The Agency Hour
The Agency Hour is for digital agency owners like you who want to start, grow and scale their businesses. It’s like hanging out with friends while getting a masterclass in how to tackle the most significant obstacles you’re facing as an entrepreneur.
The Agency Hour
The Job Scorecard
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Just hire someone. Just put up a job ad at a local university and find a web design student to come on and help you. Right. You can't do it on your own. And I was terrified. I was like, I'm not going to do that. Are you kidding me? Then I'm going to have someone asking me questions all day. I'm like, how do I do this? And how do I do that? And where do I go to do this? And blah. Then I have to pay them. And what if I don't get enough business to pay? I was absolutely terrified of bringing on my first team member. And I get it, it is very scary. However, I will say this the there is the own, I believe the only way to free yourself from your own creation is to expand your team.
SPEAKER_02If 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.
SPEAKER_01Hey ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of The Agency Hour. I'm Troy Dean, and this here is Pete Perry. How are you, brother? I'm doing well, man. How are you? Good morning. I'm freaking outstanding. I've had my morning walk. I'm on my second coffee. I had a meeting with the sales team this morning. You closed another Maverick.
SPEAKER_03I am just we had our big meeting last night with our with our coach.
SPEAKER_01Dude, yes, we had a meeting yesterday with uh Anna, our business coach. Things are good, I gotta say. Things are very, very good. I'm extremely lucky and I feel very blessed to uh be where I am, even though we're in lockdown. I I still feel very lucky uh and very grateful. Hey dude, how how are you? What's going on in uh in in Kingston, New York?
SPEAKER_03Well, as my father used to say, it's raining harder than a cow pissing on a flat rock. I'm not sure what that means. I have no idea what that means, but it means it's raining hard. It means it's raining really hard.
SPEAKER_00I got a visual, and I reckon that's pretty splashy. So um well, raining hard at well.
SPEAKER_03So in Australia, we're getting the tail end of of the hurricane that came up through New Orleans. We're just getting rain, nothing bad.
SPEAKER_01So I heard this on the news the other day. They said it was like the worst storm in U.S. history. It was gonna be worse than that.
SPEAKER_03It was pretty bad, yeah. I don't know, I don't know if I don't know if that's true, but it was it was pretty damn bad. But I think we're a little better prepared for it than we were in previous years.
SPEAKER_01So I heard the other day, I was listening to an uh so it's like the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, uh, which is it was the same exact right.
SPEAKER_03It was the it was on that day that the storm hit this almost the same exact place. Yeah, it's crazy.
SPEAKER_01And and I heard that in uh Hurricane Katrina, I didn't realize this, but it wasn't actually the storm that did the damage, it was the breaking of the levee, right?
SPEAKER_03The levee broke, yeah, right. Just like the old Led Zeppelin song.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. Uh yeah, it was it was bad.
SPEAKER_03And that's like because it's uh New Orleans is actually below sea level, right? So when the levee broke, it was all over. Man, so it didn't happen this time. There's lots of flooding, but the levee was held up.
SPEAKER_01All right, cool. All right, well, let us know if you're in uh Louisiana. Uh let us know that you're okay. Um, we use Omni Studio to host our podcast. By the way, we we stopped podcasting at the end of 2019. WPelovation podcast stopped back then for a number of reasons that I won't bore you with. Um but we're we're we're back with a new podcast called The Agency Hour. And there was a podcast called The Agency Hour a few years ago. They uh there was a bunch of guys that worked for an agency and they produced a podcast called The Agency Hour. They produced 25 episodes. It stopped in June 2019. So as we say, use it or lose it, too bad, we're gonna steal the name and roll with it. Um, so as long as we publish it in Omni Studio and get the URL right, I think it'll feed into all of those podcast players. I think we might just need to submit it to Spotify separately.
SPEAKER_03So um so I uh I'm a podcast virgin. Really? I've never been, I've never not only have I never hosted a podcast, I've never been on a podcast. Are you serious? I am dead serious.
SPEAKER_01Wow, dude, you have a voice like crispy butter. Like, how are you not? What is crispy butter? I don't know. It's like toast in the morning with butter that's melted, but it's just crispy in a pan, you know? It's like it's a good thing, it's like it's smooth, but it's got a bit of an edge. Do you know what I mean? I just made that up.
SPEAKER_03You made up crispy butter, I know you did, yeah. I mean, no, I just never have. I've always been I've always been a little insecure about it, to be completely honest. And uh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01What is it? Is it the sound of your is it the sound of your own voice, or is it that you're not gonna you're not gonna know what to say, or I'm just gonna, I'm just afraid that my hair's not gonna look good, you know. Right, yeah.
