MCOE Best Practices Spotlight: Jhana Li | Growing Your Agency: Hiring and Scaling.

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Let's get ready for another exciting episode of the MCOE Best Practices E show. I'm your host, Lane Hauk and today I am really happy to have a special guest with us, Jana Lee, founder and CEO of Spyglass Ops. To her own confession, Jana is obsessed with agency operations and with proven results in scaling digital businesses from seven to eight figures. And now she helps other CEOs of agencies do the same. Over the past five years, Jana has been the CEO of two seven figure startups. She's also been a high performance leader to multiple remote teams of 20 plus employees. She's been an ops consultant to over 37 and 8 figure online businesses and an ops coach to hundreds of digital startups, their CEOs and their operators. Jana, welcome to the show. Great to have you.

Speaker A: I'm so excited to be here, Lane.

Speaker B: Yeah, really good to have you. A, uh, little background for all of you who are going to watch this, this episode here. Jana and I met about two months ago at a fellow Mastermind event and I got to hear Jana speak and present and I was super, super impressed. She obviously is an expert in her subject matter of op agency operations and she went deep in her presentation about agency ops and I was definitely jamming with her as she was talking. As someone who's bu team myself and runs a team, although I have an operations manager today that does a lot of that, but that's really the topic of today's session is agency operations. And for those agencies who are watching, listening to our podcast here, um, many of you want to build your own team, many of you have your own team or you aspire to just continue to grow and build your team and operate agency operations and fulfillment definitely requires some skill sets, some certain roles that you need to have, um, in place in your agency to make that effective and successful for you. And that's where Jana really jams as an expert. So Jana, I wanted to just be able to get you on the show today and share, uh, with our audience. Just unpack all your knowledge and like we talked about, really. I thought your presentation at the Mastermind event was really awesome and so maybe we can delve into some of those things that you talk about there, but give us an overview. What is, who is Spyglass Ops? Give us maybe a little bit more background and context to your experience and then we'll just go from there.

Speaker A: Yeah, so I really fell into operations lane. The very first company that I ultimately became COO for was a marketing agency. It was a multi seven figure digital marketing agency. And I really cut my teeth and learned what operations was through the context of having no idea what I was doing, but just intuitively getting in there through trying to solve problems and seeing what happened. I got lucky with a couple of key mentors. I got lucky with an opportunity to become an operations coach inside of a community. And this community was a coaching program for agencies. So there were 500 plus agency owners in that group. They were bringing me their ops problems every single week. And that was really where I massively up leveled my operational skills because I got to learn and try and test things not just in my own business, but in 500 other businesses and see what happened. So over a couple years of being that operations coach, I really grabbed all of the data around, around what's the difference between an agency that successfully scales and successfully grants their CEO owner freedom as it scales versus what are the agencies that either never get there or get there, but only at the expense of and the burnout of the CEO who is trying to scale this thing as hard as they can. And I took all of that data. I ultimately built my own business which is Spyglass ops. And that's what we, that's what we do. Taking all of my learnings and best practices to help those CEOs scale up their companies, but do so in a way that keeps them in their zone of genius, helps them scale out of the day to day weeds and ultimately allows them to achieve their highest impact and their highest growth potential.

Speaker B: Awesome. Yeah, I mean that, I know that is, that's the ultimate dream for every agency owner, really probably every entrepreneur and business owner is to be able to get that freedom and not just be either a paid employee of your own company or sometimes an underpaid employee of your own company. Um, but yeah, that's the dream. And so for those of you who are, who are agency owners and can identify with what Jana just said all about building freedom for you as the owner, the CEO of the company, and really how to actually become a CEO of a company. Because I think a lot of agency owners don't. A lot of them. I, I didn't, me personally, I didn't start off having been, having had this, all this experience having been a CEO of somewhere else. I started my own company and then graduated and learned and grew into the role of a CEO. Once you start to really build a team and have a real company, talk to us about the nuts and bolts of building, uh, an agent, a company, an agency that, that'll, that kind of scales, uh, or phases you in as a CEO and allows you then to ultimately graduate to have that kind of freedom.

Speaker A: Yeah, I know that this shouldn't be surprising coming from me, but the difference really is operations. Right. A CEO can work really hard and grow their company. Right. You can run your company from the lens of if I want to get more results, I'm just going to dump more time and energy into this thing. I will outwork any problem and I will grow in scale. A lot of CEOs get to maybe like the seven figure run rate with that mindset and with that mentality. But, but at some point you hit your limit.

