Category: leverage

AI-assisted Content Calendar

AI-assisted Content Calendar

Transcript

We are kicking off challenge month. If you’re like, what’s challenge month? Uh-oh.You’re in trouble because it’s a lot. So challenge month is where, I am challenging you and myself to do three things every single day. Does anybody know what those three things are?


Yes. Most of the room does.


I’ll repeat them anyway.


For those who don’t, they are sending an email to your list. I don’t care how small or large your list is. Not segmenting it, just sending the damn thing.


LinkedIn post and, YouTube short slash Instagram reel, they’re really the same thing. And if you wanna throw it on TikTok too, god bless you. Go for it. Great.


Just make sure you do those four core things.


They don’t have to be in that order. That’s the order I’m gonna do them in. I might switch Instagram and LinkedIn around some days.


But that’s the objective every single day to build the habit to stop, I think, getting in our own way when it comes to what are what am I gonna even talk about? There’s nothing to say.


Just say things. Just do it. It’s worked for a lot of people. Just do it.


You’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine. Because don’t don’t say things you’ll regret. It’s all I’d recommend.


That’s really it. Other than that, get out there. Do it. If you don’t like how you look and you’re on camera, fuck it.


Whatever. If you love it, cool. Whatever. Most people don’t care as much as we think they care.


So get out there, start sharing things. That’s the challenge today.


And then for the training for this month, we will be, a little a little reactive, responsive. So as you’re going through and sharing what you’re doing every day, then we’re going to hear things like oh no this is happening or oh wow this is happening, and as we hear those things and you bring up questions and stuff like that then we’re able to come up with training that fits in, to help through those moments.


Okay so that’s the objective for the month at least five days a week.


You can do seven days a week if you really want to make sure you are in that habit. I’m gonna do five days a week and it starts today. So the objective is to create and schedule for the next day.


And I use Sprout Social because I have a lifetime free account because of work we’ve done for them, over the years. So I’m gonna use Sprout. Use whatever you want to use to schedule them. I don’t.


This is all agnostic. Use whatever you want to share with others if you’re like, I’m using this. Here’s why I love it. I’m using this.


I hate it. What would you recommend? Share that. This is a good time to participate with everybody else in the room because everybody’s doing the same thing.


Okay. So some things I wanna share with you and then I’ll share my screen and we’ll talk through today’s training.


The challenge itself as I already mentioned, breaks down in certain ways. I do have in the Copy School Pro, Google Calendar, you’ll see that there’s a forty five minute work block followed by a fifteen minute break. That is to avoid all of the heartache that comes on really hard days when you’re like, ugh, I just don’t want to. If you only have forty five minutes to write the email then just do it.


Then you can get up, walk around, get a coffee, clear your head, go outside, pick some weeds out of your garden, whatever, and then get back into it. Now if you’re in flow, you do you. Just do whatever it takes but I’m setting up the way that I’m going to do it. And that’s what’s in the calendar.


Okay.


You should probably expect to dedicate at least three hours a day. I know people are like what? Three hours? What? There’s twenty four in the day.


Who needs to sleep? Who said anything about sleeping? Not me. Alright, you we don’t know what the results are going to be this is an experiment and everybody’s participating and that’s just the way it is.


Alright, you are going to wish that you had started doing this sooner. You’ll dig in, it’ll be a slog, things won’t hit, no one will care and then someone will suddenly care or someone will care out of the gate and then nobody will care again later, that’s just the way it is. Just keep going and learn from it and do it with the expectation that this is the beginning of your new life. Like, this is how it’s gonna be.


That’s what I’m doing going into it. Like, okay. I should probably have been doing this forever. Because every time I do this stuff, it pays off.


And when I don’t, the old stuff keeps paying off but not as much as if I just kept kept at it. So, keep at it. Expect that this is the beginning of what you’re doing going forward and that’s it. Eventually, you’ll be like, okay.


I’m gonna batch my emails. I’m gonna batch my recordings. Great. You will figure that out as you go.


Don’t go into this saying, hold on. I’m just gonna figure this all out first and then maybe next month I’ll do it. No. We’re doing it this month, ugly, horrible, the worst way possible.


We’re just gonna sit down and do it. It. Okay. Now we’re going to get into the first thing that we need to do in order to make sure that we’re getting good work done and that is establishing where we’re at right now so we know where we’re growing to.


So let me share my screen and we will begin with the work. So the work that we’re doing today is day one, which is really day two of the month but day one of the challenge.


For the next ten minutes, I’m asking you to go into your CRM, to go into if you use, like, tally or type form to collect leads, to go into whatever you use to identify, new leads, how many calls were booked if that’s in Calendly or if you just, like, know that. Clients closed in the last thirty days. How many subscribers joined your list in the last thirty days? If you’re like, I don’t have a list, then there’s zero.


But by day thirty, we want people on there. Revenue from services sold in the last thirty days. Revenue from products because some of us have products that we’re selling. Daily site visitors, where are you at today?


What is the average? Go into Google Analytics.


It’s right there. You don’t even have to have special reports. You just go straight into Google Analytics. Select your website if you’re in multiple people’s, GA accounts for clients.


But just go to yours. Just see how many people came to your site overall. And if you choose a certain number, like, I know it breaks down into unique visitors and things like that. Whatever you do, just make sure that you write in, like, unique visitors three thousand or whatever.


And then on day thirty, you’ll also wanna use unique visitors so you don’t just, like, feel better or worse about it, but just keep that the same. How many LinkedIn followers you have today? This is easy. While I’m talking, you can pop over to LinkedIn and see how many followers you have.


Write it in. Instagram followers, same thing. YouTube views, I’m saying that instead of subscribers because views are way more important, than subscribers, which is pretty shocking, but it’s the way that their algorithm works. YouTube wants more people viewing.


They don’t give a crap about followers or subscribers.


So YouTube views is you can go into your reports. If you’re not on YouTube at all, then it’s zero and you will get started on YouTube today.


And then any other metrics that stand out for you, for your business in particular, you know uniquely what’s going on in your business and what you want to optimize or grow, so you can pop that in here. Now this is if you’ve done like McGhee does and you print out your worksheets and put them in binders, wonderful. You can just fill this in. Otherwise, open up a spreadsheet.


Put it in there. We’re gonna do that for the next now eight minutes. Okay? Hold on. There’s a chat.


Just making sure.


I’m recommending YouTube because that’s the place where, most businesses are today today finding people.


And so you I wouldn’t choose it over. I’d say in addition to. Just also do TikTok then because you’re already doing all these other things. So you might as well just throw that in there too and repurpose it. Cool. Alright.


You’ve got until twenty six minutes after the hours. Now that’s six minutes.


Okay.


If you didn’t get a chance to write everything in, just go in and do it. Do it in one of those fifteen minute breaks that you have, in your calendar for today. Okay. Let’s dig in.


June challenge. You will need a content plan. You’ll need one for every single day. What are you gonna be writing about?


Now we have talked in great detail about where content ideas come from, how to use AI for content ideas, all of the things. There is a lot inside CopySchool Pro in the replay area, so pop on in there, watch some old ones. If you’re not sure, they’re not old. They’re like a year at most old in most cases.


So go in there, get ideas from there if you don’t already have them. Now AI can do quite a lot.


I asked ChatGPT to put a topic calendar together. I don’t like it. This is the first draft, but at least it’s something. They do subject lines, don’t worry about it, but whatever.


Point is, you have ways easier than ever in history. There’s never been a better time to come up with ideas for what you can create content on. It’s also very difficult to make content that stands out. So that’s more the question.


Less, what should I talk about more? How do I make it interesting to people? That doesn’t mean a lot of editing or anything crazy. We can get into all of that stuff.


But you will need topics. If you don’t have topics, it’s going to be hard if every day you’re like, what should I talk about today? You will hate your life. So come up with topics upfront.


Use ChatGPT if it will help you. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. You can come up with it other ways.


A really simple approach is just to go over to YouTube directly. I know there’s, like, solutions that help with this. SparkToro is, of course, a great way to go about finding topics.


Exploding topics, Brian Dean’s, formerly Brian Dean’s, now SEM Rush’s tool is another great way to come up with topics, but obviously just play around with those. It’s not going to give you the perfect spreadsheet of, like, what you should write about or what you should talk about.


But when you are going to create shorts and reels, really simply head over to YouTube, go into the shorts area, and then just like search your keyword phrase, your topic, whatever it is, get granular or don’t, Doesn’t matter. You’ll come up with a lot of topics even if you’re just like copywriting or finding your message, you’ll come up with a lot. Oh, maybe not for finding your message. You’ll find out.


You’ll go there. You’ll find out. So then go into the shorts area. You’ll see on YouTube all of the different, like, as you’re scrolling down, there’s the big ones and shorts is all through the middle.


Just go in there and start opening in a new tab all of these new ones. Of course, in each of those tabs, more will get served up to you that’s related to what you’re watching so when you click on one video to watch it one short obviously you’ll see like five others that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise and so just use all of these to really basically audit or analyze what’s on the screen, what they’re doing. So, because it’s a short, you don’t have to worry about a thumbnail the same way as you do for, like, a full video. What’s that opening shot?


What does it look like? What’s the title?


What is your immediate reaction to it?


And try very very hard to step into your prospect’s shoes as well because I know that it can be really difficult, of course, when you see somebody talking about a subject you know well and you think they’re full of shit. At least that’s my reaction in most cases, like, ugh. But then every so often you’re like, You that was really good. So, be aware of your immediate reaction, but also try not to be too, everybody here is quite focused on advancing their skills, being the best and actually being the best at it.


So it can be hard to look at it as a beginner or as a person who, has a lot of other things going on and doesn’t care about what you do as much as they’re, like, just trying to solve a problem right now that’s why they’re watching these videos. So try to think about it the way they do as well. I know that that can absolutely be a challenge, but just try to. So I have your immediate reaction here.


Do your best to make sure you’re thinking of it the way your prospect is likely thinking of it. What is it about? What’s this freaking short about? In a word? In thirty words? I don’t care. Whatever will help you know what’s going on out there if you’re not already and I don’t think anybody here is actively doing YouTube stuff.


