If you don't, you will burn out or go broke. Okay, there you go. There's the big red flag. Right? That should really be the tweetable. If you don't build a team, you will burn out or go broke. Or probably both. Right? Going broke is a uh symptom of burning out. I've burnt out plenty of times. You know what burnout looks like for me? You know when I've burnt out? When I pass out after dinner on the couch and say to my wife, I'm staying here for the next 24 hours watching reruns of Law and Order SVU because I just want to watch Mariska Haggate run around Manhattan and catch the bad guys. I'm not moving. Can't move. Cancel everything for the next 24 hours. I don't care if the house is on fire. I just want to watch Mariska Hagate arrest baddies. Right? My brain turns to mush. I'm done. I'm cooked. Do not ask me to make any decisions. Please just feed me mashed potato every couple of hours to keep me alive.

If you have a vision for the agency you want to build, then we want to help you build it. Welcome to the Agency Hour Podcast, brought to you by Agency Mavericks.

Hey, ladies and gentlemen, welcome, welcome, welcome to a very, very special uh edition of the Agency Hour. This is a week of free training here in the Digital Mavericks Facebook group. And if you're listening to this as a podcast, I would strongly encourage you to get on over to the Digital Mavericks Facebook group and join in the fun because I'm going to be sharing my screen this week. I'm going to be showing you a whole bunch of frameworks. I'm going to be walking you through some exercises. That's going to be lots of fun. And for those of you who are in the Digital Mavericks Facebook group, welcome. Please let me know in the comments which country you are from so that I can get an affirmative that it is all working. So if you're here in the Digital Mavericks Facebook group and you're watching along, please let me know in the comments which country you are from so that I can get an affirmative that it's all working. Now, of course, the purpose of this week's free training is to help you to understand a few things. Ultimately, what we want to do is we want to help you hire your first or next team member. And we're going to make the case this week as to why you should be hiring a team member. We're going to walk you through exactly what you need to do before you hire that team member. And then later on in the week, we're going to reveal the entire what we call the team accelerator blueprint. We have been not only growing our own team, but we've been recruiting team members for our agency clients for the last, I don't know, 12 to 18 months. And we've been doing a lot of work in the background to document those processes, as we always do, so that we can make sure that we can continue to repeat the outcome and repeat the process in the future, and so that other people in the organization know how we do things, so that if someone's away on holidays, for example, someone else can step in. And uh all of those processes have been documented into a new training that is coming out later this week called Team Accelerator Blueprint. And on Friday, I'm gonna walk you through the entire Team Accelerator Blueprint so that you can understand all the different moving parts that you need to have in place in order to hire your first or next team member. So I'm just gonna bring up my slides if that's okay and share my screen. And by the way, if you're multitasking, come back to me right now and focus on this because I promise you I had a conversation with our team this morning very early on our sales huddle. And the only way to build the only way to free yourself from your own business is to have some kind of team doing things that you don't have to do. So either sales or building websites or running campaigns for clients or doing SEO or doing admin stuff or even bookkeeping, doing the finances, if you are the only person in your agency, then you've got a job, you don't have a business. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but you have a job. And if you are, and by the way, it's a you're you're a horrible boss because you're not going to pay yourself what you're worth and you're never gonna give yourself a holiday. If you are still doing things in your agency that are low-value tasks, and I don't mean that to be uh disparaging, but if you are still, you know, building websites for clients, then that's fine. But essentially you're a freelancer with some other freelancers who might be helping you. You still, in my mind, you still don't have a business because you are only getting paid when you are on the keyboard, right? If you are only getting paid when you are on the keyboard or on the mouse doing the actual thing, then you're a technician who thinks you're a business owner, but ultimately you're just a technician, right? So, what I'm gonna do in this episode of the agency hour is walk you through why I think you should hire a team member and kind of get you to understand what the future might look like for you if you do hire a team member, your first or next team member, okay? In the chat, please let me know in the comments. Do you have a team at the moment? Uh just let me know in the comments if you're a solopreneur or if you have a team at the moment, how many on your team? What does your team look like? Just let me know in the comment, in the comments, how many are on your team at the moment. Is it just just say me or just put a number in the comments to let me know how many people are on your team? And