Speaker B: There's no more time.

Speaker A: There's just no more time. There's just no more energy. If you try and push past that limit, you enter into burnout. And that's not a, that's not a pretty movie either. And so what's really interesting is that I saw so many like brilliant CEOs try to go that route and they were never able to figure out that last piece like they were creating financial success. They got that seven figure or plus agency, but they never figured out that final piece. And they never figured it out because they got that success on their own, back on their own sweat equity and they accidentally built themselves into a corner within their company where they were required to show up every single day just to keep the thing moving, just to keep the thing growing. And in that reality, the reality like you are never further away from your freedom if that's how you're going about scaling your business versus in my very first marketing agency, I was actually living full time and traveling full time in a converted van. And so I wasn't working, I mean Definitely wasn't working 80 hour weeks most weeks. Probably wasn't working 40 hour weeks. Right. I never, in the very first agency that I was scaling and we scaled to 450k months, we did that without a full time CEO or a full time COO. And I had to learn how to. How do you create operations, how do you build a team, how do you create systems, how do you lead in an environment where that's possible? Because it is possible. But if you as a CEO are not forcing yourself to learn those skills and you're just like, I'm just going to work harder, I'm just going to outwork this next problem, then you're never going to learn those skills and you will actually build yourself into being totally

Speaker B: required and you wall yourself in. Yeah, uh, there's no, there's almost no escape. There's no escape. Out of that. That's if you want to call that a strategy. Yeah.

Speaker A: And the reality is, that's where most of our clients find us, is you've actually reached the limit. Your company has started to stall out or plateau because you literally cannot pour anything else into it. And then my clients come to me, they're like, all right, Jonna, tell me about this operations thing. Give it to me. And I'm like, all right, we can do that. But the reality is that we now need to transform every piece of your business and systematically work your way out of every piece of your business. And wouldn't have been so much easier if we had just started that process six to 12 months ago. And you had six to 12 months of freedom that you now have lost because we didn't put the right systems in place, the right team in place earlier. And we could have.

Speaker B: When do you recommend an agency really starts to dial in on this? Because there's obviously, there's no reason to dial in on this if you're doing 20, 30, $40,000 a month in revenue and you're just beginning. There's just not, it's not applicable yet. But when you're experienced, where does this really become applicable?

Speaker A: Yeah, actually, you captured it perfectly. The most savvy, uh, kind of proactive agency owners will start to layer in operations at around the 30k per month mark. Most will do it in the 50 to 75k per month mark. And you really can't effectively scale past the seven figure run rate without operations unless you're working those 80 to 100 hour weeks. And again, I don't choose that. And if you don't choose that, you're going to need those operations by the time you hit seven figures.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think we all, as agency owners and entrepreneurs have to recall why we got into this. We didn't. We wanted to. I know for me, I wanted to stop trading my time for money. So don't be. That agency that Jana just described. Sorry, John. That John just described, uh, in terms of just trying to outwork every single problem you have. Because that I think oftentimes we think that's the easiest route in the moment. Like, just let me just, I'll just put in another five hours this week and just power past some of these, these fires I have or whatever. Again, you're building all that dependency on you and your business. Let's talk about, let's unpack some of the key roles as, uh, you start to build out that operations or fulfillment team. What are some of the really, especially the, the beginning key roles. What are those? If we're at 30 to 50k a month and we're just starting to really feel like, all right, I've got to do something more than just outwork all these problems myself.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: What do I want to hire for the first two, three, four hires?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So the way I see most agencies do it is that you're going to be hiring the key day to day functions of the business first. And I would agree, I would stand by that. Right. So that's going to be a media buyer, an account manager, a client success manager and, and generally like a salesperson. Right. Depending on your specific agency and what you offer, you need client fulfillment, client success and communication and then sales. Maybe there's a marketing VA or a marketing hire thrown in there as well. But essentially you're building out that kind of core frontline team that can start to do all of the day to day actions required in the business and can start to run the day to day without you. That's generally where our clients start to need us. Because now not only do you have to run this entire damn business, but you now have to manage four people who are maybe not doing the work correctly, who are maybe coming to you all the time with buyers with questions and it's actually putting more work on your plate as opposed to less. If that's the situation you find yourself in the final key piece there, the final key hire is operations. Right. And the great news is you don't need a COO. I see a lot of CEOs hold off on the ops higher because in their brains, when we say operations, the only thought that comes there is like coo, I need my Layla Hermosi. I need my high level, badass second in command coo. That's going to cost me 100k plus per year and I can't afford that right now.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So I obviously can't hire operations guys. Ops is like anything else. There's entry level operators, there's executive level operators. You don't need a COO in the same way that you don't need a cfo, a cmo, a CRO and everything else. Right. What you need is an ops manager. An ops manager is significantly cheaper than a coo. An ops manager is all that's needed to optimize the day to day systems. And the great news about the ops manager is that by making that one hire, they're going to turn around and they're going to help you make every other hire they're going to help you identify who are the real A players versus B players on our team and systematically start leveling our team up. Uh, they're going to start to build the systems and the infrastructure needed so that the day to day fires go away, so that like that constant state of reactivity goes away. And really what they do and how they drive value to the business is by helping optimize you and getting your time back. Because how many marketing and sales efforts are you not making right now because you're too busy stuck in the weeds on the back.

