Transcript
Hello. Hello, hello. Everybody. How you doing, Joe? How you doing, Adrian?
Right. Good. Thank you.
Chris Simmance:
Whereabouts are you in the world at the minute you chaps? Because I’m in London. And it is. Still, 3° and I’m been, I’ve been freezing all day.
Adrian Lomas:
Well, I’m. I’m near Henley on Thames, just outside there. And yeah, it’s still a bit chilly, but I’m in a warm den here. This is mine, my little den we’ve got in.
Chris Simmance:
There you go. Joe, you are, are you up in are you up at HQ or are you down in Spain?
I’m in Spain at the moment, so it’s about 15°. Yeah, I’ve not got my shorts on though.
Chris Simmance:
Now it’s over. So for those for those who are already watching at this point, Joe runs fact, Joe. He’s gonna talk a little bit about that. But I think you spend about what about 2/3 of the year down in Spain at the. Minute roughly and yeah.
Joe Davies:
No, about six months, six months of the year. In Spain.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah. And you still don’t have a tan.
Joe Davies:
No, no, don’t.
Chris Simmance:
Good. It’s all that hard working hard work that you do. So throughout this webinar, like all of the webinars that we do, anyone who’s watching from LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, ex, etcetera and you’ve got a question comment you want to ask anyone along the way, just ask and we’ll be putting all the best comments up on the. On the front. There, feel free to poke fun as well. Because I hate boring stuff and boring stuff makes like 45 minutes go. Really. Really slow. Let’s get into it because I think there is a huge amount to talk about today. So we’re gonna go. We’re talking about from vision to execution and there’s a good reason why I’ve got Adrian in the room. And and you’ll soon find out why. And just as good a reason why Joe’s in the room. And. But for the most part. And an agency leader is trying to execute on a vision. It’s best to have some kind of process or some kind of way of doing that that maintains traction and there’s a fantastic book all about that cool traction and but. If don’t know what you guys are like if you buy the trainers, it doesn’t mean you’re a runner. If you, uh, if you buy the car doesn’t mean you’re a racing driver knowing. How to to? To stick to these things, is is where real kind of execution comes in. So First off, little roll call. Here. Adrian, would you mind giving us a little? Bit of a. A little bit of one to 10. Who are you? Where have you come from? Apart from where you are right now.
Adrian Lomas:
Sure, yeah, grew started an agency up in Cheshire called Blue Leaf back in the last century there, I say 99. So green. I know, I know. I started young, but yeah, it was an agency. Did did pretty well. It should have been a dairy farmer in Cheshire in those fields where we were. But instead now we grew an e-commerce agency over. Time and quite a well known ecom agency who did very well, we were picking up like Red Bull, Laura Ashley and stuff like that, which is all very nice. But you know, along the way things go up and down and I sort of lost it a little bit really and ended up under my desk, went through divorce and losing my mum all in one year and. Been told my business was insolvent and I was insolvent. But yeah, somebody gave me that book traction. I read it and really took to it, even though it’s quite simple, you know, it’s simple process followed, it, changed the business round. Long story short, sold the business in 2019 and. And eventually became an EOS implementer because I’m such a raving fan of what it did for me from taking me under my desk to selling my business. I’m just a raving fan. Of the process.
Chris Simmance:
And that, my friends, is exactly why Adrian’s in the room. So. Joe Joe, a Fat Joe fame or one of the Joes of Fat Joe fame, you’ve been on the scene for a good while as well and tell us your story.
Joe Davies:
Yeah. So I’ve been in SEO for around 15 years now, started in house and then did some ancient. Work and then around 2012 founded Fat Joe out of frustration. We couldn’t find anyone to do good links, good content, good infographic design, business citations, press releases. So we we create it and we’re a specialist agency, we don’t run like a traditional agency. We primarily are for other agencies to outsource their deliverables. And that’s been. That’s been for 10 years, over 10 years now. We’ve kind of been doing some of the traction principles over the years. Just by accident. You just kind of naturally end up doing these principles. But more recently last year, I did read the book and we’re trying harder now to implement it properly and we’re doing a slow. Slow but OK job of that it. There’s a lot to get through, but yeah, it’s a real help.
