How to Automate Your Agency

Key Takeaways

um [Music] hey what's up guys welcome to the copy blogger podcast my name is tim stoddart thank you so much for joining us as always we have my friend and my co-host ethan brooks hi ethan how are you doing good man how you doing i'm excellent i'm excited about today's episode we have some really cool topics lined up for the next couple weeks and i've been feeling great about the previous topics as well it seems like every week after we we hit publish me and you are getting dms sometimes in the same chat sometimes separately with people saying that they really love the recent episodes so if you have been giving us good vibes we hear you we see you we really appreciate it thank you so much and uh one quick announcement before we jump right into the show we have a website now so when you hear us talk about the show notes you can find all of their show notes you can find links to everything that we might mention or reference in the episodes it's very simple copybloggerpod.com and if you would like sign up for the email list we'll send you some goodies and we got some cool stuff lined up there as well but that's it let's uh let's jump right into it ethan you said you had uh said you had a way to tee this one off yeah well okay so we are for the second week now covering something that you have created recently this is the uh this is the article on statsy.com this week and it's all about how you've automated all the processes inside your agency and you sent this to me this morning i thought it was awesome i'd love to go through it and just kind of pepper you with some questions at each step and in order to start that let me just tee this up at a high level to make sure that i understand all the crucial pieces of this equation and then we can dig into each segment like as we go so at a super high level i guess there's like two things that i wanted to call out the first is a single quote from the intro and then the second is the high level structure for how you made this piece this is this sentence really jumped out at me so i'm curious as to what it is is right up here at the top man your success in business is determined by the boring tedious detail-oriented processes that make your business run efficiently we'll come back to that in a second but such a great line in fact i wanted to say like overall and people should go check out this article obviously we're going to talk about it here we'll link to it in the show notes but i just wanted to say before we get into it this is like very well written piece i mean you you cover a lot of ground in this in a way that's really clear and i i know just from experience how hard that is so uh good job on this let me make sure i fully like understand the scope of it i would say there's basically three maybe four segments i think three segments to this piece and they're they're sort of like the three different systems that are crucial for the success of your business the first is the sales and marketing funnel so you basically created this sales and marketing funnel that is running on autopilot and we'll dig into the individual pieces of that but it basically has allowed you to continue bringing in more and more of the right types of qualified clients and i think that was really interesting section then there's this intermediary step onboarding and account services so once you're bringing in these leads and basically closing that business there is a set of automations in place that takes new business and transfer them to their account their account owner their account manager and we can dig into that and then the third piece of the equation is this relationship between strategy and project management parts of your team and this was interesting because as you mentioned in the article these are two teams that basically have a different set of responsibilities and very different communication protocols their strategy doesn't want to be communicating a lot because they just kind of need to be in the weeds of figuring out what strategy is but project management needs to be communicating quite often those two teams rely on each other and so you had to create a series of systems that allowed them to interact without sort of undermining what each has to do so i think that's the high level right that's pulling the business in getting them online getting them set up with their account manager and then making sure that the strategy can be carried out planned and carried out at speed without any major roadblocks were there any pieces of this that you don't feel like i mentioned there because i think those are the sections i want to focus on and i want to do them in a certain order no and ethan let me tell you the fact that you were able to conceptualize what i was trying to say is like i thank you for recognizing that i can't remember the last time i had an article stress me out this much it's so dry and like instruction oriented that um boy i struggled with this one a lot really really i did i really really did and so to hear that you totally got it in the i even publishing this this morning when i sent it to you i was like i'm still editing this and i was just really trying to figure out the the perfect order of sentences to because a lot of it's visual like there's a lot of times i was like if i could just show you guys the documents that i'm talking about it would make perfect sense but i can't one because that would be an efficient but two because a lot of that has like pertinent information on it that i can't share you know and so i was like how do i explain what the hell i'm talking about without actually just saying this is what the worksheet looks like this is what the spreadsheet looks like this is what the such and such looks like so so thank you and i really mean that this one stressed me out for real well yeah absolutely i mean i know how hard it is to write clearly so i'm not going to say that i am surprised this stressed you out but it's very clear piece so i i know how much work went into it um and it's super tactical too so i want to let's get into some of this let's get into some of the nitty gritty here yeah um do you mind shooting screen control back over