happen again. So, obviously, improving the security, we got like these safe doors, we've got security cameras. They won't entirely prevent them, but hopefully next time um it'll stop it from happening. Looking at the NASDAQ side of things, we started to create a process on how we store our data so that it's backed up and it has a secondary backup. So now we have a new NASDAQ and it's backed up in Google Cloud, and it's also encrypted so that you know if the worst ever happened and someone broken again, there's a process on how to manage our data in the cloud. Wow. And it we can just carry on as if nothing happened.

Wow.

There were there were just loads of little things that we had to kind of look at improving, and all of them contributed to making us a better company. So the data got more organized so that that didn't happen again. Um it we kind of drilled it into the team that they don't save files on their Macs as well without storing them in the NASDAQ. So there was an SOP on how to save files, which sounds really obvious and really basic, but no one follows it. Yeah. So it's really important to have that laid out and what folders we organize them in. So we went a little bit above that and started to, you know, while we're looking at organizing our folders, um, where do we put the files? So then we start to look at how we organize our fold folders and files in the future so that it's nice and easy for people to access. Even to the point of creating a process so that should the business ever be burgled again, or maybe something worse happens, um, maybe the plate the building goes up in flames, or I don't know, maybe we have an electrical power cut. What do what do we do in them scenarios? So we create a process that the guys would go work from home, they would log in on Slack and do what we did during COVID and carry on working, and now everything's stored in the cloud because they followed the process. Yeah, they can just carry on and and we can pretend that nothing's happened for a little while.

You're you're so inspiring to me. I mean, the way that you have like even when when you're in the program, just how many SOPs you guys and your team churned out over the course of like less than a year, you were like in the triple digits of number of SOPs that you had, just crazy number of SOPs, super generous sharing them. And uh, you remind me of Manish at E2M because they they they I think their staff is, I don't know, it's 180 or some crazy number of team members that they have providing all these amazing services. And they are just like the only way that they do it so effectively is with their processes, um, where they just you know have it down like this is how we do this, this is how we do this, and all of their team, you know, follows these processes and they provide an amazing service. So I think, you know, um going back to like being the hamster in the wheel, having to like write all your process yourself, or the other option is right, you find someone like E2M who's a great white label partner and you say, Hey, we're gonna just contact them and have them provide these services that we don't have time to document or haven't figured out or don't have the right team members for. And I think it's just a huge uh a huge uh possibility and value added. You've even used E2M, right? Before Thomas? Yeah, yeah.

So funny enough, this wasn't this wasn't very long after the burglary because we had suddenly a big stack of work that catch up on and redo and all the things, right? Like we didn't have time to train someone new up and and get them up to speed. We needed someone that could just jump in and and do the job. So there were there were some projects that we were very lucky that might have been stored in Figma, which is in the cloud. So that was extremely easy for us to just say, e2 and we got four web projects. Can you just can you just get them into WordPress for us and we'll figure out the rest so that we can carry on bringing in new clients and sales and recover? And they did a great job. They they enabled us to to kind of get back on our feet so that we could then look at growing again um once we recovered finances and got ahead above water. So we we used them for quite uh I think about six to eight months just to get ahead above water. Wow. And um, they were a massive help, but they were so inspiring like from that I think if anything, that that kind of proved to us that we still had a long way to go, even though we had so many processes, there were things that we'd never even thought about. So and you you can tell when a company's got their processes down because there's a great experience the whole way through.

Yeah, great experience, the things don't fall through the cracks, everything's accounted for, and you've just really excelled. And um and and I but just to close the story on the break-in, you guys had another uh attempted break-in recently, right?

Yeah, yeah. So um pretty much the same time of the year. So they clearly we clearly had a target on our back. Um they tried to do it again last year. And uh we had a new designer at the time and he rung me up and he said, I can't get in, I can't get into the office. And I just instantly, he didn't have to say anything, I just instantly knew what had happened. We've got these like ridiculously armoured doors. I kind of went overboard to get these doors. Um so as soon as they got to the office, I just saw this footprint and instantly I knew what happened. They'd try to break in and they'd somehow jammed the door or broken it. So I just said to the guys, I said, look, there's a footprint there, don't touch the door. You know, go back home and let's just crack on. And everyone was amazing. Like they just they knew what to do, they just it was just automatic. They just went home, cracked on with what they had to do in in the day, and I just could deal with the mess that had been started. And I think we had to wait four hours for a professional locksmith to get into our door. So that's amazing, though. Yeah, it was great, and although it was an inconvenience that day, it was nothing compared to the year before, which you know it took us a year to recover from. So that was you know, it was totally worth the investment of fixing the problem and preventing it from happening again.

Yeah, and now you're you're our newest uh agency Mavericks coach, which I'm just so excited about. But the team was like, hey, we need someone over in the UK, like who would be the best person for the job? And like everyone was like, Thomas would be amazing. And so we're just so ecstatic to have you as a coach, and you've just continued the SOP journey. It's not like you kind of, oh, I had that project done. Like, just talk about some of the things that you've learned, tips, things that because I know you're helping all kinds of agency owners like get their processes nailed down and grow their business and stuff. So just talk a little bit about that.

