This episode covers a LOT of territory. We talk about everything from managing clients & why I love remote workers, to SEO, Citations, Pokemon & Podcasts!
[Transcript]
Adam: On this episode, we take lots and lots and lots and lots of dope questions.
Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of “The Steele Entrepreneur Show.” This is episode eight… Eight? Nine? Nine! Thank you, Brandon. I don’t know… It shouldn’t be that hard. We’re in the single digit still, and yet I struggle. How’s it going Brandon?
Brandon: Oh, pretty good.
Adam: Good, man. You had a good week?
Brandon: I had a great week. But I got something for you, though. This is your possible camera with, you think, I’m checking out?
Adam: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Brandon: There’s two lenses in there.
Adam: Holy crap, okay.
Brandon: But you don’t get the bag, though.
Adam: So I’m thinking of… What’s in there? I’m thinking of stepping up my game. If you guys haven’t checked out the “Adam Answers SEO” question-answer type stuff. So I do these little clips and… Oh, that’s nice. And right now, as some of you probably noticed, the audio quality stinks. So I’ve been thinking about getting another camera that has sort of an audio input/output thing-a-doo. So that I can use one of these sort of lapel type mics. That’s slick. Let’s check that out after. All righty. Thank you, Brandon. All right, put that down there.
Well, in case you’re curious, Brandon, I’ve had a pretty good week.
Brandon: I’m terrible.
Adam: Today, a little bit low energy though, which sucks. I think this week has taken a little bit of a toll on me, unfortunately. And usually, it doesn’t. Usually, throughout the week, I’m super high energy. But today I think come Friday, the sleep finally starts to gnaw… Rather the lack of sleep starts to gnaw at me and sort of remind me, “Hey dude, you’re getting to your limit. It’s time to catch up.” And so on the weekends that’s when I usually catch up.
But, we got a couple of new clients that I’m really excited about. And I was putting… Check out the Facebook page. I had this little convo back and forth with a fellow name Dev Basu, and he was…
I mean, this show, sometimes it can be a little bit selfish in that I’m trying to learn. And so he was walking me through how he sells. And I don’t really have a sales process. I just don’t. I mean what I do have just it kind of sucks. Anyways, I employed his sales technique on one of these leads that we had this week and closed them on the phone first call. It was amazing. Now, mind you, it wasn’t a huge deal or anything. And it was referral so it was already warm. But still, like that doesn’t usually happen. So, pretty cool.
My buddy wrote a book. Patrick Coombe, I think that’s how you pronounce his last name. I’m not going to do a lot of these, kind of, little sort of promotional things. But Patrick has been really good to me over the years and he’s been really good to the industry. He’s always there contributing and always there helping out in, sort of, the SEO industry. And become, sort of, the fabric of the community. And I haven’t, to be honest, read page… You know, front to back but I’ve read three, four pages and it’s really well done. So I would check that out if you’re looking to get up on your SEO game.
Other than that, let’s get into the show. What do we got? What’s the question? We’re just gonna bang out some questions today. Because sometimes we don’t have a lot of questions and sometimes we do. So what do we got, Brandon? What’s question one?
Brandon: How do you handle client managements?
Adam: That’s a good one to start with because it’s a little bit thick. Some of you will have read a blog post that I wrote some time ago on Trello and Scrum. So we get clients involved in Trello which is a piece of free project management software. And we get them sort of educated on Scrum. Scrum basically is a… It is a tool, I guess. Not like a physical tool or a software tool or anything like that. But it’s more of a way of doing things. A way of doing things faster, essentially. And I’ve had a couple of episodes about it before. We get them involved on that. We educate them on that.
Now, I’m just backpedaling a little bit. If you’ve chosen the right clients and that is an entirely different discussion. But if you’ve chosen the right clients then quite frankly, you shouldn’t have to manage them. They should just sort of manage themselves. There should be no real management at all. You have your deliverables that you’ve, you know, promised to them on a monthly basis. In our case, sometimes, we do a little bit of just one-time type work, but we also do retainer-based work. And we’ve sort of drawn out the expectations. We’ve let them know what we’re gonna do every month. And it should be kind of that simple.
