Oh, by the way, before we get into this episode, I would love to tell you a little bit about Life Notes. Now, Life Notes is a weekly-ish email that I send completely for free to my subscribers, and it contains my notes from life. So notes from books that I've read, podcasts I'm listening to, conversations I'm having, and experiences I'm having in work and in life. And around once a week, I write these up and share them in an email with my subscribers. So if you would like to get an email from me that contains the stuff that I'm learning, almost in real time as I'm learning it, you might like to subscribe. There is a link down in the show notes or in the video description.

Hello, Matt. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? Good to see you. I was really hoping we could have this conversation as a bit of a mini coaching session where you help me understand what it takes to get from, let's say, 10 to 100K a month and then 100K to a million a month. Let's do it. I'm looking forward to it. Let's just say it's an hour team meeting. In about 45 minutes of it is dedicated to issues, opportunities, and awarenesses. If you're not coming with any of these things, I literally don't know what you're doing. That is a good point. All you've basically done is just like name systems for each step of the process.

And already it just feels like I have way more clarity. Inevitably, like the best people to sell are people that are referred by an existing customer. And your best leads, your hot list leads are your referred leads. This is just like mind blowing to me. And I think for you too, one of your big models when you think about anything new is can I do this for the long term? And the answer to that is hell yes, you can. If...

Hello, Matt. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? Welcome to Dubai, Oli. Good to see you. Good to see you, man. Okay, so we have done lots of episodes on this podcast so far, sort of about the starting point of entrepreneurship, like how to go from zero to, for example, 10K a month with like, you know, your concept and your audience and your avatar and your offer and all that and a sales system and all that kind of stuff. You seem to specialize from, I don't know,

previous conversations that we've had and me being on your podcast and the stuff you post on socials, you seem to specialize in helping people get beyond the 10K a month point. Our business at the moment is, we did like 5 million last year and we want to get it to 10 million. And so I was really hoping we could have this conversation as a bit of a mini coaching session where you help me understand what it takes to get from, let's say,

you know, 10 to 100K a month and then 100K to a million a month, which is the sort of kind of scaling that you seem to help founders with. Let's do it. I'm looking forward to it. Before we dive into that, can we summarize your backstory for people who might not be familiar with who you are?

Yeah, so I started four different profitable businesses over the last decade. First business was called Bitmaker. We trained full stacks, software engineers, got them jobs at Shopify, Meta, Google, trained over 2,000 engineers over a few years. And the company was acquired by General Assembly when they came north of the border to Canada, which is where I'm from. Since then, started a couple other businesses. One more recently, it's called FounderOS. We help founders with

proven systems to scale their audience, brand, and community. And so, yeah, the general mission I have in life is to really help 100 million founders accomplish their dreams through proven systems and through the ups and downs, the valleys and the mountains, you know, involved in building businesses, understand kind of how hard and yeah, just difficult it can be. And over the years, I've learned that there's

you know, there's systems and that success is really an OS and there's ways to build an audience, monetize, build a team, hire, onboard. These are all systems. And the tighter those systems, I think the stronger your business. And so, yeah.

So yeah, excited to dive into some of those today, I'm sure to help you get to that million a month milestone. Nice. Okay, so I first read the E-Myth Revisited in like 2019. This was two years into starting my YouTube channel. And that was the book that really gave me the first like, like the terminology of systems. I was like, like, I'd had a business when I was in med school, sort of 2012 to 2019, and knew nothing about hiring. I was doing all the admin myself and getting super overwhelmed. And I just, I didn't even have

And it's like in my brain, there wasn't even a room for like systems or like business or anything like that. And I never really thought to read any books about it. And then seven years later, I discovered the E-Myth Revisited. I was like, oh my God, like I've been missing out on so much.

valuable insight by not having read books about this stuff already. And that was the book that really told me that, oh shit, I can delegate and I can hire and I can sort of build a sort of franchise model around my business so that if someone else were to try and replicate it, it's like, what are the systems and the standard operating procedures and stuff? And so really that was my first introduction to the world of systems. How did you get into the world of like business as a system?

Yeah, so like you, I'm an avid reader, whether it's books like, you know, Systemology, E-Myth Revisited, Traction, you know, Rockefeller Habits, the list goes on.

i'd be lying if i said it was just some like linear process you know just from kind of being in the mix of building businesses going through the struggles inevitably anytime something went wrong i realized it was because we didn't have it documented properly we didn't actually know what the smooth process for that thing was who the owner was who was accountable for it and so after kind of you know running into these blocks making these mistakes you know i eventually started to realize if i could just have

you know from the starting point of a customer's journey all the way through to the promise that we're looking to deliver on and then through the referral all sort of systemized all processed um

selfishly, it would just lead to a lot less headaches. And I think one thing that we're both into is like, aside from building businesses, I think we love living vibrant lives. We love to travel. We have different hobbies. I enjoy playing paddle tennis and hanging out with friends and traveling around. And so, you know, the more my business is systemized, the more it's just like a calm company, the

the more sustainable it is long-term and the more I can selfishly just go do other things in my life that I enjoy doing. So yeah, that's been a bit of my journey. Sick. Okay. So let's say I were to, you know, we were to somehow end up doing like a one-on-one coaching session where I was like, Hey Matt, can you help me grow my business? How, how would we, how, how would we go from there? Yeah. So what business do you want to start with? I guess.

I guess I think of my business as a content and courses kind of thing. So we've got the YouTube channel, we've got social media, we've got the podcast, we've got my email list. And then the course that we sell right now is our YouTuber Academy, where we've got a $1 product, which is like a self-paced, very quick course on how to start a YouTube channel. That upsells people into a $1,000 product, which is a self-paced course on how to

kickstart and grow your YouTube channel. And then we have a YouTube accelerator, which is a more higher ticket, like at the moment 5k a year, but we're upping the prices depending on when people hear this. And that's like a 12 month program that has support from my team and weekly office hours from my team. And I do a monthly Q&A. And we have like account managers, and we're working with ethical scaling to build custom success for that.

So we have that vertical for products, i.e. helping people start, grow and monetize YouTube channels. But we are about to launch a productivity thing. At the moment, it's tentatively titled Productivity Lab. And we want it to be like a sort of

one to two K a year like community type thing where the pitch is sort of like Peloton for productivity, a community for ambitious entrepreneurs, creators and professionals looking to double their productivity, focus and consistency so they can do more of what matters to them in work and in life. Where the idea is like it would be

There would be like a life cohort element where I would teach a course on productivity for the first four weeks, probably just as a one-off and then make that evergreen. And then we would have 12 months where every day there are Zoom co-working sessions. Every week there's a facilitated weekly review, a monthly reflection, a quarterly planning session, regular workshops on like vision and goal setting for your personal and professional life. Just something that can, that sort of target at like, yeah, entrepreneurs, professionals and creators who want to, I guess, double their productivity.

We're in the process of building that up to launch it probably end of Q1 2024. At the moment, most of the business revenue comes from the YouTuber stuff. We'll probably do about a million from our content arm, a million pounds, so like $1.3 million, and probably around 2.5 million pounds from the YouTuber stuff. And we're hoping to do at least 2.5 million from the productivity thing or stuff. And...

That's the sort of back of the envelope math that I'm doing to try and get us to 10 million. Okay. If any of that makes sense. Yeah, makes a lot of sense. So I appreciate all the context and just your vulnerability to over the years of just being open with your numbers and allowing others to learn from sort of the specifics. A lot of people I think are nervous to just like divulge the in and out. So appreciate that. So first things first, I think when we started about systemizing a business,

it can feel a little bit like daunting and overwhelming, right? And so I like to use a couple principles to start off with, which is like number one, the 80-20 rule. Like what's like the 20% of the business we can systemize to reduce like 80% of the headaches and make this thing run pretty damn smooth. And then the second aspect is before moving on to anything new,

Let's make sure that just the existing foundation is running like a well-oiled machine so that we almost afford ourselves the ability, the time, the freedom to either do it doing things we love or building that next business arm to get yourself to say,

a million a month. Because the last thing that we want is to start up this whole productivity lab side of your business. And then right while that's getting up and going, the other side of the business just starts falling apart. And now you're just burning it on both ends and going crazy. And I think it's oftentimes a recipe for burnout. And so I think to start with, let's just talk about sort of that

core journey that someone in your existing business would go through. So if we put yourself in the actual customer's shoes, right? So I'm someone that maybe has first arrived on all these YouTube channel because it showed up on my homepage of YouTube and I clicked on a video.

What's that journey that that person goes through from, oh, this Ali Abdaal guy is really interesting and I love this productivity video I've seen all the way through to, you know, the end of that journey. What's that kind of journey?

What's one example of where someone would go? Nice. That's just a really good question, which I've never once thought about. So thank you for that. I'm just like thinking, damn, I should really think about this more. Okay, so what's one example of the journey? One example of the journey, they see one of my videos pop up on the homepage. They're like, watch the video. Maybe they'll, I don't know, watch some percentage of the video.

And then they're like, "Okay, cool, close YouTube, forget about it, move on to something else." And then because they've watched a bit of my video, the next time they go on YouTube, maybe the algorithm recommends them another video. And so now they're in the sort of the Alibdaal ecosystem as it relates to the YouTube algorithm, and they're watching a handful of my videos. At some point, one of two things will happen. Most likely, they'll just continue on as a regular viewer or whatever, but they might see a plug for my email list

which is like, "Hey, I send emails every now and then every week. Sign up to my newsletter." Or something. Unlikely. They might sign up for one of our lead magnets. So we have a video that's gone viral this year called "How I Manage My Time with the Trident Calendar Method" this year, last year, whatever, where people enter their email and then there's a little tick box, "Would you also like to sign up to the email list?" And then I think they get the template and it asks them a few questions. "Hey, are you interested in productivity? Are you interested in this? Are you interested in growing your YouTube channel?" Kind of thing.

Or they'll happen to stumble across one of my videos around how to start and grow a YouTube channel. And within those videos, there'll be a link to our YouTuber Academy. And they might click on that to be like, "Ooh, it's kind of interesting."

So either they'll end up directly going to the YouTuber Academy website, or they'll end up on the email list, or they'll end up signing up to one of our lead magnets, some of which are productivity related, some of which are YouTube related, some of which are like random, like journaling stuff, just because we thought, hey, might as well. And they'll end up on the email list somehow. And then in theory, they will be post signup segmented into based on their interests into they like productivity, they like YouTube, they like both, they like entrepreneurship. I think we have a few buckets. Wait.

which as I say, I'm like unsure of, so you look into that. And if they end up in the YouTube thing, then we send them, I think, some nurturing emails that have a pitch then, "Hey, would you like to sign up for one of the courses?" And then hopefully if they are a complete beginner to YouTube and they're like, "Oh, I actually want to start a YouTube channel," they sign up to our $1 course, which gives them the option to upsell into the $1,000 course.

