In this episode I share how I optimize team output, I talk about client budgeting & are citations close to extinction.
[Transcript]
Adam: On this episode, we talk about making your team move faster. We talk about filling invoices and P&Ls;. And finally, we talk about the future of citation building.
Hey, everyone, my name is Adam Steele, and welcome back to another episode of The Steele Entrepreneur Show. This is episode…
Rheanna: Seven.
Adam: Seven. Thank you. Oh, man! Seven. Every episode is a little challenge of mine. I will be the first to admit. I don’t have the discipline to get in here every Friday and do these. So I have to set an appointment out a week out. I have to pay for the space. I have to do all of these things to kind of like wrestle myself into these episodes. But it’s all good. I like doing them. It’s just there’s just so many things I need to do.
Anyways, we’re gonna talk about a few things today. These last couple of videos have ran super, super long. And so I was fortunate to get a few questions this time. And I’m just gonna stick to those questions, because I just don’t want these videos to be… We uploaded the last video to Facebook. And Facebook made us go back and compress it, because it was too big and too long. Did we tell you that, Rheanna?
Rheanna: No.
Adam: No? That’s crazy, right? So, yeah, I think we got to keep them in sort of the 25-minute, 20-minute arena. Well…
Rheanna: Compress it quality-wise or lengthwise?
Adam: Definitely, it wasn’t length, because, obviously, we didn’t cut it or anything like that. We had to reduce the quality, which, you know, I didn’t even check to see if that became a problem or anything. So I’ll find out. Anyways, Rheanna[SP], what’s topic one? Well, you’ve got the order over there.
Rheanna: How do we measure speed with units of work?
Adam: I touched on this in one of the earlier episodes. So go back…I wanna say it’s episode two, maybe episode three where I talked about Scrum and Trello and how we have our sort of system worked out, how we move, how we get stuff done on a weekly basis or workflow, I guess you could call it. And I’ll mention again, just like I mentioned during that episode, you must, you absolutely have to, if you lead people, you have to check out the book “Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice as Much in Half the Time,” something like that. It’s by Jeff Sutherland, I wanna say. And I think Jeff and Jeff, I think son and father, yeah. And it is an absolutely brilliant book on how to manage teams, but, more specifically, how to get teams to kick ass.
And so what we’re gonna talk about today is a subsection of that book or a subsection of some of its teachings. And it talks about units of work and measuring units of work and being able to measure how fast your team is working in a particular period of time. So we have basically seven-day sprints[SP], so Thursday to Thursday. That is a…you know, we’ll queue stuff up to be done on Thursday, and it will have to be done by Thursday, the next Thursday. And then we just sort of cut it off and we see, okay, how much we got accomplished and then we calculate our speed. And we do that by assigning a unit, a number to each particular task that we queue up. And again, we use Trello. So we’re queuing up these little cards, these little tasks in Trello.
And so we use these numbers. And I won’t go into the nitty-gritty of it. But I might queue up a task, or an account manager rather would queue up a task, and it would be, let’s say, a three. And the way they explained how to sort of pick numbers and use these numbers is they want us to use one, two, three, five, eight, and then they’ve got a few other numbers beyond that.
Do you know what those numbers are called, that sort of sequence of numbers where it’s like one, two, three, five, eight?
Rheanna: No.
Adam: I su
cked at math. In any event, one, two, three, five and eight, and, basically, those were explained…we’re told to think of those more as project size versus how many hours it’s gonna take to accomplish a particular task. And the reason for that is they want it to be relative. At least I think this is what they explained. It’s been a while since I’ve read the book. But they wanted to be relative to another sized task. So a two-sized task is twice as big as a one. And a three is bigger than a two and so on and so forth. So they want there to be that relativity. They want you to be able to look at one and be like “I can’t take on this. You know, I don’t have a three left in me today. I’ve got a one.” Or you’re just starting your day, and you don’t wanna dive into something big. So you just knock out a couple ones. And now you’re like “Yeah,” you know, “I’ve got some stuff accomplished. I feel good. I’ve checked some boxes. I’ve dragged some tasks or some cards in Trello.” And then you could take on something bigger.