We collaborate in a huge way with our clients. Trello sort of enables that. We bring our clients into Trello which I think a lot of people would be uncomfortable with. Or that’s sort of the feedback I’ve got that they’re not really comfortable with their clients seeing everything. Every nook and cranny of what their team is doing.
But for us, we kind of take another look at… We look at this a little bit differently. If we know what our client can see every message we send amongst each other to do with a particular project… Now mind you, we do use Slack so there’s a little bit of private communication there. But anything to do with a project, we’re quite strict about either… If it doesn’t happen in the client Slack channel… Now, we don’t have clients in Slack with us but we have like a channel set up for each client. If it doesn’t happen there, then it must happen in Trello itself. So on the Trello board for that particular client. Which is to say, we have a Trello board, a unique board for every single client that we have.
And again, go back to some of those, some of our earlier episodes, I wanna say two or three, where we talk about Scrum and sort of explains the setup. And again, there’s a video on the Magistrate blog, magistrateinc.com/blog/scrum something or other. And it’ll show you, with an actual video, like a screencast of how I set that up or how my team sets it up. And that’s the management.
Like that’s the management side is we’re working in there, they can see everything. Everything is transparent which keeps us real honest. It keeps us super accountable because we’ve said, you know, this is what you’re getting. And they can see us as we’re doing it. And they can see, like they can see the difference between a slow week and a big week. And that is like how many tasks we have queued up or how much communication there is during that particular week or all that kind of stuff.
Like if we slack off, they notice which is great because we can’t slack off then, and sometimes that will happen. Sometimes, we will be tempted to focus elsewhere, tempted to be pulled a different direction. But we know that the client is watching and I think that, for us, that’s really important. And quite honestly, we don’t fine any clients nit-picking. Or I don’t think we’ve ever been called out or anything. I think the only thing we’ve really had to be careful about and we’ve made the mistake once, is language. We are a team of cussers. We like to cuss and that can’t exist on the Trello board. It’s just not professional. So, we try and temper our language a little bit and everything works fine. And everybody seems to be pretty comfortable with it.
I think at the start, it might have been a little bit shaky. But now everybody’s used to it and so we don’t worry too much. We have a couple of clients that do not do the Trello board. We’ve included them on it and they’re just not having it. And those are the campaigns that never, ever, ever, ever, ever do as well as those with which we manage with the Trello board. And those clients which collaborate with us and communicate with us on a daily basis. It’s not a big time commitment. Like, I tell them, “Expect to spend 30 minutes per week communicating with us.” Like, that’s nothing. I mean, really, it would be nice to get more than that but 30 minutes is fine so.
And I mean, we could get into sort of the organizational structure, account managers. You know, we kind of have I think a pretty typical system. An account manager who manages X amount of accounts. And then he basically has a talent pool available to him. And so, the account manager is added to the board. The talent pool, meaning like link builders, citation builders, designers, developers, programmers, you know, SEOs, etc., they’re all added to the board. So then that account manager has that pool of talent available to him or her. And he or she can just sort of assign different tasks to them related to what deliverables we have promised them for that month so. And we could go a lot deeper than that but I think we’ll just leave it there. And we’ll leave some of those follow-up questions for another question.
Brandon: Building your business for growth, I imagine you started contracting to freelance/other suppliers first. What about your first employee? Were they part-time or full-time and what kind of duties did they do? Were they masters of all or did they have one job?
Adam: Gotcha! So, we are still contractors. We have zero employees which will surprise some people. But it was a choice that we made early on and we have not felt the need to do anything differently, to have employees. There has been the pull occasionally where, you know? It’s kind of glamorous almost to have employees that show up from 9:00 to 5:00 and come to an office and all that kind of thing. Like, I get the glamour in that. I get that it would be nice if someone screws up, you could reach over and strangle them kind of thing. But, at the same time, how glamorous is it that everybody, you know, works when they wanna work, works where they wanna work, at whatever time they wanna to work. They just have, you know, absolute freedom.