And along the way, hopefully they'll see an apply now button for our YouTube accelerator. If they are an adult with money, they might be like, oh, actually, you know, it's really quite useful to have like Ali's team holding my hand through the whole process. And then they might apply for our accelerator program. Perfect. Yeah. So as I'm hearing you say all this, right, it's easy to kind of pull out from that, like the core client journey and maybe like nine of the core systems, right?

that matter there, that if you can nail those, like 80% of the battle is won, right? So starting off, you have your YouTube system, right? Which you know very well. I think that's your competitive advantage is right there, right? So like, yeah, thumbnails, everything that you teach in part-time YouTuber Academy, like that side you got down. The question too is like, where's that documented, right? I think it's a notion, which is I think typically you're knowing you, that's kind of like one of your hubs, right?

And then who owns that? So that down the road, you're working on something new and something blows up on YouTube or something goes wrong, you know to go to that owner. Maybe that's Angus on your team. Maybe that's someone else. That's a sick system. That's like dialed. Well, it's not dialed. We keep on trying to improve it, but it's our bread and butter and I'm very happy with our YouTube system. Cool. So Tintin owns that. That's documented in Notion. That one's down. Second aspect then is

You talk a lot about lead magnets, right? So each one of these different videos you have oftentimes leads to something like a score app page or a different landing page, maybe in ConvertKit, where you're driving people then to that unique lead magnet. If it's the castle method, you drive into a castle method for free. If it's the trident method, you're driving them to that for free. If it's a different personality quiz or something around productivity quizzes, you're driving that on the score app. So you've got a bunch of these and it can sound a little bit amorphous and sort of like, wow, there's a lot of these going on.

But the truth is like, it's just a lead magnet system that, okay, the YouTube video has been made. Are we driving them to an existing lead magnet or are we creating a new lead magnet for this thing? So what is our lead magnet system? Where is that documented and who's the owner of the lead magnet system? Yeah. So it's so funny that you say that because literally as of about a month ago, we moved one of our team members who was previously on the podcast and had been working on the podcast for like two plus years.

to become the owner of the lead magnet system. Because we were like, hey, Amber, we need to take the email list really super seriously. Amber didn't have much experience, but she absolutely smashed it with the podcast over the last two years. Super detail-oriented, like...

super quick learner. So we're just like, all right, take these courses, read these books, talk to these people and get up to speed on how email works. And now she owns our lead magnet system and has documented it in Notion where we now have for the first time a database of all of our lead magnets. And she's leading the charge to be like, okay guys, what are the new lead magnets we want to create and why do we want to create them and what's the goal of the lead magnets and all of this sort of stuff. So we have

or in the process of building out a lead magnet system. Great. And then the one aspect there too that I think is useful is, so all that's amazing, is then what is the one core metric that would determine that person's success? So as an example, with lead magnets, you're plugging these into YouTube videos. You may know that, okay, traditionally, when we've plugged that lead magnet in two strategic spots in a 15-minute video, we drive approximately, you know,

10% of viewers to signups for that lead magnet. We want you to improve that metric and get it to 13%. Let's just say.

Right. And so you may know what is your steady state lead magnet conversion from YouTube video. Yeah. And try and give them now a stretch goal of now that you're solely focused on this area, we'd like to see that 10% improved to 13%, which over a year that, you know, that could equal, you know, hundreds of thousands of newsletter signups. Absolutely. That's a really good point. What is the metric here?

Yeah, a question I've been thinking about a lot with a lot of areas of our business is what is the metric that matters here? Because for example, for lead magnet stuff and for the email list, we were thinking, so we have like a weekly scorecard, which actually I might bring up the laptop and just do a screen share so we can bring it up. So we have like a weekly scorecard where based on the traction principles, we track all these metrics week on week. And one thing we don't really track yet, which we are now starting to, is like how many emails...

how many email subs came from which lead magnets and which sources. We have all of those in some combination of Google Analytics, Looker Studio, ConvertKit Analytics. They're all over the place. But just getting them all in one place is the job for the next week for the team. And then UTM linking all these lead magnets because our social media people are also driving traffic to some of these lead magnets. Because one thing that we've thought about is that... Actually, I'm curious to get your take on this. Someone who subscribes to Sunday Snippets, my email newsletter...

versus someone who is an actual lead. I was speaking to Eric Partaker, I think you know about this, and his view on this was that a lead is someone who has expressed explicit educational intent in the vertical of a product that you actually have. So for us, it's like if they sign up to our YouTube crash course or our...

Grow your YouTube channel scorecard. All that kind of stuff makes them a lead for our YouTuber stuff. But if they're just the people who sign up to Alibdal's newsletter, or if they've signed up to, for example, the Castle Method, which is a business thing, and we don't yet have a business product, then do they count as a lead? Do they just count as a subscriber? What's the metric that matters here? I'm just throwing this at you. Any thoughts? Yeah, so let's get that actually at the end. Because I think we can talk to that more in the dashboard system, which will be the final one. Okay, sick. So...

The next aspect after nailing the lead magnet system, which we talked about again, having what's the source of truth. And for you, I think it's notion. The second aspect is then who's the owner and then what's the core metrics of success. Keep it simple, right? If we have those three things for each of these systems, like we're moving in a nice direction. Yeah, we really are. So the next one then is, okay. It would be sort of weekly leads and we can. I think from there it goes up to your newsletter system.

Because they're signing up now to like the newsletter, they're in there and we'll keep going down the flow. So then it becomes, okay, well, who's the owner of the newsletter? Who's owning the newsletter calendar over the next bit? Because you've also got the brand side that gets integrated. So it can't just be this thing where week to week, you're just scrambling per newsletter. Oftentimes you need to have a level of...

planning there so that, yeah, things are organized and you can kind of see in the future, okay, hey, these are the next like 12 weeks of newsletters coming out. So who's the owner there? And like, what would you say is the core metric? Oftentimes it's something around like say click-through rate. Nice. Yeah. So at the moment the owner is Nadia.

and she sorts out the upload calendar puts the sponsorship in the thing sends me a slack message each week being like hey here's the convert kit template ready for you to populate and then every sunday usually every sunday i sit down and write the newsletter i didn't do it yesterday because i was here and busy with stuff and so i need to do that today at some point so sometimes it becomes not really a sunday email but a monday or tuesday email depending on how like busy i am and we're always like you know it would be nice if we were a few weeks ahead but

then I don't write things that are a few weeks ahead. And I think the team have written some sort of backup options if like Ali really doesn't want to do a newsletter one week. But Nadia owns that system. The metric, I mean, we track subscribers on Sunday Snippets newsletter, we track open rate, we track click-through rate, but we don't think, like none of these really have a target as such because it's also like my personal newsletter. And so how should I be thinking about like...

Yeah, metricizing the newsletter, if that makes sense. Yeah, so I just think with any of these, it's part art, part science, right? So there's not like, oh my gosh, this is the way it has to be and I've been missing out all over these years, right? I think my personal approach to this stuff is,

you know, if you have the data, great. If you don't like let's back and app in it. Like how many newsletter subscribers have we gotten each of the last say three months? And then what is a reasonable growth rate of that to hit on a monthly basis, you know, for the next year. Yeah. Right. So that we have kind of targets and actuals over the next year. And we know, okay, like we're looking to hit 12,000 in February, 13,000 in March, so on. And like, where do we get to? Because the success of,

The lead magnets, the newsletters, and you're obviously growing a lot on YouTube too. So we should be funneling more people to the newsletter over time. It shouldn't stay stagnant. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, so I guess a metric for Nadia could be newsletter growth. But Nadia doesn't really... She's more involved in the system for newsletter creation, which is different to, I think...

And with anything, it would be Amber who's on the lead magnet system, which would be more newsletter growth. So maybe for Nadia, it's like, hey, let's just keep open rate at like 50% if we can or something like that. And then there's that. And then there's also things like it could just be like, I like that you're thinking about like smart goals, like specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time bound. The other side too is, yeah, maybe it's just that at all times, there's a 12 week schedule and calendar that is made. And they are the source of truth to always know that like there's 12 weeks organized, like they're ahead of the ball.

So that, you know, as we're planning different launches and everything, it's very easy to know that like, oh, the newsletter stuff is not some scrambling thing. We know exactly where we want to plug these things into. So it could be something like that. Yeah, it could be open rates. It could be a combination of these things. Okay, cool. So we've got YouTube system into lead magnet system into newsletter system. Yeah. And so workshopping this with you, I think the next stage that you may consider off the top is now...

your like lead system or like it could be called a couple of things, your lead system. It could be called like your low ticket product system, your funnel system, any one of these, you know, we could workshop around. This is where now someone's seeing the newsletter.

are seeing your content and now kind of raising their hand and becoming a lead and getting now into one of the streams of products you have, whether it's the $1, $100, $1,000, whatever it may be. And now, as Eric had mentioned to you, like that's where we start, like these now people are leads. So we're taking people from the broad audience of YouTube. They've been in the newsletter, which is still a pretty massive audience of people that just may be interesting in all these thoughts week to week. And now they're sort of raising their hand going, no, I actually want to

potentially purchase something from you. And so it's that person that's managing things like what are those low ticket products? What are those email sequences? What are the text message sequences? If there are any, eventually, I don't think you do that yet. And what updates need to be made to the existing low ticket products and what potentially new low ticket products need to be launched? Or are we considering launching? Which we don't need to get into that too, too much. But

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All you've basically done is just like name systems for each step of the process. And already it just feels like I have way more clarity. The fact that you were just like, oh yeah, there's these nine systems. I'm like, are there? And he's like, yeah, there's the YouTube system. I'm like, yeah, that's a system. There's the, you know, the lead mag system. Yeah, the system, you know, the system for these. I just leave them like, oh, just thinking of it as a system

like a sort of a system that's strung together with other systems, just makes the whole thing feel a lot less black boxy, a lot more manageable. Good. So that's just like nice on a sort of meta level.

I guess, okay, so for our leads system, this is where it starts to get a bit muddy because we have like Jakob, our marketing guy, we have Gareth, our product guy, we have Saf who is helping, who's building our CRM. He's like our sales and marketing rev ops kind of guy. We've just transferred to HubSpot as of like a month ago and are trying to use that to track leads and stuff. But now we're running into the issue of like, well, we don't want to bring every newsletter subscriber into HubSpot because that's freaking expensive. And like,

What if we bring everyone who's put their hand up into HubSpot? That's still really expensive. Hmm, should we pay someone for HubSpot? And we start to get into these ROI calculations. My instinct is that we should just bring all leads, official leads into HubSpot. And I'm, yeah, between Gareth on product, Jakob on marketing generally, and Saf on like sales and marketing, RevOps. I'm not like, I wouldn't be able to say who is the owner of the lead system. Okay. Do you have a sense? Yeah. Yeah, so...