Chris Simmance:
And and and Speaking of doing. It accidentally I I remember. Talking to you first couple of months ago I. And it came to light, essentially, that I’ve been doing most of that accidentally when I was running the agencies as well. And I think it’s quite it, it’s it’s not, it’s it’s not difficult like you say because the, the, the principles of it are relatively simple. It is, I know it sounds silly to keep saying it, it is actually. Direction the the majority of agency leaders, they’ve got a million things to do, a million fires to fight and a million other things that they haven’t even conceived of being on their plates and then keeping a an eye on that three, five years into the future is is really, really. Mod and I think having some kind of structural way of doing that is is, is is quite quite big as I’d say. Yeah. And if we, if we look at for those of you who’ve never encountered ES model and and all of this stuff that we’re talking about today, this is a great reason. Again, thanks, Adrian for being here and giving us some of your time because you’ll be able to explain some of the the principles and the and the, the, the. The vernacular that we’ll that we’ll probably use a little bit in here and quite a lot of you guys watching this right now or in on, on catch up later. You’ll probably realise that. Ohh when when he’s talking about vision, what I actually mean is this in my agency. And so you’ll be able to kind of work out the parities there I. Typically try and think of this model as basically be. Being a guidebook on how to run a company, Adrian, can you explain it in a much more intelligent way please?
Adrian Lomas:
Not sure about the intelligence, but I. Can follow the model for. You have you got, you’ve got the. Diagram, haven’t you? Is that right?
Chris Simmance:
Yeah, one second. There we go let. Me. Make it a. Little bit bigger. And there we go is that? A bit bigger. There we go.
Adrian Lomas:
So for for people that don’t know, it’s called the US model. The entrepreneurs operating system. And it is a system. I think the key thing around it is that it’s quite a. Poor process that we go through, but if you have a a rigour in the organisation to follow a system, it really does make a difference and that’s what it’s about. You know, we can come across many of the things within the model and just develop those things ourselves. Many of them are, you know, values that like prolific across agency world, right. So it’s just about how we use them in in the business. But let me talk very quickly around the model. It’s at the top, there is vision. We’ve got to make sure that we’re getting you as leaders, senior leadership team, all clear on the vision because if you’re clear where you’re going, the rest of the team are going to follow you. That’s what happens generally in business. And then the next one to the left is the sort of second piece of the pie. It’s about the people. We’ve got to make sure we’re getting the right people in the right seats. So we’ve got to know what the right seats. Well, that’s for sure. We’ve gotta create that because so many times we just inherit people and then we make make them good and. But they don’t always enjoy what they’re. Doing all great at what they. Do so. We gotta get right people in the. Right seats. Third one on the right, there is data that’s getting the right metrics that we’ve gotta be measuring. So we’ve gotta create a scorecard that we can use weekly, not monthly, not quarterly. We just need this, you know, eyes on what’s going on in your business. So we create. Weekly scorecard for you and all the team. Now, if we get all those three things right, then we’re creating openness in in the business which creates on the on the far left issues. Issues are good. We want this, so we want to create a culture of of capturing issues in the business because we’ve got some tools to solve it. So we’ve got we go through something called DS which is identify and discuss and solve by taking them off the issues list far right process. We don’t want to frost our business with process. We just want to get capture some of it and make it smoother. And then at the bottom there, it’s all about. Attraction we’ve got. To create massive traction in the organisation heading towards that vision, cause vision without traction is illumination, so we’ve gotta get it all right. So that’s the model and it’s simplest.
Chris Simmance:
And and one of the things which I think you’ll recognise, Joe, in the years of of running Fat Joe and probably the amount of different versions of vision, should we say that have been conveyed internally as you as you learn how business works and how the agencies work and how things progress in an industry, you start to refine. What that really means, and I think there’s there’s a big difference that between we’re gonna be the biggest agency in the world and we’re gonna be the most well known X in Y for Z. Specialism. There’s, there’s there’s big distinctions between that kind of thing. And this is where I think reading the book is important. Reading through this, having some advice is great. But like, how many different versions of a vision have you had for Fat Joe?
