June 11, 2023 • 19 mins
Chris is the founder of the OMG center, a place where Marketing agency leaders can gather and exchange information for free. You can join too at https://omgcenter.org/digital-agency-community/
You can find Chris on Twitter and Linkedin.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
If you built a digital agency and you're hiring really good people and you want really good people to do really good work,
why would you hold them to a 50 point checklist for every single thing?
This is time for marketing,
(00:20):
the marketing podcast that will tell you everything you've missed when you didn't attend the marketing conference.
Hello and welcome to the time for marketing podcast,
the podcast that brings you the best marketing conference speakers and allows them five minutes to sum up their conference presentation.
(00:44):
My name is Peter and as always,
I'm your outside uh CMO that you can find at uh S C Os dot SI.
And we'll have a great podcast if you're not subscribed yet.
And if you haven't checked,
so if you're not subscribed,
go and subscribe.
And if you haven't checked the history,
this is episode number 48.
(01:05):
So there are 47 excellent conference speakers from all around the world,
from all of the different conferences in the archive that is freely available to everyone.
So go and check that out today with me.
I have Chris Simmons.
Chris.
Hi and welcome to the podcast.
Hello.
Hello.
Hello.
How are you doing?
And how is life?
(01:25):
Um What are you up there on the left?
Uh Life is good.
I'm doing good.
Uh I am a bit more nervous now than I was a minute ago when I realized that I'm following 47 other really good people.
I had to scan through the youtube channel earlier and realized,
oh,
I know a lot of these faces.
They're very,
very,
very knowledgeable,
very smart people.
(01:46):
I was very glad for this podcast or I am very glad for this podcast to get all really all of the best marketing conferences speakers.
Uh You know,
sometimes even I'm a bit surprised that people are willing to come to the conference and to the podcast and I'm very glad that you are also one of them here.
Um Chris,
you're the founder of O M G Center,
(02:09):
what is the O M G Center?
So the O G Center is a place where digital agency leaders can come uh learn from each other.
Uh And when they're ready,
um they can have support coaching,
mentorship,
uh ST strategy building um to essentially give them uh more free time,
more money and a lot less stress.
(02:31):
Hopefully,
I like that,
more money and more free time.
Um This is a center is also a slack channel where people can come and share their questions and everything else.
How do people get their way in there?
Ah So they have to follow a series of clues each more complicated than the last.
(02:52):
Um No.
So um the,
if you go to O M G dot ce N T er forward slash join,
uh so if you're an agency leader,
um O M G dot ce N T er forward slash join,
um you're more than welcome to come.
It's free.
It will always be free and we'll put that into the show,
not in the uh descriptions.
(03:12):
Uh So that people come join the,
it's one of the communities.
Uh As far,
far,
far I see on Slack is one of the communities where stuff is really happening.
So I'm really encouraging people to go and check that out.
How did you get into being agency coach as you call yourself?
I,
I've checked to linkedin and I saw that you started off as a ski resort.
(03:36):
So,
how did that happen?
Number one.
Uh How was the partying on the ski resorts?
Is that as big as everywhere?
There's,
there's,
there's no,
no better party than on a mountain.
And uh yeah,
so I started a long,
long time ago working in ski resorts,
uh initially in chalets,
cooking and cleaning.
Uh and then went through to helping the people who'd actually booked on the holidays and then guided on the mountain on my snowboard,
(04:01):
which was the best experience ever.
I came back to the UK uh and had zero qualifications and no hope so.
Exactly.
So I did what most people do and sort of accidentally find out what S C O is um built a career around it,
built uh a digital marketing agency and then a web development agency.
Um And I actually realized that I'm pretty good at helping other people and it is sort of part of my DNA.
(04:29):
I really do enjoy that kind of seeing the success of other other people um thing.
Um So the O G Center was like a natural progression.
Uh And uh it's been uh a whirlwind um that,
as you said,
the community things are really happening,
lots of people talking.
Um It's,
it's an incredible feeling to see all these people sharing their knowledge and helping each other out.
(04:51):
You know,
everyone's got the same kind of problems,
they've just got them at different times.
So why not help each other?
Yeah.
Yeah.
What's the one,
number one problem that agency founders come to with?
It's so we have way too much work and we are not profitable or uh so there is uh it's hard,
there isn't a number one.