But also, the second reason that they want us to do that is because Scrum is often…I think it sort of came out of design and development shops. And so in design, and forgive me if I’m wrong on this. I believe this is how he explained it. In design shops, you know, you say something is gonna take eight hours. It takes 60. It’s just the way it is. Certainly, if it’s something you’re doing for the first time or this is, you know, a new website you’re building, even if you’ve done this particular function may times, oftentimes, it always takes longer than you think it’s gonna take. At least that’s the case in my experience. Shame on my developers if I’ve learned wrong.
But basically, to make an eight eight hours, it doesn’t really jive. It’s not going to jive, because I’m eight, if you say it’s gonna take eight hours, there’s a good chance it’s not gonna take eight hours. And so now, what does that number represent to you? It’s kind of meaningless, right? So we’ve tried, and it’s tempting to think of it as hours. We’ve tried to think of it as project size instead.
So like I said, we will assign a particular task with a number. And one really important thing that I’ve discovered is not to… The reason we stop at eight is because eight is like a full day, essentially. And again, try not to think of it as hours, and I know eight and eight hours, eight hours being, you know, your typical day kind of thing perhaps. Think of it as project size. Eight for us is a full day, right? So if you’re gonna take on an eight, you can expect it to take a full day, right?
And the reason we don’t have, say, a 12 or a 15 or a 20, which they prescribe that you use is because I want my guys and gals to be able to complete something in a single day. I want them to have that sort of satisfaction that, you know, they came in today. They crushed it, and they got a eight done. Or they got an eight and a two done, right? Versus coming in, working on a 12, and leaving and have not accomplished anything. Yes, maybe they’ve, you know, completed the first and second component of that particular task. But there’s a certain satisfaction, like mental satisfaction, that you get from moving something left to right, to doing something, to completing something. And so they get that when they’re able to take a task, which was made smaller, and drag it over.
So let me give you an example. Designers hand over PSDs to the Photoshop files to the developer. Developer will break it down into three tasks. And this is hypothetical. Forgive me if I’m getting this wrong. It’s just the first example that comes to mind. They’ll break it down into, say, slicing, coding to HTML, and then bringing into WordPress, right? Now, you could put that into one task, because, you know, depending on the page, it might only take, you know, it might only take a day, right? But we assume that it will take more, and so we break it into three tasks. So that, you know, that individual may now be able to accomplish three things in one day. It feels like they got a lot accomplished, even though, you know, really it’s only one task. But we broke it down into three, and he got more done.
Now, for the managers, how frustrating would it be if you looked across all your clients or all your projects, and because you have grouped everything into these big tasks that, you know, take multiple days, you look at a day, and nothing got accomplished. That would be depressing, right? You would go to your people, and you would say, “What the fuck is going on here, right? You know, I’ve given you all these tasks, and you didn’t get anything done.”
And they’ll explain, “Well, I got 30% of this done. I got 20% of that done, 10%, right?” It doesn’t feel the same. So for managers, it’s nice to be able to see stuff moving, like physically moving, being done, checked off a list. And so that’s why we have broken things down into no bigger than an eight.
So the final step is the actual measurement of speed. How do we measure how quickly a particular task is completed? Or rather how do we measure, how much rather was completed in an individual week? Well, what we do is once everything is moved and done, so once everything is done, we tally up, you know, we tally up all the projects, all the clients, all the whatever we’re working on, we will tally up all the numbers. Okay, an eight was accomplished, a five was accomplished, a three was accomplished, a one was accomplished, a bunch of twos were accomplished. We add all those numbers up. Let’s say 33. And we then compare that to other weeks. So we’ll see that last week, we only got 21 accomplished. So this week, we’re moving much faster. We got more accomplished, assuming, of course, our project size numbers are accurate, which they generally are. And so now, I know that my team is getting faster.
How would I have known that otherwise, right? Sometimes it’s not clear. So by assigning a number to a particular size of task, I’m able to figure out how my team is moving each week and why they’re having a down week or whether, you know, a particular area or project is moving slower than it did in the previous week, because you can break it down. You can go even further, and we never did this, but you could break down by employee too potentially. How much are they producing in an individual week? How productive were they?