to me so that i can share my screen we'll just go through this top bottom by the way i wanted to say like the reason i think we should go through this there's a couple reasons one it's good we have a lot of agency owners that listen to this i think yeah um so this is going to offer a really great set of frameworks people can use to maybe extricate yourself from the day-to-day as a agency owner scale some of your operations start making more money if that's uh like a current goal also similar to the conversation last week i think a lot of this would actually transfer to other certain types of businesses yeah like the one that comes to mind for me and this is probably because that's where i spend a lot of my time would be like newsletters specifically ad sales or if you're doing like extremely high ticket courses i think there'd be some crossover too but the process of doing agency work is very very similar at least in terms of the customer interaction as the process of doing the ad work like this isn't really just limited to agency owners i think there's a lot of different businesses that can learn from something like this so let's let's dive in i'm going to start at the top up here and i want to i want to start by going through your automated process for generating leads and let me just see real quick how far this goes okay let's call this a five step process that starts i think a lot of people will be very familiar with this but i want to dive into each of these sections and ask one or two different questions so the five steps are this get traffic drive them to an email sign up use your email drips to create trust by well for the content that you send them sort of drive those email readers to a live call and then use that call to close the sale that's high level and then in this piece you broke down specifically how you do each day so let me let me start with let's start with number two so step one as i said was drive traffic you guys do that through content marketing that's what kind of blogger is all about so if everybody has questions for that yeah literally just go read anything on happy blogger but this was interesting so you said we generate in the email step you say we generate most of our email leads or email like emails email address captures by giving away long-form pdfs and guides that users can read on their own time so talk to me a little bit about this because what i'd love to do is dig in and and kind of understand two things how do you decide which guides you want to launch as a company like how do you how do you kind of is that process similar to the blogs that you write or how do you decide on topics for that and what are some of the topics that have worked really well for you guys so far like what is what is the most effective pdf that you see the most downloads on well we decide which guides to write because we only put guides together for cornerstone pages we talked about cornerstone pages on this podcast a couple times but any service business specifically something something that has really direct intent behind what it is that you are selling and this is this will work for any media company it's not necessarily has to be an agency there's a ton of crossover with newsletters because there's still an interaction between like you and a client you know it's just like who the client is changes and so your mental framework changes a little bit but the the system stays exactly the same same thing for your website there's something for like boring service businesses if you're doing like house cleaning or um like any service really yeah absolutely so a cornerstone pages is any website will have about 10 to 20 pages that the rest of the web website kind of links around so in the case of stadzi internet marketing.com is my agency this blog my personal blog is on timstodds.com i know i like use my childhood nickname too much in my in my [ __ ] but i hope you can get it and so there's only six cornerstone pages that we have on on statsy and it's the industries we serve so this part is important and we talked about it before but this is always why my conversion rate and my time spent selling is so low in relation to the amount of money that we generate because of how targeted it is so everyone knows what sashi does it won't probably not everybody but i think a lot of people listening we market specifically to behavioral health care centers so that's drug rehab facilities drug detox facilities mental health facilities eating disorder facilities and there's a there's two different variations of um what we call harm reduction which is like not necessarily treatment it's just kind of like a long-term medication that keeps um somebody that needs help from like doing anything stupid basically and so it's it's those six keywords and that's it and people really really over complicate this i got this trick from noah kagan and he used to do this on sumo.com where he would write these super super long form guides and this is when it clicked for me where it's all the pdf is is convenience and he would say it on the top of the blog on sumo.com it would just say don't have time to read this we'll click here to download the guide i was like i don't have to write a full guide i already wrote the cornerstone page so let me just take this page word for word and turn it into a pdf like i don't have to do it over and over again but somebody who is serious about needing these services is going to be the kind of person that says you know what while i'm tomorrow morning while i'm drinking my coffee i'm going to print this thing out and sit down and really really read it right and so like at the end of this these these steps we'll go through them all but it says that the the prospect has qualified themselves like many many times and so this is just step one of the qualification process you know like if you're willing to download a 22 page pdf and read it as like an instruction manual as a way to grow you know whatever business that you're working on that's a qualification mechanism and so it's it's very simple but that's how we do it that's fascinating i didn't realize that that you basically took the text from the cornerstone page and that is the guide