also, let me just say this: there is no right or wrong answer to any of these questions, all right? If you are a solopreneur and it's just you, that's totally fine. And you can stay that way. You might get to the end of this week's training and say, Troy, you're an idiot. I don't believe anything you say, I'm just going to stay this just being me as a solopreneur for the rest of my life, and that is totally fine. It's your business. You can do whatever you like. I'm good either way, right? It's not going to impact me at all. If if you're the only one in your business and you want to stay that way, that's totally fine. It's entirely up to you. There's no judgment here, there's no right or wrong way to do it. I just know from experience that, and I can tell you uh uh a quick story. It's story time with Uncle Troy. Oh, Max. Where's our bumper? Where's our bumper? We don't have a bumper yet, do we? It's story time with Uncle Troy. Uh a year ago. Oh, there we go. We do have a bumper. That is fantastic. We need some voiceovers, voiceovers on these bumpers, dude, so that people listening to the podcast know what's going on. But that was a fantastic little bumper. It's storytime with Uncle Troy. A year ago, I took a holiday. That's right, took a holiday with my family and our my sister-in-law and the kids' cousins, and we all went down to Phillip Island, which is a beautiful uh getaway destination here in Melbourne. And we went down to Phillip Island for two weeks. And every single day, Monday to Friday, for those two weeks, I was on calls with new leads and prospects. I was doing sales calls, and uh it really got in the way of the holiday. In fact, it caused some friction. In fact, I will be as transparent as to say that my wife and I had a massive bloody fight while we were away, right? Because I just wasn't able to disconnect from the business. Fast forward a year, we took the same holiday, different destination. We went to the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, and we stayed at a beautiful resort with the same group of people, the in-laws, the kids' cousins. We're everyone's a year older. And I spent uh seven days, I think we had up there. My wife and Goldie came up later because they both had COVID. Max. Oscar and I got over it quickly. So we got up there a couple of days earlier. We had seven days up there, and I did two things while I was away for work. One, I logged into the bank account and moved some money into our international account so someone could pay some bills. That took me about three minutes. And I had one call with Emily and uh who's our ops manager, and Tissu, our chief marketing officer. Uh, that took about 20 minutes, that call. That's it, that's all I did for a whole week. The rest of the time I was in the pool and the hot tub with the kids, and it was amazing. Went and had a Hawaiian massage, and everyone was commenting on the holiday. Wow, you're not working at all, isn't it great? Just to be completely present and disconnected from the business. And the difference, ladies and gentlemen, in that 12-month period is three key roles in this organization. Emily moving into operations to basically run the place, Damien in uh enrollments and sales to talk to our clients about the obvious next best step for them and to make sure they're on board into the right program. And Diosa, who qualifies people to make sure that they're a good fit and we can actually help them. Those three roles performing really well allowed me to get out of the business for a couple of weeks and pretty much disengage. So, what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna share my screen and uh also can you just let me know in the comments if you're thinking about like who is the next role that you would hire? We're gonna do some of these exercises in a moment, right? But who is the next role that you would hire once you understand how and you've got the confidence to do it and you've got the systems and the support in place, which we are going to give you, once you are ready, who is the first or next role you are going to hire? And while we're talking about that, I'm just gonna share my screen. And I'm going to share this baby here. Here we go. Look at him. Whoa. Free training, why you should hire your first or next team member. There we go. Look at that slide, isn't it fantastic? Big shout out to Max Jeffgott, by the way, who's the producer here at the agency hour. Also for putting these slide, this kind of slide template together for me, which I just logged into Canva the other day and just copied and pasted and changed the content and the colours on a couple of slides, and bang, there we go. We've got a slide deck. Took me about, I don't know, 20 minutes to do that. In the past, it would have taken me probably three days to build a slide deck template because I don't know what I'm doing and it wasn't templated. So, again, just another uh example of using people and processes to speed things up and to keep you in your wheelhouse. Paul Torben would hire another developer. Excellent. Very good. Who would you hire? If you're watching this in the Digital Mavericks Facebook group, just let us know in the comments who are you going to hire? Who is the next role that you're going to hire? And right now I'm going to start to move through my slides a little bit. So, welcome to the first. We've got four free trainings coming up this week, just to let you know. Four free trainings. Today, we're going to talk about why you should hire your first or next team