And it's a great, this comes up, right? Like this is natural where as we get in, some of them are super clear, like YouTube, Tintin obviously is our guy. And now we're into more like the funnel and we're a little bit confused there as to who the person is.

That's actually a great part of this whole sort of thinking exercise, right? It's like, oh, damn, like who actually is owning that thing? And maybe what we have right now is like a few different stakeholders that are generally aligned, but also are sort of sometimes swimming in different directions. Yes, 100%. And are not totally aligned in their thinking. Exactly. So, you know, that may be cause to like, hey, we need to create a bit of a funnel system here.

Let's get everyone in the room. Let's determine who's the core owner of this. And then almost like the sub owners maybe of the more minute parts of it. Yeah. Right. So let's decide on what is the core metric there in terms of maybe leads per month. Yeah. Right. Let's determine who's like the overarching, like when, when,

one guy is saying, hey, we should do this. And another guy saying, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like we're not using HubSpot and piping those leads in there yet. It's too expensive. We're doing this. Who's the one that can just say, no, we're doing this. And it's not you. Right.

Yeah. Right. It's like that owner needs to be able to say, hey, I respect both these directions, but we're doing this. Nice. Right. Yeah. That would be so nice. Yeah. That would be a breath of fresh air. Yeah. Yeah. So we need to kind of we don't solve that right now. Right. But I think in a room you've got a great team and you guys are all super close and you guys go on like team trips every quarter. So maybe this is a good topic for the next team trip you guys run. So figuring out who is owning this sort of like funnel system. Right. I'm just going to think out loud here. So lead lead magnets.

get some people onto Sunday Snippets newsletter, but also get some people to become leads by raising their hand for like a YouTube product or a productivity product or whatever. To what extent then would Amber, who is our lead magnet system owner and responsible for growing the email list generally, to what extent would she be also then in charge of like the leads system? Like what is the point of a lead system?

What I'm categorizing, let's just call it the funnel system to be clear, right? Funnel system. Those people are then taking the, you know, people that have raised their hands and are now leads and now they are now directing them

to the different products in our product suite. So some of these people are determined to be like for the $1 product and they help facilitate that through email sequences. Some people are determined that they're right for the $100, the $1000, the new productivity lab product you have coming out, right? There's this whole sort of architecture of different email sequences, hand raisers.

you know, just kind of nurturing that goes on there that people are responsible for on your team and that someone now it's like, okay, I've brought you that individual. Now you need to now filter them to the correct product that we have. And that's a whole other beast of a thing. Yeah.

Okay, fine. So Amber's job would be to put the leads into the system. And once they are in the system, once they're in, let's say HubSpot, then someone else on the team takes over and it's like, all right, I've got this. And that person is building out like the email flows and the if-then automations and all that stuff. Exactly.

to funnel them into the workplace. All those ConvertKit automations that I think you likely have, they're like the owner of ConvertKit. He owns all those things. He's absolutely sick of that. So he would own the funnel system. And then you said determine the metric that matters. Presumably it's not number of leads generated per week because that would be Amber's lead metric. It would be something else. What could that metric be? Inevitably, I think that if they're doing a good job

there's a level of like, how many of these leads are we converting to paying customers? Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. Because inevitably, if they're doing a good job, these email sequences filter people into the right product for them. And those people convert. And if they whether it's a conversion rate from lead to product could be one second, it could just be straight revenue. Right. Like if they're just, you know, doing a good job and their sequences are correct, they're ideally just

Just getting people monetized from lead to transaction. Nice. Yeah, so in our case, two metrics come to mind. One is just straight revenue, but straight revenue from...

products that people could have just purchased with a credit card, but also number of sales calls booked for our high-ticket thing or number of applications received for our high-ticket thing, which would also be at the end point of the funnel system, I guess. So either they convert into revenue or they apply for the thing. And what you could have too is just an overall revenue number, but then be able to double-click into that and see where's this coming from.

Right? So it's like, oh, like how much of this is the dollar product? Yeah, exactly. The $100, the $1,000, so on and so forth. Yeah, the funnel system. Man, this is good shit. Okay. Yeah. So the next one, I think we're on number six, I hope, is the sales system. Yep. Right? So now you have people that are now been piped into HubSpot. Some people have converted to a low-ticket product, which is handled in the funnel system by your ConvertKit owner. Some of them now are moving on to a high-ticket product

you know, clothes and are being passed to a salesperson or whatever you may call it in your business to then have a conversation with people and convert them to sale. Yep. So who's the owner of the sales system? A sales system in your case may consist of things like who owns the sales script, who's ultimately in charge of the pricing of that product potentially, who's in charge of hiring more people on that team.

who's in charge of the setters, people that may be setting leads in other areas that we haven't discussed, which not to confuse us, but you know, you get it. And,

also the person that's inevitably responsible for running a well-oiled sales machine. Nice. Okay, this is good. So at the moment, it is unclear who owns the sales system. So we have this amazing guy called Kevin, who works for us as a freelancer, as a sort of sales closer. He took our YouTuber Academy years ago and enjoys working with our team and he's amazing.

And we also have Saf, who is our kind of HubSpot guy on the sales and marketing side, who is sort of working with Kevin to build, be like, hey, Kevin, you know, what are the fields that you need to be populated? And then Kevin's giving feedback to be like, oh, actually, you know, sometimes, oh, you know, we've got a bunch of unqualified leads. So how do we qualify them more before they hit the sales call? And, you know, all that kind of stuff. But if I were to ask, you know, who would be responsible for hiring another closer or for selling pricing and stuff?

it would be like, oh, I don't really know, sort of Angus, sort of Ali, sort of everyone. The sales system does not have a clear owner right now. Cool. Yeah, so what I would say is, you know, this isn't that uncommon, right? Oftentimes, I think...

people like ourselves that are very like we're creative we're into building like beautiful things and serving people and um oftentimes we're into like the content side of things i think at heart like me and you are both artists it's oftentimes like that sales end of the business that it's like yeah a little bit of an afterthought yeah exactly right it's not like our innate sort of default to go and be like oh i'm going to build a badass sales team yeah so you

I've been there in my own career years ago. You know, I had every other part of the business running just beautifully. But that piece, I just couldn't figure out. And for me, at least what I realized was best, like I had to get a good handle on that myself. Inevitably, one of the core metrics, it sounds like as an overall business you're looking to get to in 2024 is to a million a month. Yeah. And so, yeah.

a million a month, like it's largely a sales thing, right? Like you're great at product. You're insanely good at content. You've got the YouTube system, the lead magnet system, all these things. Like I'm very confident you guys got down.

this sales one, right? Inevitably, that's going to be really damn important if we're going to get to a million a month, right? Number two, like we got to have a badass owner of that. I think you need to have an understanding of it. Angus needs to have a strong handle of that. Who's your general manager? Because inevitably someone on the leadership team needs to like really know that in and out so that they're not just being told some BS by the sales organization and then believing it to be true when sometimes like you dive deeper into the numbers and you realize, oh,

Oh, it's not that we need more leads. Our close rate is an abomination, right? Or it's not that we need more closers. We have the worst show rate ever. Only 20% of people are showing up to calls. Yeah. We need to fix the show rate. I'm not just hiring more and throwing more closers at a problem that, you know, that's not the problem, right? So you need to have someone on the team, on the leadership team that can understand like the root causes of

and be able to be a bit of a sparring partner with whoever that sales leader is, from my perspective, or else you really risk like the organization kind of running away from you. And you see this a lot, like I think in terms of the stage that you're at, and that not all that different than the stage that even I'm at in some of my businesses, is that you're not going to die because you don't have enough business, you will die because you get too much business.

And the whole thing just collapses in on itself. Either the sales team just becomes a mess and they're closing the wrong people or they scale too fast. And then the next stage, which we'll get to, customer success and delivery, that just falls flat on its face because you have more customers than you know what to deal with. And it can be a reputation ruiner and everything can just fall flat. So that sales piece, you think you have a couple options, either

Angus learns that piece, gets his own hands dirty and starts building that up himself. Or he just gets more of an understanding and then promote someone from within to own that piece of your business. Maybe it's the closer and sales guy that's been there for a little bit and it's now time for him to be a sales lead. Or you bring someone from the outside, which has its pros and cons, to then own that area. This is very good.

Yeah, so I realized a couple of months ago that I had zero handle on what sales even meant. And at the time we had access to Cole Gordon's Closers course, because we took it last year. And so I just sort of blitzed through a lot of that and I was like, oh, okay. I feel I sort of get it a little bit more now. Watched a bunch of YouTube videos about it. Haven't read any books about sales systems yet, although I know that there are some on the market. So yeah, in my own head, that's like a whole, a bit of a whole of knowledge that

Where I know, for example, what a setter is and a closer is. And speaking to some creators on this here in Dubai, it's like, oh, you can do DM closers as well and DM setters. Interesting. We're not really doing that. And like, you know, all this sort of stuff. Yeah, definitely needs an owner. Do you think, so for example, Saf, who is our HubSpot sales and marketing RevOps guy at the moment, doesn't really have experience with like building a sales team as such, but has a lot of experience with like

kind of the rev ops side of things. Do you think he would be reasonable to promote into sales lead or is it for this sort of thing just better to get someone with experience or either promoting Kevin if he wants to join our team like full time or bring someone in from the outside? Yeah, so there's a lot of ways to slice the pie here.

I think that I've seen both work successfully, both like getting an existing A player and then elevating them, which I think is generally my default. Or if you feel like you don't have the right person internally for that, then looking to get someone from the outside. I think the benefit

from promoting people within is number one, it's just a great culture builder. People realize, hey, wherever you start in this company isn't where you're gonna end up over time. Like look at, you know, Angus started as a writer here and scripting with me in my apartment five years ago and now he's running the whole operation. And I'm sure that's a great sort of thing that a lot of people are like, oh yeah, wherever I start, like, man, there's so much career mobility here. So I generally like that and I know you're about that as well.

And so I would say that's where you'd probably want to default to if you determine that the gentleman that you would consider isn't then fit for it, then yeah, we need to look for someone from the outside. I would still say that no matter what route you go there, Angus, your general manager, still needs to get a hell of an understanding over that system. Nice. Because...

Again, if the core metric of the companies get to a million a month, like we need to make sure that that sales system is down pat and really strong. And it's, I don't think it's something that you are going to want to dive too into yourself just knowing you like as friends. And so I'd say like Angus needs to get a good understanding, go through some of Cole Gordon's stuff, really get a good understanding of like how this stuff all works as if he was almost running it.

He should be on the sales calls. He should be part of making the projections. It should almost be as if Angus is running it. And so is this other gentleman. So you almost get like a couple people on what is probably one of the bottlenecks right now in the company as we look to scale it. Nice.