And what I’ve found is that I could find as good as, quality-wise, people as I might find as employees, if not better. Because I don’t have just Vancouver to pick from. I can pick from… We’ve got people in Seattle. We have people on the east coast of Canada. We have people in Africa. We have people in Uruguay. We have people in Mexico. We have people in Africa. Like I’m able to pick, I mean, sort of like the best that I can find regardless of where they live. And as long as they get their work done on time and the quality is high, I mean how awesome is that?
I don’t have to worry about… My job already is HR enough, you know, managing personalities and all that. Like, if I had employees, well then, at this point, for sure, I’d have to have like an HR manager and like an HR assistant. And that would be crap. Like, I don’t want that. That would be horrible. I mean for me anyways, for my personality, and for what I imagine I wanna build. I don’t want that. Instead, I have this freedom, this flexibility. And everybody sort of shares in that freedom and that flexibility. And I think everybody’s happier for it.
So, from day one, we were a subcontractors and to date, we are subcontractors. And…
Brandon: Do you mind if I interject?
Adam: Yeah, please.
Brandon: Great. How would you create a culture, a company culture when everyone is in their own vicinity? And I bring it up because I find with my partner when things get stressful, it trickles down into their personal life. And then I help them with their personal life stuff and their work goes back up to sixth gear. But if you’re not seeing them in the flesh, I could imagine it’s harder to assist them.
Adam: Yeah, really good question. Culture-wise, we were very lucky. For the first couple of years, maybe first few years, there was little culture at all. And that was because we were kind of off in our own worlds. We weren’t working on these Trello boards. You know, everybody had their task and that’s all they knew. The beauty of these Trello boards is it gets everybody involved in this project, in this client. And people don’t just know their piece of the puzzle, they now get to see other people’s part of the puzzle.
I saw things really changed and I think the catalyst in part was Slack, getting us into Slack. And strangely enough, people just… It just sort of came. Now, it doesn’t mean we’re chatting all day or anything like that. But there seems to be just sort of a genuine sort of care and interest and kind of regard for one another. And I sort of recognize that we all have our own lives outside of the work we do. And so for some folks, like they come to work, they work and then they get the hell out. And that’s fine, that’s fine.
As far as the personal stuff, it’s definitely limiting. And especially with someone like me where I’m not paying attention. Like I’m not hitting you up daily and saying, “Hey, how are you feeling today?” You know, I don’t see that, obviously because they’re remote. I just don’t take the time to do that and that’s kind of on me. And I do wish in the future to try and make a bigger effort but we’re moving so fast and it’s just right now, it’s not a reality.
I mean, right now, a perfect situation ,I am very likely gonna lose one of my best developers and it’s because… You know, we met about a month ago. I didn’t ask the right questions. And I did not know that he was struggling in his personal life. That he was not getting the kind of, you know, satisfaction that he wants in his job and in what he does. And he just wasn’t feeling very motivated or anything like that. So, I missed that and I might have seen that or made myself more available to him had we not been sort of in a remote environment.
So, yeah, like Brandon that happens and it guts me but it happens rarely. It really happens rarely. I think part of the remote lifestyle is you kind of start to learn that you… In part, you’re kind of on your own. You are your own boss. You have to learn to deal with these things and we all try and make ourselves there as a resource to each other. But if you’re not, sort of, willing to come to us, and I know how hard that can be. But if you’re not willing to seek the help, nobody is really gonna, sort of, ask you or even see it. So, it’s always a struggle.
Brandon: Is there a point where you stop building citations? How many in a certain time frame, are too many?
Adam: Good question. So that’s Jake Hoover over at Tim McHaley. They are a wonderful client of mine. And I guess… I mean, I kind of have sort of a magic number and it kind of depends. It’s gonna to depend a little bit on what the people who are winning in your market, in your niche at what do they have. Both from a quality standpoint, a type standpoint, a number standpoint. My recommendation would be to dig in. Dig in and figure out what’s your top three. For your, let’s say, like [inaudible 00:18:18] top five of your main search terms or key words, run them through like local citation finder for example. And check out what they have for citations. Or if you wanna go even deeper… What would I do?