member. Tomorrow, we are going to walk you through how to build your very own org chart, your future-facing org chart. In other words, the org chart that your agency will have in a year's time. We're going to walk you through how to do that. Uh, Thursday, we're going to walk you through how to how to start thinking about a job scorecard for the next role that you hire. This is the number one thing that people get wrong when they and m myself included, by the way, let me just do a little sidebar here, right? Everything I'm sharing with you guys is basically for my own benefit. Okay, the reason that I share content on the internet uh is so that I don't forget in the future what to do. Go, right, we've hired someone, we're using job scorecards now, thank God for that, because we used to use job descriptions and that was horrible, and we didn't know what we were doing, and we've mishired some people in the past, and it's all turned to shit and been a very bad experience for us and them. But now we're using job scorecards, yay! This seems to be working. I'm gonna share that on the internet for myself so I don't forget what to do next time. Just so happens we've managed to turn that sharing of content into a business. Aren't we lucky? Uh so on Thursday we're gonna talk about the job scorecard, and then Friday, as I said, I'm gonna walk you through the entire Team Accelerator Blueprint and show you how all this stuff works together. And uh then we'll talk about the next steps and we'll give you an opportunity to become uh to get early access to our training. Team Accelerator Blueprint. More about that later on this week. Jeremy Hardy is gonna hire an admin assistant. Amber Rushton is gonna hire a webcare person and a developer. Woohoo! That's two for the price of one. Well done, Amber Rushton. Love it, love it, love it. All right, so back to my slides for a moment. For those of you who don't know me, uh, that is who I am, and those two little munchkins there are the reason that I uh do what I do. If you're watching if you're listening to this as a podcast, you really should join in the Digital Mavericks Facebook group so you can see a picture of me and Oscar and Goldie at the park the other weekend. Uh I'm holding a football because Oscar's decided to take up Oz kick, which is, you know, footy for little toddlers, and I'm teaching him how to kick. And I sat down and he came and sat on my lap, and Goldie came over and sat on my lap and reached up and grabbed a handful of cheek and just tried to pull my skin clean off my face. Um so that's why I do what I do. That's why I'm here. And uh these this these two are the reason that I'm so passionate about continuing to build my team so that I can do drop-off in the mornings and I can take Oscar swimming like I did last night after Kindi. And I don't have to ask permission, and I don't have to worry about things falling through the cracks when I'm spending time with my family because I know the team have got my back, and the team are here to serve our clients, right? So here's what we're going to cover today. We're gonna cover why you should hire. You're gonna tell me why you should hire, and I'm gonna also tell you some of my thoughts. Uh, we're gonna cover what to do first, then we're gonna cover uh later on in the week, we're gonna cover the team accelerator blueprint. So sorry, this is what we're gonna cover this week. Today we're gonna talk about why you should hire. Tomorrow we're gonna talk about what to do before you hire, which is your org chart. Uh, we're gonna and and the job scorecard on Thursday. Then we're gonna talk about the team accelerator blueprint, and then we're gonna talk about your next steps. All right? Are you ready to go? Yes? Give me an amen. Okay. So before we dive in, I want to get personal. Oh, that's the wrong sound effect. It was supposed to be this one. No, it was supposed to be this one. There we go. I want to get personal. I want to start talking about you and your business and your personal situation right now, and how your business is serving or not serving your personal situation and your life. Because after all, I mean, I think most of us are on this journey of having our own business because we feel unemployable, but also most of us are here because of the flexibility and the freedom that it offers. Am I right? Give me an amen. Yeah, by the way, if you're multitasking, come back to me now. Come back to me now, ladies and gentlemen. Eyes this way, eyes this way. Okay, let's just stay focused here. What I want to what I want you to think about is, and for those of you who are, again, listening to this podcast, if you're in the Digital Mavericks Facebook group, you'd be able to see the beautiful visuals that I'm sharing on the screen. Uh, what I've got on the screen right now is a slider from one to five. A slider that goes from number one to number five. And at the moment, the slider is positioned at about one and a half, between one and two, right? So, what I want you to do, and I'm not trying to pre-frame anything here or suggest how you should score yourself, but what I am gonna ask you to do is to give yourself a rating out of five, and I just want you to drop these in the comments. I just want you to drop these numbers in the comments, okay? I'm gonna talk about some different areas of your life, and I just want you to give yourself a rating on a scale of one to five based on how you currently feel about these areas of your life. And believe me, we will come back in a moment to how building a team