Now, I’ll be the first to say I’ve had troubles imagining this. I struggled at the start. We got it going. And then it’s that counting bit. It’s the keeping track of the numbers, adding them all up, throwing them in a spreadsheet. We had an app that sort of did that for us, but there was a lot of shortcomings. And it just ended up being kind of a real sort of pain in the ass to do.
My suggestion is to either be less lazy than me and just make it happen or assign someone to do it specifically. That is their job. That is part of their job expectations. Or maybe, you know, there’s a million Trello integrations. There’s a million…you know, you use something like Zapier or something like Zapier, and you can create an integration that way. There is a way to automate it, no doubt about that. And that’s what we’re looking at right now is how can we make it so a human doesn’t have to do it?
And I think if we can do that and then perhaps chart it and graph it and then spit it into Slack at the end of, you know, every day or at the end of every week, we can get sort of a sense of how we’re moving and report to people and do so in a way that isn’t labor-intensive, that doesn’t require me, that doesn’t require, you know, someone else to put it together. So something worth giving a try. I know for the time that we did it, and, again, we’re trying to get it going again, it was tremendously helpful. And it was a great way to monitor how things were moving along on a project basis, but also a companywide basis as well. So try it out. If you haven’t read Scrum, get that book.
And my last thought on the matter is I recently put together a screen share. I had put one together before but the sound volume was absolutely terrible. Just search Youtube for Trello, Scrum, make my team move faster or doubled my marketing agency speed, or something like that. We’re gonna share it on our Facebook page too, /theadamgsteele. Lame URL I know, but it’s what we had. And, yeah, check that out because I go into a lot of detail, a lot more detail than I have, and it’s easier to sort of understand when you put sort of a video to, you know, a screen share of my screen, obviously, and how our boards are set up and how we use Scrum and how we use those numbers and all that kind of stuff. So check that out. We just recently posted it on YouTube, and it will be on our Facebook page pretty soon as well. BRheanna, what do we got next.
Rheanna: Okay, we’ve got invoicing, billing, and PNLs.
Adam: Yeah, so invoicing, billing, and PNLs. So I had a gentleman who was putting together his first company’s client base sort of thing, and he’s wondering how we do our billing, how we do our invoicing, how we do our tracking and costing and PNLs and all that kind of stuff. And this is something I’ve struggled with from day one, I continue to struggle with today. But there are a few things that I’ve learnt along the way. I promised in the show that we would have…that it would be, you know, in the trenches, right? That it would be what I’m doing what my company is doing on a day-to-day and try and sort of help you navigate a few of those things, maybe make a few less incorrect turns along the way. And that’s what I wanna do.
So with this invoicing thing, there’s something that we’ve been looking at this week, and my programmer and I have…Josh have been going over how do we automate this? How do we make it less painful for our bookkeeper? How do we make it less painful for some of our VA staff who are putting together numbers? How can we leverage the strength or the feature set of FreshBooks. We do all our time-tracking, invoicing, and a number of other sort of tracking things within FreshBooks. It wasn’t too long ago, maybe only two years ago, I was quite literally doing my invoicing via a Microsoft Word doc. I had a template I would just change the numbers. I would PDF it, and I would send it to a client. And then we would sort out payment and it was just…it was terrible. It was so terrible. And it was disorganized. And I am just really grateful that we discovered FreshBooks when we did. I wish I had found it earlier, but we didn’t.
It’s just like me to sort of think that I can do it myself. But eventually, it just wasn’t scalable, and it was not organized. It was just a mess. So like I said, we used…the way we have it set right now is…and I think it’s kind of unique. Maybe it isn’t. But I think it is. I mean it works pretty well for us as we have everybody in FreshBooks. So I mentioned we do time-tracking. So basically, what I’ve done is I’ve created a company FreshBooks, and then I’ve added everybody as a subcontractor. So we’ve got, you know, a couple dozen people at least set up as subcontractors in FreshBooks. And you can add their…you know, what their billable hour is, among other, you know, different things.