SPEAKER_03That's really well.
SPEAKER_01I mean, you look like but dude, you look like George Clooney, everyone says that. So I mean and also podcasts are mainly audio, brother. So I know and it's yeah, I think if there's video, I think they call I think the young kids call that a vodka, aren't they? Hey, on today's show, by the way, we're going to reveal the secret document. Where's my uh the X Files? It's good, isn't it? It's the Twilight Zone. We're gonna reveal the secret document that can completely change the way you hire and recruit team members, and this applies even if you're just working with other freelancers and other contractors, right? This is the one thing you should do, the one document you should have in your business. And I'm gonna we're gonna show the screen. I'm not gonna give you the document, but I'll show you the screen long enough that you can take some screenshots and copy it because I know that's what you'll all do. Um, and this is the one thing that you should get dialed in before you think about hiring anyone or bringing anyone else on in your team. We're gonna talk about that a little bit uh in a moment. But before I do that, I just want to talk about, let me tell you a story. Storytime with Uncle Troy. Let me tell you a story about how I went out to when I first started out as a freelance web designer, and I was feeling a little bit overwhelmed and I was like, I can't grow this thing because there's only one of me. I need some help. And I went out to lunch with my wife and her, who was my fiancee at the time, and her godmother. And we were sitting out on the water at this beautiful restaurant in Sydney, and uh her godmother said to me, Just hire someone, just put up a job ad at a local university and find a web design student to come on and help you, right? You can't do it on your own. And I was terrified. I was like, I'm not gonna do that. Are you kidding me? I'm gonna have someone asking me questions all day. I'm like, how do I do this and how do I do that? And where do I go to do this and blah? Then I have to pay them. And what if I don't get enough business to pay? I was absolutely terrified of bringing on my first team member, right? And I get it, it is very scary. However, I will say this the there is the own, I believe the only way to free yourself from your own creation is to expand your team and bring people on to help do things to free you up so that you can spend more time in your sweet spot. So, Pete, I just want to talk, and I remember when you and I first met actually, you were also a little bit skeptical of bringing on team members and maybe a little bit um I was.
SPEAKER_03That was our first uh I won a I won a one-on-one coaching call with you in 1945. 1943, it's September 2015 during the war. And and we won't we won't talk about the beginning of that call. Do you remember?
SPEAKER_00You and I have different memories about this. All I remember is turning up and you being on Skype and having your arms folded and being like, This is bullshit, and I don't believe a word you say, and being really skeptical. But we you have a different memory. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_03What happened? I was very upset because I couldn't get Skype to work, and we were doing it over Skype, and I couldn't get Skype to work, and I thought you were gonna bail on me, and like this is the you know, you're the great Troy Dean, and my well, at least I thought so. I thought so at the time. Like you were a rock star to me, and um now you're my roadie. No longer oh fantastic, love it. No, you know, I was I was a little intimidated. I was I and and I couldn't get Skype to work, couldn't and I I actually got up and left thinking, oh well, there goes my shot. And I came back and I rebooted my system. I came back, and you had been sitting there on Skype waiting for me for like 15 minutes, and I was like, Oh Jesus, what the so I was it wasn't anger, it was just uncomfortable. I was uncomfortable. Oh but anyway, yes, we the first conversation we ever had face to face was you kind of encouraging me and walking me through the steps of hiring my first my first developer.
SPEAKER_01I I remember that. I still have that guy, I still have him on my team. Yeah, I totally remember that, and I remember because I'd made some uh catastrophic mistakes hiring people and and trying to outsource and delegate, right? I had no idea what I was doing, and I made some really bad mistakes. And I remember talking to you on Skype that that night, and I remember you, I remember thinking, I know exactly how you're feeling right now, and I know you're skeptical, and I know it sounds like work, but I also know it's the only half you have, like it's either this or you burn out and you just keep spinning your wheels. And um, and then to your credit, dude, you went off and you took massive action and you came back and you started feeding back and you started telling me what was happening, and we kept the conversation going. And then, you know, that that journey has been amazing to see you go on that journey and then end up helping others do the same. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So I hired my first person. Uh, it took me about a month to find them and onboard them and everything after that call. So let's say probably early or late October, and I hired my second person in mid-November. So, like weeks later, I hired I hired a what you would call a VA, I guess. He now runs my care plans. She's still with me, too. So I didn't waste any time. Like you you encouraged me to take massive action, and I figured one wasn't enough, two was massive, let's go.