fits into this, okay? The framework I'm gonna use for this is known as the five F's. I can't remember who uh coined this phrase, but it was an estate planner, a financial planner, who basically spent his life helping people who were about to die figure out what to do with their money. Right? And I couldn't do that job, by the way. Uh, but someone did, and he came up with a framework called the five F's. And the five Fs, he basically said, Listen, when I'm talking to people who are on their deathbed, there are things that they tell me that are the most important to them in life. And in order, they are these things, and I'll run through them in a moment. What I've also done is I've added plus one to the five F's. So it's the five Fs plus one. And the plus one comes from my wife, Amy. And I'll tell you about that one in a moment. Here are the five F's. So when people are on their deathbed, here are the things that they say are most important to them in order. Family. Most important thing is family. And they always say, I wish I had spent more time with my family and less time in meetings. Number two, friends. This is in order. Right? The most important thing in my life has been my family and then my friends, then fitness or overall overall well-being, you know, mental health, physical health, right? Then faith or fulfillment. In other words, how are you giving back to the community? What are you doing from a faith or a fulfillment point of view? If you if you're not a person of faith, then what are you doing in terms of being fulfilled? Are you volunteering at a charity? Are you coaching a local footy team? Like, what are you doing in order to give back and to fulfill you? And then finally, finances is the is the least important. It is important, but it's the least important. When people are on their deathbed, they're like, yeah, money doesn't mean anything. It's all about family, friends, fitness, faith, fulfillment, and finances. And my wife, when I told her this framework, she'd said, There's one thing missing. What's the plus one? What's the plus one, ladies and gentlemen? Any idea? Any idea? Drum roll, drum roll. She I said, What's missing? She said, fun. Fun, fun number one. What is fun? You gotta have fun. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to give yourself a rating out of five. Let me know in the comments. How do you currently feel where one is, oh my god, this is on fire. I need to deal with this immediately because I'm not happy at all with the relationships I have with my family, right? That's how a one is, yep, I need to spend some time investing in the relationships with my family. Whereas a five is my family are good, man. I've got a great relationship with all of my family. I'm gonna play along with you, by the way. I'm gonna drop, I'm gonna tell you my numbers. You're gonna drop your numbers in the comments, right? Number five with family would be I love all my family, my relationships are great. There's nothing, I don't I don't feel like I need to spend any time fixing or nurturing or developing relationships in my family because it's all good. Right? My current situation right now is I'm gonna give my family a three and a half out of five. Okay? I'm giving the way I feel about the family part of my life, I'm gonna give a three and a half out of five. Okay? Jeremy Moff's given us a two, Max has given us a four, anonymous Facebook user has given us a three. Leave your number in the comments. And by the way, if you're listening to this as a podcast, you should really come over to the Digital Mavericks Facebook group and join in the fun. Paul Torburn gives a three for family. Okay. Number two is your friends. How do you feel about your friends in your life? Now, here's the like, whereas a one is I have no friends, uh, and the friends I do have, I don't nurture those relationships at all. Whereas a five is I got tons of friends, and I spend time with them and they nurture me and they fulfill me. Max has given himself a one, and that's because Max is basically a vampire and never leaves the house and uh doesn't like human beings very much unless he can drink their blood. That's why Max has given friends a number one. I'm giving my friend situation a number three out of five. I know that there is some work I can do in nurturing long friendships that I've had for a very long time because those friendships do add a lot of meaning to my life, but I don't spend enough time nurturing them. So I'm giving myself a three in terms of friends, right? David Chung has given himself a one. Thank you very much for playing along, David, and thank you, Jeremy Moff, also. Thank you for sharing, guys. This is super helpful. I'm glad that you guys are sharing and being open and vulnerable with us here. So I appreciate it. Okay, now I want you to drop a number in the comments and give yourself a rating out of five in terms of your fitness. I'm gonna give myself a four, that's right. Yeah, baby. Because I feel pretty good. I have got a little bit of COVID lockdown stuff that I want to work on. But you know, for a 48-year-old, almost 49-year-old bloke, I know it's hard to believe, isn't it, when you look at me, you think that man can't possibly be 49 years old. It's a combination of Nivea, moisturizer, and just drinking the right amount of wine over the years to pickle myself and preserve myself so that I don't age. Um, and probably genetics too. Uh anyway, I think I'm doing pretty well for a 49 year old bloke, but there is definitely room for improvement. So I'm