However,
(05:12):
the majority of the problems uh uh can be distilled down into um not having the initial correct foundations.
So most digital agencies start because you're an expert at something.
Um You're really good at S E O so you start an S E O agency,
but you don't run a business.
Uh You're just a really good uh consultant with friends.
(05:35):
Uh and eventually you realize it needs to turn into a business and that's when lots of other things need to be addressed.
So,
um vision values,
focus uh strategy,
long term thinking,
leadership skills,
things like that.
So this is why I don't want to start an agency.
I just want to do uh consulting.
I want to help people directly with them,
(05:56):
with their companies and with their problems and,
you know,
because starting an agency brings so many other problems and things that you have to do and not do the things that you like.
It does.
Absolutely.
And again,
that's where the community comes in because,
you know,
for yourself,
you're in the community and you can see things that people are having trouble with or see things people are doing well and you can learn from it for,
for when you get to a point where you go,
(06:16):
I want to be an agency owner or maybe not because you see some other stuff.
Um I invited you to the podcast because you were a keynote speaker at the digital marketing conference of and we'll start that again.
Um I invited you to the podcast because you were a keynote speaker at the digital marketing conference.
(06:39):
Europe.
Tell me something about the conference.
How was the,
how was being there?
And how was,
how are the lecturers there?
Um The,
the lectures were really good.
The,
the other speakers were fantastic for the,
for the most part the ones I did get to see were fantastic.
It was um an online only conference I think they were doing um in person.
Pre-covid.
And I think it's just naturally become uh much bigger for them uh online.
(07:02):
Um The,
the talk that I gave was around critical thinking in digital agencies and essentially how it can unlock superpowers in your,
in your agency team.
Um I love giving that talk because um it's one of the most like,
it's,
it's almost like it's one of the quickest wins you can have with the team and it's still a lot of effort,
(07:23):
but it's a big,
it's a quick win to build trust and to build,
um,
the right skills that everything else kind of falls off of afterwards.
Yeah.
Excellent.
All right.
So let's not beat around the bush here.
Five minutes,
right?
Ok.
My God,
I got five minutes to talk all about the thing that I talked before.
45 minutes about.
(07:44):
Ok.
So,
uh,
critical thinking is one of the few things that people don't do very well.
Um,
we're kind of built for it innately in our heads,
but there's an awful lot of things that,
that prevent that from happening in the real world.
Some of it starts with,
you know,
education systems and things like that because you're taught to remember how to do things,
(08:06):
not how to think about how to do things.
Um,
you know,
you're taught your times tables in maths,
but you're not taught how math works.
For example,
um critical thinking is something which um is also a problem when you have lots of processes.
So in digital agencies in particular,
you know,
you have a process for a process,
(08:26):
for a process for a process quite often.
If you're um most agencies,
they're either on a Google doc or they're in an Excel Sheet or they're something really unwieldy in Asana or Treo or click up or whatever.
And half the time most people don't look at them because they kind of know what to do.
Half the time,
the other half of the time people,
when they do look at them,
(08:47):
they,
they kind of skip things or do them in different,
different ways,
um that those processes are often built in order to create some kind of consistency.
Um But the problem is the process,
it is built so that people don't have to do too much thinking.
So you can have consistency.
Well,
if you've bought,
if you've built sorry,
(09:08):
a digital agency and you're hiring really good people and you want really good people to do really good work,
why would you um,
hold them to a 50 point checklist for every single thing you hire them to do the thinking.
Now,
this thinking bit is the hard bit for,
for quite a lot of agency leaders because no one can do it as good as me.
(09:29):
No one is as smart as me,
I'm the best at this job.
Um So once you can kind of let go and realize that 80% is good enough or 80 my 80% is good enough.
Uh That,
that usually means you can,
you can kind of um uh you,
you,
you can,
you can,
you can let someone be a bit creative.
(09:51):
You can let something come out a little bit differently to how you would do it,
but it isn't going to cause problems for the client.
It's not gonna cause problems for the business.
So,
critical thinking allows you to follow a much more broad process which suggests internally,
this is what good looks like.
And the final outcome of the project should look roughly like this.
(10:13):
But the critical thinking aspect allows people to think before,
think during and think after the process that they're delivering,
it kind of allows people to be a bit more creative without getting hit around the back of the head with a keyboard later on for making a massive mistake.