Speaker B: Every minute away from that is in something and doing an ops and fulfillment is a minute away from marketing and sales and building your revenue, growing your business right.

Speaker A: From actually leveling up the revenue of your business. So the real opportunity cost of not having an operator comes out to be hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a year. Because without that operator, you, the CEO, are stuck. And when your operator comes in and starts to free you up and free up your time, now you're able to redirect that towards the front end of the business and grow so much faster and so much more confidently. Because the other thing we see Lane a lot is that CEOs will either be subconsciously or consciously pumping the brakes on sales because they know that every new client acquired is a new headache, is a new set of client fires. On the back end is a new extra 5 hours of push that they have to put into the week to make sure that client is happy and it doesn't leave. And again, if that's your reality, where more clients equal more work from you, you become the cap on the business. There is a limit to how hard you can work and how many hours a day you can spend on this. And you will cap yourself out. There's no other, there's no other end to that movie for sure.

Speaker B: So there's agency owners I know listening to us going, yeah, I need to hire, yeah, I need some of these roles right now. I needed them yesterday.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: But I think a lot of times the, the real rub or the, the challenge there is, okay, I want that person. I need these people on my team, these roles. But how in the heck do I afford it? And how the heck do I find them and actually find the right people? Because I'm sure plenty of entrepreneurs have had at least a, uh, hire or two that they've tried and then things didn't go well and they wasted time and money on all that. And so that, that can oftentimes be an inhibitor to somebody taking another stab at going, all right, let me hire somebody new for this role. So any best practices that you can share with agencies for those that kind of find themselves in that, that stick sticky place of I know I need these roles, but geez, how do I go actually go about finding them and affording it?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So many. And we, uh, see this a lot. Even in the operations role where people are like operations, it's not for me. I tried to hire an operator, it didn't work out. And they pull from that the conclusion that they just shouldn't have an operator. Right. Like that they will just somehow be able to scale without this role. And that's true for every single role. If you hired an account manager and they totally blew it and clients turned, that doesn't mean that you don't deserve an account manager. Just means that you didn't hire the right person.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And uh, why would you? Because you've never hired somebody before and you don't know how to do it. Right. And so when we were talking about what's the difference between the CEOs who effectively and ultimately scale themselves out of the day to day weeds versus those who don't, the CEOs who eventually get there are the CEOs who recognize, okay, I need to learn a different set of skills earlier in order to be successful at this lane. Literally. On Saturday, I was on Necker island with Richard Branson for a mastermind that I was a part of and he was sharing stuff. We had a Q and A session with Richard and one of the things he said word for word was learn to delegate early. Like in your career as an entrepreneur. Learn to delegate early. Learn how to create a team that can run the day to day of your business without you so that you can keep your focus on, on the big picture vision. And you're like your zone of genius contribution to your business. Right? This is Richard frickin Branson. Right. So the reality is like when that first hire doesn't work out, what do you as a CEO do? Do you pull from that the lesson that says, ah, uh, guess I just can't trust people. I'll just have to work harder and you double down. Or do you take that as data that says, cool, where did I mess it up?