Just for a bit of a sort of context for people, and also for me, actually, this is helpful. It's only recently become apparent to me that like sales is a thing. Because before I was always just like, oh, you just, I don't know, as a creator, you have a big audience, you just make a product, people buy the product. Like, what? Like, hop on a call? What the fuck? Why would anyone need to hop on a call to buy anything? Dot, dot, dot. Like, why?

Why do you feel that sales is like... Firstly, what does sales refer to and why is it so important in getting to a million a month? Yeah, so there's no one-size-fits-all sales model, first off, right?

You could run your business whereby there is a very limited sales function and all sales are just made through the funnel system we talked about. And the sales system actually is almost in many senses eliminated, whereby just all sales are happening online without ever speaking to anyone. Yeah.

In your existing system right now, you have some more high-ticket products that are, say, over a couple thousand dollars. And you've determined that having, you know, someone that people can talk to as it's a big investment in their life would be useful. I tend to agree with that general approach. And so...

Yeah, there, I think it's as follows. It's like you're looking to have a more high ticket product with those products. We know that oftentimes people want to speak to someone because they have questions and the salesperson, I don't think in either of our cases and what we're running needs to be like a sales salesperson. And I think that's,

Maybe whether it's us or others in the audience, when they hear sales, oftentimes they think it's like, oh my God, this person is super aggressive, just trying to persuade me. Maybe that person's unethical, like just telling me lies. When really, I think, especially in what we're doing,

A lot of the people that you're selling are people that have followed your journey for years. They know you, they know what you're about, they trust you, they don't even know what they're about to buy. They just need someone to kind of answer some questions, help them get a little bit of a deeper understanding on how the community works and what the process will be from kind of start to finish and then make the purchase, right? And so I think why sales is important is because you've got...

all of these warm leads that you've generated through the lead magnet system and you funneled them to the right product now through the funnel system. And now they're at that final step. And we want to make sure that all that investment that you've made in your content, which I believe is like upwards of 150K or so a month, that we need to make sure that that investment pays off in spades, not just so that, you know, Ali can live the lifestyle he's hoping for, but because you've got a team of 12 people that we've got to feed.

We've got other products that we want to launch. We want to continue to invest in these existing products that you've made. And we can't do that unless those sales in that area are carried through from hot lead through to close. So that's how I see it as important, not just for the end customers so that they're

questions are handled and they can find themselves in the right product that's meant for them. It's also important for us as a business to make sure that we're then able to use the profits from those sales to reinvest into people, the product, and back into the processes and systems of the business to make sure this thing runs like a well-oiled machine. Nice. That's great. Yeah, the other thing that I found really nice about having sales as being like a thing, and yeah, A, I think I immediately had that like,

gag response to the word sales just because the word sales feels a bit like a dirty word. And then I sort of realized, oh, actually, it doesn't have to be like that. You can have sales people that are pushy or you can have sales people that are really nice and very educational and very non-pushy. That kind of thing. It's also been really helpful in terms of just expectation setting. Because previously we were allowing people to buy the 5K product just on the website.

And so some people would buy it through the website, but then they would, because they hadn't actually spoken to someone, they would have a slightly wrong expectation around what to expect from the thing. And we realized actually making everyone apply, apply to join the accelerator. And then we, it allows us to kind of say no to people because there were some people who just had wildly unrealistic expectations. Like I'm a total beginner. I'm 50 years old. I've never used a computer in my life and I want to be able to quit my job within three months by starting a YouTube channel. You guys are going to help me. It's like,

basically never going to happen. So like, either we have a conversation to realign expectations, or we just say, sorry, I don't think I don't think this is the right fit for you. Whereas previously, we would have got those people in just through the checkout link on the website. Yeah. And now they're in and our customer success girls are like, ah, okay, Alice has wildly unrealistic expectations, but she's already in and like,

Now it's a bit awkward. And so we found that actually that expectation setting is also a really useful part of the sales process. Yeah, no, exactly. I think a lot of these sales folks are actually more like kind of product specialists or strategists, right? Making sure that the right people are

get to the right product. And if someone's not right for this, or they have the wrong expectations, either get to a common understanding as to whether it's right for them or not, or just turn them away. If it just doesn't make sense and it's not the right fit because we don't want someone, you know, coming into anything that we're creating that just doesn't seem aligned with the general mission, the general kind of flow of what we're trying to create. So yeah, the next system then after that is your delivery system.

Now you've sold something to someone and you've made generally some sort of promise as to what they can expect from joining the product that you've created. And so now we need to make sure that the actual customer success side of things and the delivery is down pat.

So that now when they're in, they want to stay in and they're super happy by the end of that experience that they want to be upsold maybe to something else you have. Or when you release Productivity Lab, this new thing that you're about to drop soon, they're eager buyers for that because when they signed up for the existing thing that you sold them,

they were blown away in terms of the value. And so anything new you launch must also be worth joining as well. You've kind of kept that promise and then some for them. Nice. Cool. So we've got Allison who's in charge of our customer success system. She has an amazing team underneath her working on that. Our Accelerator clients are super happy. We have a tiny, tiny refund rate. We've got ridiculously happy customers, which is amazing. And we're working with your friends at Ethical Scaling to help

systemize the customer success side of the business and figure out like, you know, depending on is someone a complete beginner, a non-complete beginner, intermediate or advanced YouTuber, like which path they need to be taken down, what are the key touch points and milestones along that path.

A big realization from this whole process is that we have way more beginners than I thought we did. And therefore, actually, you know, where I was, where I'm thinking, hey, we're talking about systems to scale a YouTube channel. Actually, a lot of our people have not even started because they're held back by limiting beliefs and imposter syndrome and fear of talking to the camera. And so we were like, oh, okay, we actually need to zoom into the beginner end of the thing to really dial that out.

Because I'm very experienced with like helping someone scale a YouTube channel. But like for a complete beginner struggling with emotional issues, I'm actually not the right person to be talking to them. But whereas our customer success girls are amazing at that. Like they love that accountability, the support. So we're like zooming into that and really like dialing in the customer success system. Question on this front. Yeah.

We have, for example, our $1,000 self-paced course and our $1 self-paced foundations course and our $27 templates and stuff. At the moment, improving on a self-paced product

feels like it doesn't have a clear owner because customer success feels like it's for the accelerator, which is our high ticket thing that has loads of things. But like that more like product side of things, like just like improving the core things that are part of the funnel system, the end products of the funnel system. We've got Gareth, who's our head of product, I guess, that he could sort of be in charge of

Like where does improving on existing self-paced stuff fit into this system? Yeah, I, in my own brain, see that as part of the funnel system a bit. So you have the owner of the funnel system. They're driving people to either leads for high ticket or selling them direct to these low ticket offerings. And the product guy that you just mentioned would sit under that person likely. So this person's orchestrating convert kits, sending them to the right things. And then with those low ticket offerings,

the improvements of those or creating new ones, that product guy sits under the funnel guy. - Perfect, cool, yeah, that is sort of what we have at the moment. - Yeah. - Nice. - And so, yeah, that makes a lot of sense on the customer side. It makes sense that you have a couple different journeys. It doesn't surprise me that you have more beginners than you thought. The reason being is that while you're creating this massive audience on YouTube, which is your primary lead funnel to all of your products,

and it's just natural that there'd be more beginners in something than advanced people. So it makes sense. There's a law of physics. There are more beginners to anything. More people haven't started YouTube than people that have. So it just makes sense that, yeah, hey, there's quite a lot of leads on that side. So, yeah, you're right. You should have a couple pathways there in terms of the product to make sure that there's people that are, you know,

Not started YouTube yet are getting certain experiences and then those that are starting and scaling YouTube get sort of a different experience and maybe probably skip a couple of the intro modules as an example. Yeah. And so from there, yeah, that area very similar to how we just mapped out your overall business system.

It's almost like the customer success journey has its own journey and system to it. So as a customer now of you, when I'm in the program, what are all of the different touch points I get along that journey?

Right now, when you map it out, it could actually surprise you that there's maybe like 80. Yeah. Right. Between like the intro email, the onboarding call, the first module, then this exercise they complete and so on and so forth. And then the question is, okay, now this thing is mapped out, whether it's on a whiteboard, Miro, Notion, Google Docs, doesn't matter, just wherever. Yeah.

How do we kind of simplify that so that maybe there's a lot of touch points and it gets a little confusing and we maybe want to just like condense it slightly because obviously the value oftentimes of these educational resources like you're building is getting people from where they're at to where they're looking to go as quickly as possible. And so if we can kind of reduce and simplify those steps and then make them more delightful, we've created a great product. What do you mean by more delightful?

So I think, say, you get those 75, 80 steps down to 60, right? And we're like, okay, these are the core parts of the journey. You know, The Power of Moments is a book by Chip and Dan Heath, the same authors as Made to Stick. And they talk about

you know when someone looks back on a experience in their life it's oftentimes these sort of peak moments that they really remember and so after we've gone and shown those maybe 60 core steps that make up an amazing part-time youtuber academy or amazing youtube accelerator

We want to go and then look at like maybe that journey and go, okay, what are maybe a few of like the key moments that we're going to kind of break the script? We're going to double down on that when they look back on their experience inside of this container, this product, this educational experience, whatever.

They are just like, wow, that was something else. So, you know, maybe it was getting their first YouTube video reviewed by a customer success person in a really cool way. Or maybe it was a graduation call they were on that was a great celebration. Or maybe when they published their first three YouTube videos, they got a surprise in the mail from you guys.

Or, I don't know, something. But you can start to then look at those things and go, okay, we're going to like spice up these key moments a little bit and go from, you know, maybe this being like an 8 out of 10 to an 11 out of 10 in terms of just delight. And also then just going and filtering those touch points too. Like one thing that I think is really, really important to think about is,

A lot of the time when people purchase something, and I'm sure you've been there in your life, you buy that thing and there's a slight sense of buyer's remorse.

I personally, like for some reason, why I buy clothes afterwards, I'm like, Ooh, did I want to buy this, these clothes? I don't know. Like, did I make the wrong decision? Luckily I have a girlfriend with great style. That's like, no, no, no, Matt, you definitely made the right decision. I'm like, all right, all right, all right. Thank you. Thank you. Um, but it's a natural thing in humans just to feel like that a little bit of uncertainty. And so I like to think of that onboarding call that they have as the goal of the onboarding call is to deliver the

a two X ROI on their initial investment in the program. So say they invested 5,000, how in the initial call do you deliver $10,000 of value? So instantly they're like, Oh my God, this intro call itself just paid for this entire program. Not to mention whatever else all these got planned here for the rest of this experience. So we just completely smash any possibility of people being like, this wasn't worth it.