Joe Davies:
Oh, so many, so many. And we. Yeah, we were absent from a vision to begin with. It was just make enough money. So we don’t go out of business. So we weren’t there weren’t anything at the start really. If I’m honest. And then the vision kind of formulated it was kind of like, OK, we want to be this kind of business. We want to be you know. The best link building supplier. But then when we started doing more than links, we want to be the best. Marketplace. And then when we when we defined our customer avatar, we want to be the best marketplace for agencies. So it does keep changing. And just lately we’ve changed it again, we’ve only just recently started sharing it with our team. So this is a new one for us that you know it was only a few years ago we started doing this with the whole team. And making sure everyone was on the same page so you can see that the difference already in you know, getting everyone on the same level in the same boat point in the same direction. Whereas before everyone was just. Kind of doing their job. They didn’t know. What the bigger picture was? So I think it’s it’s really important and I think it’s OK for the vision to change as well, just as. Long as you’re. Not, you know, being crazy about it and changing it every day. I think it’s OK for it to change if so often, or morph into something else.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah. I I always tell me if you think this is this is wrong, Adrian. I always used to kind of. Analogize through, say, not even a real word, but it sounds good vision for a destination and always used to use the analogy of your honour like a a 1500s Galleon style ship. And you can’t really afford mistakes cause it will sink and and that vision was the destination you’d intended to go to. And whilst the vision might have to change over time because of environmental parameters or internal issues and reasons, you can, you’re not. You’re not going 1,000,000 miles away from where you intended to go and primarily. Because otherwise you wouldn’t be the business that you are the only. So my vision for three years into the future is to have an agency with a £3,000,000, a year revenue and and some of the best accolades in the industry you get a year down the line. You realise that isn’t attainable because of external market. Things your vision hasn’t fundamentally changed, but the but the the the destination is slightly different. I find that that kind of analogy kind of helps when you’re looking at totally different agencies all trying to do something different. What what do you typically do when you get that vision stage Adrian with a with a team?
Adrian Lomas:
Yeah. Well, there’s several things. One is it, it is good. Joe, I’m glad you’re sharing it with the rest of the team because you do need the whole organisation to be going up the mountain if you like. And and and that’s how I use it. Really. I would sort of say, look, that’s the mountain that we wanna climb right now. So if that’s the mountain, we’re clear on that we can all see the top of it more or less. We know where we’re going and then really we just bring it back down into sort of more bite sized chunks of right head down. Let’s just go for it. Now it’s fair to say that as you start going along towards that, you might have some challenges along the way, whatever that is, COVID being one of them, right? But you know, then we’ve gotta make some decisions and we’ve gotta make that decision to say, actually, do we still want to go up that mountain or shall we go over to that one, which is a little. Bit easier so or the opposite. More challenging, right? So yeah, it’s what we know at the moment. That’s where we’re going. We get all of our team and when we bring it all the way down from that long range vision down to, say three years picture of what it looks like down to one year plan down to quarterly, down to weeklies, and that’s what we’re trying to do is make sure that this week we’re going to move ourselves a little bit more towards what we want to do. 90 days of that quarter. Then we just look up and make sure we’re still going up the right mountain.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah, and and and one of the other pieces of this I think is like it was almost like a watershed moment for me when the when I was looking at the people aspect of of the business and and Joe, I know that you’ve got quite complex you you you’ve run a lean outfit should we say but it’s basically lean because you’ve been smart about how you’ve organised it. But when I first drew my org chart. For the for, for the agency a good while ago it was several seats were my face and my name on it because I was the this and the that and the other. And then there were a few seats which were just like. SEO manager for example and and there was no one to manage and nothing really to manage it beyond the client work. And it wasn’t until you kind of built a real organogram of of of the agency that you start to realise, wow, there’s there’s real seats to fill and some of these people that are in them right now don’t necessarily fit that. And and when you’ve got that vision and the. The the org chart in there. It makes it a little bit easier, but I don’t know about you. It’s you can’t run a business without having right bums, right seats, the right people on the right seats. And was that? Was that particularly hard because the way you run your agency from from the the? You’re you’re the. Agency for agencies in many senses. And it yeah, it must was it were are there parallels? What? How how did you manage that?
Joe Davies:
So yeah, it is a little bit different to a traditional ANC. But anything that’s like anything that’s a deliverable. So anything that’s repeatable or a confined piece of work, they don’t need to see the broader mechanics of Fat Joe, for example, a piece of content or a link being built or an infographic being designed, something that on its own could be delivered by anyone, without any, without any further knowledge. Of of the bigger picture or anything. Like that that’s contracted out, that’s out. Cost to to a trusted provider or vendor or contractor or vendor, but they’re just not on the payroll of that Joe. This allows us to to grow and shrink with economic, you know, changes or market demand. So we’re very antifragile in that respect. In terms of the core people in the Fat Joe team, they’re all I call it the brain. So anything that requires thinking or like everything requires thinking, but anything that requires some wider knowledge of the fact, Joe. Mechanics and the the overall vision, I think needs a seat in house and those people are are often, in fact, they’re multifaceted. So we don’t look at like an org chart of like this person only does this job. We look at the person and it’s they’re responsible for this and this and this. So there might be multiple things they’re responsible for. We don’t give them, you know, we’re not just filling up names on a on an org chart because we need someone to do SEO. We need someone to do PPC or, you know, manage the. Oftentimes, the staff have multiple, multiple roles just because that works for such a lean team. I mean, it’s hard to find those people, and often that they’re they’re kind of they organically grow with the company. So they may start as a poor person. So they may start with no prior knowledge of SEO or prior knowledge of marketing and they come in, they learn on the job two years time. They may be taking on a new responsibility of. Outreach, for example, or managing the writers or hiring writers. So that’s that’s kind of how we’ve done it.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah. And I and I yeah, yeah.