giving myself a four in terms of my fitness. My mental fitness and mental health is very, very good at the moment because I've done a lot of work on it over the years. And I'm in pretty good shape there. Michelle's giving herself a minus one for her fitness. There we go. Well, thank you for being on us. Jeremy's a three and a half. Paul is two. David is a three and a half. Max is also a minus one. Again, because he's a vampire and never gets out of the house and only drinks human blood and has no vitamin D. So he's giving himself a minus one. Okay. But he looks 12. I know it's remarkable. Right, so the fourth category here is faith fulfilment. How do you feel about your life at the moment on a scale of one to five when it comes to your faith or fulfillment? Now, if you are a person of faith, which I am not, but that's okay, there's no judgment here. If you are a person of, so please don't judge me. If you are a person of faith, how do you feel about the time that you are spending with your faith? If you are not a person of faith, then how do you feel about the time that you are spending in the community? How are you fulfilling yourself? What are you doing? That I took Oscar to Ozkick on Saturday, met a whole bunch of dads, and all of a sudden we're all just volunteering to get in there and help out, set up the equipment and hand the balls back to each other. It was so much fun. And I'm like, yes, this is what I'm doing every Saturday morning for the next three months. I'm helping little people learn how to play football. That's awesome. And that fulfills me, right? I also volunteer to some local causes that I'm very passionate about. And uh, you know, I get on the phones, I go door knocking, I hand out pamphlets, I volunteer uh a bit, and that really gives me so much purpose and so much meaning. Jeremy's a two and a half, David is a one, Jeremy Hardy is a four. All right. And finally, well not finally, number five in the original 5F's framework is finances. How do you feel about your finances on a scale of one to five? Where one is, well, Houston, we have a problem. Uh, I really need to do some work on my finances, and five is, dude, I am sweet. Oh, by the way, faithfulment, I'm gonna give myself a three. Because there's definitely more I could do, and more I want to do. Finances on a scale of one to five, where five is I'm good, man, like everything's taken care of, houses paid off, I'm debt-free, everyone's being fed, I'm donating to local charities, everything's good there. I've got an investment port, whatever, it doesn't matter, whatever your success criteria is, right? On a scale of one to five, how do you feel about your finances? I'm giving myself a four, not quite a five yet, but I'm giving myself a four. Jeremy Moff's a two and a half, Jeremy Hardy's a two, Max Jeffgott's a three, anonymous Facebook user is a one. All right, and finally, fun. How do you feel about your life on a scale of one to five in terms of the amount of fun that you are having? All right, again, uh, interest of complete transparency, I'm gonna give myself a three and a half. So there's a little bit of work to do. Okay. I definitely could be having more fun playing music. I'm not spending enough time playing music at the moment. Paul Talbon gives himself a four point eight five eight five eight five. That's fantastic. I think we need to restrict our answers to two decimal points, Paul, if that's okay in the future. Uh David's a two, anonymous Facebook uses a three. Max is a three and a half. Well, it's easy when you just stay home and don't go out and mix with other human beings. It's easy to control the fun you have, isn't it, Max? Jeremy Hardy's a three. Uh Jeremy Wolf's a two. All right, thank you for playing along. This is fun. So, uh hopefully by now uh you've worked out where you want to spend some time, okay? Here's what I want you to do is, and we're gonna do this rapid fire, okay? I want you to drop a number in the comments and I want you to let me know where that number needs to be, where do you want that number to be in the next 90 days? You can make massive changes in 90 days, right? They say it takes 21 days to form a new habit, right? You can make massive changes in a 90-day period. I've seen it happen. I've seen people completely transform in a 90-day period. So, on a scale of one to five, let's run through these again and tell us where you want the number to be. Let's start from the start. Family. Where do you want family to be? I want my family to be at four. Five is it's family. Come on. Five is unrealistic. So four's good. If my family's at four, it's good. I'm currently three and a half, got a little bit of work to do. But I'm working on it. I'm actually taking action and I'm doing things. Drop a comment, drop a number in the comments. Again, if you're listening to this as a podcast, you really need to come to the Digital Mavericks Facebook group and join in the fun. Uh, just come, click the join button, answer a couple of questions, we'll let you in, and then you can join in the fun. On a scale of one to five, friends, where do you want your friends to be? I want that to be a four. I said it's a three at the moment. I want it to be a four. Got a little bit of work to do there. Right? Where do you want your relationships with your friends to be on a scale of one to five in the next 90 days? Fitness, where do you want your fitness to be? I want, I well, I'm at a four at the moment. I want to get to a four and a half, right? Which is incremental but important.

Yeah.