So then get out there and just, like, write down what it’s about. Why do you think it’s so watched? Like, if and you should be focusing on the ones that are quite watched just to be sure just to be clear in case that wasn’t clear. Two hundred and forty six thousand views, that kind of stuff. Look into those things.


It doesn’t mean that’s the right way to go forever, but for shorts, I would recommend that we at least start there.


Based on topic, why it’s so watched based on delivery. So maybe it’s like one solid shot and it never moves and you’re curious about that. What’s going on there? Or it’s heavily edited or or or the list goes on.


So like just look at it. What are you seeing? What are they doing? If you had to storyboard that if you were making that for yourself, what notes would you take away to make sure you could make that for yourself?


So very light reverse engineering just like just note it. Is there music? Is there not music? Is the music uppity?


Is it chill? What’s the vibe going on? And at what point did you get bored? Because most of us will get bored and that will, based on what I’ve been learning about YouTube, and we’re outsourcing that, but nonetheless, I on my understanding based on the training that I’ve taken, again, I’m outsourcing this so I can’t say this is what we’re doing, but you go through and you watch you watch drop offs, in your video analytics and then you, like, cut those parts out.


So where you get bored is an important thing to pay attention to, and that’s really it. So assessment goes in one column and your idea, any ideas that come out of that go in the next column. So if you the opening shot was like a weird face or something, maybe your idea is do a weird face. I don’t know.


That’s maybe a horrible idea. Doesn’t mean you’ll do everything that’s in your idea column, but get some ideas.


Businesses run on ideas. Write your ideas down. Okay. That’s your homework. That’s what you should do in order to get ready to start getting on YouTube, and the things that work on YouTube shorts are likely to work in Instagram, on in in, let me not stammer, in reels. So you should, come out of this with more than just an audit of what’s going on.


On YouTube, I will stop sharing. Any questions on this subject, on the challenge itself, on what you’re going to be working on? Abby, is your question about this stuff?


Yeah. I wanted to just share something I found out about YouTube that might be helpful. So, I was reading about, outlier videos. So that’s if yeah. If somebody’s got a small following, but one of their videos blew up.


So that’s, like, a good thing to do if you have a like, if you’re starting from scratch. But there’s a tool called vidIQ that you can use, and it will, pull up the outlier score so then you can reverse engineer those, which, yeah, is it’s good if, like, you’re starting from zero.


Nice. VidIQ. Awesome. Chatted that out. Thanks, Abby. Anybody else wanna share anything?


No? Nobody’s got any any ideas? Is everybody ready to go?


Cody, how are you feeling?


I’m feeling alright. I like I said, I was I’ve been working through Laurel Portis, like, ad ecosystems all about creating content. I think that’s important because she helps you break down, like, to solve micro problems for your audience instead of just posting, just to, like, post and say stuff. Because I know for me, I have been very consistent with content, and, it never I mean, not that it never led to results, but not the results that I would have expected to. So I think just, you know, maybe checking her out and checking out, like, how to, write like, solve micro problems for your audience would be helpful as well.


Yeah. Nice tip. Awesome.


Anyone else?


No?


Okay. Well, that’s the challenge.


As you do it, I invite you to pop into Slack and share what’s going on for you, any insights, anything that you’re learning, struggles, relief that you got through the first week.


And if you don’t post one day, just start again the next day. That is not an excuse maker. That’s not, oh, I’ll just do it tomorrow. Try to do it today. Put all of your effort into doing it today.If somehow it doesn’t happen, there you go. Oh, Abby just chatted over her a hundred pound bonus for every day you do it.Dig it. Love that too. Alright. Good. Rewards are good.Excellent. Okay.

Transcript

We are kicking off challenge month. If you’re like, what’s challenge month? Uh-oh.

You’re in trouble because it’s a lot. So challenge month is where, I am challenging you and myself to do three things every single day. Does anybody know what those three things are?

Yes. Most of the room does.

I’ll repeat them anyway.

For those who don’t, they are sending an email to your list. I don’t care how small or large your list is. Not segmenting it, just sending the damn thing.

LinkedIn post and, YouTube short slash Instagram reel, they’re really the same thing. And if you wanna throw it on TikTok too, god bless you. Go for it. Great.

Just make sure you do those four core things.

They don’t have to be in that order. That’s the order I’m gonna do them in. I might switch Instagram and LinkedIn around some days.

But that’s the objective every single day to build the habit to stop, I think, getting in our own way when it comes to what are what am I gonna even talk about? There’s nothing to say.

Just say things. Just do it. It’s worked for a lot of people. Just do it.

You’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine. Because don’t don’t say things you’ll regret. It’s all I’d recommend.

That’s really it. Other than that, get out there. Do it. If you don’t like how you look and you’re on camera, fuck it.

Whatever. If you love it, cool. Whatever. Most people don’t care as much as we think they care.

So get out there, start sharing things. That’s the challenge today.

And then for the training for this month, we will be, a little a little reactive, responsive. So as you’re going through and sharing what you’re doing every day, then we’re going to hear things like oh no this is happening or oh wow this is happening, and as we hear those things and you bring up questions and stuff like that then we’re able to come up with training that fits in, to help through those moments.

Okay so that’s the objective for the month at least five days a week.

You can do seven days a week if you really want to make sure you are in that habit. I’m gonna do five days a week and it starts today. So the objective is to create and schedule for the next day.

And I use Sprout Social because I have a lifetime free account because of work we’ve done for them, over the years. So I’m gonna use Sprout. Use whatever you want to use to schedule them. I don’t.

This is all agnostic. Use whatever you want to share with others if you’re like, I’m using this. Here’s why I love it. I’m using this.

I hate it. What would you recommend? Share that. This is a good time to participate with everybody else in the room because everybody’s doing the same thing.

Okay. So some things I wanna share with you and then I’ll share my screen and we’ll talk through today’s training.

The challenge itself as I already mentioned, breaks down in certain ways. I do have in the Copy School Pro, Google Calendar, you’ll see that there’s a forty five minute work block followed by a fifteen minute break. That is to avoid all of the heartache that comes on really hard days when you’re like, ugh, I just don’t want to. If you only have forty five minutes to write the email then just do it.

Then you can get up, walk around, get a coffee, clear your head, go outside, pick some weeds out of your garden, whatever, and then get back into it. Now if you’re in flow, you do you. Just do whatever it takes but I’m setting up the way that I’m going to do it. And that’s what’s in the calendar.

Okay.

You should probably expect to dedicate at least three hours a day. I know people are like what? Three hours? What? There’s twenty four in the day.

Who needs to sleep? Who said anything about sleeping? Not me. Alright, you we don’t know what the results are going to be this is an experiment and everybody’s participating and that’s just the way it is.

Alright, you are going to wish that you had started doing this sooner. You’ll dig in, it’ll be a slog, things won’t hit, no one will care and then someone will suddenly care or someone will care out of the gate and then nobody will care again later, that’s just the way it is. Just keep going and learn from it and do it with the expectation that this is the beginning of your new life. Like, this is how it’s gonna be.

That’s what I’m doing going into it. Like, okay. I should probably have been doing this forever. Because every time I do this stuff, it pays off.

And when I don’t, the old stuff keeps paying off but not as much as if I just kept kept at it. So, keep at it. Expect that this is the beginning of what you’re doing going forward and that’s it. Eventually, you’ll be like, okay.

I’m gonna batch my emails. I’m gonna batch my recordings. Great. You will figure that out as you go.

Don’t go into this saying, hold on. I’m just gonna figure this all out first and then maybe next month I’ll do it. No. We’re doing it this month, ugly, horrible, the worst way possible.

We’re just gonna sit down and do it. It. Okay. Now we’re going to get into the first thing that we need to do in order to make sure that we’re getting good work done and that is establishing where we’re at right now so we know where we’re growing to.

So let me share my screen and we will begin with the work. So the work that we’re doing today is day one, which is really day two of the month but day one of the challenge.

For the next ten minutes, I’m asking you to go into your CRM, to go into if you use, like, tally or type form to collect leads, to go into whatever you use to identify, new leads, how many calls were booked if that’s in Calendly or if you just, like, know that. Clients closed in the last thirty days. How many subscribers joined your list in the last thirty days? If you’re like, I don’t have a list, then there’s zero.

But by day thirty, we want people on there. Revenue from services sold in the last thirty days. Revenue from products because some of us have products that we’re selling. Daily site visitors, where are you at today?

What is the average? Go into Google Analytics.

It’s right there. You don’t even have to have special reports. You just go straight into Google Analytics. Select your website if you’re in multiple people’s, GA accounts for clients.

But just go to yours. Just see how many people came to your site overall. And if you choose a certain number, like, I know it breaks down into unique visitors and things like that. Whatever you do, just make sure that you write in, like, unique visitors three thousand or whatever.

And then on day thirty, you’ll also wanna use unique visitors so you don’t just, like, feel better or worse about it, but just keep that the same. How many LinkedIn followers you have today? This is easy. While I’m talking, you can pop over to LinkedIn and see how many followers you have.

Write it in. Instagram followers, same thing. YouTube views, I’m saying that instead of subscribers because views are way more important, than subscribers, which is pretty shocking, but it’s the way that their algorithm works. YouTube wants more people viewing.

They don’t give a crap about followers or subscribers.

So YouTube views is you can go into your reports. If you’re not on YouTube at all, then it’s zero and you will get started on YouTube today.

And then any other metrics that stand out for you, for your business in particular, you know uniquely what’s going on in your business and what you want to optimize or grow, so you can pop that in here. Now this is if you’ve done like McGhee does and you print out your worksheets and put them in binders, wonderful. You can just fill this in. Otherwise, open up a spreadsheet.

Put it in there. We’re gonna do that for the next now eight minutes. Okay? Hold on. There’s a chat.

Just making sure.

I’m recommending YouTube because that’s the place where, most businesses are today today finding people.

And so you I wouldn’t choose it over. I’d say in addition to. Just also do TikTok then because you’re already doing all these other things. So you might as well just throw that in there too and repurpose it. Cool. Alright.

You’ve got until twenty six minutes after the hours. Now that’s six minutes.

Okay.

If you didn’t get a chance to write everything in, just go in and do it. Do it in one of those fifteen minute breaks that you have, in your calendar for today. Okay. Let’s dig in.