SPEAKER_01Yep. And uh and that's typically what happens is once you start to delegate and and you start to see the results, it kind of opens up that pathway in your brain, and then you're like, okay, you know, now let's do this again, and let's get rid of this other stuff off my desk that I don't want to do.
SPEAKER_03So let's let's talk about that word for a second, delegate. Because when we started talking about the job, do talking about the job scorecard tonight. I was thinking about I look at the job scorecard as it's the evolution of delegation. So I think when when I first hired somebody, you start out by delegating tasks, like uh like go do this, then do this, then do this, then do this, and and then when you're done, come back to me and I'll tell you what else to do next, right? So that's that's how you start delegating. Eventually, if you're smart and well coached, you move on to delegating decisions, and then eventually you move on to delegating outcomes, and that's where the job scorecard comes in.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, love it. I remember talking to Simon Kelly about this at one point and going, like, you don't need my permission to just like make a decision. I trust you enough to make a decision, right? Um, I've had this conversation with Max uh you know a bunch of times as well. Max, I I'm I'm never gonna trust you enough to make a decision, so please run everything past me. No, I'm kidding. Now I'm at the point where it's like I get pissed off if people ask me too many questions. It's like you don't need to ask me questions. I actually don't know the answer, right? You're better at this than I am, so please just go make a decision. And then when then when trust, then when you build more trust with someone's ability, then delegating outcomes is incredibly liberating, also really scary. But it's not only liberating for the business owner, it's liberating, I think, for the team member because it gives them more autonomy, right?
SPEAKER_03Max is not it gets you, it gets them you, you're not in their way anymore.
SPEAKER_01That's right. Exactly.
SPEAKER_03If if you did it right, you hired people that are better at that task than you are, and so get the hell out of their way. Let them do their thing and just tell them what done looks like, or or help them figure out what done looks like, and then step back and let the magic happen.
SPEAKER_01Love it. Um, we're gonna dive in and have a look at the job scorecard document in a moment. I do need to give a shout out to um the creators of this, which I will do in a minute, and also I'm gonna talk about a book later on. I'm gonna give you a book recommendation that I'm reading at the moment. I've just about finished, which is just completely blowing my mind. It's like I think it's the best book I've read in a long time. And I know I say that about most books I read, but this is this is just above and beyond. This has raised the bar for me. Before we do that, I want to know from you guys in the comments what if you could wave a magic wand and hire someone right now in your business, putting finances aside, let's just put finances aside for a second, right? If you could wave a magic wand and hire someone in your business right now to add to your team, who would it be? What would the role be that you would hire? And then I want you to start thinking about, and I'll walk you through the template in a moment, I want you to start thinking about the outcomes that that role is responsible for, and how you are going to measure the performance or the success of that role. And I always think about sporting analogies, right? I always think about, you know, I watched The Last Dance last year during lockdown, the fantastic documentary on the Chicago Bulls. Two three-peats, as they call it, uh, in the 90s, they won the championship three times in a row in '92, three, and four, and then in '96, seven, eight, I believe. And um, one of my really good friends is actually married to Luke Longley's brother. And I've met Luke Longley a couple of times, and uh he was part of that Chicago Bulls team that won the second three-peat. Now, his role, you measure his role by number of tap-outs from the center. That was his job. I mean, the guy's 94, 94 feet tall, and his job was basically just to tap the ball out. Jordan's job is obviously to put the ball in the in the ring. Uh Dennis Rodman's job was uh was uh rebounds, right? That was he was the master at rebounds. So everyone had a role to play, and we knew and they would look at the stats at the end of the day and say, cool, man, like you know, Luke Longley, 12 shots, you know, 38 tap-outs, whatever. That's how you measure your performance and that's how you improve over time. And everyone on the team knows what that person's responsible for. Um Zach says project manager and sales. Sanil Wu says, I'd hire someone to do cold call lead generation. That's interesting. Uh, cool. So let us know in the chat what you would uh who you would hire if you could. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna bring up the job scorecard template. I'm gonna attempt to share my screen here. Uh if you happen to be just listening to this at some point in the future and not watching it, then I strongly suggest that you get on over to the Digital Mavericks Facebook group and check out the agency hour show and have a look specifically for the agency hour uh related to the job scorecard template uh or the job scorecard and uh check out what we're sharing on the screen. So here it is. This is the job scorecard template. You might notice that this is a document that we have built out in clickup. And let me walk you through the three main components of a job scorecard. And a huge shout out, first of all, to I learned this from a book called Who, W H O by Jeff Smart. Now, that's actually not the book I'm going to recommend, but that is definitely a book worth reading. It's just called Who by Jeff Smart. Jeff Smart's father, Brad Smart, wrote a book called Top Grading, which is basically all about how to hire A players. And it's meant for much larger businesses. Jeff, uh, his son wrote a book called Who, which is a really practical guide uh as to how to recruit uh A players in a smaller business, and it gives you a whole process you go through from you know where to find talent, how to interview them, all that kind of stuff. It's a really good book. It's very detailed. This is really at the heart of what they teach, which is not a job description, it's a job scorecard. And the three we've we've um we've embellished this and augmented it quite a lot, but the three main components of the job scorecard as as Jeff teaches it in Who are the mission, right? The outcomes, and then the competencies, right? So we as I said, ours look slightly different, but I'm gonna I'm just gonna walk you through the three main components. The first component is the mission. And the question here is why does this role exist? Now, this is not generally not uh uh quantifiable with and I'm gonna show you an example of this in a moment for a social media manager. If you were hiring a social media manager, I'll show you an example of this. So the mission is why does this role exist? So if I think about Michelle here, who's customer success manager, the mission of that role is to uh make sure our customers have access to the right products at the right time to ensure their success. And that's her job, is to make sure our customers succeed.