Right. And so that would be an example of kind of like, you know, with that customer success system, once we get the initial part down pat, we've simplified the system, we have an owner of it, it's documented, then giving it another scrub way through to delight and add some peak moments. And then maybe giving that intro sequence another scrub through to make sure that the onboarding call in it is just an absolute banger and people are blown away. Nice. Oh, that's super inspiring. I love that.

Yeah, I can already think of a lot of different things that we can do just on that call that would help people get that experience of delight of like, oh, shit, this is already really good. One thing that I'm kind of thinking as we're talking through all this stuff is that on the one hand, I'm like, damn, this is a lot of work. But on the other hand, I'm like, it's so good that this is a lot of work because we are actively doing a lot of this work and actively finding ways to do this and like,

the more time that passes, as long as we're just focused on improving these systems over time, the more of a moot we build around our own business. Where for someone to compete with us on this, bloody hell, that's going to be hard. Like, my goodness. I imagine someone listening to this and thinking, you know, this idea of starting like a YouTube accelerated 12-month program seems kind of funky. Like,

Let's make it happen. And I'm like, okay, good luck. Yeah. Well, we talk about too, with folks like yourself that are looking to get from, you know, say 500 K per month to a million a month. Yeah. There's a couple of frames that I often have experienced when I do this exercise in my own businesses. Number one is you've got amazing people in your business. Folks like Tintin, Angus, and, um,

Yeah, the other folks I've met on your team are just next level, right? So while this may seem a little bit overwhelming to you, I think this clarity, this structure may actually feel very enlightening and just really, yeah, nice for them, right? Because now they're like, oh, I own this area. Yeah, I've already got most of these things around me. I just need to kind of package it up. Which leads to the second thing, which is you've been running this for quite some time. When I'm building these out, I generally try to default to copy and paste versus building something net new. Yep.

Like this process that you're about to implement and systemizing this, it's probably more of a process of simplifying and eliminating than it is like creating some new stuff. Maybe there's a couple of things like in the sales system, you mentioned like there's some stuff there potentially, but most of those other areas, it's just like, oh yeah, let's just amalgamate what we got and, you know, sequence it all right. And, and just put it all there and clean it up. But it's not anything like net new. You really got to build. Right. Yeah.

So, yeah, getting back to the customer success side, I think there are generally three core metrics there to consider. Number one is performance.

If and when you have something that can be upsold to someone, that team is almost like a back-end sales team. So if they're doing a really good job, the people that join the YouTube Accelerator would be super stoked to then join the productivity lab. You start as an example. So customer success becomes a profit center rather than a cost center. Exactly. It should be a massive profit center if you're doing it right. Oftentimes, if that division is working properly, they are doubling your revenue and more than doubling your profit.

Because you already have this whole infrastructure and then they're just adding more revenue to that existing infrastructure without adding much more costs. So upsells, number one. The second aspect is testimonials. So just keeping those testimonials great. Your landing pages, I'm always inspired by the testimonials you have there, you know.

Yeah, it's awesome to see like where people start and then you got the cool graphs as to like where they are now. They should be responsible for getting say each of them, say 15 of those a month. So if they're doing a good job,

you know, they're recording where people started at and then they're like tracking their growth over time, whether it's people that they're working with now or the alumni of the program and making sure that we constantly have a fresh batch. So when I scroll through your landing pages, it's almost just this endless scroll of graphs at the bottom of just like overwhelming social proof that you can also be using in your funnel emails as well. So they're constantly getting all these new fresh ones versus people constantly seeing, oh,

I keep seeing the same testimonials over and over again, say two years down the road. It's like, no, we want a fresh batch constant because that stuff is the best content possible for things like your lead magnets and your funnel system. Nice. Yeah. Cool. And then the last thing there, not to overwhelm you, but just things I've learned. So just sharing it in case it's useful is your referrals. Yeah. Right. So inevitably like the best people to sell.

are people that are referred by an existing customer and your best leads your hot list leads are your referred leads right so making sure that these this customer success team in the interest of making them a profit center are ideally asking people at strategic moments in time which you should map out inside of that client journey map where they're going to ask them

Right. And so that each month, whether they're on a one-to-one call or maybe they're on a group call and at the end, they're just saying, Hey, you guys got a lot out of this. We'd really appreciate it. If you could just dump an email into the chat of someone that you think would get a lot out of this, we'd love to go and give them a free resource that we've just created and see if they're interested in hopping on board like the rest of you, assuming you've got a lot out of this, we'd appreciate it. Yeah. One, as you're saying this, I'm thinking one of the things that holds a lot of beginner YouTubers back and actually pro YouTubers back is the fact that no one around them is doing the thing.

And I think everyone has at least one friend who they think, you know, this person should probably start a YouTube channel. And so like, I think an individual's chances of success are way higher if they can also bring in a friend and have a friend to go through the process with, because now it becomes a social activity and not just an individual thing you do on your own computer. So I think there's something around there. Similarly with Productivity Lab, yeah, referrals, I think is something I haven't really thought about just yet, but...

definitely something to think about. Yeah. And so I think we're on the final two systems now. So let's roll up our sleeves. So the next one is your finance system, right?

There, it's things like making sure that we're collecting the cash. If you have things like payment terms for what you're doing, we want to make sure that we're modeling out the business over the next year. So if our goal is to hit a million a month, we need to forecast, you know, when are we going to hit that? And then each month be able to review, are we on track, off track? What were our actuals versus our forecasted revenue?

The home run that I've learned over time is, again, I think we're similar. We're artists. Things like sales and like finance sometimes can take a bit of a backseat because we're just busy creating and doing that side of things. So I think that's okay. And you can actually kind of turn that into a strength. What I do is I require any CFO in any of my businesses to text me a CEO scorecard to my phone every Friday. Oh.

Oh, so I get a text message from the different CFOs of the portfolio companies I run and they send me what's our monthly profit this month, which are, what's our monthly revenue. What are the monthly expenses as in month to date? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. What were we at last month in those areas? Um, what are we at based on projections? So what percentage of target, what does it look like we're going to make this month? Yep. Like based on what you're seeing so far.

And if you were to give me say three to five implications of the financials, what do you think I need to be most focused on over the next week?

And so they are then looking like, I don't need someone just to bubble up numbers to me. That's one part of it. Cause I can then discern implications of things. It's also important that like you are owning the finances as a CFO and I need you to then look at these numbers and let me know, what are you seeing that I should be aware of? So an example of what they may be seeing is they're looking at the metrics and they're like, Oh, 63% of people are showing up to a call. We agreed that there should be an 80% show rate for calls and

And so... So they're looking not just at the P&L metrics, but also at like the... Everything. All the metrics. Everything. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And so everything. They should be able to see everything. Nice. And so they're then...

What may have happened there is that he looked at end of this example, like revenue wasn't right. And then was able to then go a layer deeper and versus just saying, Matt, make more revenue. Yeah. Right. It's like, no, what's going on here. Okay. I'm able to then look at the metrics and dissect what's happening with revenue. Okay. There's enough calls being booked. There's enough leads coming in. Oh, the show rate looks off. Yeah. Okay. Matt.

the show rate's off we want to get it to this i know we're implementing these things right now yeah you know again it's not necessary that the cfo has all the context on what we're existingly doing in the business to impact show rate but now can at least point me in the right direction to say hey this revenue thing's important to us this show rate thing looks like it's the bottleneck right now go and look at that and go fix that area and now at least i'm like okay over the next week when i get that on say a friday afternoon

My personal goal generally is like before I sign off, before the weekend, I instigate and start the action plans and let the owners know that, hey, I've seen this area that I think is a bottleneck right now. And I want you to go into next week knowing that like we got to fix that thing.

So basically I know right away what something's stuck and I've been had it fed to me like just, hey, these are the areas I'm seeing. And before I sign off for that weekend, I know, okay, those owners that I trust are aware of this being a bottleneck in the business. And next week, Monday morning, maybe even over the weekend, depending on the kind of weapon you bring on board, they are executing that thing with full force and eliminating that as a bottleneck of the business. Sick. That's great.

So yeah, so someone owning the finances, owning projections, owning cash and bank, and added bonus is owning that CEO scorecard text message I think folks like me and you should be getting. Yeah, so Angus definitely owns that system and works with our fractional CFO and also our accountants and stuff. And has recently started sending me like a weekly Slack message at the end of the week that has like all the different areas of the business with like red, amber, green in terms of concern level and just a quick description. But...

month to date finances is not on that list right now. And so the only handle I ever get on finances is every month when the management accounts come through, Angus gives a little bit of a loom presentation on it kind of thing. But they were for the previous month.

And so I always feel like I don't really have a handle on what our finances are looking at right now because it's always like a month out of date based on management accounts. So I love this idea of like a weekly, as part of the weekly message, just like, hey, what are the key finance metrics and what does that tell us about what we need to do? Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, I like the idea of like red, yellow, green sort of going on. The next step to that would be, so what do I need to do? Like if you were in my shoes, you were the CEO of the business, like what do I do now that this is a yellow or this is a red? Like what do we need to do?

And if they can then serve that to you too, and also like what they are going to do so that you're almost just like, yeah, it looks good. Yeah, exactly. So that's what Angus does at the moment. He'll be like, you know, this area is a yellow, but actually it's fine because we're in the process of hiring this person or this area is a red.

And what we're doing about it is we're having a meeting on Monday with this person, this person, this person to get together and figure out why it's red and blah, blah, blah. So often I'm just like, cool, I'll just keep making videos. You guys carry on because it's under control. It doesn't surprise me because Angus is a beast. So that's great. So yeah, the next and the final system, and I want to just caveat this for saying, I'm sure there's a lot of people that are looking at all this and going, well, what about this system? And what about that? And what about that?

That's probably the case. I'm sure there are some things that are being missed here, right? But I do think that when we've outlaid this thing, we've caught about 80% or so. I mean, I can't think of anything that we've missed here. I'm like, this is 100% of what we're trying to, we haven't really talked about our social media system, but we can. Yeah, but I'd kind of put that under the YouTube system more or less. And then, yeah, that's like your pillar content that would be filtered to other platforms. So exactly though, like there's these little minute things.

We can get to those. Let's just at least, if we really got this nailed, all that just becomes, yeah, like a little bit of, you know, stuff that we just also got to fine tune, but we've got a good amount of like structure in place here that that's not going to become overwhelming. And like the core of the business isn't going to fall apart. So the last one that I see for you, which is cool that your team's working on this over the next week or two is your dashboard system. Right. And so, um,

All of these areas have owners and have metrics, maybe one metric, sometimes a few. And we need to have a core source of truth whereby we can measure their performance and that we can easily in a snapshot, see the health of the business. So that when we're looking at that,

You could just be on your phone on a Friday on a beach chair in Thailand and just sort of like look at your phone, scroll through these metrics, get your CEO scorecard and understand, okay, my finance team or Angus is telling me, hey, these are the things you need to be focused on and this is what we're doing about it. And you're like, cool, go for it. And then you're also able to see a snapshot of the core metrics across this entire system and go, okay, cool. We

We're above projections for the month. Awesome. And you can sleep at night knowing that like you have a nice picture of the business. And I think between, you know, having a good team in place that's owning their areas, getting your CEO scorecard and having your CEO snapshot, you've kind of got a well-oiled machine. And so the core thing now that we've outlined each of these steps of the system is that we know now the core metrics that determine the success of those pieces. And let's just make sure that's all captured in the dashboard. Sick. This is our...