June challenge. You will need a content plan. You’ll need one for every single day. What are you gonna be writing about?

Now we have talked in great detail about where content ideas come from, how to use AI for content ideas, all of the things. There is a lot inside CopySchool Pro in the replay area, so pop on in there, watch some old ones. If you’re not sure, they’re not old. They’re like a year at most old in most cases.

So go in there, get ideas from there if you don’t already have them. Now AI can do quite a lot.

I asked ChatGPT to put a topic calendar together. I don’t like it. This is the first draft, but at least it’s something. They do subject lines, don’t worry about it, but whatever.

Point is, you have ways easier than ever in history. There’s never been a better time to come up with ideas for what you can create content on. It’s also very difficult to make content that stands out. So that’s more the question.

Less, what should I talk about more? How do I make it interesting to people? That doesn’t mean a lot of editing or anything crazy. We can get into all of that stuff.

But you will need topics. If you don’t have topics, it’s going to be hard if every day you’re like, what should I talk about today? You will hate your life. So come up with topics upfront.

Use ChatGPT if it will help you. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. You can come up with it other ways.

A really simple approach is just to go over to YouTube directly. I know there’s, like, solutions that help with this. SparkToro is, of course, a great way to go about finding topics.

Exploding topics, Brian Dean’s, formerly Brian Dean’s, now SEM Rush’s tool is another great way to come up with topics, but obviously just play around with those. It’s not going to give you the perfect spreadsheet of, like, what you should write about or what you should talk about.

But when you are going to create shorts and reels, really simply head over to YouTube, go into the shorts area, and then just like search your keyword phrase, your topic, whatever it is, get granular or don’t, Doesn’t matter. You’ll come up with a lot of topics even if you’re just like copywriting or finding your message, you’ll come up with a lot. Oh, maybe not for finding your message. You’ll find out.

You’ll go there. You’ll find out. So then go into the shorts area. You’ll see on YouTube all of the different, like, as you’re scrolling down, there’s the big ones and shorts is all through the middle.

Just go in there and start opening in a new tab all of these new ones. Of course, in each of those tabs, more will get served up to you that’s related to what you’re watching so when you click on one video to watch it one short obviously you’ll see like five others that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise and so just use all of these to really basically audit or analyze what’s on the screen, what they’re doing. So, because it’s a short, you don’t have to worry about a thumbnail the same way as you do for, like, a full video. What’s that opening shot?

What does it look like? What’s the title?

What is your immediate reaction to it?

And try very very hard to step into your prospect’s shoes as well because I know that it can be really difficult, of course, when you see somebody talking about a subject you know well and you think they’re full of shit. At least that’s my reaction in most cases, like, ugh. But then every so often you’re like, You that was really good. So, be aware of your immediate reaction, but also try not to be too, everybody here is quite focused on advancing their skills, being the best and actually being the best at it.

So it can be hard to look at it as a beginner or as a person who, has a lot of other things going on and doesn’t care about what you do as much as they’re, like, just trying to solve a problem right now that’s why they’re watching these videos. So try to think about it the way they do as well. I know that that can absolutely be a challenge, but just try to. So I have your immediate reaction here.

Do your best to make sure you’re thinking of it the way your prospect is likely thinking of it. What is it about? What’s this freaking short about? In a word? In thirty words? I don’t care. Whatever will help you know what’s going on out there if you’re not already and I don’t think anybody here is actively doing YouTube stuff.

So then get out there and just, like, write down what it’s about. Why do you think it’s so watched? Like, if and you should be focusing on the ones that are quite watched just to be sure just to be clear in case that wasn’t clear. Two hundred and forty six thousand views, that kind of stuff. Look into those things.

It doesn’t mean that’s the right way to go forever, but for shorts, I would recommend that we at least start there.

Based on topic, why it’s so watched based on delivery. So maybe it’s like one solid shot and it never moves and you’re curious about that. What’s going on there? Or it’s heavily edited or or or the list goes on.

So like just look at it. What are you seeing? What are they doing? If you had to storyboard that if you were making that for yourself, what notes would you take away to make sure you could make that for yourself?

So very light reverse engineering just like just note it. Is there music? Is there not music? Is the music uppity?

Is it chill? What’s the vibe going on? And at what point did you get bored? Because most of us will get bored and that will, based on what I’ve been learning about YouTube, and we’re outsourcing that, but nonetheless, I on my understanding based on the training that I’ve taken, again, I’m outsourcing this so I can’t say this is what we’re doing, but you go through and you watch you watch drop offs, in your video analytics and then you, like, cut those parts out.

So where you get bored is an important thing to pay attention to, and that’s really it. So assessment goes in one column and your idea, any ideas that come out of that go in the next column. So if you the opening shot was like a weird face or something, maybe your idea is do a weird face. I don’t know.

That’s maybe a horrible idea. Doesn’t mean you’ll do everything that’s in your idea column, but get some ideas.

Businesses run on ideas. Write your ideas down. Okay. That’s your homework. That’s what you should do in order to get ready to start getting on YouTube, and the things that work on YouTube shorts are likely to work in Instagram, on in in, let me not stammer, in reels. So you should, come out of this with more than just an audit of what’s going on.

On YouTube, I will stop sharing. Any questions on this subject, on the challenge itself, on what you’re going to be working on? Abby, is your question about this stuff?

Yeah. I wanted to just share something I found out about YouTube that might be helpful. So, I was reading about, outlier videos. So that’s if yeah. If somebody’s got a small following, but one of their videos blew up.

So that’s, like, a good thing to do if you have a like, if you’re starting from scratch. But there’s a tool called vidIQ that you can use, and it will, pull up the outlier score so then you can reverse engineer those, which, yeah, is it’s good if, like, you’re starting from zero.

Nice. VidIQ. Awesome. Chatted that out. Thanks, Abby. Anybody else wanna share anything?

No? Nobody’s got any any ideas? Is everybody ready to go?

Cody, how are you feeling?

I’m feeling alright. I like I said, I was I’ve been working through Laurel Portis, like, ad ecosystems all about creating content. I think that’s important because she helps you break down, like, to solve micro problems for your audience instead of just posting, just to, like, post and say stuff. Because I know for me, I have been very consistent with content, and, it never I mean, not that it never led to results, but not the results that I would have expected to. So I think just, you know, maybe checking her out and checking out, like, how to, write like, solve micro problems for your audience would be helpful as well.

Yeah. Nice tip. Awesome.

Anyone else?

No?

Okay. Well, that’s the challenge.

As you do it, I invite you to pop into Slack and share what’s going on for you, any insights, anything that you’re learning, struggles, relief that you got through the first week.

And if you don’t post one day, just start again the next day. That is not an excuse maker. That’s not, oh, I’ll just do it tomorrow. Try to do it today. Put all of your effort into doing it today.

If somehow it doesn’t happen, there you go. Oh, Abby just chatted over her a hundred pound bonus for every day you do it.

Dig it. Love that too. Alright. Good. Rewards are good.

Excellent. Okay.

People Management & The 10% Rule​

People Management & The 10% Rule

Transcript

Today, of course, we are continuing on with August theme for Copy School Pro, which is the people powered month, how to get help and get them to be helpful.

So I’m going to share my screen. You got the worksheet delivered over the weekend. Tina sent that out.

So make sure you reference that and print this out.

Now this is today’s lesson is based on something that I only heard after a good six or seven years of managing people. And that was this whole ten percent rule, which is kind of crazy to me, and it might be to you. So what I learned is that every person that reports to you takes up ten percent of your time to manage. So if you’re managing five people, half of your day is half of your day, half of your time is spent, managing those people.

And that might seem like, woah. That’s a lot. But the reality is there’s a lot that goes into managing people if you wanna do it right. Then you look at companies like Google where there’s, like, twenty eight people reporting into one developer, and you wonder how that could possibly work.

But that’s a whole different story. I think that’s a lot of, like, you just make it work for various purposes and reasons and people.

I would argue that they’re probably not very well managed as people. Probably not getting a lot of time to talk about development, to get one on one with you or with the person who makes decisions about their career, who helps them through their career.

I think it’s really important to remember that everybody that you hire is on a career path. They’re trying to do something in their life, whether that is I’m shifting from a high stress job to a lower stress job or I’m looking at my career ladder and where I wanna go, they’re on a path. And so it’s important for us as employers to respect that.

Thus, we need to give them the time that we would want to have with somebody if we were working for them. So ten percent of your time is real, and, thus, if you are going to continue in an execution role, which I know so many people here are still like, I can’t give up control of research, of synthesis, of planning, of writing, of editing, of talking with the client. If you can’t give that stuff up, how are you ever going to really grow if people are at the heart of where you get that leverage that you need to grow? And so even if you only wanna have a small team, if you’re like, I only want three people reporting into me, that’s thirty percent of your time that’s gone.

It’s gone. So you really have to make sure that the seventy percent that is left is time really well spent. So it’s a really simple lesson today. How can we make sure that the more people you hire, even if that’s one or two, every single if you hire one, it is ten percent of your time gone, possibly more because you’ll be so partnered up with that person and because they’ll really depend on you as, like, a social, like, being in their lives, like, you are the only two that work together, you’re gonna get pretty close.

And if it’s not a close feeling, you’ll probably lose them.

So you have to think about that. And every time you lose somebody and have to replace them, every time you hire the wrong person and then have to fire them, this is all stuff that takes up time, and this is the stuff that will burn you out on people. So we wanna be realistic about people. If you want to get to a place where you’re going to make really good money without doing all the work, you’re going to need people. They’re gonna have to be the right people who are well managed and who feel like they’re part of a bigger vision of growing something. So meetings.

Meetings are how we communicate as remote team members. There’s there’s Slack, of course, but meetings are going to be critical. No one likes a meeting. It’s a rule. Nobody likes a meeting. Only middle managers like meetings because their whole job is to meet with people.

That’s not your job. That’s not an individual contributor’s job. You hire a copywriter. They don’t wanna have meetings. They’re also going to complain a lot about meetings. Oh, it’s interrupting my flow.