Adrian Lomas:
Chris actually cause. We’re on an E OS talk. I’m going to challenge you guys. It’s not an old shop that you need. It’s not an org chart.
Chris Simmance:
Do it. What is it?
Adrian Lomas:
It’s an accountability chart. Hey, so. The business right.
Joe Davies:
That’s what I was getting at.
Chris Simmance:
I I don’t. I don’t want to say this, but my the point I was just about to make before you jumped in was that the way I built my seats was to have each seat as a list of accountabilities before. Title yeah.
Adrian Lomas:
So you create the function you need in your business at 6 to 12 months. You create that in a room, you go and lock yourselves away with your senior leadership team and you create that that what do we need as function and then you create like 5 or 6 roles that each one of those seats does and then? We put the right people in the right seats. Most people do the other way. They have these people and then they create the org chart to fit the person into. Something then we give. Them some things. Here’s the problem. Most people will not fit into what we. Call the GW. CGWC is, do they get it? Do they get the role? Do they understand SEO or PC or programming or whatever it is? Do they get it? Do they want it? Do they get up every morning wanting to do that? And then the first one is capacity, do they have the capacity to do it, the skills, the know no for all the the knowledge, all that sort of thing now we say that we never take people on who do not get it and we never take on it, don’t want it and really we shouldn’t with capacity. But that is negotiable if they’re going to come in and learn. Job we’ve gotta make sure they get. It once it and meet our.
Chris Simmance:
Well, so arguably the the 4th 1:00 then is values let’s say. So they meet the values lovely, they get the job and they know what they’ve gotta do. I’m not. I’m gonna be very careful. Which thing goes down next and they get the job. They know what they’re gonna do. They want the job and they. Willing and but they don’t have the capacity that helps you identify. OK, there’s a training need or some support. If they get the job because they know what they’ve got to do and they can do it and they’ve got the capacity, but they aren’t willing or don’t want to do the job, then the chances are they also don’t meet the values of the business as well.
Adrian Lomas:
I’ve I’ve sat in front of people like that before, Chris many times and I’ve interviewed them, and partway through it I’ve actually. Said really want this and you know you can normally tease it out in a little. Bit it’s like, well, I I just need a job. Well, I don’t want. You. I do not want somebody in my team that just wants a job. I want somebody that gets up and just knows that they get it and they want it and they can create it.
Chris Simmance:
I’m sorry. And and I and I think there’s there must be like I I think we’ve all made mistakes in hiring in the past. I don’t think you can hire people. Without making mistakes, but I think we’re. This kind of formula in mind and the right accountable seats, should we say, and and that the jobs are built around accountabilities and so on, it makes it a heck of a lot easier to more quickly identify your, your mistake and and more quickly help someone if they need it more quickly support the team. If required, it gives you a, a a good view of the future or a good opportunity to not have the day-to-day blinkers on. I think Ken, like just the the bottom part here and and I I we’ll talk about processes and operations shortly, but the next piece of this, the right at the very bottom there is this traction and the rocks and the meeting pulse thing. And one thing which I I can think of and I won’t name names. Because it’s not fair, but I can think of at least five agency leaders, which I either work with right now or know and have known for a long time that absolutely. Of a checklist and a plan. And they’ve got a new notebook every year to rewrite their business plan and every every six months, there’s a new spreadsheet with this and they move on to from Monday to click up to Asana and all these sorts of things. And none of it is. It it’s none of it has traction because it doesn’t get done. Do you mind, Adrian, just for a moment, just explaining this, this organiser thing because like I I I I I understand it in principle totally see this and I completely, you know I’m I’m behind it. I I buy it but I know me and and I’m pretty sure I’m not unusual when it comes to. UM, life in the sense that I could write all of these things. I’d be very happy. I had high 5 myself at the end of the day, and then I wouldn’t. Today again, how do you how do? How does this work?