so i like that it's got to be really strong for different seo reasons so for somebody who's thinking about doing this for their own site let's say that they are aware of what one or two of their cornerstone pages would be can you just give me the high level like structure for those pages like what's going into these guides is it you said it's 22 pages so what are the kind of the major milestones inside that piece well it's 22 pages when you put it together on a pdf which includes like graphics like we spice them up you know i got a designer on fiverr charge me 150 bucks and i say hey here's here's 3 000 words turn this into like a really cool pdf i think the one in particular is 4 000 words which is closer to 22 pages but they typically won't have to be that long what goes into it is education and like this is another qualifier because what you're doing this is what i've done and you can see this even in the the articles that i write on my personal blog i'm telling people exactly what to do and then you're just banking on the fact that people are busy and they got [ __ ] to do in their own lives and they're like why am i going to bother doing all this when this person already knows how to do it right so you're just you're qualifying yourself by saying like hey if you want to do it on your own go ahead like this is the copy blogger why education sells teaching sales if you want to do it on your own go ahead here's how to do it i'll build my credibility through this content but if you want to hire an expert then we've already shown through these long-form pieces that we've written that like we're the best in the business so just don't bother and hire us that's awesome okay so giveaway cornerstone page does by the way that's like that's why it's so long form it's like this is everything you need to know to facilitate such and such service that's the key word and when okay and so when you're linking to a cornerstone page from other sections of the site the idea is you have this one like long piece all about say i don't know seo for healthcare companies that's like a cornerstone page or seo for uh harm reduction that one of the types of harm reduction companies and other articles link off to that do they link back to it exactly okay okay interesting we start by creating long-form content that draws people to the website then you are basically offering this long form content in downloadable form and like linking other pieces of content to this cornerstone page next step or steps three four and five were were interesting and quick but the one that i really wanted to call out was three so once those people join your email list you say we generate all our leads and phone calls through email marketing again because of what you said that helps qualify readers as serious potential clients and what i thought was really interesting about the way you set this out was you said so step three is basically what does the email drip look like and your framework is trust and proof and he said specifically that well trust is basically like here is showing you we know what we're doing so here's like how to basically do this and then proof is here's what we've done so testimonials client case study stuff like that and what i thought was really cool is that you cycle between these two on and off throughout the course of the email trip and you have a screenshot here that goes like literally trust proof trust proof trust how did you guys develop that where did that come from and how do you think about this when you're like writing new email groups i don't know one of the ways that i i remember thinking about trust for the first time was listening to a podcast this was years ago when i lived in boca with the six principles of persuasion and one of them is uh is social proof and uh i remember seeing in websites so much there where everybody put their facebook likes on their website remember you just have like little buttons that showed like this page has like 80 000 facebook questions yeah yeah and back in turned out to be it was so long yeah yeah that was so long ago right but i i just i remember toying with that in my mind and it came to me that trust is just your reputation that's all it is trust is your reputation like what would people say about you if you weren't there that's like your reputation and then proof is so i i discovered proof because it got so easy to close deals when people were calling me through the website and i'm doing exactly the thing that people are going to hire me to do and so i had this line seos have a bad rep let's like just be honest about that right and so there's plenty of seos that have just like made false promises and over hyped themselves and didn't really do anything and so i would get this rebuttal a lot well how do i know that this is going to work and so i'd say well how did you find me i thought you were gonna yeah i thought you were gonna say the uh the tommy boy line like well i could give you a real good look at a t-bone statement oh my goodness would you rather take his word for it i want to say that how did you find me okay so i'm doing it i'm literally i'm drinking my own or i'm i'm implementing my own strategies here and that's how you found me so that's how you know it's going to work exactly and so that was proof where once i started doing i was like look you don't have to listen to me just look at what i've done like you found me through google obviously i know how to do that i don't know if i've ever had like a white light moment about this but i think another one actually was um ramit sethi recommended a book it was like one of his mentors or something and in the book i can't remember what it's called it's in my bookshelf over there i can find it in the show notes uh there was a chapter all about risk and the idea that the person who is buying is taking all of the risk and so like however you can get rid of as much risk as possible you'll open up your conversions and so that's why like everything i do is a 30-day money-back guarantee you know it's just like no risk there's no risk there's no risk and so i remember hearing that as well and thinking about selling a service in the same way that you would sell a