That’s too… We’ve got… We do like this competitive analysis now with our citation audits. So when you order a citation audit which is basically just like an audit of all the local business directories. And any instances of name, address, phone number online, you get everything. Like, quite honesty, we find like the strangest shit out there, where your business information exists. You know, there’s no like… We don’t leave anything behind, it’s just like that is the picture.
So with that audit, we include a competition analysis. And so we’ll run your five key words both manually and… So by a manual means but also using the local citation finder. And we will sort of find and organize all the citations that your competitors have for your top five key words. But further, we’re going to go to our list and to our previous research. And figure out where people have… Typically people who are successful in your market so, say Vancouver, or your niche and that might mean like iCare professionals across Canada, or iCare professionals the United States. What do they typically have based on our findings. And we’ll include that list, we’ll include… So that’s two lists and then there’s the buy keyword list and we’ll include all of that.
And so then you get a really good idea of what you need based on what your competitors have. And you get a sense of how many key of these citations your competitors have. And I mean, SEO has always been like this, you do what your competitor has done and then do more, same thing. So, I don’t know that there’s a magical number. If I was to assign one, I would say somewhere in the space of 50 to 125 depending on niche, market, popularity, etc., etc. I usually aim for between 75 and 100. And after that, you know, I start thinking about diversity of citation. You have photo citations, you have video citations, you have image citations… or I already said that one, audio citations, video citations like…
I don’t like just local business directory citations or, you know, name, address, phone number on local business directories. I like to see it elsewhere because for me, I believe that’s natural. I believe that your NAP, name, address, phone number, is gonna appear elsewhere. It’s not just gonna be on local business directories and so I try and mimic that. Not to mention, these are like high quality sites. YouTube, Flickr, etc., these are like high quality sites and I think there is a great value to being on those sites as well.
So after you sort of hit the number of say local business directory style citations, then I think you need to start thinking about diversity, if not already. And I think it’s just like, when you start running out of quality, like when the quality starts to suffer, stop. And just try and keep an eye on that. And, yeah, that’s how I play that.
And then don’t forget like blog post, whatever. Name, address, phone number, that’s what a citation is occurring online. It doesn’t need to be in a local business directory. It could be anywhere. Right? When you’re building, you should also be thinking citation building. You get a guest blog somewhere, get that NAP in, ask them for that NAP. Go back to all your existing links. Knock on some doors, “Hey, I saw you published this for us, thank you very much. Could we sneak in this NAP?” Right? It doesn’t have to be limited to local business directories. So think wider, think more diverse.
That was good. l like that one.
Brandon: Some business hire their own dedicated person to do SEO. What do you think the pros and cons are versus hiring an agency?
Adam: I think it’s a cost thing, a cost in expectations, cost in goals. If your needs are very small and you just don’t… Maybe you’re already doing very well in Google or maybe your digital marketing is already on point, then maybe you don’t need a lot. But, for most businesses we see, hiring a single person, you’re not gonna get that multi… You’re rarely gonna get that multi-disciplinary, if that’s a word, I think it is, type of individual. Somebody who’s strong at link-building, copywriting, conversion rate optimization, email marketing, social ads, you know, PPC, etc. You’re not gonna get that by just… You know, it’s rare. Like, I know maybe a handful of people that I would trust to do all of that. And these are guys who had been doing it for a long time. And they’re gonna cost a lot of money, right? You hire one of these guys, you’re looking at a $120,000, $150,000 a year right?
How much is an agency gonna cost you, right? Probably, you know, like a half-decent agency is gonna cost you five grand a month, three grand a month, that type of thing, right? And as they get better and as they get more sort of elite and as they get bigger, they get even more expensive. So I mean, if you can’t get… And these types of people I’m talking about they get snatched up. You’re gonna be hard pressed to find somebody who is strong at all these things. Not even just at that rate but also just find them, period. Like they’re just hard to find. I would not count myself one of them. Yeah, they’re hard to find. So I think that’s gonna be a challenge.