Adrian Lomas:
OK, well, it’s more linked to the top one more. Well, it’s both vision and attraction. So normally on day 2, when we’re working together, day two and three called the Vision Building day. We work on this document, the two page a four document that’s all it is. It’s sort of like the ohh can we? Go. That’s that’s great.
Chris Simmance:
That’s clever.
Adrian Lomas:
The new feature I’ve seen and. That’s good. You can do others as well, I believe. Whether that works or not. I don’t know, but anyway it’s creating this vision traction. Organiser and what we if we take the first page, which we’re looking at here, we’re going to make sure that your company knows what the the core values are. We do a session drill that down can do yourself or we can help you to get very, very clear on what the core values are. Then we’ve got to create some sort of focus. You know what is the focus that you’re you’re you’re. You know, what is it? What’s your purpose? What’s the nice? Why do you do it? You. Know where’s the? Passion. We gotta make sure we’re clear. On what all? Those are and then it’s that longer range we talked about before, we say 10 years, some do it five years, some do it 7, some do 20. It depends, it’s a long range and it’s we’re something that we’re looking at. And then if we’ve got those sort of things. Clear. We can then start to figure out what the marketing strategy is to help us to get to. So you know, we gotta think about if we’ve got in a lift and we’ve got this target client that we know is exactly us, we’ve got to be clear on the demographics geographics, who’s that perfect client of ours. And if if. We’re there with them. Can we share with them some uniques what makes us as a business unique, ideally free, you know, might be one or two which are similar to other companies. But if the combination of the three really makes this just really super strong, especially if we’ve got a next bit, which is a proven process, this is how we do it here. So we’ve got to get all these things, maybe a guarantee or a promise, which again makes it very easy to use, use the organisation, and then it’s then bringing it down to a three-year and then the next piece is is down to one year and that’s when we get quite linear on the numbers and then we’ll see the thing about rocks, rocks is sort of like the 90 day world. The big things we’ve got to do in the business over the next 90 days. Goal related.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah. And the and the rocks would be like the big, heavy thing that needs to be moved versus the that allows for the rest, for other things to happen, right. So it’s like.
Adrian Lomas:
Yeah, it it’s sort. Of like the rocks go in the glass first rather than the water going in the glass cause when the water is in the glass you can’t put anything else in. We put the rocks in first, then the big things which aren’t always the most urgent. But they are the most important things you’ve gotta do over the next 90 days. In your business. You’ve gotta get them done. You look at them first before you get into. Business as usual. Does this work on the Big Rock?
Chris Simmance:
Yeah. So to to give an agency example, from a marketing point of view, a a rock would be to make your website speak to your audience. Do all of your positioning aspects on there before you would put some sand or whatever or pebbles or whatever the nomenclature. Is, which would be.
Adrian Lomas:
Before you check your e-mail.
Chris Simmance:
Build us, build a social media marketing. Campaign and then the the one at the end of that would be have a spreadsheet ready to track it. And so you don’t build the the tracking before you build the the campaign before you build the website for example, it might well be in any number of other versions of those sorts of things, but the the big thing that moves first, that allows the smaller but equally important. Really. But there the the smaller things are more many in nature. It’s it’s easy to do 5 smaller things than one giant thing, but you can’t do any of those five until you’ve done the the the big, the big one. And yeah, Joe, what? What? Where do you sit in this kind of spectrum of? I’ve got a plan every six months and I’ve changed the the systems and the and and I and I’ve and I’d write it all down and I’m high fiving myself through to in a perfect world, Adrian loving you. For, for, for. Following the POS programme.
Joe Davies:
We’re very, very basic on it. We’re quite primitive. We we basically just use Trello as a as like a. It’s almost like a vision board. Yeah. And we’ve got Q1Q2Q3Q4. And then in those in those quarters, we’ve got the rocks, if you like that. The rocks that we want to complete in each quarter, so that’s our kind. Of like year. Year plan as the year goes on, we might move things around or drop things out, but at the start of the year we kind of have, right, we got we want to get XYZ done in Q1 XYZ done in Q2, there’s usually only one 2-3 maybe tops. Things like rocks that go in each quarter and then we. We have a one year goal or a one year vision if you like, which is we want. We want to achieve X. And usually it’s something. Very arbitrary. You know, we want to get. So many customers or hit this revenue, it’s just something it’s an All Star to go go towards and then we have something like a. A more achievable goal in there as well, like the the big service, we want to release this year. That would be one of our one year goals as well in terms of like yeah, after reading the traction book like I was filled with you know dopamine I wanted to implement it all. I wanted to get get it all filled out. You you do kind of like lose a bit of steam after after fill it out and thinking right, OK, I’ve gotta tell the staff that we’re gonna do this. We’re gonna do quarterly meetings. We’re gonna do weekly scorecard and stuff like this. I’ve just. I’ve gave it my head of operations. I’m trying to make a read every every page because I I didn’t read every page. So I was, you know, I was reading. It’s that that really that was interested in and in theory. Yeah. Emily. Yeah. So.