SPEAKER_03Right, which is is not necessarily measurable in and of itself. It's not, it's not a smart goal.
SPEAKER_01No, not at all. It's a which is okay. It is a big statement, right? It's a it's a big statement. It's like the the mission of the coach of the Chicago Bulls is to turn that team into the best team on the planet and to develop the players, right? Now they would measure that through championships, but that's a com that's a slightly separate conversation. The mission of uh of Michelle's role really is she's a customer success manager, but she's also a customer advocate. She goes into bat for our customers to make sure the company are delivering on our promise, right? So once you've and and sometimes this can be the last thing that you write on a job scorecard. Once you've once you've designed the outcomes, then you might come back and re and write the mission last, right? Well, why this role exists is is for this purpose. So then the second part of the job scorecard, as taught by uh Jeff Smart, is outcomes. And you know, we just follow the smart, the smart goal uh rule here, which is you know, it's got to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. So a smart outcome, for example, for Michelle might be uh as customer success manager, might be to maintain our NPS above 80.
unknownRight?
SPEAKER_01Net promoter score tells us how well we're doing at serving our customers. Let's keep that above 80. Now that's not time bound, that's not actually specific to a particular date. It's ongoing. That's an ongoing metric that Michelle is responsible for. There might be some other outcomes that are more short term. So, for example, when we did the rebrand exercise, when we did the rebrand project, Michelle's part of Michelle's uh responsibility there was to make sure that all of our customers log into the new members website at academy.agencymavericks.com and they still have access to everything they bought when we were called WP Elevation. That was one of her smart outcomes, right? By 1st of July, customers log in, they still have access to everything. She's responsible for that. Nowhere does it tell her how to do that, right? Nowhere is there a list of tasks or a description of how she should do that. We just talk about what done looks like, okay? So I, you know, they say three to five outcomes. I don't think you can be responsible for any more than three outcomes in any role. I think that's just overwhelming if you're responsible for more than three. Charmaine, who's our customer support manager, for example, her number one number is our CSAT score, our customer satisfaction score. We survey everyone that we answer support tickets to. We send them an email saying, hey, how do we do? Rate our reply. And her job is to keep that above 90%. She set that number, not me. Uh, and she does an amazing job. And everything else that she does can be measured by, hey, our customer satisfaction score is has slipped down to 85. What's going on? There's a problem that needs to be fixed. But as long as that's above 90, I don't actually care how she does it because I don't know how to do it. And this is, I think, the big challenge that most people have when they hire people is they hire a project manager, for example, and then try and teach them how to be a project manager. And unless you are a really good project manager, you shouldn't be hiring a project manager and then teaching them how to do it. You should hire them and then have them teach you how they do project management and just have an outcome that they're responsible for and then get out of their way and let them do their job, right? And then the third part of this is competencies. Like, you know, what are they going to have to be competent in in order to do the job? So, for example, they might need to be, you know, through a social media manager, they might need to be competent with, you know, some social media scheduling software or They might need to be competent with WordPress because we publish all our blogs on WordPress. And you might want them to have, you know, if they're going to interact with clients, you might want them to have good people skills. And, you know, if they're a project manager, you want them to be super organized and punctual. So just some basic competencies that you require. But again, we're not telling them how to do their job. And then when we recruit, we just run people through this scorecard and we give them a rating. Uh, and our job is to make sure that we feel like, and we've and we've run them through the well, I won't go through the three interview process, but there's three interviews that we put people through when we uh when we recruit. And as a result of those interviews, we rate them against this scorecard and we say, hey, is there a 90% chance that this candidate is going to succeed in this role based on these outcomes? And if there's not a 90% chance that they're going to succeed, then we don't recruit them. Make sense. Yeah. Anything I missed, Pete? Any questions? Anything you want to add? Okay.