And basically, they track their time, and they’re able to assign their time to a particular project. So similar to, you know, like what a lawyer might use or what a lawyer might do, they assign their time to a particular project, and they explain what they did during that time and so on and so forth. We do the same thing, not for the client’s benefit, but rather for our own, my own, my account managers own, just trying to get a sense of how we’re spending our money.
But not only that, like I like to check in on projects that I’m not actively involved with and just get a sense… If I wanna get a sense of, you know, what people are spending their time on, there’s no better way than to go into time-tracking and just, you know, pull up an invoice or pull up a project and see “Okay, in the last week, you know, Alex worked on this, and Hugo worked on that,” and blah, blah, blah. I can get a really good sense very quickly of what happened in the last month or in the last week or, you know, whatever. So I found time-tracking to be really valuable but also valuable because I can run PNLs pretty easily, so profit and loss statements. And I can do it by client.
So we have this set out once upon a time in QBO, QuickBooks Online. But we sort of outgrew it very, very quickly. It’s just not as nimble as we needed it to be, as customizable, I suppose, as it needed to be. And so we’ve since moved to QuickBooks Desktop, which has been kind of a pain in the ass, to be honest, but we’re finally sort of getting there.
And the goal, and we’re almost there, is to be able to look at every project, every client, every subproject, every investment, everything that we’re doing, and be able to see of course what are we making, how much revenue are we bringing in, and how much are our staff billing us. And so how much do we make that month, right? And there’s gonna be a lot of projects that are totally in the negative, right, you know, investments we’re making or whatever. But it gives me a very granular, or not so granular, when I want it, look at how each particular project or clients or whatever is doing. And so by doing that time-tracking, I’m able to assign their time to a particular project. And by building these PNLs based on clients and projects, I’m able to look at, you know, a particular project, and not just the company as a whole, but a particular project or a particular client and know exactly how we’re doing on that project.
And so what unfortunately happened is, you know, as we get more clients and more employees, that work accumulates and accumulates and accumulates. And it takes us a long time to prepare one of these reports. And so what’s now happening is I’m not getting those PNLs as fast as I need, which means for two or three weeks of the…you know, let’s say, what are we? We’re June. I’m yet to receive my PNLs. I have some idea of how we performed last month in an overall sense. But I don’t know how we did in sort of a granular way. And it’s because it takes so long to prepare, right? And we’ve got client who got other priorities, right. But I’m driving with a broken windshield essentially. And that is a scary place to be.
So we have to put together some sort of automation that essentially probably takes the PNLs out of QuickBooks, which removes that burden for the bookkeeping and accounting staff. And I think the way we would have it is we would use the FreshBooks API…I don’t know how good it is yet, we’re gonna find that out…and grab the data we want, get some… We’ve been looking at some open-source graphing and accounting software, spit it into there, it’s a horrible way to put it, but to bring it into there and then have it chart our growth, chart our PNLs, and all that kind of stuff.
So we have the PNLs for our self there. And then we’ll be able to send along much more simple, I guess, just not these like crazy broken down… Like an invoice. John sends me an invoice. I send that invoice off to…or that invoice goes off to the bookkeeper. His invoice will be broken down into like 30 different projects. [inaudible 00:22:49] work on 30 different projects that week. And so that will be bookkeeper has to take each one of those expenses out and apply it to a PNL 30 times. So instead of just having one invoice and plugging that in and that being, you know, the Magistrate or the Loganix or the whatever company PNL, you just got to break it down.
And imagine that times all of our employees and all of our projects. Like, yeah, he probably has 30 items in his PNL. But, you know, other teammates will have even more than that. So do the math on that. It’s insane, right? But that was, at the time, the only way that I could think of of getting these sort of super granular reports.