And I mean, if you start adding things up, like let’s say you hire an SEO to come in-house, okay. So that’s minimum 60 grand a year. And now you need a copywriter’s time. So I mean, you’re not gonna bring on a full-time copywriter but let’s say you bring one on part-time to help with the projects. Copywriting rates, a good copywriter is gonna be expensive. Now, what if you need a developer? Okay, good developers, expensive as well. Now, who’s gonna manage all this? Do you have the time? No, maybe not. So now you need to hire someone to manage this marketing effort. You’re already spending more and likely getting less than you will with a good marketing firm.
So it’s needs and costs. You just got to balance those and figure those out and make your decision based on that. I can’t think of too many situations that I’ve come across in the past where somebody could… Some single person was working for a company, had been hired by a company to do everything, and did it very successfully. I just haven’t seen it. So I’m sure it exists, but I just haven’t seen it. So, yeah, good question, really good question. I like that one.
Brandon: Can you recommend any podcasts? Bonus if they’re under an hour.
Adam: I always recommend the “JockO” podcast. I’m freakin’ in love with it. It’s the first podcast I look for every time I look for a podcast. And I’ve talked about that a million times so I won’t go too much into that. I like “The Tim Ferriss Show” because there’s just… I mean, that’s gonna to be a longer one. Shit, those are both long ones. But I have to mention them because the quality is just so tremendous. You know, let me see. I’ve got a lot but they’re not… My memory isn’t so good, unfortunately. Let’s see here.
Brandon: Question for you.
Adam: Yeah, go for it.
Brandon: Have you played Pokémon GO, yet?
Adam: No. Who’s got time for that?
Brandon: Like millions of people.
Adam: I know, it’s crazy, man.
Brandon: Like it is nuts. I see kids, I walk by parks.
Adam: They’re just full of kids.
Brandon: I’ve never seen anybody in this park, nearby my place. And I walked by the other day and there’s like 30 Asian kids just meandering.
Adam: I wonder… Now, if we were to strap a Fitbit to each one of those people and compare it to, you know, pre-Pokémon, how much more exercise are these people getting? It’s kind of amazing. Like, I love the idea, I love everything about it. It’s just how… If I was to play it, it would be to come up with a business model. Or rather I mean, they have a business model, but to come up with for the business of my own to exploit this amazingness that they have created. And I’m just not there yet.
Brandon: If we had as much time as we did when we were 12…
Adam: Oh, I would love that. I had Pokémon cards, man. Like I have…
Brandon: That’s our generation.
Adam: Dude, I had like a binder about that thick. I mean, maybe there’s gonna be… Like those are worth something now. It could be, man.
Brandon: That was our generation when it came out. I talked to some of the kids at my martial arts school and they’re playing Pokémon GO. And they had never seen an episode of Pokémon or played the Game Boy game or played the cards. They don’t quite get how cool it is to have that old Game Boy game translated into this augmented reality.
Adam: I’ve noticed on Yik Yak, this is like just such a guilty pleasure of mine, I’d check out Yik Yak before I go to bed for a couple of laughs. There is, it’s all Pokémon now. It’s totally taken over. And the people that are on Yik Yak are typically sort of… I think they’re pretty much a younger demographic. They’re in their late teens, early 20s, maybe even mid-teens. At least that’s what I gather anyways just from being on their everyday. And it’s all Pokémon. Like, every second Yak is about Pokémon so it is taking over. I mean, it’s crazy. It’s just amazing. I look forward to studying that one day.
So, “Common Sense with Dan Carlin,” if you’re into politics or anything like that. I have a very weak, poor understanding of American politics. And that’s because I don’t understand government in the United States. So, it can be a little bit tough for me. But still, like I do pick up at least one thing every one of these episodes that he puts out. “The Top” with Nathan Latka. I was on that once upon a time and it’s good. “Growth Everywhere,” I wanna say it’s Eric Siu. I don’t listen to that too often but when I do, I really like what I hear. “Planet Money, Criminal… This American Life” a little bit. “Reply All” is good. I listen to the “TED Talks.” Obviously, “The Ask Gary Vee Show,” I love that. And those are nice and quick and dirty, like 20, 30 minutes.