digital product through like these these these automations where like what can i do to take as much risk out of it as possible so i don't know like i said i never had like a like a aha moment from it it just sort of came together over the culmination of like experimenting with a bunch of these things because how would you how could you not call like seriously when i read this automation sometimes i'm just like who wouldn't send an appointment with me like this is why it'll work this is what we've already done this is how many phone calls we generated this is what people are saying about us yeah that's pretty straightforward what i liked about this breakdown specifically was that i think this trust proof combo would work pretty much anywhere too it's just email marketing is a great example but like if you're building a social media strategy i think there's something that could be done with this there so like you know we talk a lot about twitter threads in this show twitter threads are great for building trust uh showing that you know what you're talking about i don't know that i've ever seen i guess i do see people from time to time use them to build to show proof and actually i don't think a lot of people are really good at that but it would be a great way to stand out like to take those case studies that people are currently putting on their websites or in their email and use the same framework there i just i like how reductive this is it's very like very simple you can remember this it reminds me of sahil's strategy too what he does for twitter is he uses um i don't want to put words in his mouth but basically there's like two different types of stories that he'll share one is like authority or trust i guess which is what you would classify as it classify it as here where he'll teach you something about finance you know this was back in the early days when he was pretty much exclusively focused on finance and those are great but i think a lot of people will tune out if they're just constantly being taught and so the second side of the coin was always stories and it would be like incredible stories from the history of finance like crazy scams that had been pulled off or yeah market changes stuff like that so that ability to take something like present and flip the coin present the other side present percent flip flip i think there's a lot of power to that and i like how simple this was so that's trust and proof you're sending these emails and then at the bottom of every single email there's a link where people can go through to your calendly page total power move linking off to account only page well i want to talk about this thing for a second though i really do wait the whole calendly power trip thing or this no this this strategy like if you're just starting out don't do this if you're just starting out put the phone number at the top of your website and talk to as many freaking people as you can and like this was why i was having a really really hard time with this article because there's so much stuff that i wanted to say you know and like even within the departments that we're going to talk about there's like automations that we put together and so i was i was struggling with it man i am in a very fortunate position where we have earned the privilege to protect our time as like ruthlessly as possible and so we'll go through it ethan will talk through it like this is another qualifying measure so that i only talk to people who are serious about you know spending real money with us but if you're just starting off put phone numbers all over your website and like point red arrows to them and be like i'll talk to you about your dog i'll help you order a pizza like i don't care talk to as many people as you can i just wanted to make sure i i put that out there that's a great tip yeah i uh i hadn't thought about that that that's a good tip it reminds me two of the uh breakdown on different landing pages that we did that one time where the guys got there's one copywriter who's got this page with a slider that talks about he's like uh do you want the hard sell or the soft cell and he was dragging what was that guy's name i well that's the crazy part for the life of me i can't remember it but i remember his website and i could find his website if i wanted to but yeah you go all the way up to the hard sell and it's flashing phone number and explosions and stuff like that do that i guess if you're just starting out but at this point with the calendly sign up you do include a lot of information that people ask for and people can check out the the website if they want some of the details on this but it's not just like name email pick a date it's also like what's your monthly marketing budget what services are you looking for and again this ties into the effort to qualify people so at this point in their relationship with you they've found you online they've taken the time to download one of the pdfs they've started receiving emails and clicked through on the email to the calendly link then they filled out the calendar so these are pretty well qualified leads at this point and then that's when they get a chance to meet um with you talk through whatever they're doing and potentially move forward as a client or not okay so that's the first section that's that's your inbound that's how you're getting your leads sales and marketing sales and marketing and we could do a whole episode on every single one of those steps we could do a whole episode just on how you handle that phone call so people let us know if you want to hear those but for now we're going to keep trucking through this because the next step is just as crucial account onboarding yeah and this is the handoff and what i really liked about this so just to give people the high level overview your business is set up in such a way that once you make the sale you basically are filling out kind of like a project brief like a form and as soon as you fill that out you could tell me if you were exaggerating here or not but it sounds like once you hit submit on that you're done you don't actually focus on a project again unless it goes into like you know defcom one and there's a big problem right that's