So that’s something we’re working on. Again, I don’t necessarily know the right way yet. We’re figuring it out. That’s why I’m telling you about it. And hopefully, the next time we speak, next time I do another episode or in one of the mini episodes, I can kind of explain, you know, how things went. And I mean feel free to check in with me, you know, in a week or in two weeks. You give my program [inaudible 00:23:58] enough time to muscle around a little bit with the API and some of what I hope are built-in integrations that FreshBooks has. So we’ll find out. And hopefully, next month, I’ll have my PNL right away. And I’ll know exactly how we did last month so that I don’t need to worry, because it keeps me up at night. Like I know we’re doing fine, but still I’m just obsessive-compulsive that way. I have to know what I get. I freak out.
So that’s how we do it currently. It’s not a perfect system. But I think we’re gonna make it better, and I’ll let you know how that goes.
Rheanna: When do citations no longer become a thing?
Adam: Yeah, I actually like kind of talking about this stuff more than I do the business invoicing type stuff, because it’s…I don’t know. I guess I feel like I’ve been doing this stuff for longer. Whereas, the business stuff, like, yeah, we’ve been in business for seven years, roughly. And, you know, we’ve built a bunch of companies. But like I only recently kind of started picking up on the whole “What the hell am I doing?” because it was all just like kind of figuring out as I was going along, not being able to put a name to what the hell I’m doing. It’s just like it’s just this function. I’m gonna do this, and hopefully it will yield this. And it was only, you know, maybe a couple years ago where I started to actually figure out what it was that I was doing.
Anyways, the question is where is citation building going, essentially? [inaudible 00:25:32] citation building as an effort, I suppose, of SEO. And I got this question on the phone the other day. And I thought, “Oh, what a brilliant question?” At least I think it is. And basically, you know, as we’ve seen with other types of link-building, let’s use scholarship link-building as an example. There was once upon a time where I could do a scholarship link-building effort for somebody. And it would yield massive results. It would be tremendous, right?
And they would get, you know, 150 links or 80 links or 50 links depending on, you know, on the campaign from amazing websites. Like I’m talking like Stanford, Cambridge, like top, top universities, universities with domain authorities of like, I don’t know, like 70, 80, maybe more, right? And so one time, it would do amazing things. And as they always do, marketers ruin everything. SEO’s even worse. And so now, when I do that same campaign, I pretty much get nothing. And I’ll get just as many links, if not more, same type of links, still do follow, nothing’s changed, same dilution on page, so same set of OBL, outbound linking on the page. Nothing’s changed. But what happened is…and I don’t know this with certainty, of course. I’m speculating. What happened is people decided, “Well, the best way that we can deal with this is…well, we can’t penalize them because we’d probably end up nailing a whole bunch of innocent people. But rather, let’s just devalue them. Let’s make them less valuable, right?
And so now, like I said, when I do a social campaign, nothing happens. It’s a waste of time. It’s a waste of money in my opinion, unless… Well, I mean for SEO value, it’s a waste of time. Of course, you wanna give back. And then [inaudible 00:27:31], yeah, I don’t generally do them unless my concern is, you know, I’ve got this big client. He’s got a huge thing profile, and he’s got maybe too much of one type of link. And I wanna diversify that. I want some scholarships. I want some EDUs. And so for that purpose, I will do it.
But let’s see, let’s see. As far as a citation is concerned, I think they’re probably going the same way. So citation, if you don’t know, is just an occurrence. And as far as local SEO is concerned…excuse me, it’s just an occurrence of name, address, phone number, generally. Some people will argue that it’s an occurrence of name, address, phone number, websites or URL or, you know, whatever. But let’s just assume, name, address, phone number. So it can occur anywhere, right? It can occur on a directory, like a local business directory, which is the typical sense. That’s what people are talking about, citations. They’re usually talking about local business directories. But, you know, it can be anything, right? It’s just an occurrence of your business information online. That’s all it is.
But anyways, in the past, in past years, we’d see more of organic bumps, like non-local bump in rankings from citations. We see less of that now. And I can’t say that I see less of a bump locally, because I think locals always been slow. And by that, I mean like you build citations. And generally speaking, you’re not gonna see anything, any result of those citations for 60 to 90 days, which I believe is still a result of the local index, Google’s local index, only updating every 60 to 90 days. So it takes that long for them to uncover any changes that you’ve made and sort of credits you for them.