Now,
with the,
with,
with critical thinking as well,
you can essentially preplan for problems.
(10:37):
Um So asking who,
what,
where,
when,
why style questions in your head allows you to know?
Um is there gonna be a blocker in this project?
So a blocker isn't necessarily a person,
it could be time could is,
is this project going to be blocked because of a public holiday or because of uh someone going away.
Um What are the best and worst case scenarios allow you to plan or preplan communication for when you see leading measures of success not being met.
(11:06):
So if you can prem to a client and you can tell the client,
um,
this isn't looking like it's going in the right direction.
It's way better than telling the client.
Oh,
it didn't work.
Um,
it's not going in the right direction.
So we've,
we've got these other things preplanned as contingencies,
way better than it didn't work.
Sorry.
(11:27):
But thanks for all the money.
And so you keep your clients happy,
you keep your clients for longer,
the team feel trusted,
it builds confidence in people.
It allows um It's like,
like I said,
it's like a superpower.
Um critical thinking as well is one of the key points in like negotiation skills.
So if you can think,
(11:47):
pre think of um objections that people might have or um ways to challenge uh an argument better,
you're more likely to have the better kind of um argument or challenge or conflict with someone where everyone gets what they need out of it.
I'm not talking about me in the middle.
I'm not talking about you win or they win.
(12:08):
It's kind of like critical thinking allows for like a no lose everyone gains situation.
And uh and that was what the talks all about essentially um condensed into a few minutes.
Excellent.
Um You know,
I'm a big proponent of critical thinking I've been and I still am,
like,
for the most,
probably 15 years,
(12:29):
um,
a part of the debating community in Slovenia debate,
the,
the,
the competitive debating where we teach.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know,
and teaching critical thinking and all the other skills,
uh,
public speaking with that is a big thing in there.
Um,
but it seemed that,
and,
you know,
I've even,
we even had a debate club in my recent agency where I was the head of S C O.
(12:53):
So,
you know,
we met and we've tried to get people to think critically to,
you know,
in the debates.
I love that.
But on the other side,
you know,
we,
because we felt we're not profitable enough,
we started to create lists of all of the tasks that have to be done and wanted to have work flows and wanted to have time sheets fill out and all of that.
(13:16):
So,
you know,
we,
it seems that we tried both of them.
How do we avoid that?
You know?
Yeah.
And so this is where the foundations kind of come in that often end up being part of the longer term problem.
Um So you should always have things like time sheets or at the very least estimates of time for tasks because that allows you to manage internally whether or not someone's got too much work on or they can take more work on or anything like that.
(13:42):
You shouldn't be reporting time to clients though.
Absolutely not because otherwise you get into all sorts of questions and conversations where you've spent five minutes solving a problem that gives them a million euros worth of value.
But they still ask for the six hours and 55 minutes that they've paid for.
Um,
the,
um,
the,
the,
(14:02):
the right levels of strategy and the big vision and the focus for the business allow the team to kind of understand where they're going.
The,
the way that I typically work with agencies,
we would do an entire day where half the day would be around critical thinking,
um,
importance and urgency training,
um and the the principles of debating.
(14:24):
So around challenging people properly without causing arguments.
And then the other half of the day would be around how to build A I call them recipes rather than processes.
So a recipe would be no more than five points.
A recipe would have the core,
five core things that would be done in order to get the job done.
(14:44):
And inside that recipe,
you would have uh links to guidance,
links to videos,
links to templates,
anything that would help that person get the job done.
So you've got something then that has like an estimated amount of time to deliver it.
So let's say a technical audit,
um,
10 hours,
uh but you have five points which is get the access,
(15:06):
do the crawl,
analyze the data,
put the report together deliver the report for argument's sake.
Um It's a lot more complicate,
complicated than that,
you know that.
But inside analyze the data,
you've got example templates of things.
You've got um a big long list of potential technical S E O elements that you might need to uh to review and that allows that person to not have to look at.
(15:30):
Does this site have a MP or um is there hr F lang issues because that's in a,
in a,
in a checklist because they know it's not an international site and they know it doesn't have a news feature.
So they don't need to look at those because they're not in the checklist.
It's kind of the recipe and just like with a,
a recipe for a cake.
If I gave you the basic recipe for a cake,
(15:50):
you and I would both create cakes,
but they would be slightly different.
Yours might taste nicer.