cool i don't know a lot of founders who can just make a sale and walk away from a project maybe not but you do know so this is why i think agencies are so cool and so underappreciated because it's only the fact that you're dealing with clients that millennials don't like them right because like millennials and gen c's we're too cool to do service business like we're all about sas and scale and leverage but it doesn't matter what kind of business you're dealing with even if you're dealing a sas business there is always going to be some kind of handoff between like awareness to relationship and it's always always always always this handoff where problems happen so i grew up doing carpentry one of the most important lessons i ever learned in my life was mike thornton his big giant carpenter had like huge bare hands wear a flannel shirt every day and he told me that the weakest point of any structure is in the joint and i just i never ever forgot that and so anytime i was putting these processes together i would draw quite literally on the board behind me like where are the joints where are the connection points like what are the nails that could snap if a storm comes through and the biggest joint in any company whether it's an agency or an accounting firm or a newsletter company or a sas company that's handing off people to customer service the biggest joint is always going to be the relationship between like awareness into relationship and so you can't [ __ ] that part up and that's why it's so boring and it's so tedious and like well who wants to talk about onboarding i want to do sales you know like i want to 10x and shoot to the moon but you can shoot to the moon all you want and if all of your customers get stuck they bottleneck in onboarding in whatever kind of business you have you're going to have huge huge huge problems and they're terrible problems to solve because everybody's mad at you so like i really really love this section even though most people most people's eyes will like glaze over it here yeah well that's such an interesting way of putting it to with the carpentry which by the way is not in the article that's a great extra little bonus for everybody listening but it sounds like there's a lot of stories there too i mean this isn't something that you come out of like you know entrepreneur kindergarten knowing so how did you how did you kind of like how did you learn that this is one of the most important joints in the business and what was it what did it look like when you first designed this process like what was that what was that experience like well i learned it through just like endless endless bottlenecks of onboarding continuously i mean geez right here we love talking about business ideas i think um uh k k he is is doing something like this his isn't quite an onboarding consulting agency his is like a a company post pandemic consulting agency where he he does a lot of this stuff he puts documentation together but the pain that you feel from a client who you've spent months sometimes years trying to close and that client getting off to like such a bad start because every time they reached out to you you didn't have their website logins or like you didn't have their credit card and like you sent an invoice to the wrong email and the pain that you feel when you lose deals from just stupid [ __ ] like that not being tight and not being clean i mean it's awful it's just it's the absolute worst as like a sales person and an entrepreneur so i don't even know how many just dozens what's interesting about that to me is that that's there is a solution to that and what it is is that as you're operating you kind of feel this pain point like something new comes up it's a problem you end up solving it and then there's an option right there you're kind of at this fork in the road where you can put your head back down and keep working or pause for a second and like think about your system and think and like ask yourself why did this happen and how can i avoid this happening again and that's that's that split between working in your business and working on your business so can you tell me a little bit about how you structure time to uh to make those refinements as the leader like how often are you working on these processes and when something new comes up like that i say a new you know stressor that forces a client either away or just creates um static with a client what does the actual process look like for you analyzing that as the leader yeah that's a really great question and this was a hard lesson for me to learn and i think this is a valuable lesson for anybody trying to figure this out for themselves too in the past it was everything stops until we fixed this and maybe that was the right way to do it maybe it was the wrong way to do it i'm really not sure you know that was just my obsessive personality kind of saying like everybody stop all hands on board until we figure this out now and this is probably maturity and just time of knowing that the world's not gonna fall apart if somebody's mad at me you know but now it's very much under the stephen covey urgency importance matrix and it's like even if something is like really really wrong sometimes we'll just straight up ignore it because we know that we're taking our eye off of section two which is like important not urgent and spending time on uh section three which is urgent and important it's easy to say you know it's a little bit more difficult to do when a client might be emailing you and like they're really really pissed off and stuff like that and you know you play it by ear i'll have one of the account services reps just try to hold their hand try to save the deal do the best we can like no matter what personally like it's it's really important to us as a company that we treat people right and if someone's not satisfied they're never going to get burned or anything like that like we'll never just ignore a problem and be like i don't have time to deal with that that's not what i'm saying what i'm saying is every second that you take your eye off of down field is like a second that you're not progressing so in in today's stadzi with our culture being what it is i i