Jeremy Hardy says four. David says four. Paul says four. Facebook user says three. Thank you, Facebook user. And thank you for being a Facebook user. Uh faith fulfillment, where do you want that to be? What did I say? I said I'm at a three and a half. I want that to get to a four. Yep. Max says his fitness is going from a minus one to a five. Well, thanks, Max. I haven't asked about fitness yet, but thank you for preempting and jumping the gun. I really appreciate it. And and now drum roll, fitness. Oh no, we said fitness. Sorry. I already said fitness. Sorry, Max. Sorry, I apologize. I apologize. Finances. Where do you want your finances to be in 90 days from here? 90 days from now, May, June, July, August. 17th of August, where do you want your finances to be on a scale of one to five? I'm a four. I'm going to increment it to a four and a half. Okay. And fun. Where do you want your fun? Where do you want your your fun level to be? I definitely want that to be a four and a half. And what did I say? I'm a three and a half at the moment. Max is a six off the charts. Ding a ling-ling a ling ling. Jeremy Waff, three and a half. Jeremy three. All right. Awesome. So hey, I know we haven't really done much now. We've just been kind of hanging out and sharing some ideas, but I'm curious, what's been most valuable in the last 34 minutes that we've been hanging out here? What's been most valuable so far? Please let me know in the comments. And again, I just want to talk to the people who are listening to this as a podcast. This might feel a little strange as an episode of a podcast because this is a special episode of the agency hour. It's a free training that is in the Digital Mavericks Facebook group. This whole week we are running free trainings to help you hire your first or next team member. And what I'm doing here is I'm trying to get you to think about the areas of your life that need some attention. And the only way to give yourself the time and the headspace to focus on these areas of your life so that you can improve these areas of your life is to enlist the help of other people to help you get things done in the agency so that you can free up some of your time and then you can focus on other areas of your life so that you're a more well-rounded, holistic, healthy human being, not just smashing and grinding and you know, hustling all the time, that we have some uh balance and that we have some other areas of your life that are being nurtured. Jeremy said just putting things into perspective has been super helpful. Max has said fitness for me clearly needs work. All right, awesome. Very good. So it's time for some truth telling. Yeah. Uh wrong sound effect again. I don't have a truth-telling sound effect. Here we go. Time for some truth-telling. Sure. I mean, that sound effect seems to just work for anything, doesn't it? Um, here also is here's we're not personal anymore, right? This is now time for Troy to get serious and to actually tell you guys some cold, hard truths about why you need to hire your first or next team member. All right? You ready for this? Because so these are some grown-up reasons to hire your first or next team member. Number one, there is no leverage as a solopreneur. I've said this before and I'll say it again. And and by the way, there's nothing wrong with this. I just want to have an honest conversation about it. If you are a solopreneur and you have no ambition to hire any team member ever, then just admit the fact that you've got a job and factor in your annual leave every year and go, I'm gonna take a holiday for four weeks a year or two weeks a year, and during that two weeks, I'm not gonna get paid because I'm not on the tools. I'm not on the keyboard, I'm not clicking the buttons, I'm not delivering value for a client. So that's okay. I just need to factor that in and earn enough for the rest of the year, put some savings aside so I can take a holiday because while I'm on holiday, I'm not getting paid. There's no leverage as a solopreneur, which is totally fine. It's your choice. I just want you to know, I just want you to go into this eyes wide open. There is no leverage as a solopreneur. You are getting paid for the value that you deliver. You're essentially trading your time for money or your personal services for money. Okay, even if you're charging value-based pricing, even if you're making good margins on the projects that you're doing, there is no leverage. People are paying you for your skills. Okay? Again, totally fine. Just want you to know that that's what it is. Number two, you are not a unicorn. I'm sorry to burst your bubble. Again, remember at the start of the show where I said I share content for my own benefit? This is me basically having a conversation with myself. There is no leverage as a solopreneur, Troy. Troy, you are not a unicorn. As much as you would like to think you are, you are not a unicorn. You are not the best at everything that you need to do for your clients. If you are building websites, designing, developing, doing copywriting, security, maintenance, plug-in, updates, care plans. You're doing conversion rate optimization, SEO, you're doing all of that for your clients. I guarantee your clients are not getting the best outcome because you are not a unicorn. You are doing all of that mediocre because you can't be amazing at all of that stuff. It's just not possible. Okay. You owe it to your clients and your family. Sorry to get personal. You owe it to your client. What is it? Hashtag sorry not sorry. You owe it to your clients and your family to build some kind of team. And I know that might sound a bit weird, but here's the reality. You owe it to your clients because if you are it, then you are the bottleneck to your clients' growth. If all of your clients decided to call you at the same time and say, hey, Troy, we've heard about this thing called a growth plan, and we think that you have the skills to help us grow our business, not just build the website, but to help us actually grow and do some marketing and some conversion rate stuff and some email copy and some fancy funnels and teach us how to close more deals and do some remarketing and look at our Google Analytics and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If they all wanted that at the same time, you couldn't do it. And you owe it to your family so that you can go on holiday and not be on the phone every day while you're away. Again, just sharing this for my own benefit. Okay? If any of this resonates with