You might have chocolate on it.
You,
I might have berries on it,
but we've both made a cake.
Now,
if someone said give me a cake and we gave two cakes that were slightly different,
no one's gonna complain.
They're,
they're both right.
(16:10):
So you allow for the creativity,
you prevent risk of someone providing um a banana instead of a cake you present,
you prevent the,
the,
the the risk of kind of bottlenecks and dropout and issues and things like that way,
way,
way easier to do it.
That way than it is um to have like a long checklist and then tell everyone to think critically because you're not,
(16:33):
you can't do it,
it don't work.
Um Excellent.
Um Chris,
we are at the 15 minute mark and this is where we wanna finish the podcast.
Do you have future conference plans or where can people see you talk?
Um So the O G Center is looking at doing uh our own events uh in the autumn or winter this year.
(17:01):
So keep an eye out for that best place to look is in the community.
Um I am speaking at,
I don't even know how many different um events in the next few months.
Um This next week or week after next,
we are at S E O on the beach in LA Manga.
Uh And our operations and events director Vicky is talking about uh essentially operations and events because why not?
(17:25):
Um But how to get the most out of um uh the right kind of operations and things to look for and things,
things that could be a risk.
Uh We're,
we're basically everywhere all the time.
So I will probably be at a bunch of other events,
don't know which ones yet.
Great.
So just go to conference to good conferences and Chris or someone from the O M G Center will be there.
(17:50):
Uh If you come to me and say hello.
Yeah.
Uh If people want to talk to you online.
What is the best way to find you?
It depends.
IC O answer.
Um So,
uh on,
it's at Chris Simon um on linkedin,
just search for it,
mate.
It's easy.
Um And if you really want to O M G dot center is the website.
(18:12):
Yeah.
All right,
Chris,
thank you very much for being on the podcast and see you somewhere on the conferences.
Thank you very much for having me,
Peter.
Bye bye bye.
Thank you for listening to the time for marketing podcast.
(18:34):
Please go and check out other episodes from the podcast archive or give this podcast a review,
maybe even subscribe to it.
If you were at a marketing conference and saw a great presentation.
Please let me know you can contact me with guest ideas or other questions at info at time for marketing dot com and if you need any help with your S E O,
(18:56):
you can find me at S C Os dot si or just find me at N Have a great day.
If you built a digital agency and you're hiring really good people and you want really good people to do really good work,
why would you hold them to a 50 point checklist for every single thing?
This is time for marketing,
(00:20):
the marketing podcast that will tell you everything you've missed when you didn't attend the marketing conference.
Hello and welcome to the time for marketing podcast,
the podcast that brings you the best marketing conference speakers and allows them five minutes to sum up their conference presentation.
(00:44):
My name is Peter and as always,
I'm your outside uh CMO that you can find at uh S C Os dot SI.
And we'll have a great podcast if you're not subscribed yet.
And if you haven't checked,
so if you're not subscribed,
go and subscribe.
And if you haven't checked the history,
this is episode number 48.
(01:05):
So there are 47 excellent conference speakers from all around the world,
from all of the different conferences in the archive that is freely available to everyone.
So go and check that out today with me.
I have Chris Simmons.
Chris.
Hi and welcome to the podcast.
Hello.
Hello.
Hello.
How are you doing?
And how is life?
(01:25):
Um What are you up there on the left?
Uh Life is good.
I'm doing good.
Uh I am a bit more nervous now than I was a minute ago when I realized that I'm following 47 other really good people.
I had to scan through the youtube channel earlier and realized,
oh,
I know a lot of these faces.
They're very,
very,
very knowledgeable,
very smart people.
(01:46):
I was very glad for this podcast or I am very glad for this podcast to get all really all of the best marketing conferences speakers.
Uh You know,
sometimes even I'm a bit surprised that people are willing to come to the conference and to the podcast and I'm very glad that you are also one of them here.
Um Chris,
you're the founder of O M G Center,
(02:09):
what is the O M G Center?
So the O G Center is a place where digital agency leaders can come uh learn from each other.
Uh And when they're ready,
um they can have support coaching,
mentorship,
uh ST strategy building um to essentially give them uh more free time,
more money and a lot less stress.
(02:31):
Hopefully,
I like that,
more money and more free time.
Um This is a center is also a slack channel where people can come and share their questions and everything else.
How do people get their way in there?