Actually, I wonder if we can, yeah, do you just want to have a look and scroll through? So the idea here is that we have a biggies sheet, which is sort of like the big numbers that I think I care about, which seems it's on 6.0 because we've had so many iterations of me trying to figure out what are the metrics that matter to me. And then for each person or each area of the business, we have their own sheet where they input the metrics for that week. And some of them feed into the bigger score, the sort of my view scorecard, which is like the biggies sheet.

I think at the moment, I don't know, like it's very rare to actually get feedback on this because like no one ever shows what their internal scorecard looks like. So I don't know if we're doing a good job or like what are the quick wins? What are the areas where like at the moment I do feel like there are too many numbers. At least for me, I feel like I have to scroll through a bunch of different sheets to see what I really care about. But then I think, well,

We could just make a master sheet where I can see what I really care about, but then I don't really know what I really care about. And so there's a circular thing of we have all this data that we're tracking week on week. I'm not really sure what are the core metrics that matter. The ones, if I think of, well, let's make YouTube weekly views the thing. And I'm like, oh, but it doesn't cover all of it. Like subscribers is important, but also watch time is important. And then I start to get into a bit of, oh, I might as well just look at the whole YouTube scorecard. Then I look at it and it's all these numbers. And I'm like, fuck it. I can't be bothered to look at the whole YouTube scorecard.

If that makes sense. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, there's... So, first off, I think this is in a, like, a solid state. Like, it's pretty obvious that this is on, like, a V6. Like, it's solid. Given that it's a V6, I have, like, some more, like, nuanced feedback to it that is nothing overly drastic. So...

Yeah, the couple of things I'd say is, so you got this tab, the Big E 6.0, which I love. Minor change that I would personally make, maybe just how my brain works, is I would invert it. So I would make the dates, the columns,

So that I could easily see a row and see like, you know, is it going up or down? So I just like look across the sheet and I can see that pattern versus looking down. It's kind of, and then that way the rows could be eight metrics or it could be 50. And it's just easy to like kind of scroll down and see, okay, these are the rows versus like scrolling to the side of a sheet

And it's like, you know, massively long and I'm scrolling left and right to try, oh, what was this over there? What was that over there? It's kind of interesting. I would personally, how I make these generally is just invert those. Interesting. Because in our biggies 1.0, we, in our version one, we had them that way, but then it sort of felt like we had to do a lot of horizontal scrolling to see the pattern. Okay. But as I'm saying that, like that would have been solved by just having a graph.

Yeah, or just hide some columns over time. So it's like, oh, okay, we have all of 2023 and 24 now. Oh, but it's a new year. We'll just hide 2023 for now so we can just see 2024. And if we so need to, we can unfreeze those columns. Yeah, that's good. Okay, interesting. Yeah, that's just how my brain works. It's not the biggest thing ever, but I think it kind of leads into number two, which is,

it sounds like you're still in this stage of understanding what are the metrics that matter. We just went through all of these core systems. And so I think it's about now going into those core systems and understanding, you know, YouTube it's subscribers and watch time lead magnets. It's, you know, a conversion rate and email signups lead system is conversion rate and, you know, revenue, you know, sales is revenue. Customer success is upsells reviews and,

referrals, so on and so forth. That kind of thing, yeah. Right, so then we kind of look at it and it's like, okay, well, what else is missing? Oh, I'm a bit weird and I also love to see views per week. Cool, add that in there. Yeah, nice. Oh, I actually just also love to see team size. Sure, add that in there too. And so now you kind of have all these rows of all these metrics that you wanna see in the Biggie 7.0. And I think then like most things in life, you know,

Sometimes we want like a quick like light bulb moment for things like this. I think it's very similar to like people that want a product idea to come out of the blue or are hoping to figure out their niche out of the blue. I personally believe that things like this are more of a process of refinement over time, hence why this is the biggie 6.0, right? So hopefully on your rows now, you've got like a good amount of metrics that like this feels good. It might be too much, but it's pretty easy to see it. Like, you know, maybe there's between 15 and 20 max. Yeah.

And then over time, you're looking at this every week, maybe a couple of times a week, just to feel like get into it a bit, feel like biggie 7.0 and how it resonates with your brain. And then if you're like, okay, you know, this metric actually don't need this or this don't, then just delete those rows. And then suddenly you get to like, Hey, maybe like the 10 core metrics that are needed to understand the health of the nine core areas of your business. And you're in a good spot.

That's how I would do it personally. And I don't think, and the good news is like, I don't think you're far off of that at all. I think you have the metrics here, just like you need to refine the systems. You just need to kind of double check that you are measuring the right thing per area. And you're welcome to send me this over when you completed it. And I can just give you my sense on like the documentation, the metrics, all that good stuff.

And then from there, when you've agreed on it, just input those core metrics into the rows, the dates week by week into the columns. Yeah. And...

And then you can also, if you really want to, with each of the metrics, label who is the owner of each of those so that if you see for some week it's off, you know if you really wanted to, you could ping that person. Or I think in your case, it's much better just to probably ping Angus. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, already people who own the metrics are putting a comment in the Google Sheet any time a metric is off. Either very positively off or very negatively off. They're just leaving a comment to be like, oh, this is because blah, blah, blah. Oh, great. Yeah. Question.

Should every metric have a target? I think so. Yeah. Whether that's in like the main dashboard, like the Biggie 7.0, I'll leave that to you. I think that you could have an area at the bottom of it, which is just like forecast. So you have like actuals, you know, this eight metrics. And then below that, you just have a section that just is like your forecast for the year. So if you really wanted to, you could just like

scroll below, see how we're doing. Yeah, so at the moment, like for our YouTube, like for example, we have like a weekly target with conditional formatting that makes it go red anytime it's off that. Yeah, that's great. I would do that. And then we can just sort of see at a glance and be like, weekly shorts views is under target. Do we care? Well, no, because we're not really doing, we're not really caring, we're carrying my shorts. Cool, whatever. That kind of thing. But also, huh, email open rate was like 10% lower this week and last week compared to normal. What's going on there? That requires some zooming into, you know, that kind of vibe. Well, it's interesting, right? Like I think that

You know, you bring up your YouTube metrics there, you know, not knowing a lot about you, but know a decent is like, I bet you that area of your business is probably one of the strongest. Yeah. Right. So if like your color coding and that works well, and that gives you a lot of data to then look into things like, imagine you could have that level of detail with every single part of your business. Yeah. It would all be insane. Yeah. You know, so yeah, I think if that's working for you, the color coding, I would double down on it. Nice.

And then one thing that Traction says, for example, is anytime a metric is off for like two weeks in a row, it automatically becomes an issue in like the weekly team meeting and stuff. Like what's your take on that approach? Yeah, I think that's a good way of doing it, I think.

yeah, your team meeting cadence, having a weekly team standup, ideally with like the core owners, like the core leadership team. You don't want it to be too big. You want it to be, I don't know. I just kind of like that Jeff Bezos, two pizza rule, like to keep it to that. And so, yeah, maybe every six people in that meeting,

You know, you start off with maybe going over wins from the past week that people want to share. And then ideally leaving like around 45 minutes or so to the meeting to awareness issues, opportunities, right? And ideally people after maybe having the team go through the scorecard and just see what's well, what's not going well. We're just pulling any of these red or yellow areas into the sort of opportunities section of that meeting so that the majority of the meeting is solving the bottlenecks that we're seeing and

working through it together. Awareness issues and opportunities. That's like a, can you kind of zoom into that? And yeah, how do you think of the difference between these three things? Yeah. So in terms of awareness, I think it's spending time as a team, making sure that, hey, maybe there's something that we have coming up in four months. That's not really an issue. It's not an opportunity, but it's like something that we should start talking about and be aware of because it's coming down the pipeline soon. Maybe, you know,

Ollie's taking a month off for his wedding and we should be planning for that now because it's coming up quite soon. Or there's a launch of this new product and we got to kind of like start thinking about that now, right? So it's good for that kind of thing. Issues are just like, yeah, we're looking at the metrics. There's something that has been read now for two weeks. We've got to address this. And so that would be an issue. And then...

An opportunity could be, hey, something's been in the green for four weeks. It's growing like crazy. Who knew it? But as fast as YouTube's growing, our LinkedIn is blowing up and we're barely doing anything there. It seems like a big opportunity that if we pay more attention to LinkedIn, we can 10X that platform as an example. And so opportunities is kind of like, hey, are people seeing any big things that we should...

be paying attention to? Because I think if you pay attention to any one of these things, you're missing out. If you're only paying attention to opportunities, well, what if something's blowing up in the business, right? If you just pay attention to issues, your leadership meetings tend to be quite kind of negative and it's just problem solving the whole time. And there's like the positivity and the optimism to them. And then awareness is like, okay,

yeah, maybe we've dealt with issues and we've seen some opportunities, but like, where's like the broader awareness, maybe the bird's eye view of like what's coming down the horizon that we should just also be aware of. Man, like just those three words is ridiculously helpful. And the reason it's ridiculously helpful is because traction uses the word issues. And so we were using the word issues for like two years. And then we were finding that everyone was like, well, it's not really an issue. So I don't really want to bring it up. And I'm like,

It's not really an issue. It's a small thing. I don't want to call it an issue. And then our issues list would be like basically zero because people didn't want to bring things up because it's technically not an issue. And then we were like, all right, no one's bringing up issues. So let's rename issues to awarenesses. So now we then over the last year, we've been calling them awarenesses. And now Angus is still like, guys, please fill out the awarenesses before the meeting. Crickets. All right. We've been through. I weren't any any other awarenesses. Crickets. No one speaks up.

because it's like, oh, is it really an awareness? Well, we talked about the awareness. But just framing it as awarenesses and issues and opportunities where the metrics are automatically issue-ified, just opportunities gives me a chance to be like, hey, I just spent two days in Dubai with Matt and with Erica and like, oh my God, there's,

real opportunity for us to use many chat to set up Instagram closer DMs kind of things like let's talk about that like that gives me an outlet to do that whereas it's not really an awareness and it's not really an issue and so I wouldn't normally bring it up and it would just sort of be in my mind of like someone should be thinking about this but like I don't want to bring it up to the marketing guys because they're already busy and I don't want to say he's already busy just gives me a nice outlet so I just love that framing of awareness issues and opportunities yeah totally no I

Yeah, it's something I'm in the same position over the years. Like, yeah, it was issues, opportunities. And I heard awarenesses through Daniel Priestley. Oh, yeah, yeah. He's the one who told us about awarenesses. We were like, oh, sick. Yeah, but of itself, it didn't feel like enough. So I was like, all right, let's just smush all these things together. And at least nothing can get missed. I feel like if you got all those three into it. Yeah, A-I-O's. Yeah. I just need A-E-I-O-U. Yeah, exactly. It's a bit much. No, and I think the other thing too is, I mean...