And and that’s fair, but the reality is you work in an organization, and that organization needs meetings to grow. So what you need to do is make sure you know what meetings you have and what meetings you don’t have because people adding meetings to your calendar is how things get out of control. No one cares about your calendar like you do. So right out of the gate, we need to make sure we’re making really good calls about what meetings you have as a team. And that could be starting with you as one person.

Having meetings with yourself is huge. So if you have a start of day stand up with yourself, that’s you sitting there looking at your to do list and determining what’s the most important thing to get done, when you can do it, blocking out your calendar for the day, whatever that might be. An end of day stand up could be a thing for you as well. And then just think of all the other meetings that you need to have. If you can start with a strategy now, then every single new team member that you hire, you can just hand this sheet over to them and say, this is how we do meetings here. So you choose, are you gonna do start of day stand up or an end of day stand up? Are you gonna do both?

I would recommend you choose one or the other and you make it daily and you keep it short. So we’ve got how long is it gonna be. If you have a ten person team, you’re gonna need at least thirty minutes for the stand up. And then later, you have to, of course, come up with your own agenda for that stand up.

Because the last thing you wanna do is go into a stand up and just have people say, today, I’m working on this. And you’re like, I could I could see that in Asana. I need to really, like, know what my stand up exists to do. Is it a social stand up to get everybody, like, jazzed for the day or to celebrate what we did at the end of the day?

So you need to decide that as CEO of your business.

When do you do a stand up? And that’s a whole team meeting, and how long is it? Do you need weekly team meetings or biweekly team meetings? What happens in a team meeting? What’s its function? What why are people going to attend this meeting and not be, like, upset that it’s interrupting their work? How long is that team meeting going to be?

There will be a need to have team meetings later.

If you figure this stuff out too late, you’ll always find your meetings are changing. And every new person who comes on says, let’s do meetings differently. Let’s do meetings differently.

You are not running a democracy.

You’re running a business, and you’re in charge of it. So you say, this is when we have meetings, and you get everybody on board. And if you have a good why behind that meeting, when it happens, why it’s as long as it is, what you cover, then it’s not a waste of time meeting. And then we’re not just adding in meetings for the sake of meetings.

So what does the stand up exist to do? What do your team meetings exist to do? When is there a time to socialize? What what happens there?

Things that you would normally do in an office where it’s lunchtime and you go get lunch together. It’s coffee break, you go get coffee together. What can you do to unite your team members? Do you need a large format team meeting, which is more of, like, even if you’ve only got, like, one person in sales, two copywriters, a smallish looking team, sales and account management.

They’re the same thing at this point.

It might feel like, well, all hands is, like, every single meeting we have. But an all hands meeting is a really good chance for you to restate your vision to the team, for individual team members to say, here’s how I fit into this world and, like, teach the rest of the team about their job. So there’s a lot that you can do with that that can better help you communicate. And then things like project briefings.

Those are just whole team meetings. Then you have individual meetings. Do you have a weekly one on one or biweekly one on one? How long is it?

Do you have coffee chats where you just sit down together? If your one on one is not meant to be a time to, like, talk about each other and what you’re going through, If it’s more of a get me up to speed on your projects, then when do you have time to just chat and be social with them? You are somebody that very likely they look up to in some ways. They’re usually going to be confused by the decisions that you make.

What you think is clear, they won’t think is clear. So there’s a lot that you have to consider in managing people, and just having a coffee chat is a good way for them to be like, oh, I think I understand you better. And for you to be like, oh, okay. Got it.

I see who you are now as a person. I’m getting to know you better. And that’s really critical for managing them well.

Quarterly performance reviews, annual performance reviews, what happens with those? Do you want it to be quarterly or annual? Gotta have a performance review at some point. People need to know how they’re doing or they’re not gonna feel well managed, and they won’t have a chance to say, I want more. I want less. I want clarity. Whatever those things might be that they’re looking for.

Goal setting.

They’re your team member.

You have targets for them, I’m sure. You probably have goals for where they go with their career in your organization, what they want to do more of. You won’t know unless you set goals with them. And Then, of course, once you set a goal, do you have growth check ins? Do you have, like okay. You said that you wanted to get better at email copywriting.

Great. We put you in ten x emails. Let’s talk about how that’s going for you. And then they can say, I haven’t taken it yet.

Okay. Now you can manage them towards taking it because they said that they wanted to. What’s getting in the way of them taking it? You have to manage them towards that.

So we gotta have our meetings figured out. Shorter is always better. If it can be done in fifteen minutes, do it in fifteen minutes. People expand to the size of a meeting.

And then comes basically this stuff. Just what are the days that you won’t work? So oh, sorry. Won’t won’t work.

Won’t have meetings. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Which ones are they? If you can set that up front, then everybody who joins your team knows.

We have no meeting Tuesdays, no meeting Wednesdays. I don’t know. You decide what those are. When do you refuse to have meetings as a team?

When is energy highest to do a person’s work versus when is it a good time for team members to meet? As you add in more people who are going to dictate what other people on the team are doing with their day, will that change? Should you always start your meetings at nine in the morning and only go until ten, and that’s a daily thing? That’s the only time, but you have to have rules.

You gotta have these standards set up or people don’t know what to do, and they just go populating meetings all over the place. And your clients are already gonna try to do that. Your clients already do not give a crap what your calendar looks like. So the more control you can have as an agency owner, the better.

Whether you think of yourself as an agency owner or not, if you have services that you produce, even if it’s a very small business, it’s still going to need to operate like an agency. And then what rules do you have about non work, non meetings? So Slack, email. When do you communicate?

What are the rules on scheduling a message versus not scheduling a message and just posting it? Are we allowed to send out anything after five PM or before nine AM? You have to have that rule. And if you have that rule, then everybody knows how to operate.

And if you don’t, then somebody ends up pinging the CMO of one of your companies that you work with at seven PM and interrupting how they live their lives, which is not good. It’s not a good look. So you have to figure that stuff out. It’s good to figure it out.

It really is a checklist with a circle around the thing that’s the starting point of your strategy, and then you just have to start to live it and then creating calendar controls. So this is part of no meetings days. Do you have all meetings in the morning? If so, then afternoons never get meetings.

It’s good to have those rules. Everybody can follow those really clearly. Are meetings only in the afternoon, and all morning time is there for you to work, get in flow, go through stuff while you’ve got high energy?

Or do you believe that your team might not actually show up until eleven in the morning because it’s remote and you don’t actually micromanage them. And if that’s a concern, then you might wanna start your meetings at nine in the morning and have an end of day meeting as well. That’s up to you and how you wanna trust people or not. Trust them.

It’s not your fault or their fault that you don’t trust them. It’s the reality of remote work. We wanna just make sure people are actually working during their work day. You decide that.

That is all. Then I want you to go away from this, and we’ve done in the intensive freelancing. I think it was in the intensive freelancing, but it was during a different week. Anyway, I know that at this point, you’ve drawn an org chart with where you’re going to go for your organization.

Now the time is now to go in and start circling those next hires. We’ve been talking over the last few weeks about who you should hire, how to find the constraints.

So if you can go in there and say, okay. My next four hires are this, this, this, and this, which means forty percent of my time is about to be eaten up with the meetings and other work that it takes to manage people. I’ll have sixty percent left. Is it time is my fifth hire going to be someone who can handle more project management, more people management? That does not have to be a full time person either. That could be a part time person that you hire just to make sure everybody is aligned with the business goals, everybody’s getting their stuff done, they’re feeling heard, etcetera, etcetera.

But you need to know who’s next because you need to know who’s about to take up ten percent of your valuable time. That is all for this week. The takeaway is every new team member takes ten percent of your time.

Alright. And it’s good. If they’re doing good work Mhmm. Then that’s great. If they’re taking up ten percent of your time, but they’re freeing up seventy percent of your time, then it’s a good trade off. That’s brilliant. Okay?

Alright. Any questions, thoughts, concerns?

No? Alright.

And if you think, oh, it’s just really not worth of hiring people. It really is. It really is. Even with all those things considered, it really is. Alright.

Question time. We have forty glorious minutes to talk about what you’re going through in your business. So if you have a question, please put up your hand using, I think, the react button so that happens.

Lower your hand if you no longer have a question, and we’ll go in order. Start with your win, please.

And if we have no questions, then we’ll just call it a day.

Are we good? No quest oh, Marina’s up. Marina, what’s your win?

I already shared my win, but that’s okay.

Hiring a brand person?

Hiring a brand person.

Dig it. It was yeah. Just had lots of epiphanies about what’s holding me back and how to get over myself so I can do it.

So Love it.

Huge win. And K. Thinking about meetings, and, yes, I agree with this.

Well, it doesn’t matter whether I agree or not, and it is true that every court takes ten percent of your time.

And I’m wondering about scheduling meetings. I can get really rigid about things.

And thinking about clients, this is not a problem right now ish, but I hope that it will be a problem, so I need to solve for it now.

If you say like, how much time do you leave on your calendar for booking client meetings? Do you say I’m only taking client calls in the morning? Also, I’m thinking about time zones. So I don’t love morning meetings, but all of my meetings end up being in the morning. So I’m like, okay. I just have to have morning meetings because that’s when all of the stuff is.

Yep.

Yeah. And eastern time zone, and they’re not gonna want a meeting at four because it’s after their work time. Yep. So knowing that, then I can still say that okay. What is my succinct question?

How many days do I have to allow for client meetings, and how flexible do you need to be to still have the client meetings, but also manage your calendar, and they’re also paying you?

So how do you That’s why you wanna manage your meetings the best you possibly can.

So you’re in control of when your team meets.

That is controllable.

So if you say, as a team, we never book meetings with each other between this hour and that hour or on this day and that day, etcetera, etcetera, then they know if they have a quick question to ask Marina or they wanna run copy by you that you only book meetings in certain times and always as close to an existing meeting as possible. Like, you have to set those rules up so they know that, because clients will be able to do a lot of dictating around the meetings that you have. Now if you are following having more of a standardized offer with retainer that comes off of that, then you set those meetings up all in advance.

And there’s less reason for a client to want to book an ad hoc meeting with you because there’s nothing ad hoc about what you’re doing. Everything’s planned. Everything’s good to go. Right?

And so if they want to have a meeting with you, it’s probably a meeting that’s critical to keeping them as a client. So they wanna change direction. Okay. Shit.