SPEAKER_03No, sounds good.
SPEAKER_01Um uh let us know in the comments if you have any questions. Uh, I'm gonna show you a template, I'm gonna show you an example here.
SPEAKER_03So one thing I'll add is uh this can be, I mean, you're talking about using it for hiring, but once the once the person's in in the position, it can be used for a keeping them on track. They should be checking back to their scorecard and saying, is what I'm about to do gonna help me reach these outcomes. 100% and then it should be part of their evaluation annually or whatever you do. It's it's it's a living document too. You change it, you change it, you change the outcomes as they're achieved, you change them.
SPEAKER_01Correct. So, you know, there there ideally should be, you know, one ongoing outcome that they're responsible for, which is just ongoing. So, for example, Michelle, it's NPS, but there might be other short-term outcomes that are project specific or that are, you know, and I'll walk you through an example here. There might be some outcomes that are, you know, hey, so Emily's constantly coming to me going, I need to change my scorecard. And Emily's Emily's really taken ownership of her scorecard and she uses it as a guide to make sure that she's doing the right kind of work. And she'll be the first to come to me and say, I'm I'm I'm off track. I'm not, I need to revisit my scorecard because I feel like things are moving so quickly. We either need to update my scorecard or I need to change my activities because I'm not actually doing what I should be doing, you know, relevant to my scorecard. And that's just because sometimes we we we knock it out of the park and we finish a project and we move on. So let me walk you through an example here for a social media manager. Don't worry about this, the interview stuff here, because that's a whole other conversation. But I just want you to pay attention to the mission, the outcomes, and then uh okay, we haven't done the competencies here on this example. So the mission for this social media manager, the purpose of this role is to represent the organization on social media, give our audience a voice they can relate to, and help generate leads with potential clients. Right now, none of that's measurable because it doesn't say how many leads, right? It's just that's the reason that this role exists. So that's the mission of the role. Now let's look at the outcomes. So by the end of Q3, ensure all social media platforms and content is on brand and consistent. Now there's a little bit of subjectivity in here. There's a little bit, a little bit too much subjectivity for my liking around the word consistent. Like, what does that mean? On brand, I get. Like if I if we see social posts that just don't match our style guide, it's like why the hell are we using those colours and that font? That would be a problem. Tone of voice, like, hey, we don't say that in agency mavericks. That's not who we are, that would be a problem. Consistent, I kind of get. I would okay, look at our Facebook, look at our YouTube, look at our Instagram. It's all gonna kind of feel like it's coming out of the same uh the same house. That's probably a little subjective and not super, super quantifiable, but it's better than it's better than writing out a list of things that the social media manager has to do, right? That's the outcome. I don't care how they get there, but that's the outcome that we're looking for. Second one here is is is I think much more uh quantifiable. Increase social traffic to website by 100% by the end of Q3. In other words, let's have a look at Google Analytics, look at where our traffic's coming from, and by the end of Q3, let's double the amount of traffic we're getting from social media, organic social media, not paid, right? And generate 150 leads per week from social media by the end of Q4, which uh would be, you know, in America would be December. Here in Australia would be June because we have a fiscal year that runs from July to June. That's quantifiable, and we can measure that through our analytics tools. Again, I would probably like revisiting this now, I would probably want to say uh generate 150 marketing qualified leads per week from social. In other words, like because 150 leads is pretty easy, right? You just, I mean, you could just crank them up and get mechanical turks or fiver, right, to get leads, but you want qualified leads. So I'm we might I might want to put this would be a good starting point, but over time I would want to probably dial that in a little bit and say, hey, well, what is a what does a qualified lead look like and how do we get qualified leads and and not rubbish leads? So they're the outcomes. Now, do I care whether Maddie uses who runs our social media? Do I care if she uses buffer or hoot suite? I couldn't give a shit what she uses.
SPEAKER_03Exactly.
SPEAKER_01Not interested. As long as what she uses is congruent with what the rest of the team is using. There's no like we're all in, we're a HubSpot shop now, so we're all in HubSpot. There's no point her using buffer if everyone else is using HubSpot and there's no integration, right? So she's got to play by the rules and kind of work with the team, but I don't care when we post or what we post. That's not my job to figure that out. It's Maddie and Emily's job to figure out what we post, when we post it, to get the engagement to deliver these outcomes, right?