gotta say we don't spend a whole lot of time wiping slates clean and fixing things rather it's just a continuous like okay what's the next step to get to this what's the next step to get closer what's the next step to get closer and then i think tactically what's important and this is what i learned through the e-myth which i've talked about a million times it's like any time that you do this stuff you write it down and then you have a meeting on monday and everybody says like crystal clear like we all know how this works now right like i'm saying it once if you have questions we got it say it over and over again we'll sit here as long as we need to figure it out but as soon as this meeting is over this is it so like crystal crystal clarity that's how we do it now and i think that's the best way we've ever done it truthfully that's really interesting uh we'll be sure to link off to a version of that uh copy matrix or some people might notice like the eisenhower matrix yeah for anybody who hasn't seen that yet but i was reading about that recently so you know the boron letters gary halpert's copywriting letters they're sort of like they're one of these resources that i think a lot of copywriters these days point to as really good training for copywriting so this guy gary halbert or halpern i don't quite have his last name but he was a he was like a direct sales copywriter kind of guy very successful very good at his job and at one point i guess he got thrown in jail for like creating an ad that he didn't deliver on or something related to that so yeah it's kind of like a white collar type of crime and yeah it's uh there seems to be some contention over whether or not he was actually a criminal but the way he dealt with it is he's like yeah well in my life i've gotten away with some things that i should probably should have gone to jail for so he just kind of saw it as like cosmic karma and uh and just shut up and went to jail and dealt with it but uh while i was there he wrote his son a series of letters and the letters are all teaching him how to sell things by mail they're called the boron letters because that's the name of the prison he was in and um they're really interesting a lot of copywriters will recommend that if you want to learn to write copy you print them out and you write them by hand and the reason for that is that the way there's they're structured like old cell by nail letters so even though it's like publishing yeah but even the length like when you turn the page is important it's it's like thoughtful and it's it's designed in a certain way like that so as i've been reading through him and his son ended up compiling them all online which again we'll link out to but he writes several pages of commentary on them and i don't know if his son took up the family business or not but he wrote he wrote a bunch of additional stuff and the commentary is really interesting so he's got this whole thing about the eisenhower matrix and how gary actually got it from stephen covey and by focusing on those things that are important but not urgent every minute you spend there is time that you you like basically prevent yourself from having to focus on something that is important and urgent right because you're basically doing the important things before they become urgent which exactly yeah it's a really interesting thing so we'll link off to that but i think that's so important what you said especially in this day and age when there's basically no end to the number of problems you can experience and that's so important to do it there because it was an exercise for me to deal with just anxiety but not even anxiety like letting people down you know and i think that's the urgent stuff that we get stuck in in life it's like someone's gonna be mad at me someone's gonna be disappointed in me like i am gonna be responsible for some kind of catastrophe and uh the more you stay in important but not urgent like it takes time but those things kind of just go away until eventually you'll wake up which is i'm i'm grateful to be at like this place in my life where it's not to say i don't have problems but i can't think of the last time like esta do we have a motto it's it's urgency is the enemy of progress and so like nothing is urgent if anything is urgent it's a huge problem we're like what happened here what happened here we just it's a hum right it's like a 87 hum it's like driving on the highway at 70 miles an hour at like 2000 rpms and so it's it it was hard it was a real personal exercise for me over the last five years but totally totally worth it yeah i like that a lot i've never heard that saying before it's a good one but i've experienced the feeling that you're talking about and before we hit record yeah before we hit record we were talking just a little bit i've been going through this exercise recently because i what i think happens is like you basically allow you allow things to become urgent and it's not that it's not even that they like become urgent there's always stuff that's screaming for your attention and you have to develop the discipline to keep those things in their place and like you know a simple like a simple example this is say so well said i'm writing that down say that exercise is important to you and like you wanna you want you want to build a lifestyle where you have two hour window at five days a week to exercise if you work hard you can pretty quickly get to the point where you'll have that window what's a little what's what's harder than creating the window though is keeping it because now all of a sudden you've got two hours of free time or like free quote air quote free time yup somewhere in the middle of the day and when these things start howling for your attention that's the first thing that goes right it's like oh well yeah i'll skip the gym today and i'll just get back on it but what you don't realize you're really doing is you're like letting go of the discipline of keeping those things in check and what i've found what typically gets me back on course is i actually have to start with the solution state before i can get the work into the shape that it's supposed to be and so i have to start by forcing myself