Chris Simmance:
Is that Emily? He’s going to read every. Single page twice.
Joe Davies:
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. She should be watching this now. If she’s not, then she’ll be in trouble. But. Yeah, we’re kind of on the primitive scale like we’ve got the best intentions. And we’re doing. It in a fashion, but yeah, we we’re not going through the whole granular process of going up week by week, coming up with school. Card and things like. That we want to get to. At that point, it’s just, you know. Step by step.
Chris Simmance:
And I know that we’ll come on to some advice points towards the end of the. The webinar but. You what? You what you’ve just said there, Joe is not a million miles away from where Adrian is, but obviously they’re different things, but they are essentially big jobs, medium and small jobs split over time. The missing bits are obviously like. Like Adrian showed that you know the vision and the their ultimate aim and that ties it all together. Where? Where, what? What point? Adrian, do you? If an agency’s been running six months, do they start on this? If they’ve been running six years? Is it too late? If they when? When’s when’s? When’s the right time, do you think?
Adrian Lomas:
Right time is when they start to implement it I.
Chris Simmance:
There we go.
Adrian Lomas:
Mean it’s it’s always. You you come to it at that point, don’t you? Mine was. I was under my desk. I was broke. And I was told to close the business. Someone gave me the book. I read it, I implemented it. And you know the the The thing is, things come to us at times in our life. And sometimes you just dismiss it. Dismiss it, dismiss it. And then suddenly the same book. Is relevant, so it’s up. To you, I I have some. Teams that I work with. You’ve got two people in them. And I have some teams that are much bigger. EOS is sort of sweet spot if you like is between 10 and 250 people in an organisation we work directly with the senior leadership team to help them. To get get it. Pure in their business cause when? They get it pure. That’s when it really flies. Tinkering as agency owners. Can do. I was 1, so I’ll go in that model and you know, we grab a bit of this and a bit there and a bit of that and we make our. Own don’t we? That’s what we tend to do. But.
Chris Simmance:
Seems to be there, yeah.
Adrian Lomas:
The way we do it, so we’re we’re creative. People we have.
Chris Simmance:
I’m gonna sound. I’m gonna sound really harsh. I’m gonna sound really harsh when I say this right now. And I’m very sorry for anyone listening to this that it upsets Adrian. You’ve been, you’ve been under the, you’ve been under the potential insolvency bracket, Joe, it can’t have been plain sailing every single day of the year financially. The answer to the question of when should you start doing this? If you as an agency owner? Don’t know when you should start looking at things like this. I employ you to do a cash flow forecast and then that will tell you the latest possible point. You can start doing this and start doing.
Adrian Lomas:
Well, you don’t have one.
Chris Simmance:
It and all that.
Adrian Lomas:
You should that’s that is very true. You should have one of them.
Chris Simmance:
Yes, often, often that isn’t the case and it’s. Essential so the last part part on here, the sort of the bottom right, the process piece that’s something which and and I I expect to see some kind of. Every agency needs to have some sort of process, right? And I’ve seen everything and I’m sure you’ve seen everything from a text file all the way through to a Google doc and then something really long and lengthy with loads of loom videos in motion and all sorts of things like. That where do we sit around process implementation and optimization? I’ve I I I never hit the nail on the head with when I was running the agencies. But now working with them. I I’m I’m I’m finding it an awful lot, a lot more easy to we say because once you can see someone else’s team. Make up, Joe. What? What? What? How? How do you go about like, you know, processes and and making sure that, you know things were geared to cause quite a lot of the stuff that is internally dealt with but is actually outsourced to other from other agents? That’s that requires relatively clear guidelines, but how far in a process does things go?