any of you, that's a bonus. But I'm just sharing this for my own benefit to remind me what to do and what not to do in the future. So I owe it to my client. I owe it to you guys to build a team. You should thank me for building a team and taking on that responsibility. Because frankly, it is. I'm not pretending this is easy, and I'm not pretending this is not going to cause you sleepless nights. It will. Growing a team is hard work and it's painful and shit goes wrong all the time. And just when you think that it's all rainbows and unicorns, in comes a hurricane and turns your world upside down, and you've got to basically feel like you're starting again. It's not easy. But if you don't do it, then you're putting your clients at risk, and you're also letting, I believe, you're letting your family down because you're on the hook all the time. Someone can email you or call you, and you have to respond because you're it, right? The buck stops with you. And I absolutely know this, and I didn't know this 10 years ago. I didn't know this three years ago, really. Building a team allows you to find your best self. It allows you to find your best self in terms of leading a team, growing a team, and then ultimately finding your role in that team. Which I'm not going to give anything away right now, but your role in that team doesn't always need to be the boss or the team leader. Okay? Not going to give anything away, but you know, there'll be some developments over the coming months here at Agency Mavericks that might just surprise some people. It doesn't mean just because you grow a team, it doesn't mean that you need to have all the answers or that you need to be the one that makes all the decisions or does all the training or leads them or does all of that, right? Growing a team allows you to find your best self, it allows you to become a great leader, and it also allows you to find your best role within that team. So there's some grown-up reasons I think you should hire. And also, if you don't, you will burn out or go broke. Okay, there you go. There's the big red flag. Right? That should really be the tweetable. If you don't build a team, you will burn out or go broke. Or probably both. Right? Going broke is a uh symptom of burning out. I've burnt out plenty of times. You know what burnout looks like for me? You know when I've burnt out? When I pass out after dinner on the couch and say to my wife, I'm staying here for the next 24 hours watching reruns of Law and Order SVU because I just want to watch Mariska Haggate run around Manhattan and catch the bad guys. I'm not moving. Can't move. Cancel everything for the next 24 hours. I don't care if the house is on fire. I just want to watch Mariska Hagate arrest baddies. Right? My brain turns to mush. I'm done. I'm cooked. Do not ask me to make any decisions. Please just feed me mashed potato every couple of hours to keep me alive. Right? Preferably with some gravy and a cup of tea and some chocolate. That's what burnout looks like for me. I've done it plenty of times. It's not pretty. My wife hates it. She's like, oh God, here we are again. You've turned into a useless ball of nothing. And I she has to basically administer first aid and keep me alive for 24 hours until I recover. Not pretty at all. So please don't burn out and don't go broke. Okay? The way to not burn out and not go broke is to build a team of some description. I'm not, you don't need 15 people, you don't need 20 people. You might end up with three or four. Right? But I promise you, the only way to free yourself from your own business is to build some kind of team. All right. So here's the question. Well, if I build a team, what do I do with this extra time now that I have on my hands? What do I do with the extra time that I now have? And to be completely transparent, I have absolutely no idea what the next slide says. So I don't know if I'm supposed to just talk here or if I'm supposed to go to the next slide. Shall we find out? If I go to the next slide and it's the wrong slide, I'm gonna go back pretty quickly. Oh, okay, it's a wrong slide. Right. So what should you do with your extra time? Well, here's some ideas. Here's what I do with my extra time. One is I get away from the computer. Right? That's rule number one. Get away from the internet and get away from the computer. I call it incubating. Do something else. Play guitar, play golf, read a book, you know, go and visit your grandma in the nursing home. Do whatever. Just get away from the business and give yourself an opportunity to think with some distance. Okay? You should also focus some of your time that you're at work, you should be focusing on business development activities. Okay. Growing the business, bringing on new clients, building partnerships with people who can help you bring on new clients. You should also be thinking about who you're going to hire next. Okay? You should be thinking out thinking about what you're going to do with the profit that you make in the business. You should be looking at your finances in the business and make sure that you are running the business profitably. You should be going through your PL and cutting costs regularly. Okay? And you should be getting the team that you've got rallied around a common vision and explaining to your team why the work they're doing is important. Okay? They're the kinds of things that I do with my extra time. And having fun is a big one, ladies and gentlemen. Because I don't know, for those of you watching, I don't know how old you are, but I can promise you this as you approach 50, you start to realise I said to my wife last night, uh, you know, something came up and uh she said, Well, we've been living together for 13 years. I said, Yeah, we have, we've been living together for 13 years. And I said, and I reckon, you know, we've got maybe 30, 35 to go. 30 or 35 to go. Because that'll make I'll be 80 in 31 years. I'll be eighty in thirty-one years. Jesus. And she said, Oh, don't say that. We've only got thirty or thirty-five years left. I said, Well, yeah, that's if everything goes well, you know. I've had friends pass away in their mid-50s. I've had friends pass away at 46. One of my mentors, Toby, my public speaking mentor and good friend, passed away last week. I reckon he must have been 54, maybe 55. At a push. So have fun. Spend time having fun. Yeah. Laughing. That's what you should be doing with your extra time. Okay, so what's been most valuable apart from this sobering conversation from Uncle Troy