to just act as if yes and and it's always difficult in that moment because you're like i really don't have the time to to step away from this now but i've just found over the years the time never comes if you don't start with stepping away and what ends up happening is very quickly because you're forcing yourself into like shorter and shorter time windows of handling work like you said those things they start to disappear you'll you'll handle problems faster you stay on top of stuff you have to be a little bit more disciplined in your system for how you plan your days and stuff but it always starts with the solution state and i found that to be true with client work too like when i first started so i used to do like web design web development and i was just a one-man shop but i'd take on like clients here and there and in the beginning i didn't know how to set prices i didn't know how to charge i didn't really even know how to build websites so i was kind of getting like i was learning on the job but there's always this thing that that i think a lot of people with client services go through is this they'll they say like ugh like i have one or two really terrible clients right now but i need to keep them because i can't afford to get rid of them and when i can't afford to get rid of them like then i'm gonna start being more picky about the clients that i choose and it was the same deal there i had you had to start by actually walking away from the clients and just hanging out over a cliff and being like oh my god i don't know if i'm going to make enough money next month and then inevitably what ends up happening is because you have forced yourself into this position where you are demanding more of yourself and of the people that you interact with you know i found that very often it kind of pans out and then and then it snowballs right it's only once you attract these things into your life that they start to really deliver on those increasing returns so anyways i love this this is um did i just cut you off no i it well maybe but i don't think you did it on purpose i just said so cool because this isn't the first time where we've come across this kind of life design concept that translates well into our work and onboarding is that [ __ ] that you don't have time for when you get busy like onboarding is that time at the gym but you said it so well where if you just live in the solution where it sucks but it and it's it's also kind of like the pay yourself first type thing you know like you stop paying your plumbing bill for like three months and like it really really sucks but it doesn't matter because like you aren't the kind of person anymore that freaks out about your your plumbing bill you're the kind of person that pays yourself first and so like be the kind of agency that does the onboarding no matter what's happening and then eventually those things just won't be there anymore like be the kind of person that goes to the gym no matter what's happening because eventually those problems aren't going to be there anymore you know so this is why the onboarding thing i get so excited about it because i think it's a little bit more than just like an onboarding dock it quite literally is just that it's like the self-nurturing part of of the business it's the thing you do to take care of yourself you know it's the thing you do to keep from from getting old and broken who's continuously on board in the right way so uh so yeah i know it's like a little bit meta but it's really important and i think it's a good way to live your life huh yeah that is pretty that's a that's a cool way of thinking about i'm gonna have to chew on that a little more but i guess to keep rolling through this for people so that's stage two of three so we're coming up we're coming up on the end here the and the the third stage was interesting because what you basically laid out is you say okay you brought the traffic in you converted them into clients you've even gotten them started with their relationship with your account manager which is super important that's your weak joint that's what's like you have to focus on in order to make sure the business runs well and then there's sort of this there's these two teams that work behind the scenes and there's like a natural friction between them because they have different goals very different needs and far in terms of like how they communicate day-to-day and they rely on each other and so what you did was you designed this this system where that basically allows these two groups to work together and i'm just going to summarize it very briefly the two groups are strategy and project management as i said at the top of the episode problem with strategy is that strategy team does all the research and they're deciding what the client actually needs in terms of like marketing project management is sort of in charge of executing on that so people listening can see the interrelationships between those two teams that's crucial uh but strategy needs to be heads down doing research whereas project management much more communication oriented so what did you do there's basically a document there's a document that both these teams have access to it's the client sheet and the strategy team fills everything in in the client sheet including a next actions list or a list of to-do's and then those to-do's are basically that's where project management gets their to-do list from and they take those schedule and execute and then each of those teams basically has slack channels but the slack channels have different rules so yeah on this strategy also another part that i wanted to write about but i couldn't because i i quick side note i truly truly believe that slack it can be like a business killer and we have like rules about slack and it's not to micromanage it's about freedom you know it's like you guys all have the freedom to live your lives in the way you want to so if we all act with a certain etiquette then we won't be like interrupting everybody's mental and emotional and like freedom of time and so that was another thing i really wanted to write about but yeah wait take me deeper on that man what are some of the what are some of the the