Joe Davies:
It it’s really, really process. So everything is so processed to the point of we’ve built software, you know, we’ve built our own platform which does a lot of the automations which. Does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of process, so it kind of like leaves very little room for mistakes. We basically what we got left with is input. Boxes from our contractors to to input something, but for any work like whether whether it’s writing or link building, or whether it’s answering emails, answering support emails, we have a process. We have an SOP and we’ve got a big database. It’s a Trello board. Again, with every kind of job that we do internally and there’s an SOP for every. Single one and SRP generally generally looks like a Google doc with a loom video on. The top and. It’s it’s quite simple. You know, we try not to make it a big. Bible of do this and if this happens do this. We’ll try and just give some you know, just give some guidelines and some best practises, but for the most part with our with our work that we provide. We try not to make it, you know, no one can play jazz. It’s just this is what this is what you do. It’s gotta be done in this way. The software does a lot of it. So all that’s left is the people to do their individual parts. So it’s it’s a big part of our of our one of our. I mean one of our values is does it. Scale. So before doing anything or before. Implementing anything. Can we do this over and over again? Can we do this 1000 times? So we we’re kind of heavy.
Chris Simmance:
On it. Yeah. Yeah. And what? Where do you sit with this? Adrian, when you were running the agency, what did your processes look like prior to EMS and things like that? How did how, how did the, how did that change how you handled things?
Adrian Lomas:
Weren’t as strong. That’s why we nearly went bust. So have them. Look, system isn’t predictable. That’s what you. Gotta do system is predictable, so we can humanise the exceptional what we believe in really is. To just go, you’ve heard of the Pareto Law 8020 stuff, right? So we’re not trying to get 100% of everything documented because we have time to read. It so we. Go for 20% of it documented. So then we get the 80% gain. If anybody’s aware of greater law, so we.
Adrian Lomas:
Free. We have a tool as. You would expect with EOS. Three-step process, documenter. We we list out with all businesses have got a handful of processes. You know which we we’ve gotta figure out HR people, mods in sales OPS. And then we then get. Accountability, which is always a key thing that we’re looking for, is to get somebody accountable, to do each of those processes, which will allow us then to create a very simple flow of what is the predictable and that’s what we create.
Chris Simmance:
I am just for people listening and people watching at the minute. Obviously every agency is different and the way that you build your processes and and what you build them in and how you manage them will be slightly different. But. What Adrian has just mentioned there is is really, really important you. If you go too far, you’ve got too much and no one listens and no one follows it. If you’ve got too little and no one’s got anything to follow, and the the the general sort of perspective I’ve got and feel free to disagree guys, is that. Usually if you got a team of specialists and your agencies, a specialists agency, for example, your standard operating procedures, slash processes, whatever you’d like to call them should be very much more open and allow those smart people to do smart things. And I often find that the best thing to do is explain the purpose of the of the task in that process template. This is why it’s done, and why we’ve sold it to the client. Here is an example of the template. This is what yours should look like at the end. Go about it however you like, as long as you get it done in time for the for the client the the other. End of things is you know if you’ve got your more broad full spectrum digital digital marketing agency agency for example. You’ll have a bunch of juniors in there, probably, and it’s a great opportunity to use those more broad SOP’s to become a little bit more compartmentalised and they can be used as a training tool and you follow those processes in whilst you’re being shadowed or whatever and they become a training tool and the. I typically look at a single process, let’s say an SEO audit, and you’d have the purpose of it. You’d have the the example of what good looks like, the minimum value, the minimum requirement is, use the right font, use this spreadsheet and use. You know that all of those things. And then five bullet points and or five tasks and those tasks will be the core 5 things that have to get done in order for this document to be the right thing for the client. And within there you might have some questions that you should ask yourself, or you should have some things you should definitely look at, but it’s not hamstringing people whilst also allowing juniors to learn, and that then allows it to become more accountable depending on the system you’re using, you can see how long someones taken do it and so on and so forth. But if you. Do 95% of your processes. As a Google doc with one to 10 and loads of links in there, how many Joe you know, there’s probably more than any of us. How often does Google change its guidelines, documentation and therefore the links in someone’s Google doc process don’t work anymore. Yeah, or I I I did. I looked back the other day, so I was trying to find a Google ads process to show someone where I started off with processes and I found this one that’s got the old app Google ads interface from 2012 and it looks nothing like it. It does now it uses the different naming conventions and everything and if I had kept that going through the course of years you’d have to change that every single, you know, six months to a year. So the balance needs to be struck. I’d I’d I’d argue in, in, in quite a lot of these senses, but the right thing to do, like Adrian said, is don’t do 95 plus percent, don’t do 5 percent. 8020 is pretty decent rule for the entirety of life, hence the law, so you know. Try try and work from it that way and coming to the like the the the tail end of of of this cause I I appreciate that. First of all Joe you’ve got what 11 years of running an agency experience more or less or 12 years almost. And you, we could talk for days on a, on a webinar. And I know you do a lot of content and things like that, so we could be here for a lot longer. Adrian, you literally live this and breathe this everyday. You’re the living proof that it can work for an agency and and you you you spend literally what it’s a it’s a good 18 months plus with agencies. In a programme, isn’t it over the from one end to?