Sure. So yeah, we've kind of got to the point now where Tom has quite a lot of spare time and I love I love helping people, so you know it's great to be part of of the team. So yeah, there's there's quite a lot to learn from SOPs from what we've done. One of the things that I think is hugely valuable is where you store them. So, as an example, when we originally started to do SOPs, we done them in documents in ClickUp. We ClickUp's a fantastic tool. We've been using it for I think the whole time I'd been running my company, back before most people even knew what Click Up was. But we kind of got to a point where my agency needed some different software, and it was really, really difficult to Do that because I'd invested all of my time into one piece of software that prevented me from doing that. So one of the biggest things that we made sure is all of our SOPs were done in Google Docs. Touchwood, I I hope Google Docs doesn't go, but it was something that I couldn't foresee going anytime soon. So the important thing with doing that was should I change my project management software? Should I change where I store my SOPs? I just had to add a link in to whatever platform it was to show the relevant the relevant SOP. So we tried different software and all the software that we tried all did work. It was just preference. We we tried Airtable. Airtable was really good. We could add categories to filter what types of SOPs we needed to use. We did actually do that in ClickUp as well. But we we sort of grew to love Notion, and that's kind of the platform that stuck for us. And even migrating that over was a job, but it was it it didn't mean we had to recreate the world. We already had it. We already had all of our categories we could just import them in, and it has like a nice preview to the document on the page, so that if you're not quite sure if this is the right SOP, you can read the overview from the preview, and yeah, that's where they spit now, and they're continuing to grow. But yeah, there's quite a lot that we did. So when we originally started to get it kicked off, one of the biggest things that we did was we had to create a bit of a culture around it within the team. So the team are never gonna be as invested as me being the business owner, and I knew that would didn't matter how much I sort of drummed it into them, they're never gonna have the the enthusiasm that I would have over having all my processes automated and the team knowing what they want to do or what they're gonna do. So we did a bonus scheme where they got £12.50 to carry on doing the same job they're doing day to day, but just to document it, and it became a big competition for it throughout the team, and we've we kind of Star Wars themed it. So I'm a big Star Wars nerd, and I go recently just went to the Star Wars uh convention in London and uh yes, I went to town with that, and we created this big intro video. So when we did this as well, we had half the team hybrid, so we were sort of recovering a little bit from COVID. Some people were still working from home and some people working in the office. So I got everyone on Zoom. I just had this slide that said, Please turn the volume up, and just said nothing, just sat there, and there's there's all the guys sitting in the Zoom call looking around thinking what's going on, and suddenly they're all putting the volume up, and then suddenly the Star Wars intro comes in. Some really nerdy story comes up about how we need to create processes for our team and it's gonna save the galaxy. And uh it was just a bit of fun. Yeah, we were just having a bit of a lot of fun.

That was so great. I remember when you made that video and I saw it, it was just oh, it was so good, and just it was like enough cheese and play, but also just fun and like you know, get down to business. And I think you the reward system that you had for like the team, the competition to get the SOPs documented was just brilliant.

Yeah, it it yeah, it just it made it really fun, and we we kind of set like a little bonus game. So they they couldn't get the bonus until certain they hit certain checkpoints. So it wasn't a case of oh, I've done one, I'm just gonna leave it now. I've done my job. Yeah, it w they had to hit certain checkpoints to do it. But we we just kept every week in Slack kept up to date. There was a Google Sheet, and they had these lightsabers in Excel that were getting longer, and it then become a race for who's got the the longest lightsaber to how much of a bonus they got. Love it. So then it came up to Christmas and everyone had a great a great extra bit of money added to their um yeah, paycheck.

Love it. That's so great. That's so great. Man, I could talk about SOPs all day long because I'm I'm I'm I'm really into them and you're super inspiring with it. Um, for those that are maybe trying to just write some of their first ones or or get out of the rat wheel long enough to do it, any any kind of final thoughts that you want to leave them with or or uh insights? Sure.

So I think for us the best SOPs that we did were ones that were the most simple, the most obvious. So I mentioned earlier one of the most helpful SOPs we created was how to ask for help. And that was actually inspired a little bit by Troy. And that stopped the team having to ask me really I would consider dumb questions where they haven't gone that extra mile to do a bit of research, to challenge themselves. It becomes very easy for someone to come to you and ask what the answer is, then it does to actually try to figure it out. So creating a process on just to ask for help was extremely helpful, ironically enough. I would say there there were there were a lot of others from we we have all of our team in-house, so answering the phone gave the team massive confidence, otherwise, it always led to top being me being given phone calls that anyone could have dealt with. Yeah. So SOPs and answering the phone, and then it depends on your agency. But I would say the first areas to look at is onboarding and offboarding, they're the most crucial parts of any business. How to onboard a client successfully and how to off-board a client successfully, because they're probably one of the stickiest points in anything that you provide. So if you can really nail that down, you're gonna create a great customer experience and they're gonna understand your process and appreciate what you do. But at the same point, the team are gonna then have confidence to deliver what's set for them. So, yeah, they're probably the first areas that I'd look at when I'm creating a process.

Love it, love it, dude. Man, this has been great. Um, definitely check out Thomas at designbox.co.uk. He's got an amazing agency website there that that you can draw inspiration from. And I'm so thankful to have you as a coach in agency Mavericks because I I just know all of your experience, your SOPs, your business growth, your team management. So much great stuff that everybody can learn from you, including myself. And so uh it's just been great hanging out with you.

Thank you. Cheers, Joey.

Thanks for listening to the Agency Hour podcast and a massive thanks to Thomas for joining us. It's so great to have you on the team, and I can't wait to see you in person at MavCon. For those of you that don't know, MavCon is our mastermind event that we host live and in person all around the world each year, where our community of agency owners get together to work on their business. If you'd like to surround yourself with amazing people and move your business forward, click the link beneath this podcast and we'll see you at MavCon. Okay, folks, don't forget to subscribe and please share this with anyone who you think may need to hear it. I'm Johnny Flash. Let's get to work.