Oh, there is one I just signed up for but I can’t find it. Oh, yeah, the “Tony Robbins” podcast. I’ve never really listen much to Tony Robbins. But I’m starting to get into it a little bit and hear a little bit of what he’s saying and there’s some pretty powerful stuff in there. And it’s 20, 30 minutes. Sometimes, you know, he’s got a guest on or sometimes a guest sort of takes over the podcast or… But I think it’s just repurposed content, honestly. I’m pretty sure this… I’m only like two episodes in but it’s just content that’s been repurposed from other things, which is fine. It’s good content. It’s content that you probably otherwise have to pay for or be somewhere, you know, at one of his conferences or events to see. So I thought that was pretty cool. Yeah, those are my favorite ones I think.
There’s some other ones here but I’m not gonna mention them because I don’t listen to them often enough to really comment. But, yeah, podcasts were kind of my… I spent a lot of time, like I think for the first seven years of my business, I didn’t read a single business book, basically, like quite honestly. And I was ignorant. I thought that I knew all the answers and it took some real sort of shaking, like a real shake to understand that I knew so little of the answers. And that I was kind of running my business like a maniac. And that I was being so ignorant and silly.
So podcasts were kind of my first, not wake-up call, but it was my first introduction to, “Hey, you should start learning.” And they were very easily digested, quick clips. I can’t remember which was the first one I picked up. It got me into fiction reading again after not having read anything since like elementary school. And then that got me into audio books. And then now I’m back into books and now I’m like practically a full-time learner so.
If you find yourself in the same position, I think podcasts are good sort of doorway content, especially on- the-go content. Like I listen to them while I’m doing the dishes, while I’m gardening, while I’m walking around in my house, while I’m walking outside of my house. Going to the gym, in the gym, in the car. Every moment I have an opportunity, I’m listening to an audio book or a podcast, it’s just it’s all there. Why wouldn’t you? I don’t know, I was so silly before. But anyways, I have learned my lesson and now I’m destroying books. So that’s pretty good. I’d recommend those ones, for sure.
So yeah, I guess that’s it. Yeah?
Brandon: That’s it.
Adam: Cool. I want a question of the day. I wanna ask a question. Do you have a good question? What’s your favorite podcast?
Brandon: I like the “Dan Carlin, Hardcore History.”
Adam: Yes. Now, I didn’t mention that one because it’s a longer one.
Brandon: It’s huge.
Adam: That’s a meal, that’s several meals.
Brandon: And they’re worth it.
Adam: Yes, they’re amazing.
Brandon: Just get in your car and drive around aimlessly to listen to it.
Adam: Oh, I would get in an accident. I listen to those and I disappear. I become like a zombie because I’m so… I love war stories. And the way he just… I wish I could communicate stories or communicate anything, a tenth of as well as he does. He just makes something that would otherwise be… You know, we would otherwise try and digest it and it would be very dry. He makes it interesting and exciting. Yeah, I had not enjoyed history… I enjoyed history in like grade 10 and then I totally distanced myself from it and then I started listening to him so.
Guys, let me know what your favorite podcast is. I’d really like to know. I need some new podcasts for my listening pleasure so I’m eager to hear that. So, cool.
Thank you for listening to me ramble, again, on episode nine. I do appreciate it. If you got any value from this show, I hope you will take just a minute and leave a comment. Let us know, let me know that you enjoyed it, what you enjoyed about it, what you would’ve enjoyed more.
Let me know if you have any questions. Honestly, I’m so happy to answer them. I was very, very, very happy to get the questions we received for this episode. Mind you, I had to shake a couple people down to get them, but, it’s all good. I’d much rather get them from other people than… You know, sometimes, I have topics. Sometimes, I’ve got something going on in the week and I’ll start talking about that but, yeah, it’s cool to get questions. I really like that.
So if you have any, hit us up in the comment section, hit us up on Twitter, @adamgsteele. Hit me up wherever. I’m around and I’m available and I’m eager to answer your questions. Thank you again. I appreciate your attention. Please subscribe, please tell your friends about the show, please follow us on Facebook. Have a great day, you guys. Bye.