Everyone has their own style and things. My style is just my style. But, you know, on those meetings, because let's just say it's an hour team meeting and about 45 minutes of it is dedicated to issues, opportunities and awarenesses. If you're not coming with any of these things, I literally don't know what you're doing. Like, because if you are working at the company and you don't see any issues anywhere, you

you don't see any opportunities anywhere and you're not aware of anything that we need to know about. Like, are you working? Yeah. Right. And I don't need to be an asshole or anything like that. That is a good point. But it's just like, you know, with all due respect, like, you know, we're all weapons here. We're like A players. We have, we are here for a reason. We are leaders for a reason. And so as a leader-

if you're not seeing anything we can improve, anything that others should be aware of or any opportunities on the horizon, guys, like, come on, we're better than this. And so I think it's just that kind of like, guys, like, let's do this thing. Like we have big ambitions here and this is not a million a month team.

A million a month team doesn't sit here with crickets for an hour wondering, hey, is there anything anyone should be aware of or any opportunity in this business? So like, let's do this thing. Like we got some big goals here. We're all jamming. We got our big meeting in Morocco or wherever you guys are going next in your quarterly meeting. And it's like, let's, the same level of camaraderie we have when we're in person, let's bring that to these meetings and come with some real implications of stuff everyone should be aware of and let's get after it. Mate, I'm gonna clip this and send it to Angus because Angus has this frustration every week where he's like,

I keep telling people to fill out the awarenesses and no one's doing it. Like what the hell is going on? Yeah. I would tell them not to show up if they don't fill it up. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Just straight up. It's just like, we're not, this is not a spectator sport. This is like, this is a sport you're on the court. Yeah.

Be active, right? We're not showing up to the basketball game just to sit on the sidelines. This is the leadership meeting and the leaders of the business should be being active in these meetings and actively bringing up stuff. And if anything, hopefully you and Angus can kind of sit back there while other departments are sort of sorting through things they need to be aware of. And you guys are just kind of

moderating a conversation versus the ones just feeling like you got to pull stuff out of others. And I've been there before in companies and it's no fun as a leader because you feel like you're just kind of putting on this like charade every week and kind of like, it's very performative because you then just sometimes feel like you've brought your two issues or opportunities and now you just have to pull more out of the hat because no one else has anything to say. Right. So yeah. Nice. One,

I think I'd love to get your take on. So at the moment, Monday is a sort of our meetings day in that we have a team, an all hands team meeting, which is like all 14 of us.

And then we also have a commercial team meeting, which is like the six or so people who are in the commercial team, plus Angus, plus occasionally me. And then we have a content squad meeting, which is like the six or so people in the content team and me. So it's like, and like in each of these, in like the team meeting, there's like team-wide awarenesses and issues and stuff. In the commercial meeting, it's more stuff related to the commercial side of the business, the content team, more stuff related to the content side of the business.

And it feels like a lot of meetings because all of Monday is basically taken up with meetings. And we also do like a nine-day fortnight, so every other Friday is off. And so a couple of team members have recently been saying that, yeah, so like all of our Mondays are meetings. And then Wednesday afternoon, we like have two hours set aside for like a thinking block, just where everyone's just...

gets on a Zoom call with a pen and paper and just thinks with like a few journaling prompts about their area of the business and a level up hour where it's like the objective of that hour is to take a course or read a book about something or whatever. So it's like Mondays are gone, Wednesday afternoons are gone, every other Friday is gone. That leaves us like two days a week to actually do the work. And then some people have like office hours with the accelerator students and like Tintin films with me every Tuesday. So he's like, I've basically just got Thursdays to do my work. Like what's going on here? What's your take? Yeah, so...

First off, it's great that you're just like aware and like have the, yeah, self-awareness. And you've obviously got a good relationship with your team to kind of understand like

What feedback is being bubbled up here, right? People saying, ooh, I only have like a day or half a day to really like get into what I got to get into. And you may actually be seeing some like sort of side effects of this in those leadership meetings where people aren't bringing up much, maybe because they're not actually getting really into things enough to then have much to bring up potentially. Yeah.

I would personally make the following changes. Number one, my only meeting day would be on Tuesdays. I like Tuesdays because people are coming fresh off their weekend and Mondays are sacred. You're like fresh. That is scientifically your most productive day of the week. You've just like been able to like rest your brain and chill. Don't slam people into meetings. Let them just work because they got all this pent up motivation and juices and they're ready to go. Let them just rip.

right? Leave like a Tuesday afternoon for like the meetings, right? And I would sandwich all of your meetings as a CEO into just my Tuesday as best I can, right? And so,

the team huddle, the leadership meeting, your commercial meeting, whatever, that's like Tuesday afternoon. So all of your team now has the first day of the week to slam through stuff, all that first half day on Tuesday to also get through it. And then they sync on Tuesday now that they've, you know, had a lot of stuff they could churn through and then are able to kind of like discuss with the squad. I would try to look at, okay, Tuesday afternoon, let's say that's from noon till 5 p.m. back in Apkin. There's like five hours there.

Anything that can't fit into those five hours, we're going to try like two months of deleting it. You know, you don't need to be that strict per se, but like what would that look like and what stuff then gets removed?

Level up our, you know, there's one world where it's like your culture values this stuff. You only bring on people that are, you know, constant learners, all that. You don't need to designate an hour for these people to do that. Potentially, they just do it naturally. They read before bed or they learn they're going through a course on the side or whatever. So maybe you just determine like we're going to just remove that.

There's some other items there that you may determine are not like the core meetings that like we're like, okay, we're going to try two months off these and let's all revisit guys, you know, from March one to May one, we're going to delete 50% of our meetings and let's revisit what ones we then want to put back, if any, come May one. And if there's none that need to be put back, then why put them back? Yeah. Nice. And yeah,

At least now things are simplified. You don't need to be on as many, people hate meetings, right? And I think too, it's like, hey, in lieu of us removing meetings, if you feel like there's things that people need to go or need to know, sorry, we have a squad channel or a team channel inside of Slack.

And just send a loom to people. And ideally, people are just using asynchronous platforms like loom to avoid having to have everyone all in one room because meetings are pricey as well, not only on your time on your energy, but like if you literally look at the people that you have in that meeting, and you give them all an hourly rate of say 250 bucks an hour, you know, you're maybe spending like three, four grand on a meeting where you're just trying to pull stuff out of people and

You know, they could just be doing a lot, especially if your team's saying like, hey, I feel like I don't have a lot of time. Like you can imagine the things that they want to get through if they weren't on meetings. They clearly want to crank on some stuff that is kind of quickly like piling up. So I would just give them the space just to get that stuff done, give them the mental peace, the ability to kind of get through that and keep it all kind of minimalist in terms of meetings. So the ones that they are on, it's like, this is very important and it's important that you come prepared because we only have two a week.

Yeah, that's good. What's your take on like a weekly sync meeting and then a weekly wrap up of the week meeting type thing? Or do you just do like one meeting a week with like the team or whatever? Yeah. So in all the companies I run, I like to have a writing first culture.

A lot of that is selfish. Like, I just don't want to be on a lot of meetings. If I can be on one meeting with the leadership team a week for 45 minutes to an hour, that's good. Assuming that everyone's a players there and they know what they're doing. Like, there's no need for us to be meeting a lot. You know, Jeff Bezos said, you know, communication is chaos. If people are always having to communicate with one another and be on so many meetings, like something's wrong.

Right. You probably don't have clear systems. People don't know what area they own. They don't actually know what they're doing. So they're just trying to communicate all the time and be on a million meetings because at the core, they have no idea what they're doing. Right. So if people have core metrics, they know what they're doing. It's piped into a dashboard. Like all that area that we started talking about is nailed. People should then just be able to go do deep work each day just to make sure that the issues and the opportunities they're seeing in their area are taken care of. And so how I approach things is you have that. Yeah, you could have your Tuesday leadership meeting.

From there, I personally don't see a need for like a team-wide meeting every week. I know that Brian from the co-founder of HubSpot, I think he talked about as they were building HubSpot, which is now a multi-billion dollar company, they would have like one team-wide meeting a month. So I personally think you can leave those kind of all-hands meetings to like once a month. I don't think you need them every week. Because what will happen too is it's redundant with the leadership meeting. Like the leadership meeting should be like, we're on the same page, now go. And

And in their respective areas, they could run like a department meeting that you don't need to be on because they're aligned with the general thesis of what's going on in the company. Yeah, so I would delete that. And then in terms of the end of week, I personally like to just see, and this is something you could help create or Angus could create for everyone, is like,

I want everyone to give me a thorough end of week update. So I want to know if you're say customer success, give me a detailed breakdown of who are the key people you spoke to this week? Who did you upsell this week? Who got, you know, what were the testimonials you got this week? Give us like five of the best ones. What are some opportunities that you're seeing? What are you working on next week?

I don't need to have a meeting with you. I don't need to do whatever. Just like give me a detailed thing so that on Friday or maybe on Sunday, because I got really tired on Friday, I just take an hour over breakfast and I'm just like scrolling through, or maybe I'm in the back of an Uber. I'm just scrolling through the end of week update channel and Slack. And I'm just able to see everyone's end of week. And if I want to, I can comment under it. Or if not, I don't. And it's not by the time I'm even seeing that their manager has seen that. So it's gone through a couple of filters and

And I feel like it's much more thorough if someone's writing their update than just updating on a meeting. Like you've really had to think about it. You've had the time and space to write what's on your mind. And now I'm just kind of reading through them whenever I want. Yeah. So I think we do a good job of end of week updates in like a nice notion database and blah, blah, blah. At the moment, the end of week meeting is like either on a Friday or on a Thursday, depending on if it's a night or fortnight. And it's like,

kind of more of a vibey personal and professional wins and like someone in the team is giving a presentation on something they've learned and stuff and i've been in those a handful of times

And I've always felt like, I'm not sure how valuable this is. But also now that we used to be hybrid and now we're like fully remote, like does the team actually like getting on the call each week and talking about what's going on in their personal lives and stuff? Yeah. Yeah. What do you reckon? Yeah. So, I mean, I think at the end of the day, there's an opportunity for you to just ask the team, right? Like maybe send out a bit of a team-wide survey of just like, hey,

Maybe the purpose of the survey is that we've noticed that there's a little bit too many meetings and we're trying to simplify the company.

uh these are the core meetings that we believe must be there yeah like in you know you name let's say three or four that you think must be there is there anything you think we're missing you know is there any other meetings you think should be still in place yeah you know how can we still ensure that the culture is maintained with the removed meetings and then just see what people bubble up in a survey and then you know again like just experiment maybe with reducing a bunch of them for two months see how that goes survey them again at the end hey is there anything that you feel like we're missing in this two-month period that you'd like to see us bring back

And then also just make some executive decisions. You're not going to make everyone happy the same way. If like someone goes through your education program, some people love it. Some people are like, this was solid. And some people are like, oh, these things could be improved. And you just got to make some executive decisions around some stuff. But I think the area where people get mistaken, I think sometimes is when you have a great team,

It's not like you're having a meeting or they're doing nothing. It's they're either you're on a meeting with them or they are in deep focus working on core areas that they know need to move forward in their collective activities.

you know, workload to push the business forward. And so then being in their flow is one of the most valuable things you can get out of anyone. So breaking that flow for a meeting, like you better have a damn good reason to do that because a one hour meeting is not one hours. It's three hours.