So It’s a very hard thing to track, right, because you do so many things in that time. You’ve added so many other variables. So it’s really hard to test whether, you know, citations are…you know, as far as influencing the local algorithm, whether they’re more effective now or less effective than they were previously. I don’t know how anyone would really track that other than just kind of feeling it out. You know, they’ve been in the industry long enough, and they kind of feel that out. I can’t say that I’ve really noticed anything. But I do feel like anything that’s scalable, anything that can be automated, you know, Google’s kind of gonna eventually devalue.
So I think if they haven’t already been devalued, they’re probably going to be devalued. And I don’t know whether they’ll be devalued in the local algorithm or they’ll be devalued in the organic sort of algorithm. I know those aren’t really, you know, real names for the algorithm per se. But I kind of think of them as that way. I kind of think of it as that way, local and organic. So I don’t know, but I would suspect because, like I said, it’s super scalable, and people have automated it so well. And I would imagine it would kind of go the way of the blog comment. You know, people still do it, and it has its benefits and its perks. And I think it has just become, you know, one of those things that you know you have to do, you know? We know it influences the local algorithms, so we have to do it. That’s all we should expect from it. You know, we just do it because we have to. We know we have to do it, and that’s it.
And I think a lot of links are probably going that way, anything that can be scaled I think. Another really great example is editorial links. Some I’ve been heavily involved with as of recent. And I remember back in the day when I could get a link from, you know, Forbes or Inc or Huffington or, you know, whatever. And the same kind of link, contextual, do follow, etc., etc., same type of page, you know? And I would see a big boost in my rankings. Today, same thing, nothing or very little anyways.
And so usually when I’m advising people on editorial links, I’m talking to them about other stuff other than just, you know, I’m not telling them just to get the most powerful link they can. Although, that’s important. But I’m also talking about, you know, what is the current state of your link profile? What is the [inaudible 00:32:16] or the topical trust flow of it? Your inbound links, how topical are they to what you do? And so if you don’t have much topical relevance when compared to the rest of your surf, then maybe that’s something we work on. And so when we buy links for you, we don’t just look for what’s the most powerful thing. We look at what’s the most powerful but also what is the most topical thing. And we spend a lot more time on that, because we know that we need to get as bang for our buck here. And in this sort of environment, in this sort of SEO environment, we have to think about other angles, instead of just DA or just authority or what have you.
So you have to start looking at other things beyond just power, just raw power, because raw power, it doesn’t seem to…at least from editorial [inaudible 00:33:12], it doesn’t seem to work the way it did in the past. So you just got to be a little bit smarter about our link choices. And likewise, with citations, they will still be part of the local algorithm, sure. But they’re not gonna do what they used to. We’re gonna have to get more creative, and we’re gonna have to make sure that our link profile is more well-rounded and so on and so forth.
Well, I think that’ll do it. I’m exhausted. I always try and pick topics that I can kind of go in on without…there’s no notes. There’s no like…to be totally honest, before I got here, I looked over the ideas, and I was like “Okay, I think I know how to answer that one. That was the extent of…and I just picked the one right before that I could sort of go in on. And what happens is we end up with a 30-minute thing because I pick topics that I just so like kind of passionate about. And it becomes a mess.
So forgive me. Guys, thank you as always for your attention. It’s amazing. It means a lot to me. And I hope that I have brought some value to you. You can return the favor. You don’t have to, but I would appreciate it, of course. If you wanna see more videos like this, subscribe please, please, please. If you’re checking this video out on Facebook, then like my page, /theadamgsteele. And more than anything, I just love to engage with you. Leave a comment in Facebook, leave a comment in YouTube, hit me up on Twitter, @adamgsteele again. And get in touch, ask me some questions. Give me something to do. Make these videos worthwhile for you, because, like I’ve said before, like I’m not doing them for me. I’m doing them to try and help you.
So if you’ve got questions, you let me know, and we’ll make it happen. We’ll get you some answers. And we will cater the show based on what you want to hear about. So anyway, thank you very much. I do appreciate it. And you have yourself a wonderful day.
