This episode I answer some questions about; diversifying yourself, managing a remote team, and creating a business structure that works for YOU.
[Transcript]
Adam: On this episode, we’re outside. Good to go? Not a crow. Dude, there’s two of them now. Let’s hope they don’t start humping. All right. Ready to go? Good, good, good. All right. Well, welcome, everybody, to another episode of The Steel Entrepreneur Show. This is episode 13 and we are going to bang out three questions. We’re outside today, we’re changing it up, and well, yeah of course, I know we’ve got the blower and we’ve got these crows humping in the trees, and we’re going to do the best we can. So let’s make the most of this, and Rihanna, why don’t we go ahead with the first few questions here?
Rihanna: Okay, so our first question is from Terry. So Terry asks, “I run a digital marketing SEO company and I often worry about whether or not I have diversified myself enough. Any tips?”
Adam: I’m guilty of the same. You could say that I’ve sort of diversified myself a little bit as far as, like I’ve got different companies, which has saved my ass time and time again. But one of the things that’s been bugging me for a long time is, what happens if the SEO goes away, what happens if Google no longer lets us play on their playground? It’s their rules, they can make them. What if it goes 100% paid? We would no doubt lose some clients and we would have to adapt and we would have to switch over to paid marketing really quickly. So that’s kind of a scary reality.
I guess, that is kind of preachy and I’ve said this a million times but I would just build something else. Build something that…you know, one of the best things that I think I’ve done so far is I built a business that doesn’t require me per se, that doesn’t require me to be in the office, it doesn’t even require me to be awake. Probably sometimes there are days where I wake up in the morning… My goodness, must they? Some days when I wake up in the morning and I would look at…I’ll pull up my phone because of course that’s the first thing I do in the morning, and PayPal transactions. So I’ll see payments coming in, and I shit you not, there have been times where it has brought me to tears because that is so sweet that I’ve created something that brings in money while I’m sleeping.
So whether it’s a… regardless of what kind of company it is, I think I would encourage you to try and build something that doesn’t require your hours because inevitably you are going to cap out eventually, as I very much have, and now find myself waking up early and earlier just to try and sneak in as much as I possibly can. So I think…and it’s funny. I’ve seen a lot of my contemporaries go the same way is they’ll start an agency and then they’ll end up as affiliates. Or they’ll end up as affiliates and then they’ll end up owning their own product, and then they sell their own product, or a number of different variations of that. Either way, they all sort of, I guess, get tired of agency life, get tired of selling their time for money, and they quickly sort of appreciate or realize the limitations in doing such.
So best advice is try and find some sort of business that you’re interested in that you can sell things while you sleep eventually, and I don’t know that I have too much advice than that other than just get it started as soon as possible because you will, like I said, inevitably come to that point where there’s no more hours left to work and you’re just going to have to sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice. Nor is it necessarily…well, it’s not necessarily necessary. So what do you think, I was starting to jive?
Rihanna: [inaudible 00:04:37].
Adam: Yeah? I guess you guys will probably get to that point eventually where…
Rihanna: I think we’re there.
Adam: Oh yeah, I guess so, right? Especially with you guys, it is you, it is you, it is your time. You have to be on scene, on set, and there’s kind of no substitute for other than selling other people’s time. Hiring employees and selling their time, which is sort of many a time more and then you have to manage those people and it just spirals from there. So there’s no good solution other than stop selling yours and other people’s time for money. What’s the next one?
Rihanna: Jim asks, how are you keeping your large remote team motivated?
Adam: Yeah, that’s always been a tough one and I don’t know that I’ve done a tremendous job of that. I think it’s sort of an everyday struggle. I think, because we are a remote team, because we are outside, we’re not in an office, we’re not…most of us have never met and probably never will, it doesn’t sort of foster the same sort of culture that would otherwise be created if you worked in sort of an office environment and rubbed shoulders with people. And so there isn’t that sort of opportunity to get in front of everybody and get them charged or to have other people’s inspiration, and motivation, and energy, and positivity, I guess, rub off on each other. There just isn’t that sort of thing. So we have to kind of do our best, and it will never be as good, in my opinion anyways.
We have regular sort of standup-type meetings, as some of you guys will now know because I’ve talked about it a number of times. We use Scrum. And so we have different sprints and each sprint ends on a different day, and with every business that we add, we add a sprint essentially. So we’re almost meeting every single day of the week because each week has their own sprint, again, which is associated with the different business. And so I take those very limited opportunities 15, 20 minutes to try and kind of get people going. But even then, we’re very task-oriented. We’re very, “Did this get done? What did the client say?” or this that and the other. And we don’t honestly leave a lot of time for culture-building and things like that.