Ah So they have to follow a series of clues each more complicated than the last.
(02:52):
Um No.
So um the,
if you go to O M G dot ce N T er forward slash join,
uh so if you're an agency leader,
um O M G dot ce N T er forward slash join,
um you're more than welcome to come.
It's free.
It will always be free and we'll put that into the show,
not in the uh descriptions.
(03:12):
Uh So that people come join the,
it's one of the communities.
Uh As far,
far,
far I see on Slack is one of the communities where stuff is really happening.
So I'm really encouraging people to go and check that out.
How did you get into being agency coach as you call yourself?
I,
I've checked to linkedin and I saw that you started off as a ski resort.
(03:36):
So,
how did that happen?
Number one.
Uh How was the partying on the ski resorts?
Is that as big as everywhere?
There's,
there's,
there's no,
no better party than on a mountain.
And uh yeah,
so I started a long,
long time ago working in ski resorts,
uh initially in chalets,
cooking and cleaning.
Uh and then went through to helping the people who'd actually booked on the holidays and then guided on the mountain on my snowboard,
(04:01):
which was the best experience ever.
I came back to the UK uh and had zero qualifications and no hope so.
Exactly.
So I did what most people do and sort of accidentally find out what S C O is um built a career around it,
built uh a digital marketing agency and then a web development agency.
Um And I actually realized that I'm pretty good at helping other people and it is sort of part of my DNA.
(04:29):
I really do enjoy that kind of seeing the success of other other people um thing.
Um So the O G Center was like a natural progression.
Uh And uh it's been uh a whirlwind um that,
as you said,
the community things are really happening,
lots of people talking.
Um It's,
it's an incredible feeling to see all these people sharing their knowledge and helping each other out.
(04:51):
You know,
everyone's got the same kind of problems,
they've just got them at different times.
So why not help each other?
Yeah.
Yeah.
What's the one,
number one problem that agency founders come to with?
It's so we have way too much work and we are not profitable or uh so there is uh it's hard,
there isn't a number one.
However,
(05:12):
the majority of the problems uh uh can be distilled down into um not having the initial correct foundations.
So most digital agencies start because you're an expert at something.
Um You're really good at S E O so you start an S E O agency,
but you don't run a business.
Uh You're just a really good uh consultant with friends.
(05:35):
Uh and eventually you realize it needs to turn into a business and that's when lots of other things need to be addressed.
So,
um vision values,
focus uh strategy,
long term thinking,
leadership skills,
things like that.
So this is why I don't want to start an agency.
I just want to do uh consulting.
I want to help people directly with them,
(05:56):
with their companies and with their problems and,
you know,
because starting an agency brings so many other problems and things that you have to do and not do the things that you like.
It does.
Absolutely.
And again,
that's where the community comes in because,
you know,
for yourself,
you're in the community and you can see things that people are having trouble with or see things people are doing well and you can learn from it for,
for when you get to a point where you go,
(06:16):
I want to be an agency owner or maybe not because you see some other stuff.
Um I invited you to the podcast because you were a keynote speaker at the digital marketing conference of and we'll start that again.
Um I invited you to the podcast because you were a keynote speaker at the digital marketing conference.
(06:39):
Europe.
Tell me something about the conference.
How was the,
how was being there?
And how was,
how are the lecturers there?
Um The,
the lectures were really good.
The,
the other speakers were fantastic for the,
for the most part the ones I did get to see were fantastic.
It was um an online only conference I think they were doing um in person.
Pre-covid.
And I think it's just naturally become uh much bigger for them uh online.
(07:02):
Um The,
the talk that I gave was around critical thinking in digital agencies and essentially how it can unlock superpowers in your,
in your agency team.
Um I love giving that talk because um it's one of the most like,
it's,
it's almost like it's one of the quickest wins you can have with the team and it's still a lot of effort,
(07:23):
but it's a big,
it's a quick win to build trust and to build,
um,
the right skills that everything else kind of falls off of afterwards.
Yeah.
Excellent.
All right.
So let's not beat around the bush here.
Five minutes,
right?
Ok.
My God,
I got five minutes to talk all about the thing that I talked before.
45 minutes about.
(07:44):
Ok.
So,
uh,
critical thinking is one of the few things that people don't do very well.
Um,
we're kind of built for it innately in our heads,
but there's an awful lot of things that,
that prevent that from happening in the real world.