keystone rules that keep stodzy slack running smoothly uh yeah one of them is only hit enter once you know how on slack it's so easy to be like put it ding ding ding and just like sentences and hit enter no no you got something to say think about it say it perfectly or write it i should say and then hit enter one time um another rule is that the channels are for departments and we don't have a random channel because random channels are just just awful we do have a general channel but that's more so for company announcements like an hr type thing and on fridays we have like a little uh ritual of sharing like old things about ourselves so like i used to be in a band you know and then like every once in a while you're like hey you guys might not know this about me but i played bass for like eight years in this band and we toured these codes and like here's one of our songs and then someone else is like no [ __ ] i used to play banjo here's one of my songs it's like every friday we have this thing where we just share like really random stuff with each other and that's fun well i have a whole onboarding or excuse me like a whole process doc about slack and how it works especially with threads because like you know sometimes a message is appropriate sometimes a thread is appropriate because if in slack the ux if you answer to somebody as a reply in a thread then like only they get the notification as opposed to everybody else um as opposed to everybody in the channel so i we went through it man but it's the same thing it's not micromanaging it's it's freedom like you're giving people freedom to step away from slack and do their job yeah i like that a lot and then it what i've found so some companies like i used to work for this company called toptal which had very well established slack etiquette and some of the rules that really stood out to me there no threats no threats none at all and the reason the reason for that is it makes it easy to drop into a channel and catch up on everything that's been said everything yeah and the other was no spelling errors in fact we literally have yeah it's kind of like that broken window theory so if you if you kind of set a standard that everyone is expected to similar to the like think about your point and press enter once it's like you're expecting if you're gonna make a message you're expected to think through it write it out clearly write out correctly and we don't tolerate misspellings because misspellings are like an oversight in the execution of you sharing your message and that probably sounds nitpicky on the surface but what it led to was like a culture yeah yeah exactly it was i think it lifted other things up and you know top tale certainly has had plenty of its own culture problems but one thing that was like very kind of refreshing it was it was nice you started to notice it after a while and you certainly notice that when you even go somewhere else that is a little bit like they play it more fast and loose on slack uh there's really something to the the what you demand or like what you the standards you hold people to in terms of communication huddles too i actually think slacks uh the upgrade to app huddles i i love them they're so brilliant it's so much easier to click huddle than it is to get on the zoom meeting real quick oh that's interesting yeah yeah well i i it's definitely an interesting tool and i think it's cool you guys have like a series of rules around it did you say you have you have some kind of strategy jack that you might share related to how you guys think through this or you just i can share that yeah there's nothing pertinent on that i can share that all right well we'll link that up in this in the show notes but the interesting thing here again was that basically these two teams they rely on each other they cannot communicate the same exact way without driving everybody nuts on both sides and so you had to basically create this system that allowed them to like work together without driving everybody crazy yeah um so i thought that was really cool i hadn't thought through some of these processes before in this way and so i definitely encourage people to check out the full post if they're interested in more i think there's some of these things you get into more detail in but that's the high level stuff for sure here uh you got your automations for sales and marketing automations for onboarding and then it is it is automations on the strategy side because this like this document sort of moves its way through the system the client sheet yes and it's also automations on well actually one level above this as well this is another reason why i think i wanted to write this in a way that it applied to everybody like every business has the generate business you know the generated attention and then the handoff between attention to relationship even if your relationship is purely digital like even if it's quickbooks you know do you have guides on it you have ways to use it you have a way to communicate this is how you this is how we work because you need that and then there's the getting [ __ ] done team like there's always those three things there's the attention team the communication team and then the getting [ __ ] done team and so like the getting [ __ ] done team has to be autonomous from the sales and marketing team because if they depend on each other then there's going to be breaks there and same thing with account services like account services can't rely on the getting [ __ ] done team because there's going to be a time where they need an answer to something right now because the client's on the phone and you know what a nightmare that would be it'd be humiliating for them to be on the phone with a client be like you know what i can't get the answer to your question right now because this person isn't available like no so like these processes work well for us but the point of writing this is to make is to generate awareness that your business is going to have these same things it's not going to look exactly the same way but it's going to have these same things so the the relationship between the getting [ __ ] done team at statsy is strategy and project management strategy li