about how death is imminent and you need to get your shit together and have more fun in life? Apart from that, what's been most valuable? Max is playing with some different screen layouts now here in the Facebook group. It's very interesting. He's having fun, that's the main thing. Let me know in the comments here what's been most valuable about this conversation so far. What has been most valuable about this conversation so far? We've got some really tactical things coming up in the coming days. We're going to help you build an org chart and we're going to help you design your first job scorecard for the next role that you're going to hire. Right? Paul says, I'm going to die soon, so have fun. Enjoy. Woo-hoo. That's right. As Ricky Gervais says, we're dead for billions of years. We're alive for about 80, and then we're dead for billions of years. So you may as well laugh your ass off in that 80 years, right? Just have lots of fun and laugh at everyone else's expense. That's what Ricky does. And uh, because then you're gonna die, and who cares anyway. Another good friend of mine says, 100 years from now, all new people. Hundred years from now, all new people. So it just doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter, right? Nothing matters, nothing is really that important. Hundred years from now, all new people. What's been most valuable? The purpose of today was just really to unlock those neural pathways in your head and get you thinking, I need to hire a team member. And this, I think I need to hire this person. I think I need to hire a developer or a copywriter or a bookkeeper or an admin assistant. I need to hire someone because there's all this stuff I'm doing that I don't want to do anymore. And in fact, if I keep doing this, it's damaging the business. If you are doing the books in your business, you're the most expensive bookkeeper in the world. Right? If you are doing admin stuff, you are the most expensive admin person in the world. So hopefully now you're thinking there's all this stuff that I don't want to do that I know someone else would be better at, and maybe it's just fear that's holding you back from hiring someone. What we're gonna do over the next few days is help you figure out who to hire next, and then give you some practical things you can put in place to start that process, and then let you know how you can get access to the team accelerator blueprint training, which is uh coming later this week, so that we can help you do it. We'll just hold your hand every step of the way. You follow the bouncing ball and follow our process that is proven not only in our business, but in all of our agency clients, they follow the same process, whether we hire for them or whether they're recruiting themselves, they follow the same process, and it is awesome. It's epic. We've spent a lot of time and a lot of effort getting it right, and it now it really is a push-button turnkey solution. We just hired Aliandra, who's our latest team member. Uh Maddie, who was running all of our social media, she left the business and we had to find a replacement. She left on great terms. She went and took a better opportunity for her, which worked out really well. Uh Aliandra came in. We put her through the exact same process. Max and Emily did all the pre-interviewing stuff. I just turned up on the final interview to have a bit of a chat, make sure that, you know, everything was cool. And then uh yeah, happy days. Aleandra's on board and she's doing really well. So the purpose of today was just to get you thinking that yes, I'm definitely going to hire someone. And now uh we want to find out what questions you have. Where are you stuck? What do you need help with to make sure that we can get you plugged into the right resources to uh get you moving the right direction? Jeremy says, be sure to have fun as being most valuable. And Max says, there's no sequel. That's right, there is no sequel. All right. Hey, this has been fun. What's coming up this week? We've got a free training tomorrow, building your future org chart. So tomorrow, same time, 9 a.m. Melbourne time, building your future org chart with my good self. I'll be hosting that free training. The org chart, by the way, that whole framework and that training piece was put together by Pete Perry, who's one of our coaches here. Pete Crispy Butter Perry. He put that together. I'm going to present it to you tomorrow. And uh, in fact, if you've registered, I think, for these trainings, you might even get a copy of the org chart. I don't know how that works, but I I'm pretty sure we're going to send you a copy of the org chart. Maybe, I don't know. Someone's going to tell me if I've got that wrong. Um, either way, we'll walk you through how to do it tomorrow. You can probably just scratch it out on a piece of paper and do it yourself. And then the following day, we're going to show you how to develop a job scorecard. This is the most important part of hiring someone because it helps you set expectations from the start and it helps you continue to manage and measure those expectations once the person is onboarded. And then Friday, uh, Australian time, we're going to show you the entire team accelerator blueprint. Okay, the entire team accelerator blueprint. I'm basically going to show you a mind map of all the things that you need to have in place so that you make sure you follow the process from start to finish, and then we'll give you details on how you can access all of our templates and uh our click-up process and all that stuff that goes along with helping you hire your first or next team member. All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's it for the slides. Woo-hoo! Got through it. Fantastic. Uh, thank you so much for being a part of it. Again, this is the Team Accelerator Training here this week in the Digital Mavericks Facebook group. These are very special bonus episodes of the Agency Hour Podcast. So if you're listening to this, uh don't be alarmed. This is the Agency Hour Podcast. You're in the right place. This is the right channel. Come and join the Digital Mavericks Facebook group and be a part of it. Just go to Facebook.com and search for Digital Mavericks and come and join the group. And tomorrow we'll walk through your org chart so that you can figure out exactly who you should hire next. All right, have a great day, everyone. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. Until then, bye for now.

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