Adrian Lomas:
The other, yeah, the, the the aim is to sort of take the company from where it is and take them on a journey to get them 80% strong and six key components and that yeah typically takes around A2 year journey. You know some getting doing this, some take longer. But you know we’re not contracted. We just join and just take you on that journey to get you stronger and stronger and stronger and then many stick with it.
Chris Simmance:
So I’d be lying if I said that this webinar could go in off a lot longer, but any final thoughts and advice guys where, where? What’s the the A cool starting point from your perspective?
Adrian Lomas:
Well read, possibly look at traction you. Don’t have to read. It if you look if you can’t be bothered to read it, give me a shout. I can do a free 2nd and. Go through the whole thing free of charge.
Chris Simmance:
Out loud over the course of several days on.
Adrian Lomas:
I can get 6 minutes and I can share all that, not it’s called a 90 minute meeting free of charge. I can run that with anybody that’s interested to to know more.
Chris Simmance:
On on the zoom floor, yeah.
Adrian Lomas:
But yeah and. The other thing you mentioned about cash flow, if you’ve not got a cash flow doc, get one.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah, on the OMG Centre website, sorry to sound overtly promotional there, but on the OG centre website there’s a an article all about budgeting for agencies and in there there is a free downloadable. You don’t even have to put your e-mail address in or anything. Cash flow forecast template throw your P&L into there, split it out properly. Put your opening balance or your closing balance from the previous month in. That’s your beginning beginnings of anything. You can then give that to your accountant and ask them to. Talk you through it, help you understand it or give me a call or speak to to to any one of the OMG agency advisors. Joe, sorry to have interrupted the opportunity for you to give your first. Piece of advice, but what? What? You you’re. Still, shall we say in the agency running trenches? What kind of advice do you think? And you can offer for agencies that are, you know, looking at like, I don’t even know where to start with any of this.
Joe Davies:
Yeah, I’ll say a big one with this is just having the vision. Just having where you want to get to it would be like the the day zero kind of kind of thought to have about all this stuff in my opinion and and at least having some kind of, I mean it took us so many years to get to this point where we thought right, we need a plan of what we do in this year. It was it was. Almost day by day, so having some kind of like quarter one, we’re gonna get this done. Quarter two. We’re gonna get this done quarter three quarter. And then you got some kind of structure, even if the world happens and it unexpected stuff happens and it doesn’t go to plan, at least you’ve got some kind of direction. You’re going in, so. Say if you don’t do any. Of the other points in this vision and and having some kind of structure for a year would be a good start.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah. And I I, I I completely agree with both of you on that and the the the UM, the important thing is that everything’s everything’s. And everything’s changing consistently in agencies and the only constant is change for the majority of the time in agencies having a vision at the very least allows you to kind of weather some of that change. But none of the rest of those components in that in that wheel that we showed you at the beginning are without absolute value. So just cause you know where you want to be in three years. There is no bearing on whether you’re going to get there, just makes you feel a little bit better if you, you know, you hit you, buff it against the the friction of of of, of running an agency. And if you want to get in touch with Adrian, his contact details are just on the screen here. I fully recommend you have a chat with him about at the very least, the 90 minute meeting. Because I believe that if you’re wondering whether or not you know where you’re going or how you’re going to get there inside of 90 minutes, you’ll probably be able to work it out. Joe Fat, Joe Davies on Twitter. I I saw something yesterday about you trying to increase your Twitter following. I’m not sure where that was an old thing or or cause the feeds all messed up these days, but. You got a couple of Twitter followers, so you know you should be happy with that. You might get a couple more. After today. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And thank you so much, guys, for for coming on to the the the show today and it’s been fantastic having you and thanks very much for watching whether watching now or in the future everybody.
Speaker
Yes, guys. Thank you.