SPEAKER_03Right. If they want to stop using Canva and start using Photoshop, they can do that.
SPEAKER_01I don't care.
SPEAKER_03You don't care, I don't care. It doesn't matter to me.
SPEAKER_01No one cares, right? Because and I'll tell you why I don't care, because I'm not very good at this job being a social media manager. It's not my sweet spot. So I can't train Maddie how to do it. I I don't even know how to use Instagram. Maddie said to me once, oh, can you put a story up on Instagram? I'm like, yeah, no worries. And I pinged her back 15 minutes later. I'm like, listen, I reckon I'm pretty smart and I'm not that old, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to add a story to Instagram. Where's the story button? Right. And she had to top left. That's the story. I'm like, okay, there it is. So I have no idea how to use Instagram. I don't even have WhatsApp on my phone, right? My wife's like, you miss out on all these great conversations with our friends because you're not on WhatsApp. I'm like shit. I'm like, what? If you want to talk to me, ring me. Uh so I let Maddie go and do that stuff because she knows it. I don't uh I don't even know how to do it, right? And I'm not interested in learning because I've got other things that I'd want to do. What do you think, Pete, that we hire people and then try and train them rather than just hiring people who already know how to do the job?
SPEAKER_03Uh that's a good question. I'm not really sure. Is it psychological? I think it is. Are we uh is it like an insecurity thing? We don't want them to be better than us. I think it is. It's an imposter syndrome. We don't want them to know that we don't know how the hell to do it.
SPEAKER_01Correct. Absolutely. Bang on. That's exactly that.
SPEAKER_03Must be what it is.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, three cheers for Pete. That's exactly what I would have said. I would have said we don't want to be found out as being an idiot, right? Whereas I now want to be the dumbest person in the room because otherwise, what's the point? I'm not learning anything, right? Um, so I think it is a control thing. I think we want to feel like we're in control. And if we hire people who are smarter than us, then we're a little bit scared that we might become redundant and that they might not need us, or they might go, Well, you're a bit stupid. I'm gonna go work for someone else because I'm not you're not learning anything from you, right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it takes a little uh emotional intelligence, I think, to be able to do that, you know, just be able to put down those insecurities and move forward with hiring the best that you can get. They're not gonna take over the company. That's right. They're not gonna be the CEO. They're not gonna do what they did to Steve Jobs and throw you out.
SPEAKER_01That's right. They're not. It's not gonna happen. You know, being being a being a business owner is incredibly risky and takes an enormous amount of emotional resilience to get up every day, come to work, get punched in the face 150 times, get up the next day and do it again. Most people don't want that responsibility. Most people just want to come to work, add some value, feel like they belong and that they're important, get paid well, and they don't want the added responsibility of owning a business. So the vast majority of people that you recruit just know that 97% of them don't actually want to, on average, 97% of them don't want to start their own business, right? They they just want to help you grow your business. And I also think once you realize the way I got rid of my ego, because I was terrible as I used to micromanage the shit out of everyone. I've I've had people leave the company and on the way out go, dude, I can't do my job, right? I'm just like you've got my hands tied behind my back and you come in at the last minute and try and save the day, and it's just, you know, it's horrible. So I've had to learn. And the thing that the the the thing that's got me there is the realization that the only way to move faster and go further is to empower other people to do an amazing job and for me to get out of their way. And that is what actually frees me up and reduces my stress. And it also is incredibly liberating because then I can put my hand up and go, I don't have the answers. I don't know. Stop looking at me for all the answers because I'm the dumbest person in the room, right? You guys figure it out and then tell just tell me what to do. Andrew Tate says, I'm finding this interesting after having run with this for a team for 15 years in my previous life. I thought I had said goodbye to all that, but maybe not. Uh it sounds like Andrew is embarking on a new venture. Zach says, if you aren't hiring people smarter than you, you aren't truly growing your business. Sure, you might be able to build more hours, but you won't be improving your offerings. Yeah, totally. I know that we're not far away from us having products in this company that I have nothing to do with developing them or delivering them or marketing them. We're not that far away from that reality, which is incredibly rewarding for me to see to be able to see that light at the end of the tunnel.