Right. It's the one hour getting ready for it prepped, then getting to the meeting for an hour, then kind of getting back situated after and getting back into the flow. And so it's just very costly. And more than anything, I think it's better to just free up people's time and allow them just to focus. What are your thoughts? So at the moment, Angus does every other week one on ones with everyone in the team, basically.

What are your thoughts on like manager one-on-ones and cadence of those and stuff? Yeah, I think that's good. That's a good cadence. Like I didn't see any issue with that. And yeah, like, you know, in your book, right? Like feel good productivity. And in a lot of my own sort of trial and error with this stuff, I don't know how you see it. I think we see it very similar though, which is like, I know in my life, my greatest happiness comes from,

And it's proportionate to the amount of flow I get in my life. Yeah. Right. The amount of time I just like get to do my thing. I get to work. I get to be creative. I don't have a lot of distractions. I get to just like live a nice open calendar day and do my thing. And your team's no different. Right. And so the more that we can just allow people to embrace whatever flow looks like for them without interrupting them too much, you know, I think you're just going to get a better place. And there's a culture oriented with that as well.

right? Like just happy people in flow working on what they believe is important is I think a good healthy culture too. Nice. While we're here, one other thing, I mean, one of many things I want to get your take on. So currently as part of our YouTube accelerator, which is our 5k a year, 12 month program thing, um, we have like everyone, all of our students are in a Slack channel where we've offered like unlimited support. And so they ask questions and,

And we've basically said to everyone in the team that, hey, everyone in the team spend 15 minutes a day in the accelerator Slack, like responding to questions and stuff, which students find super valuable because now all these team is responding to them every 24 hours in Slack. Everyone in the team also has their own weekly office hour for the accelerator students. So we have one that Tintin does for YouTube, one that Saf does for video, one that Dan does for website and so on. So we end up with like sort of 10 potential office hours a week that students can join basically unlimited for the whole year.

But one thing we're finding is that it seems like not a lot, but getting everyone on the team to spend 15 minutes a day just looking at the Accelerator Slack and replying to questions is a thing that takes them away from their core thing. And it's always a thing where it feels like, guys, come on, let's respond to the Accelerator Slack. I've been kind of thinking, is there a better way to be able to deliver good customer success

have the students' questions be answered, but without our team having to go into the Slack every single day to answer the questions. Any thoughts come to mind around that? So here's, I'll give you a quick thought experiment. If I told you that, you know, you're making a YouTube video, like you had to make a YouTube video a week and you're spending 15 minutes on that YouTube video every day, what do you think you should change? What would you change about that process? Oh, I would do it all in one go, like once a week. Yeah.

That's the same thing. Yeah, batching. Batching. Right? So what I would do is I would assign, say I have 10 team members. I would give each of them, each of them get a day a week. Just one day a week. So Tintin and Angus are Mondays. And, you know, so on and so on. They're like Tuesdays, Wednesdays. They each just get a day. Yeah, nice. And they're not answering it all day. They just go in there for 20 minutes, 30 minutes that day. They have a little calendar thing. Yeah.

Oh, this is my day. So I spend 20, 30 minutes that day answering my sort of questions that are in there and whatever, and just answering the general stuff coming through. And then, hey, if some question comes through from the community that's relevant to them, yeah, maybe it doesn't get answered till the next Monday. But that's just like the sustainable way to do this, right? Because inevitably too, I think what all of the students experience

the program are paying for is beyond having their questions answered timely, which this would still allow you to answer most of them timely. I think they also need to make sure they're also paying for your team to progress very fast in your given area of mastery and then to share those lessons with them. And it's hard to become a master in what you're doing if you don't have time to focus and to be in flow.

And so if the team's constantly feeling, oh, I'm in meetings, oh, and then I need to go into the Slack, oh, and then as an afterthought, maybe I get to keep on perfecting my craft, then they never really get to go as deep in their craft as they get to go or they could go, and thereby they don't have as much insane deep learnings to share with the community as they could.

if they had tons of time to go really deep and then yeah, just a couple of times a week, they're assigned to answer some stuff in Slack and they're there as well. So I would just kind of batch it the same way you would do anything. And I think everyone in the community will understand that because you're teaching them batching with YouTube. And then you're also applying that level of thinking and psychology to how you guys are dealing with the community as well. Nice. That's great. It's a great idea. Yeah. Um,

Anything else that comes to mind around things that we should be thinking about in our quest to go from 5 million to 10 million? Yeah, so I think that one mental model that's useful when you do this stuff. So, you know, you may start going through this system and you're implementing this whole flow and everything that we spoke about.

And sometimes it may come up like, damn, this is so much work. Like, why are we even doing this thing? Like, I just want to move on to this productivity product that we want to launch as an example. I think that when you're building this stuff out, a useful mental exercise to consider is you are building that product now when you do this.

Because you are basically going to replicate this entire flow for that product. You're just going to change some minor things. So like one of the most complicated things we brought up, I think that we're like the stickiest for you. We're like the funnel system and the sales system. Once we nail those perfectly for what you're already doing, then just kind of, you know, changing the sales script for the new product. It's not that much work and making sure that that owner is also ready for it. It's not that bad.

Once we take that funnel system and we then, okay, this is the existing one. Oh, we just got to add in two more flows now for productivity stuff. Okay. That's not that bad. So it's kind of like you already are building probably like 70% of that new product by laying this thing out properly.

And I just think that's a useful mental model to think about so that the truth is you are building that product now. And by getting this thing right and making this thing strong now, you've built like 70% of that new thing. And it will be that much more sturdy, sustainable. And I think for you too, one of your big models when you think about anything new is can I do this for the long term? And the answer to that is hell yes, you can if all of this stuff is formidable and strong. Yeah.

Yeah, weirdly, like, I guess it's another weird, but since finishing the book, and since like, that's kind of been off my shoulders, I have felt like a newfound, like, interest in diving in and like building and perfecting the systems and stuff. Because I think before, even like up until a few months ago, while book mode was still going on, it really felt like every month for the last like seven years of doing this thing, I've sort of been

is running a little bit faster than I can, than is comfortable. Because it's sort of, when you're starting a YouTube channel, it's sort of like, oh shit, like, you know, we need to get this thing working and then the thing starts working and it's like, oh shit, like got to stay on top of it for it to keep working and then it keeps working. And it's like, okay, cool. Got to make money now. Got to hire the team. And it's just sort of like frantic thing because my mental model was, I am, I am a YouTuber and YouTubers don't last very long. Whereas I think what I've realized now is,

No, I'm an entrepreneur. I have a business. The business generates results for clients broadly without my input. And YouTube is just one aspect of the system. And I can see myself doing this literally forever. And it's now hard to fathom a world in which, like previously I would have said, oh, but like, what if I, what if the YouTube channel dies over time? It's like,

I mean, if it's at risk of dying over time, we will see that based on the numbers. We'll pivot. We'll have the strategy. We know everyone in the world who is good at YouTube. We'd have to really screw things up royally for a major area of the business to just die suddenly. And even if it does, we've got the systems for everything else to be able to have another system for lead gen. And now it feels like, oh, we're actually building a business that can survive...

if not decades, rather than, oh shit, I need to make the next video for the algorithm, otherwise my channel's going to die. Yeah. And just that sort of reframing from I'm a YouTuber to I'm an entrepreneur and this is a business. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's, I mean, yeah, profound. I mean, I think...

We can go and work on all the systems and all this area, right? But if we don't have like a core identity for ourself that matches like what we're trying to create, it can lead to a lot of like disarray, right? And so just thinking that you're a creator and yet any moment this whole thing could collapse, it's terrifying. Yeah, it gets into really short-term thinking like, should I maximize all my sponsorship revenue because what if I can't make money in the future? Yeah, exactly. Versus like, no, you're a founder, you're an entrepreneur. And yeah, right now,

The lead source is the YouTube system we have. And we have all these other areas of the business. And yeah, being able to view yourself as like, yeah, this is a business and like this will operate for the long term. And I think then being able to focus on like the systems, right? The stronger the systems, the stronger your business. The last thing is like,

You're looking to build something for the long term. I think that the sort of fear mindset can be just super destructive, right? But it happens to all of us, right? We get scared about, oh, well, what if this goes wrong? What if that goes wrong? That's where I've always come back to the systems of the business, right? If you have strong systems, your business is anti-fragile. I've built businesses and I currently have a couple of businesses that are in industries that are cold as hell, right?

Every business in that industry is dying right now. But our business has never grown faster because we have this system mapped out correctly. We have a strong funnel. Any leads we do get, we convert them. The sales system is incredibly strong. We're feeding back in bottlenecks to the respective area so the owner is aware and they're fixing them within a few days. And because that whole business and system is strong, it can weather any storm.

And so I think if you can focus like on that aspect of things, you know, you build a business that doesn't matter what happens on YouTube, you'll be okay. You know,

You know, because yeah, maybe YouTube in the worst case, sure. It dives a bit and your leads aren't going as strong as they were. Then we just make sure that, you know, X or LinkedIn or one of these other platforms that you're also big on that we start for making sure that the lead magnet system is dialed in correctly on those platforms and plug it in right there. And it's no big deal. You'll figure it away. Yeah.

Thank you so much. It's been incredibly helpful. Where can people learn more about you and what you do? Yeah, and the last thing I'll say too is if there's anything you ever need help with this stuff and if I need to fly out to the team in the UK or do whatever, you know, you got a friend in your corner here to help you guys and yeah, enjoyed your journey over the years. Yeah, for those that are looking to check out what I'm doing, you can find me on Matt Gray on any platform, YouTube, X, LinkedIn, and anything I'm doing with FounderOS you can find on founderos.com and yeah, appreciate you, man. Thanks for having me on. Thank you so much.

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