Okay. Let’s hear about this. Whenever they wanna book that, that’s fine. You can take that call.

And or else it’s, hey. This is going really well. We wanna add more. Or there’s something going on in their business. Like, hey. We just had a new product update, and people hate it. Our email strategy needs to kind of change for a second.

Okay. These are all good things to have, but it’s not gonna be like client has new idea they wanna run by me because that’s not the state of your engagement. Does that make sense, Marina?

Right.

So, basically, anytime a client wants to meet, you have to say yes. Like, if people wish to say no.

Yes. But that’s where you have to control as much of that as you possibly can.

Yeah.

Right. So set up the team meetings, and those are nondemocratic.

You work for me, and this is when we have meetings.

And people like it better when you just tell them things. So, yes. Yes. Democracy here. This is when we meet. Cool.

And then as far as clients go, they rule the calendar at that point.

Okay. And that’s that is in keeping with you charging more and delivering a retainer that is in keeping with what we’ve discussed. So Yes.

As a person paying you ten thousand dollars a month to optimize my emails, I feel like I should be able to talk to you when it’s time to optimize. Like, when I have a question about that, Slack is great for those quick questions, and you should default to Slack wherever possible.

But if I wanna sit down and say, Marina, we’ve got some concerns, then whenever. If I wanna call you at nine at night, that’s your job as an agency owner. You take the call. You give them your phone number so that they can call you anytime.

They’re not going to. They don’t want to call you all the time. Right. But at least they know they can.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Cool?

Yes. Fun.

This is my take on having run a couple agencies, obviously.

So I’m sure others have other takes on it. Not me, though. Okay. Adnan, what’s up? What’s your win?

So this is more of a look good kinda win. So there’s an agency that I, I think they’re based off in South America somewhere, but they have offices in London. But, anyways, through them, I got to write for Uber and Uber Eats.

Nice.

And then they contacted me last week because they have some Google projects Nice. That they want me to write for.

So it looks good. It’s not the most lucrative.

But Never is.

The win.

Big ones never are. Yeah.

Okay.

But I mean They know that.

They’re like, we’re you’re gonna want our logo.

Like, you would do this to create the logo.

The the chance out. Okay. Got it. Yeah. So that’s that’s the win.

The question I had, I I guess this relates to both the email services that I offer and also the pricing pages services that I will be offering Mhmm.

Is that over like, all the everyone that I’ve written emails for, I haven’t been able to get any feedback on how they’re performing or if there’s been a jump or any of that stuff. How do I kinda go out there and be able to quickly get that?

Like Why is it because you’ve been writing for large brands and you can’t get into their email platform to Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There’s been a couple of smaller ones. I mean, I’m I don’t know how small they are.

Success dot a I, I wrote for them. They reached out directly, but Okay. They haven’t shared anything either.

So Okay.

It’s definitely gonna be tricky, if you can’t get into their tool, to actually look at that. And that’s fair. Uber’s not gonna let you into their email marketing platform. It might even be because I don’t know. I have I have no idea, obviously, what they’re using.

If they’re using something homegrown Yeah.

They’re not even gonna wanna look in that.

Like, you’re looking for a hard pass.

And then, otherwise, it’s just generally gonna be tricky across the board. So who can you get in with who can feed you that information?

And or what can you do at the start of a project to make it clearer that the point of contact you have is responsible for sharing results with you? And I don’t just mean hide that in the contract because no one reads it anyway, except for legal.

They’re not gonna say, like, oh, hey. Point of contact. Did you know you’re supposed to do this? They’re just gonna, like, whatever.

So you need to talk to your point of contact about that right out of the gate. Like, the only way we can do this together is if I can see how it’s working so that I can help you. Maybe there’s something else you build in there. Like, it’s the beginning of a retainer offer or something like that.

But they have to understand that you wanna see it in the first place. Do you know how many copywriters ask to see how it performed? Like, none. Like, nobody ever asked.

They’re just like, I don’t wanna know. I don’t wanna know, please. Like, I hope it did okay, and then they, like, run off. If you’re like, I need to know how this is performing, and here’s why, make it a why that they care about, not like and here’s why I wanna be able to add it to my portfolio.

I don’t give a shit about your portfolio. What do I care about? So make it about what they care about so I can see that I’m getting you the results we are talking about me getting you. And if I’m not, I wanna be able to fix that.

Okay? So I need you to get me results within x period of time of emails launching.

Also, if emails don’t launch, we need to meet so I I can understand why you didn’t send them, and we can revise so that they’re the right emails for your brand.

But you have to make sure that that date is really clear. If it’s a campaign, if it’s a one off, they should be able to share results with you in a week. So seven days after is the time limit you set. If it’s an automation, give it thirty days to run so you can start seeing what’s going on.

But you have to tell them, I need to see results by this time. If the point of contact is not the right person for that, because they’re like, I’m five people removed from whoever implements the thing, Then because they’re maybe in marketing and this happens over in, like, some weird developer part of the organization. It’s not even marketing anymore even though it was five years ago, but now it’s not etcetera etcetera. Things are weird.

Who do you talk to there? Who is in charge of that? And you just ask Ask upfront. And if they’re like, I don’t know.

I’ll get back to you on that, then follow-up. Make a note of it. Follow-up until you know that person’s name, and then you reach out to that person. Say, hey.

Hi. I’m working on these emails. You’re gonna implement.

We should love each other. Let’s have a coffee talk so I can get you on board with what I’m thinking. You can tell me what the limitations are, what you’ve tried. Does that work?

That’s their job. They’re in a large organization. They’re there to have meetings. They know that. So that’s what I would do and have done. Okay. That makes sense?

Thank you. Yeah. That makes sense. It’s always like a chicken and egg kind of thing.

Right? So I’ve lost out on some clients because even though my portfolio is good, the the the first question they’ll ask is like, oh, are you guys an agency, or are there any results can you that you can share with us? And then right off the bat, like, I’m on the I’m on the back foot, if you know what I mean. Yep.

Yeah. That’s the constraint. Right? So last week, we talked about constraints. And if you can say a big constraint to me closing business is that they always ask for results, then you gotta solve that.

Because if you solve that, then the pipeline opens up again. So we gotta take that problem and fix it. Great. You’ve identified.

A lot of people don’t know what where leads go. They don’t know why it stops. You know that. So it only makes good sense for you to prioritize that, and that’s where Joel’s old case study buddy was a good thousand dollars spent because a thousand dollars spent gets you a case study that you can now use to close twenty thousand dollar jobs across the board, or you do it.

You follow-up with clients and you say this. And, of course, if all it takes, if part of all that it takes is you adding into your process three new bullet points about at this point, I tell the client this. At this point, I get connected with their technology person for email implementation.

At this point, I follow-up with them for results.

Now you’ve got three little things added to an SOP that could unlock new projects for you. So I think that’s great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Alright.

Go add it to those SOPs.

Any other questions?

Are we feeling the quiet people in the room who I’m looking at?

No. I’m looking at them.

Awkward. Should I call on someone?

Nobody has any questions or concerns? Anything that they’re working on?

Caroline, I haven’t heard from you in so long. One, how was your summer?

You were off for a month. Don’t worry. I’m not gonna put you on the spot to ask a business question, but I do wanna know how your summer is going.

It is good. It is good. We traveled to we spent June in Asia. We were in Japan and Korea Oh. Which is very cool. Yeah. We sent a our oldest kiddo off to college over the weekend.

Wow.

Yep.

Banana’s amazing. How’s that feeling?

Good. He made it very easy to say goodbye. I’ll just leave it at that.

That’s amazing. Well, now you’ll have all this time to work on your business.

Yeah. I have three other kiddos, but yep.

Oh, I thought that was your youngest or your oldest, but No.

That’s my oldest. Yeah.

Oh, okay. Funny.

So I feel like I’m playing catch up. Yeah.

After the That’s fair.

Kids go back the kids go back to school tomorrow.

Amazing.

Glorious.

Okay. Well, it’s good to see you. I was glad to see you pop back in after your month break.

I yes. Cool. Awesome. Good to be back.

Anybody do you have anything you’re working on in your business that you wanna discuss? You were shaking your head madly that I shouldn’t call on you, and then I called on you.

Nothing nothing really great to share at the moment.

Okay. Cool. Cool. Yeah. Cody? Hannah? Stacy?

I don’t have any questions, but I’ve been working on Instagram posts.

Okay. How’s this going?

Last week.

It’s okay. I think I was getting a little far in the weeds with the Gary Vee book, and I’m trying to figure everything out. But I think I I think I have a decent plan at least now. But, yeah, it took me about ten hours last week to create, like, five posts.

Oh, wow.

Do you feel good about the posts?

Yeah. I mean, I’m writing them all out. That’s what takes the longest is to make sure they’re strategic. And then you have to since I don’t have, like, a team, I’m the one in Canva designing all the things and editing the videos, and it’s it’s a lot. Yeah.

Yeah. We’ll talk.

I mean, I know that it’s tricky to hire people to do that, but there’s, like, some really good short term.

Did you watch Shane’s training on hiring overseas?

No.

But I need to because you’re the second person who told me to watch that, so I’m going to do that.

Yeah. Definitely do. He’s built cool businesses that where the people that like, he’s getting to employ people, in situations where they need employment, and it’s just cheaper than it is here. Life is just cheaper in the Philippines, and so it’s cheaper to hire someone there, and he’s done really, really good work with it.

So, yeah, watch that. Yeah. It doesn’t have to be someone local and expensive who spends four dollars on a nectarine.

Can you believe the cost of fruit?

No. It’s crazy.

I know. Okay. Well, cool. Cody, I’m glad you’re working on that. I know it’s, social.

I’m ready.

I have, like, so many videos I have to record this week. I’m dreading it. Yeah.

Hannah, you have a question?

Yeah. I’ve got a win first. Okay. Great.

I set up a Instagram account on Friday.

Nice.

And I have, eleven followers now.

Amazing. That’s great.

Yeah. So Yeah. So that is a big win because I was quite resistant because I used to have an Instagram account, for for a lot of years and then lost it all.

So I haven’t had an Instagram for maybe about three years, I think.

Mhmm. But I got one now, and I’m Yeah. I’m happy. I’m just Great.