Some of it starts with,
you know,
education systems and things like that because you're taught to remember how to do things,
(08:06):
not how to think about how to do things.
Um,
you know,
you're taught your times tables in maths,
but you're not taught how math works.
For example,
um critical thinking is something which um is also a problem when you have lots of processes.
So in digital agencies in particular,
you know,
you have a process for a process,
(08:26):
for a process for a process quite often.
If you're um most agencies,
they're either on a Google doc or they're in an Excel Sheet or they're something really unwieldy in Asana or Treo or click up or whatever.
And half the time most people don't look at them because they kind of know what to do.
Half the time,
the other half of the time people,
when they do look at them,
(08:47):
they,
they kind of skip things or do them in different,
different ways,
um that those processes are often built in order to create some kind of consistency.
Um But the problem is the process,
it is built so that people don't have to do too much thinking.
So you can have consistency.
Well,
if you've bought,
if you've built sorry,
(09:08):
a digital agency and you're hiring really good people and you want really good people to do really good work,
why would you um,
hold them to a 50 point checklist for every single thing you hire them to do the thinking.
Now,
this thinking bit is the hard bit for,
for quite a lot of agency leaders because no one can do it as good as me.
(09:29):
No one is as smart as me,
I'm the best at this job.
Um So once you can kind of let go and realize that 80% is good enough or 80 my 80% is good enough.
Uh That,
that usually means you can,
you can kind of um uh you,
you,
you can,
you can,
you can let someone be a bit creative.
(09:51):
You can let something come out a little bit differently to how you would do it,
but it isn't going to cause problems for the client.
It's not gonna cause problems for the business.
So,
critical thinking allows you to follow a much more broad process which suggests internally,
this is what good looks like.
And the final outcome of the project should look roughly like this.
(10:13):
But the critical thinking aspect allows people to think before,
think during and think after the process that they're delivering,
it kind of allows people to be a bit more creative without getting hit around the back of the head with a keyboard later on for making a massive mistake.
Now,
with the,
with,
with critical thinking as well,
you can essentially preplan for problems.
(10:37):
Um So asking who,
what,
where,
when,
why style questions in your head allows you to know?
Um is there gonna be a blocker in this project?
So a blocker isn't necessarily a person,
it could be time could is,
is this project going to be blocked because of a public holiday or because of uh someone going away.
Um What are the best and worst case scenarios allow you to plan or preplan communication for when you see leading measures of success not being met.
(11:06):
So if you can prem to a client and you can tell the client,
um,
this isn't looking like it's going in the right direction.
It's way better than telling the client.
Oh,
it didn't work.
Um,
it's not going in the right direction.
So we've,
we've got these other things preplanned as contingencies,
way better than it didn't work.
Sorry.
(11:27):
But thanks for all the money.
And so you keep your clients happy,
you keep your clients for longer,
the team feel trusted,
it builds confidence in people.
It allows um It's like,
like I said,
it's like a superpower.
Um critical thinking as well is one of the key points in like negotiation skills.
So if you can think,
(11:47):
pre think of um objections that people might have or um ways to challenge uh an argument better,
you're more likely to have the better kind of um argument or challenge or conflict with someone where everyone gets what they need out of it.
I'm not talking about me in the middle.
I'm not talking about you win or they win.
(12:08):
It's kind of like critical thinking allows for like a no lose everyone gains situation.
And uh and that was what the talks all about essentially um condensed into a few minutes.
Excellent.
Um You know,
I'm a big proponent of critical thinking I've been and I still am,
like,
for the most,
probably 15 years,
(12:29):
um,
a part of the debating community in Slovenia debate,
the,
the,
the competitive debating where we teach.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know,
and teaching critical thinking and all the other skills,
uh,
public speaking with that is a big thing in there.
Um,
but it seemed that,
and,
you know,
I've even,
we even had a debate club in my recent agency where I was the head of S C O.
(12:53):
So,
you know,
we met and we've tried to get people to think critically to,
you know,
in the debates.
I love that.
But on the other side,
you know,
we,
because we felt we're not profitable enough,
we started to create lists of all of the tasks that have to be done and wanted to have work flows and wanted to have time sheets fill out and all of that.
(13:16):
So,
you know,
we,
it seems that we tried both of them.
How do we avoid that?
You know?