SPEAKER_03That's Zach, that's exactly right. What Zach just said is is uh really a great comment. Being the only person with the answers makes you the single point of failure. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, totally. So I'm interested in uh what Andrew said here. Don't forget that this all takes time to run and review and try ties in with staff development and trading. So I agree, absolutely. It's not just as easy as a single sheet of paper. This is a key part of an entire recruiting process. This is and we're only showing you one piece of it right now, yeah, but it is a big P it is a big piece, but it's of a big, bigger system.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, totally. Here's a very, very high-level 30,000-foot flyby of our entire recruitment process, right? Here's everything you need to do to onboard a new candidate. Um, what we do, one of the first things we do is develop the job scorecard, right, for a role. Then we review the job scorecard with the team for feedback and go, hey, is this actually first thing we do is the org chart. I was gonna I was gonna interrupt you, but I don't want to. Yeah, yeah. Oh, please do, please feel free to interrupt me. Uh right, create the org chart. I'm not gonna walk you through this, but create the the future, what Pete calls the future-facing org chart uh so that you know who you think you should hire next. Then what most people do is go, cool, I'm gonna go place a job ad up for a developer because I've identified a need to hire a developer and they put up a job description. Okay. So instead of doing that, once you've got your org chart and you've identified, well, I'm currently as the business owner sitting in five of the 12 seats in my org chart, which is the reality, right? When you're starting it, you might have another person sitting in three seats and eventually go, I'm gonna replace myself out of these roles, develop a job scorecard for the next role that you're going to hire. Then once you've reviewed that with the team and you're and you're uh comfortable with it, we post up a job ad. And the job ad template is is you know kind of based on the the we have a whole job ad template that talks about the culture of the company and also the outcomes that that role is going to be responsible for, not the tasks that they're gonna do. Then we have people apply. We have a form, an intake form that we use. People apply, they end up in the short list, and then we put them through three interviews that we put them through a culture interview, a competencies interview, and a commitment interview. Then we check their references, then we make them an offer, and then we sign the contract and they're done. Or if they're not uh done and they don't accept the offer uh or we don't offer them, we might just put them on what we call the bench. We just put them on the bench for later because we might need to pull them in a little bit later. So that's the entire process at a very high level. But it really comes down to uh the job scorecard is the uh is the thing, is is kind of really at the heart of it, right?
SPEAKER_03It's the linchpin, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Correct. If you don't get that job scorecard dial in, then then you're you're flying blind because you don't know the outcomes that person is responsible for. And just to Andrew's point, and I'm gonna make my book recommendation, I've learned over the years that my job as a as the CEO is to empower and mentor everyone on the team to become the best version of themselves at work so that they can achieve what they didn't think was possible, because that is what gives people an enormous amount of pride and meaning in their work, is when they can turn up in front of the rest of the team and take pride in what they've achieved, and that they've achieved something that they might have known they could achieve, but they didn't really think was possible. My job is to help them get those results. It's not to jump in and do the job for them, right? And the book I'm gonna recommend, which has just completely consolidated and validated everything I've been learning about leadership and and developing people over the last few years. And it it for me, it's it's like the benchmark on how to do this really well, is a book called Good Authority by I believe his name is Jonathan Raymond. And I'm just gonna look this up. Good authority, how to become the leader your team is waiting for. How to become the leader your team is waiting for. Uh, he led the transformation of that global coaching brand um into the digital age, really. So he was the former CEO and chief brand officer at EMyth, huge amount of experience in running teams. He now has a company called Refound, and their whole motto, and really if you had to distill this book down and their whole approach to leadership, if you had to distill it down into four words, it is more Yoda less superman. That is the whole ethos of and their philosophy towards the industry, right? And it's it's just it's and I have been Superman in the past, and um, and uh, I'm on this journey to become more Yoda and less Superman. So Good Authority by Jonathan Raymond, definitely a book worth checking out, as well as Who by Brad Smart. And uh and then I would encourage you to have a think about you know the role that that you are thinking about hiring and uh think about the outcomes that that role is responsible for. And I want to talk about one specific example, Pete, because a lot of people have a problem when it comes to designing outcomes for specific roles. One that I'm thinking of in mind is a developer.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's tough.
SPEAKER_01A lot of people say, well, what so what is the what is what is the outcome that a developer is responsible for? I have some thoughts on this, but you tell me. Like, what do you think a developer what how do you how do we know so that a developer?
SPEAKER_03I'm not sure that I'm doing a good job of this in my agency, so I'll be interested to hear what you have to say. But um, most of what I've got my developer working on is so my developer does does both works in our care plan division of our company, if you want to look at it that way, and also does um you know website builds and things like that. So um care plan, it's easier to measure uh because everything is about timing. Like you got to get these things done in in so many hours. So that one's relatively easy to measure. The other one is a little bit harder. It's it's a and I've got it set up so that he's responsible for tasks or projects coming in on time. So we come up with a deadline and projects that come in on time, that's a that's a gold star for him. And if it doesn't, then that's a problem.