Sharing the same stuff, that I usually share on LinkedIn anyway.

So it’s easy with Yeah.

Just repurpose it. Did you read day trading attention, which we talked about last week?

No.

Gary needs a new book?

No. It’s I think I what I like about it so far, and I’ve not done it, but is this new take that the algorithms don’t care as much about your followers as so everybody’s always scared to get on social. They’re like, I don’t have any followers. It’s gonna take forever to get them.

But the algorithms are shifting in such a way that as long as you’re making content someone wants to see and will, like, pause and stay on, then you get served up to all these new audiences. So I find that encouraging because that was why I held off on Instagram as well. I’m like, well, why now? I’ve spent all this time over on Twitter, and Elon messed the whole thing up, and now I have to go find a new platform.

And so I didn’t want to, and then I just did. And now I’m, like, relieved to hear that it doesn’t matter how many followers you have. It’s always a good signal, but it’s not critical. So yeah. Cool.

I think, like, in a year’s tie in a year’s time, two years’ time, I’m gonna be really pleased that I did it. So that’s what I’m thinking.

Agreed. Yes.

I I look back now. So I set I I started LinkedIn in two thousand and nineteen, and I’ve got nearly sixteen thousand followers at all, like, all my friends.

That’s why that sounds weird.

But, and so and I’m and I look back, and I think I’m so pleased I did that back then. So pleased. Yeah. So, yeah, my question, you’ve just mentioned I just heard you mention the words, Joel’s case study earned a thousand dollars and spending a thousand dollars.

And I I don’t what what does that mean?

Sorry. So Joel Kletke is a copywriter, and he had a business called Case Study Buddy, but he just sold that. So it’s not his anymore. It’s someone else’s now. So it’s case study buddy by so and so.

And it was a thousand bucks a year or two ago. I don’t know what it is right now, but a thousand and you would, like, give them contact information for a person that you had worked with, and they would do all the work of making the case study. So they did this for a lot of different clients. And, yeah, it’s like, if we can find a thousand dollars to take a big, like, bite out of a big problem that we have, that seems like money really, really well spent.

So but it’s yeah. Joel Pletke, case study buddy, thousand bucks to get a case study made.

Yeah. Nice. And they would do everything too. Like, I used them for one case study. It turned out great.

And I would just have to connect them with this client of mine, and they just took over from there. Made the whole thing easy.

Yeah. Right. Okay. So they reach out to your client and then do everything for you.

Yeah. I think I had to warm intro them, just an email connecting the two. I I had to make sure that the client was okay with giving a case study first, but then I didn’t have to get on a call. I all of the tedium of that.

Man, Joel did a presentation at Content Jam, I think it was, a few years ago on making a case study, and there’s a lot. There’s a lot to her. It’s like, just pay just pay someone to do this for you. So I would look into that if you’re looking for case studies. Yeah.

Interesting. Thank you. Sure.

Thanks, Anna.

Anything else? Anyone? Nothing from Stacy. I saw you came on camera when I said your name.

That was just my courtesy showing my face because you said my name.

That’s all. I thought it might be. I thought it might be. Alright. Cool. Well, let us wrap up today’s session.

We have a whole bunch of people joining Coffee School Pro in September, which is our next official, like, intake.

So we have one more call without a whole bunch of new people in it. So bring any questions that you’ve had that you’ve wanted to tackle, because it’s gonna be a little a little bit noisier, not crazy noisier, little bit noisier.

Cool. Otherwise, hope everybody has a really good rest of your day. Alright, Jill?

Take care. Bye.

Worksheet

The 10% Rule

Worksheet

The 10% Rule

 

Transcript

Today, of course, we are continuing on with August theme for Copy School Pro, which is the people powered month, how to get help and get them to be helpful.

So I’m going to share my screen. You got the worksheet delivered over the weekend. Tina sent that out.

So make sure you reference that and print this out.

Now this is today’s lesson is based on something that I only heard after a good six or seven years of managing people. And that was this whole ten percent rule, which is kind of crazy to me, and it might be to you. So what I learned is that every person that reports to you takes up ten percent of your time to manage. So if you’re managing five people, half of your day is half of your day, half of your time is spent, managing those people.

And that might seem like, woah. That’s a lot. But the reality is there’s a lot that goes into managing people if you wanna do it right. Then you look at companies like Google where there’s, like, twenty eight people reporting into one developer, and you wonder how that could possibly work.

But that’s a whole different story. I think that’s a lot of, like, you just make it work for various purposes and reasons and people.

I would argue that they’re probably not very well managed as people. Probably not getting a lot of time to talk about development, to get one on one with you or with the person who makes decisions about their career, who helps them through their career.

I think it’s really important to remember that everybody that you hire is on a career path. They’re trying to do something in their life, whether that is I’m shifting from a high stress job to a lower stress job or I’m looking at my career ladder and where I wanna go, they’re on a path. And so it’s important for us as employers to respect that.

Thus, we need to give them the time that we would want to have with somebody if we were working for them. So ten percent of your time is real, and, thus, if you are going to continue in an execution role, which I know so many people here are still like, I can’t give up control of research, of synthesis, of planning, of writing, of editing, of talking with the client. If you can’t give that stuff up, how are you ever going to really grow if people are at the heart of where you get that leverage that you need to grow? And so even if you only wanna have a small team, if you’re like, I only want three people reporting into me, that’s thirty percent of your time that’s gone.

It’s gone. So you really have to make sure that the seventy percent that is left is time really well spent. So it’s a really simple lesson today. How can we make sure that the more people you hire, even if that’s one or two, every single if you hire one, it is ten percent of your time gone, possibly more because you’ll be so partnered up with that person and because they’ll really depend on you as, like, a social, like, being in their lives, like, you are the only two that work together, you’re gonna get pretty close.

And if it’s not a close feeling, you’ll probably lose them.

So you have to think about that. And every time you lose somebody and have to replace them, every time you hire the wrong person and then have to fire them, this is all stuff that takes up time, and this is the stuff that will burn you out on people. So we wanna be realistic about people. If you want to get to a place where you’re going to make really good money without doing all the work, you’re going to need people. They’re gonna have to be the right people who are well managed and who feel like they’re part of a bigger vision of growing something. So meetings.

Meetings are how we communicate as remote team members. There’s there’s Slack, of course, but meetings are going to be critical. No one likes a meeting. It’s a rule. Nobody likes a meeting. Only middle managers like meetings because their whole job is to meet with people.

That’s not your job. That’s not an individual contributor’s job. You hire a copywriter. They don’t wanna have meetings. They’re also going to complain a lot about meetings. Oh, it’s interrupting my flow.

And and that’s fair, but the reality is you work in an organization, and that organization needs meetings to grow. So what you need to do is make sure you know what meetings you have and what meetings you don’t have because people adding meetings to your calendar is how things get out of control. No one cares about your calendar like you do. So right out of the gate, we need to make sure we’re making really good calls about what meetings you have as a team. And that could be starting with you as one person.

Having meetings with yourself is huge. So if you have a start of day stand up with yourself, that’s you sitting there looking at your to do list and determining what’s the most important thing to get done, when you can do it, blocking out your calendar for the day, whatever that might be. An end of day stand up could be a thing for you as well. And then just think of all the other meetings that you need to have. If you can start with a strategy now, then every single new team member that you hire, you can just hand this sheet over to them and say, this is how we do meetings here. So you choose, are you gonna do start of day stand up or an end of day stand up? Are you gonna do both?

I would recommend you choose one or the other and you make it daily and you keep it short. So we’ve got how long is it gonna be. If you have a ten person team, you’re gonna need at least thirty minutes for the stand up. And then later, you have to, of course, come up with your own agenda for that stand up.

Because the last thing you wanna do is go into a stand up and just have people say, today, I’m working on this. And you’re like, I could I could see that in Asana. I need to really, like, know what my stand up exists to do. Is it a social stand up to get everybody, like, jazzed for the day or to celebrate what we did at the end of the day?

So you need to decide that as CEO of your business.

When do you do a stand up? And that’s a whole team meeting, and how long is it? Do you need weekly team meetings or biweekly team meetings? What happens in a team meeting? What’s its function? What why are people going to attend this meeting and not be, like, upset that it’s interrupting their work? How long is that team meeting going to be?

There will be a need to have team meetings later.

If you figure this stuff out too late, you’ll always find your meetings are changing. And every new person who comes on says, let’s do meetings differently. Let’s do meetings differently.

You are not running a democracy.

You’re running a business, and you’re in charge of it. So you say, this is when we have meetings, and you get everybody on board. And if you have a good why behind that meeting, when it happens, why it’s as long as it is, what you cover, then it’s not a waste of time meeting. And then we’re not just adding in meetings for the sake of meetings.

So what does the stand up exist to do? What do your team meetings exist to do? When is there a time to socialize? What what happens there?

Things that you would normally do in an office where it’s lunchtime and you go get lunch together. It’s coffee break, you go get coffee together. What can you do to unite your team members? Do you need a large format team meeting, which is more of, like, even if you’ve only got, like, one person in sales, two copywriters, a smallish looking team, sales and account management.

They’re the same thing at this point.

It might feel like, well, all hands is, like, every single meeting we have. But an all hands meeting is a really good chance for you to restate your vision to the team, for individual team members to say, here’s how I fit into this world and, like, teach the rest of the team about their job. So there’s a lot that you can do with that that can better help you communicate. And then things like project briefings.

Those are just whole team meetings. Then you have individual meetings. Do you have a weekly one on one or biweekly one on one? How long is it?

Do you have coffee chats where you just sit down together? If your one on one is not meant to be a time to, like, talk about each other and what you’re going through, If it’s more of a get me up to speed on your projects, then when do you have time to just chat and be social with them? You are somebody that very likely they look up to in some ways. They’re usually going to be confused by the decisions that you make.

What you think is clear, they won’t think is clear. So there’s a lot that you have to consider in managing people, and just having a coffee chat is a good way for them to be like, oh, I think I understand you better. And for you to be like, oh, okay. Got it.

I see who you are now as a person. I’m getting to know you better. And that’s really critical for managing them well.