So I think the best thing that you can do in a remote type of environment is just to lead by example, is to show up a little bit earlier, work a little bit later, show a little bit more enthusiasm, maybe more enthusiasm than you actually naturally feel, and that sort of thing rubs off on people. I’ve noticed recently with my increase in hours and waking up earlier and just generally being more present and working harder, and getting more done, I’ve seen the other folks, the other people that are working with us take notice. And I’ve seen them sort of come around and almost charge…what am I trying to say? They kind of push each other. They kind of absorb that energy and then…not force but that energy becomes very infectious, and it sort of spreads. And I see people showing up earlier and doing more hours at the end of the day and getting more done.
The only problem with that is that it’s kind of a trap, right? It’s like, okay, so when you show up, when you work harder, more gets done, but what happens if inevitably you don’t show up or you want to distance yourself or you want to go off and write a book or something like that? Does that mean that they stop showing up? Right? So you have to…as much as I think it’s taught that…lead by example, and be inspiring, and it will be infectious, be positive, and all that kind of stuff, that sort of a way of things, I think it stops when you stop.
So you need to find something and I can’t…other than building cool stuff and trying to keep it fresh, and coming up with new companies, and new ideas all the time, and just trying to keep things from being stagnant, I don’t know that I’ve really found a great way to do that. I can’t say that it’s something that I put a lot of energy into and I think it’s just sort of something that happened naturally just by doing what I do and doing what I enjoy. It does sort of transfer a little bit. So that’s the best I got for that one. What else do we got?
Rihanna: So next one’s from Michael. How do you determine how much and number of accounts each manager manages or does it matter to you?
Adam: Yeah, so one of my big regrets was I never went to work for an agency, so I had to kind of not re-invent the wheel but kind of just figure it out myself because when we were building, I wasn’t in the mindset of really asking other people or leaning on other people to try and help me figure it out. And so I just kind of went with what made sense. In fact, I think the most I ever did was I went to go see other people’s websites and other agencies’ websites and just sort of see how they structured their organization. They were account managers, they were directors, they were this and that, and I don’t know that there was really any sort of anything I found that really worked for us because every company is a little bit different. I don’t know that there is this sort of template per se.
But to get back to your question, I think a lot of times I impose myself on other people and by that what I mean is I assume that everybody will work to the same level and standard and whatever as myself. So I can keep loading them up just like I would load myself up and basically load them up until failure. So load them up until things start going sideways and then kind of pull back from there. I don’t know if that is a good way at all.
I think there probably should be some set amount of accounts per account manager. The way we’ve kind of got it set up is we have kind of a talent pool, if you will. So we’ve got essentially a couple account managers and then they have access to a talent pool and they kind of…they develop sort of a strategy and a plan and then they pick from that talent pool and say, “Hey Chris, I want you to focus on this this week and Serge, I need these designs. So can you work on this this week?” And they kind of know how much they can queue up per week or per month and how much budget they have to play with.
And so we have sort of our talent pool, account managers, and then kinda just, I guess your executives, if you will. I don’t know that I would really call any of us executives but it’s sort of folks that manage each sort of competency. I guess you call it directors or something like that. So relatively flat organization and for us, that sort of non-templated just sort of find-it-as-it-were approach has more or less worked for us. Again, I don’t think there is any sort of one perfect approach or anything like that but just kind of figuring out for yourself is not such a bad way to go about it. Just find out what works for you and then as far as loading up your people with clients, just load them up until things start to break. I think that’s probably the best way to go about it. And then you’ll learn where things break and where things succeed, and then just adjust from there. I’m trying to actively remember that, hey, there are people that are listening to this or not necessarily watching this and to create content that is sort of specific for our podcast and not create content that is visual or something like that. So I hope I’m doing an okay job of that. Do check on the podcast. It is on pretty much every sort of podcasting. I don’t even know what you call it.
Rihanna: A platform, I guess.
Adam: Platform, yeah, yeah. Stitcher and Google Apps, and iTunes, and Stitcher, and so on and so forth. So do check out that. I’d love to hear your feedback, leave reviews, subscribe obviously. And if you have any other questions, I grabbed these from…we’re doing a little bit more on the Facebook side of things. So we’ve been able to get a few questions. So if you have any, I hope that you’ll send them along and I have the distinct honor of answering them, and yeah, we love more questions. So thanks, guys, and enjoy the rest of your week.