SPEAKER_01Yep. Yep, and that is where that's where most people start with a developer role. And I think in the absence of anything else, that's probably a good place to start. Um, what I've learned uh over the last probably 18 months to two years by talking to a lot of people in Mavericks Club who have teams of developers is I believe a developer, if they're not I believe everyone in the company has a customer, right? My in my role as the CEO, my I have two customers. I have my I have our clients, our coaching clients and our customers in our programs, and I have the team. My team are also my customer. I serve them and I serve our clients. I believe everyone in the company has a customer. Sometimes that customer is the company's customer, right? Sometimes it's another person or another department within the organization. So developers, for example, if they're not interacting directly with a client, then I still believe they a developer has two customers. They have the customer who we're building a website for, and they have the account manager or the project manager, or if there is no account manager or project manager, then the company, the business, the agency owner is also their customer. Let me let me explain. The in the absence of any number, if you don't have a number for a developer and you can't figure out a number for a developer or any other role, right, then the the number I think that you should be measuring is called CSAT, customer satisfaction, C-S-A-T, customer satisfaction. So when we launch a project for a client, it's very simple. It's a the CSAT survey, it's very, very simple. How would you rate your experience with us based on this project that we just launched for you? And it's a rating out of five stars, or you can just use sad face, neutral, happy face, right? Uh when we send support tickets out of HubSpot, we use the sad face, smiley face, neutral face. So that's a customer satisfaction survey. They literally click a button. The customer literally clicks a button. Now the now the developer's job is to help contribute to keeping our CSAT above four out of five stars, four or more. If we're three, there's a problem. If we're two, then hold the phone, something's on fire, everyone stop. If we're at four out of five consistently, everyone's happy. Now, the developer's job is to contribute towards keeping that CSAT at four. However, let's just think about this for a second because the developer could do an amazing job, develop everything, compliant code, accessibility, everything's super good, everyone's happy, it gets done on time, but the account manager may not have slept for the last three nights because the developer's gone missing and hasn't communicated, and has just been in a bunker cutting code and hasn't communicated, and so the account manager's stressed out. So the other customer that the developer has is the team, right? Particularly the account manager or the project manager if that role exists. So I believe you should also have what's called an ESAT, which is an employee satisfaction. So on a scale of one to five, rate the team on this project. And the project manager or the account manager should say, Well, we got this done on time, but the developer went missing for three days and didn't answer my tickets in in teamwork. Uh, and so therefore I was pretty stressed out. I would really love it if we didn't do that again. So I'm giving you a three out of five. Okay. So I'm not talking about lines of code or accessibility or compliance. I'm talking about who is the who is the customer, external or internal, and how do we measure their satisfaction with that that employee's role. Now, my job is to get is to get out is to keep our CSAT and our NPS where where they are, and I help the whole team, mentor the whole team to do that. But also my job is to make sure our employee NPS or our employee satisfaction, which we're just about to roll out, is also four out of five. Because I don't want anyone here if they're not happy and they're not fulfilled and they're not developing. Does that make sense? And so I think you can do that with every role. I think you can, I think you can do that with a designer, because it's hard. I mean, how do you measure design? It's it's so subjective, right? But I think it's if the customer's happy and the team's happy, designers done a good job. Even if there are people on the team, even if you as a business owner are a designer and you go, Jesus, I would have designed that differently. Hey, customers happy, team's happy, shut up and get out of the way. It doesn't matter if you would have chosen a different color palette. That's no longer your job. You're an agency owner, not a designer.
SPEAKER_03Right. Make sense? Yep, that does make sense. Cool.
SPEAKER_01Pete, where what time is it where you are?
SPEAKER_03It's almost it is almost 7 p.m. where I am. But look at this. We almost made we almost made a full hour.
SPEAKER_01Almost the agency 52 minutes. Hope you guys are enjoying this. Let us know what you want to learn. Let us know if you have any guests that you would like us to bring on or any particular topics that you would like us to talk about. Thank you very much to Max in the green room for producing this show. And Pete, once again, brother, thanks for joining in. Uh love hanging out with you, man. All right, we'll see you again next week, guys. Same time uh next uh Thursday morning, Melbourne time. Till then, I'm Troy Dean. Have a great day.
SPEAKER_02Have a good night. Thanks for listening to the Agency Hour Podcast. Subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocketcast, Portable, and wherever you like to listen, you can catch all of the Agency Hour episodes on our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash agency mavericks. Or you can get involved. Check out our free digital mavericks Facebook, where we broadcast these episodes in London for our community every week, along with a ton of free channel. We'll see you there.