Quarterly performance reviews, annual performance reviews, what happens with those? Do you want it to be quarterly or annual? Gotta have a performance review at some point. People need to know how they’re doing or they’re not gonna feel well managed, and they won’t have a chance to say, I want more. I want less. I want clarity. Whatever those things might be that they’re looking for.

Goal setting.

They’re your team member.

You have targets for them, I’m sure. You probably have goals for where they go with their career in your organization, what they want to do more of. You won’t know unless you set goals with them. And Then, of course, once you set a goal, do you have growth check ins? Do you have, like okay. You said that you wanted to get better at email copywriting.

Great. We put you in ten x emails. Let’s talk about how that’s going for you. And then they can say, I haven’t taken it yet.

Okay. Now you can manage them towards taking it because they said that they wanted to. What’s getting in the way of them taking it? You have to manage them towards that.

So we gotta have our meetings figured out. Shorter is always better. If it can be done in fifteen minutes, do it in fifteen minutes. People expand to the size of a meeting.

And then comes basically this stuff. Just what are the days that you won’t work? So oh, sorry. Won’t won’t work.

Won’t have meetings. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Which ones are they? If you can set that up front, then everybody who joins your team knows.

We have no meeting Tuesdays, no meeting Wednesdays. I don’t know. You decide what those are. When do you refuse to have meetings as a team?

When is energy highest to do a person’s work versus when is it a good time for team members to meet? As you add in more people who are going to dictate what other people on the team are doing with their day, will that change? Should you always start your meetings at nine in the morning and only go until ten, and that’s a daily thing? That’s the only time, but you have to have rules.

You gotta have these standards set up or people don’t know what to do, and they just go populating meetings all over the place. And your clients are already gonna try to do that. Your clients already do not give a crap what your calendar looks like. So the more control you can have as an agency owner, the better.

Whether you think of yourself as an agency owner or not, if you have services that you produce, even if it’s a very small business, it’s still going to need to operate like an agency. And then what rules do you have about non work, non meetings? So Slack, email. When do you communicate?

What are the rules on scheduling a message versus not scheduling a message and just posting it? Are we allowed to send out anything after five PM or before nine AM? You have to have that rule. And if you have that rule, then everybody knows how to operate.

And if you don’t, then somebody ends up pinging the CMO of one of your companies that you work with at seven PM and interrupting how they live their lives, which is not good. It’s not a good look. So you have to figure that stuff out. It’s good to figure it out.

It really is a checklist with a circle around the thing that’s the starting point of your strategy, and then you just have to start to live it and then creating calendar controls. So this is part of no meetings days. Do you have all meetings in the morning? If so, then afternoons never get meetings.

It’s good to have those rules. Everybody can follow those really clearly. Are meetings only in the afternoon, and all morning time is there for you to work, get in flow, go through stuff while you’ve got high energy?

Or do you believe that your team might not actually show up until eleven in the morning because it’s remote and you don’t actually micromanage them. And if that’s a concern, then you might wanna start your meetings at nine in the morning and have an end of day meeting as well. That’s up to you and how you wanna trust people or not. Trust them.

It’s not your fault or their fault that you don’t trust them. It’s the reality of remote work. We wanna just make sure people are actually working during their work day. You decide that.

That is all. Then I want you to go away from this, and we’ve done in the intensive freelancing. I think it was in the intensive freelancing, but it was during a different week. Anyway, I know that at this point, you’ve drawn an org chart with where you’re going to go for your organization.

Now the time is now to go in and start circling those next hires. We’ve been talking over the last few weeks about who you should hire, how to find the constraints.

So if you can go in there and say, okay. My next four hires are this, this, this, and this, which means forty percent of my time is about to be eaten up with the meetings and other work that it takes to manage people. I’ll have sixty percent left. Is it time is my fifth hire going to be someone who can handle more project management, more people management? That does not have to be a full time person either. That could be a part time person that you hire just to make sure everybody is aligned with the business goals, everybody’s getting their stuff done, they’re feeling heard, etcetera, etcetera.

But you need to know who’s next because you need to know who’s about to take up ten percent of your valuable time. That is all for this week. The takeaway is every new team member takes ten percent of your time.

Alright. And it’s good. If they’re doing good work Mhmm. Then that’s great. If they’re taking up ten percent of your time, but they’re freeing up seventy percent of your time, then it’s a good trade off. That’s brilliant. Okay?

Alright. Any questions, thoughts, concerns?

No? Alright.

And if you think, oh, it’s just really not worth of hiring people. It really is. It really is. Even with all those things considered, it really is. Alright.

Question time. We have forty glorious minutes to talk about what you’re going through in your business. So if you have a question, please put up your hand using, I think, the react button so that happens.

Lower your hand if you no longer have a question, and we’ll go in order. Start with your win, please.

And if we have no questions, then we’ll just call it a day.

Are we good? No quest oh, Marina’s up. Marina, what’s your win?

I already shared my win, but that’s okay.

Hiring a brand person?

Hiring a brand person.

Dig it. It was yeah. Just had lots of epiphanies about what’s holding me back and how to get over myself so I can do it.

So Love it.

Huge win. And K. Thinking about meetings, and, yes, I agree with this.

Well, it doesn’t matter whether I agree or not, and it is true that every court takes ten percent of your time.

And I’m wondering about scheduling meetings. I can get really rigid about things.

And thinking about clients, this is not a problem right now ish, but I hope that it will be a problem, so I need to solve for it now.

If you say like, how much time do you leave on your calendar for booking client meetings? Do you say I’m only taking client calls in the morning? Also, I’m thinking about time zones. So I don’t love morning meetings, but all of my meetings end up being in the morning. So I’m like, okay. I just have to have morning meetings because that’s when all of the stuff is.

Yep.

Yeah. And eastern time zone, and they’re not gonna want a meeting at four because it’s after their work time. Yep. So knowing that, then I can still say that okay. What is my succinct question?

How many days do I have to allow for client meetings, and how flexible do you need to be to still have the client meetings, but also manage your calendar, and they’re also paying you?

So how do you That’s why you wanna manage your meetings the best you possibly can.

So you’re in control of when your team meets.

That is controllable.

So if you say, as a team, we never book meetings with each other between this hour and that hour or on this day and that day, etcetera, etcetera, then they know if they have a quick question to ask Marina or they wanna run copy by you that you only book meetings in certain times and always as close to an existing meeting as possible. Like, you have to set those rules up so they know that, because clients will be able to do a lot of dictating around the meetings that you have. Now if you are following having more of a standardized offer with retainer that comes off of that, then you set those meetings up all in advance.

And there’s less reason for a client to want to book an ad hoc meeting with you because there’s nothing ad hoc about what you’re doing. Everything’s planned. Everything’s good to go. Right?

And so if they want to have a meeting with you, it’s probably a meeting that’s critical to keeping them as a client. So they wanna change direction. Okay. Shit.

Okay. Let’s hear about this. Whenever they wanna book that, that’s fine. You can take that call.

And or else it’s, hey. This is going really well. We wanna add more. Or there’s something going on in their business. Like, hey. We just had a new product update, and people hate it. Our email strategy needs to kind of change for a second.

Okay. These are all good things to have, but it’s not gonna be like client has new idea they wanna run by me because that’s not the state of your engagement. Does that make sense, Marina?

Right.

So, basically, anytime a client wants to meet, you have to say yes. Like, if people wish to say no.

Yes. But that’s where you have to control as much of that as you possibly can.

Yeah.

Right. So set up the team meetings, and those are nondemocratic.

You work for me, and this is when we have meetings.

And people like it better when you just tell them things. So, yes. Yes. Democracy here. This is when we meet. Cool.

And then as far as clients go, they rule the calendar at that point.

Okay. And that’s that is in keeping with you charging more and delivering a retainer that is in keeping with what we’ve discussed. So Yes.

As a person paying you ten thousand dollars a month to optimize my emails, I feel like I should be able to talk to you when it’s time to optimize. Like, when I have a question about that, Slack is great for those quick questions, and you should default to Slack wherever possible.

But if I wanna sit down and say, Marina, we’ve got some concerns, then whenever. If I wanna call you at nine at night, that’s your job as an agency owner. You take the call. You give them your phone number so that they can call you anytime.

They’re not going to. They don’t want to call you all the time. Right. But at least they know they can.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. Cool?

Yes. Fun.

This is my take on having run a couple agencies, obviously.

So I’m sure others have other takes on it. Not me, though. Okay. Adnan, what’s up? What’s your win?

So this is more of a look good kinda win. So there’s an agency that I, I think they’re based off in South America somewhere, but they have offices in London. But, anyways, through them, I got to write for Uber and Uber Eats.

Nice.

And then they contacted me last week because they have some Google projects Nice. That they want me to write for.

So it looks good. It’s not the most lucrative.

But Never is.

The win.

Big ones never are. Yeah.

Okay.

But I mean They know that.

They’re like, we’re you’re gonna want our logo.

Like, you would do this to create the logo.

The the chance out. Okay. Got it. Yeah. So that’s that’s the win.

The question I had, I I guess this relates to both the email services that I offer and also the pricing pages services that I will be offering Mhmm.

Is that over like, all the everyone that I’ve written emails for, I haven’t been able to get any feedback on how they’re performing or if there’s been a jump or any of that stuff. How do I kinda go out there and be able to quickly get that?

Like Why is it because you’ve been writing for large brands and you can’t get into their email platform to Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There’s been a couple of smaller ones. I mean, I’m I don’t know how small they are.

Success dot a I, I wrote for them. They reached out directly, but Okay. They haven’t shared anything either.

So Okay.

It’s definitely gonna be tricky, if you can’t get into their tool, to actually look at that. And that’s fair. Uber’s not gonna let you into their email marketing platform. It might even be because I don’t know. I have I have no idea, obviously, what they’re using.

If they’re using something homegrown Yeah.

They’re not even gonna wanna look in that.

Like, you’re looking for a hard pass.

And then, otherwise, it’s just generally gonna be tricky across the board. So who can you get in with who can feed you that information?

And or what can you do at the start of a project to make it clearer that the point of contact you have is responsible for sharing results with you? And I don’t just mean hide that in the contract because no one reads it anyway, except for legal.

They’re not gonna say, like, oh, hey. Point of contact. Did you know you’re supposed to do this? They’re just gonna, like, whatever.