Yeah.
And so this is where the foundations kind of come in that often end up being part of the longer term problem.
Um So you should always have things like time sheets or at the very least estimates of time for tasks because that allows you to manage internally whether or not someone's got too much work on or they can take more work on or anything like that.
(13:42):
You shouldn't be reporting time to clients though.
Absolutely not because otherwise you get into all sorts of questions and conversations where you've spent five minutes solving a problem that gives them a million euros worth of value.
But they still ask for the six hours and 55 minutes that they've paid for.
Um,
the,
um,
the,
the,
(14:02):
the right levels of strategy and the big vision and the focus for the business allow the team to kind of understand where they're going.
The,
the way that I typically work with agencies,
we would do an entire day where half the day would be around critical thinking,
um,
importance and urgency training,
um and the the principles of debating.
(14:24):
So around challenging people properly without causing arguments.
And then the other half of the day would be around how to build A I call them recipes rather than processes.
So a recipe would be no more than five points.
A recipe would have the core,
five core things that would be done in order to get the job done.
(14:44):
And inside that recipe,
you would have uh links to guidance,
links to videos,
links to templates,
anything that would help that person get the job done.
So you've got something then that has like an estimated amount of time to deliver it.
So let's say a technical audit,
um,
10 hours,
uh but you have five points which is get the access,
(15:06):
do the crawl,
analyze the data,
put the report together deliver the report for argument's sake.
Um It's a lot more complicate,
complicated than that,
you know that.
But inside analyze the data,
you've got example templates of things.
You've got um a big long list of potential technical S E O elements that you might need to uh to review and that allows that person to not have to look at.
(15:30):
Does this site have a MP or um is there hr F lang issues because that's in a,
in a,
in a checklist because they know it's not an international site and they know it doesn't have a news feature.
So they don't need to look at those because they're not in the checklist.
It's kind of the recipe and just like with a,
a recipe for a cake.
If I gave you the basic recipe for a cake,
(15:50):
you and I would both create cakes,
but they would be slightly different.
Yours might taste nicer.
You might have chocolate on it.
You,
I might have berries on it,
but we've both made a cake.
Now,
if someone said give me a cake and we gave two cakes that were slightly different,
no one's gonna complain.
They're,
they're both right.
(16:10):
So you allow for the creativity,
you prevent risk of someone providing um a banana instead of a cake you present,
you prevent the,
the,
the the risk of kind of bottlenecks and dropout and issues and things like that way,
way,
way easier to do it.
That way than it is um to have like a long checklist and then tell everyone to think critically because you're not,
(16:33):
you can't do it,
it don't work.
Um Excellent.
Um Chris,
we are at the 15 minute mark and this is where we wanna finish the podcast.
Do you have future conference plans or where can people see you talk?
Um So the O G Center is looking at doing uh our own events uh in the autumn or winter this year.
(17:01):
So keep an eye out for that best place to look is in the community.
Um I am speaking at,
I don't even know how many different um events in the next few months.
Um This next week or week after next,
we are at S E O on the beach in LA Manga.
Uh And our operations and events director Vicky is talking about uh essentially operations and events because why not?
(17:25):
Um But how to get the most out of um uh the right kind of operations and things to look for and things,
things that could be a risk.
Uh We're,
we're basically everywhere all the time.
So I will probably be at a bunch of other events,
don't know which ones yet.
Great.
So just go to conference to good conferences and Chris or someone from the O M G Center will be there.
(17:50):
Uh If you come to me and say hello.
Yeah.
Uh If people want to talk to you online.
What is the best way to find you?
It depends.
IC O answer.
Um So,
uh on,
it's at Chris Simon um on linkedin,
just search for it,
mate.
It's easy.
Um And if you really want to O M G dot center is the website.
(18:12):
Yeah.
All right,
Chris,
thank you very much for being on the podcast and see you somewhere on the conferences.
Thank you very much for having me,
Peter.
Bye bye bye.
Thank you for listening to the time for marketing podcast.
(18:34):
Please go and check out other episodes from the podcast archive or give this podcast a review,
maybe even subscribe to it.
If you were at a marketing conference and saw a great presentation.
Please let me know you can contact me with guest ideas or other questions at info at time for marketing dot com and if you need any help with your S E O,
(18:56):
you can find me at S C Os dot si or just find me at N Have a great day.
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