So you need to talk to your point of contact about that right out of the gate. Like, the only way we can do this together is if I can see how it’s working so that I can help you. Maybe there’s something else you build in there. Like, it’s the beginning of a retainer offer or something like that.

But they have to understand that you wanna see it in the first place. Do you know how many copywriters ask to see how it performed? Like, none. Like, nobody ever asked.

They’re just like, I don’t wanna know. I don’t wanna know, please. Like, I hope it did okay, and then they, like, run off. If you’re like, I need to know how this is performing, and here’s why, make it a why that they care about, not like and here’s why I wanna be able to add it to my portfolio.

I don’t give a shit about your portfolio. What do I care about? So make it about what they care about so I can see that I’m getting you the results we are talking about me getting you. And if I’m not, I wanna be able to fix that.

Okay? So I need you to get me results within x period of time of emails launching.

Also, if emails don’t launch, we need to meet so I I can understand why you didn’t send them, and we can revise so that they’re the right emails for your brand.

But you have to make sure that that date is really clear. If it’s a campaign, if it’s a one off, they should be able to share results with you in a week. So seven days after is the time limit you set. If it’s an automation, give it thirty days to run so you can start seeing what’s going on.

But you have to tell them, I need to see results by this time. If the point of contact is not the right person for that, because they’re like, I’m five people removed from whoever implements the thing, Then because they’re maybe in marketing and this happens over in, like, some weird developer part of the organization. It’s not even marketing anymore even though it was five years ago, but now it’s not etcetera etcetera. Things are weird.

Who do you talk to there? Who is in charge of that? And you just ask Ask upfront. And if they’re like, I don’t know.

I’ll get back to you on that, then follow-up. Make a note of it. Follow-up until you know that person’s name, and then you reach out to that person. Say, hey.

Hi. I’m working on these emails. You’re gonna implement.

We should love each other. Let’s have a coffee talk so I can get you on board with what I’m thinking. You can tell me what the limitations are, what you’ve tried. Does that work?

That’s their job. They’re in a large organization. They’re there to have meetings. They know that. So that’s what I would do and have done. Okay. That makes sense?

Thank you. Yeah. That makes sense. It’s always like a chicken and egg kind of thing.

Right? So I’ve lost out on some clients because even though my portfolio is good, the the the first question they’ll ask is like, oh, are you guys an agency, or are there any results can you that you can share with us? And then right off the bat, like, I’m on the I’m on the back foot, if you know what I mean. Yep.

Yeah. That’s the constraint. Right? So last week, we talked about constraints. And if you can say a big constraint to me closing business is that they always ask for results, then you gotta solve that.

Because if you solve that, then the pipeline opens up again. So we gotta take that problem and fix it. Great. You’ve identified.

A lot of people don’t know what where leads go. They don’t know why it stops. You know that. So it only makes good sense for you to prioritize that, and that’s where Joel’s old case study buddy was a good thousand dollars spent because a thousand dollars spent gets you a case study that you can now use to close twenty thousand dollar jobs across the board, or you do it.

You follow-up with clients and you say this. And, of course, if all it takes, if part of all that it takes is you adding into your process three new bullet points about at this point, I tell the client this. At this point, I get connected with their technology person for email implementation.

At this point, I follow-up with them for results.

Now you’ve got three little things added to an SOP that could unlock new projects for you. So I think that’s great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Alright.

Go add it to those SOPs.

Any other questions?

Are we feeling the quiet people in the room who I’m looking at?

No. I’m looking at them.

Awkward. Should I call on someone?

Nobody has any questions or concerns? Anything that they’re working on?

Caroline, I haven’t heard from you in so long. One, how was your summer?

You were off for a month. Don’t worry. I’m not gonna put you on the spot to ask a business question, but I do wanna know how your summer is going.

It is good. It is good. We traveled to we spent June in Asia. We were in Japan and Korea Oh. Which is very cool. Yeah. We sent a our oldest kiddo off to college over the weekend.

Wow.

Yep.

Banana’s amazing. How’s that feeling?

Good. He made it very easy to say goodbye. I’ll just leave it at that.

That’s amazing. Well, now you’ll have all this time to work on your business.

Yeah. I have three other kiddos, but yep.

Oh, I thought that was your youngest or your oldest, but No.

That’s my oldest. Yeah.

Oh, okay. Funny.

So I feel like I’m playing catch up. Yeah.

After the That’s fair.

Kids go back the kids go back to school tomorrow.

Amazing.

Glorious.

Okay. Well, it’s good to see you. I was glad to see you pop back in after your month break.

I yes. Cool. Awesome. Good to be back.

Anybody do you have anything you’re working on in your business that you wanna discuss? You were shaking your head madly that I shouldn’t call on you, and then I called on you.

Nothing nothing really great to share at the moment.

Okay. Cool. Cool. Yeah. Cody? Hannah? Stacy?

I don’t have any questions, but I’ve been working on Instagram posts.

Okay. How’s this going?

Last week.

It’s okay. I think I was getting a little far in the weeds with the Gary Vee book, and I’m trying to figure everything out. But I think I I think I have a decent plan at least now. But, yeah, it took me about ten hours last week to create, like, five posts.

Oh, wow.

Do you feel good about the posts?

Yeah. I mean, I’m writing them all out. That’s what takes the longest is to make sure they’re strategic. And then you have to since I don’t have, like, a team, I’m the one in Canva designing all the things and editing the videos, and it’s it’s a lot. Yeah.

Yeah. We’ll talk.

I mean, I know that it’s tricky to hire people to do that, but there’s, like, some really good short term.

Did you watch Shane’s training on hiring overseas?

No.

But I need to because you’re the second person who told me to watch that, so I’m going to do that.

Yeah. Definitely do. He’s built cool businesses that where the people that like, he’s getting to employ people, in situations where they need employment, and it’s just cheaper than it is here. Life is just cheaper in the Philippines, and so it’s cheaper to hire someone there, and he’s done really, really good work with it.

So, yeah, watch that. Yeah. It doesn’t have to be someone local and expensive who spends four dollars on a nectarine.

Can you believe the cost of fruit?

No. It’s crazy.

I know. Okay. Well, cool. Cody, I’m glad you’re working on that. I know it’s, social.

I’m ready.

I have, like, so many videos I have to record this week. I’m dreading it. Yeah.

Hannah, you have a question?

Yeah. I’ve got a win first. Okay. Great.

I set up a Instagram account on Friday.

Nice.

And I have, eleven followers now.

Amazing. That’s great.

Yeah. So Yeah. So that is a big win because I was quite resistant because I used to have an Instagram account, for for a lot of years and then lost it all.

So I haven’t had an Instagram for maybe about three years, I think.

Mhmm. But I got one now, and I’m Yeah. I’m happy. I’m just Great.

Sharing the same stuff, that I usually share on LinkedIn anyway.

So it’s easy with Yeah.

Just repurpose it. Did you read day trading attention, which we talked about last week?

No.

Gary needs a new book?

No. It’s I think I what I like about it so far, and I’ve not done it, but is this new take that the algorithms don’t care as much about your followers as so everybody’s always scared to get on social. They’re like, I don’t have any followers. It’s gonna take forever to get them.

But the algorithms are shifting in such a way that as long as you’re making content someone wants to see and will, like, pause and stay on, then you get served up to all these new audiences. So I find that encouraging because that was why I held off on Instagram as well. I’m like, well, why now? I’ve spent all this time over on Twitter, and Elon messed the whole thing up, and now I have to go find a new platform.

And so I didn’t want to, and then I just did. And now I’m, like, relieved to hear that it doesn’t matter how many followers you have. It’s always a good signal, but it’s not critical. So yeah. Cool.

I think, like, in a year’s tie in a year’s time, two years’ time, I’m gonna be really pleased that I did it. So that’s what I’m thinking.

Agreed. Yes.

I I look back now. So I set I I started LinkedIn in two thousand and nineteen, and I’ve got nearly sixteen thousand followers at all, like, all my friends.

That’s why that sounds weird.

But, and so and I’m and I look back, and I think I’m so pleased I did that back then. So pleased. Yeah. So, yeah, my question, you’ve just mentioned I just heard you mention the words, Joel’s case study earned a thousand dollars and spending a thousand dollars.

And I I don’t what what does that mean?

Sorry. So Joel Kletke is a copywriter, and he had a business called Case Study Buddy, but he just sold that. So it’s not his anymore. It’s someone else’s now. So it’s case study buddy by so and so.

And it was a thousand bucks a year or two ago. I don’t know what it is right now, but a thousand and you would, like, give them contact information for a person that you had worked with, and they would do all the work of making the case study. So they did this for a lot of different clients. And, yeah, it’s like, if we can find a thousand dollars to take a big, like, bite out of a big problem that we have, that seems like money really, really well spent.

So but it’s yeah. Joel Pletke, case study buddy, thousand bucks to get a case study made.

Yeah. Nice. And they would do everything too. Like, I used them for one case study. It turned out great.

And I would just have to connect them with this client of mine, and they just took over from there. Made the whole thing easy.

Yeah. Right. Okay. So they reach out to your client and then do everything for you.

Yeah. I think I had to warm intro them, just an email connecting the two. I I had to make sure that the client was okay with giving a case study first, but then I didn’t have to get on a call. I all of the tedium of that.

Man, Joel did a presentation at Content Jam, I think it was, a few years ago on making a case study, and there’s a lot. There’s a lot to her. It’s like, just pay just pay someone to do this for you. So I would look into that if you’re looking for case studies. Yeah.

Interesting. Thank you. Sure.

Thanks, Anna.

Anything else? Anyone? Nothing from Stacy. I saw you came on camera when I said your name.

That was just my courtesy showing my face because you said my name.

That’s all. I thought it might be. I thought it might be. Alright. Cool. Well, let us wrap up today’s session.

We have a whole bunch of people joining Coffee School Pro in September, which is our next official, like, intake.

So we have one more call without a whole bunch of new people in it. So bring any questions that you’ve had that you’ve wanted to tackle, because it’s gonna be a little a little bit noisier, not crazy noisier, little bit noisier.

Cool. Otherwise, hope everybody has a really good rest of your day. Alright, Jill?

Take care. Bye.