Speaker B: What skill set am I missing? Or something like, yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: And they pour resources into closing a different skill gap. They pour resources into closing a hiring gap. They pour resources into closing a delegation and leadership gap. Right? You learn the skills that you need to be able to try again and do differently and do better and eventually get there. But it starts with, like, making sure that you're getting the right lesson from that failure, which isn't that you don't deserve freedom in your business, is that you just need a set of skills in order to get there.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Uh, one of my early mentors in a completely different industry back when I was in my 20s, took us through an exercise, and he said, all right, I want you to figure out how much do you want to make this coming year? So the planning. So everyone wrote down their figure. Well, how much we want to make. He said, all right. Now, obviously, no one wants to work more than 40 hours a week, because otherwise you're just not having a quality of life. So let's take that annual figure and let's divide it by the number of hours in a year, whatever that is. 2000 some odd hours. And that's going to give you what your effective hourly rate is that you say you're worth and that you want to make this coming year.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: You know, everyone in that room probably had a figure that was 75 an hour or more. Whatever it was, it was all, uh, mine was well over a hundred dollars an hour for my goal. And he said, okay, now that you've got your effective hourly rate, then you know what you're worth. Now the challenge is that you need to delegate everything.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: To somebody else that isn't going to make that same hourly rate. So if you can pay somebody $10 an hour to do that task, then you need to do, do it tomorrow. Go hire that person and start. I don't care if it's even for just 10 hours a week. If you're spending 10 hours a week sending faxes and sending emails and whatever, and you could pay somebody else $10 an hour to do that, why are you still doing that task? Right. So, same thing you just said, but a little bit different exercise. But it was a really profound.

Speaker A: I love that exercise, Lane, because it helps a, uh, CEO understand the reality of things, which is like, all that time that you guys are spending buried in the weeds of the business. And yes, it's frustrating, yes, it's annoying. Yes, you don't want to do it, but why do you continue to do it? Because you're a hard worker and you show up and you outwork the problem. So just because something's painful isn't a good enough reason for you to figure out how to get it off your plate. But it's not painful, is it? It's expensive because the gap between a $10 per hour task and a $75 per hour rate is $65 of lost revenue every.

Speaker B: Every hour.

Speaker A: Every hour. Every single hour for 2,000 hours over the course of a year. So it's. I don't care that it's annoying and you don't care either. What we care about is that it's expensive. And as soon as it clicks that it's expensive, all of a sudden we are very willing and it becomes very ROI positive to learn how to hire, how to lead, how to delegate because you're actually making money to the business.

Speaker B: And for many of you agency owners that are maybe in that, uh, 30 to $50,000 area, you can hire, actually hire a project manager who potentially can actually graduate and become your ops manager later with. As they acquire some of the skills that they need if they don't already have them. Yep. I actually hired my current operations manager and just for free of reference, I took four months off last year. It was probably a little bit. It was definitely a quantified form, full four months off of. I just did not work for at least four months last year. The only way I can, the only thing I can attribute that to is because I have a great team and I have a great ops manager who just take, uh. And I have an HR manager now who, you know, really handles the people element. But my ops manager today really had the skills when I hired her to be an ops manager, but she didn't have any digital marketing experience so I had to. So I made her project manager even though she had, she, she had managed teams even larger than what we had. Uh, when I first hired her. Yeah, she just didn't have the digital marketing skills. So she needed to cut her teeth for six or 12 months on just learning everything. Digital marketing before I could say you're a real operations manager for a digital marketing agency. But she graduated very quickly because she had those skills.

Speaker A: Yeah, you were talking about what gets in CEOs ways around building these teams. It speaks to actually one of the biggest beliefs, which is I can't afford the right talent. Right. I have to step in and do all this stuff in my business because I can't afford an A player who can do this for me. Lane, your story proves, and we see it all the time, that if somebody is bringing that right kind of operational lens to the business, they can learn, they can level up. You don't have to hire the six figure coo and we actually have a coaching program. And the reason that I built the coaching program is because we saw these amazing operational talent coming out of account manager roles, executive assistant roles, project management roles, right? There might be somebody on your team who has the raw potential to be a fantastic operator, but they don't know that and you don't know that and you don't know how to train them in that. But it is going to be way cheaper than to invest in leveling them up than in trying to hire in that expensive batteries included operator. So we do both, right? If you don't have that person on your team, you need them, then we can recruit them. But if you have that person poor and you know them, you like them, you trust them, you work well with them, then it will be absolutely cheaper for you to just invest in leveling them up. And then the really brilliant thing is that they can turn around and do all of this shit in your business. You don't actually have to and you can get back to being a CEO.

Speaker B: Uh, all of our team leads on our ops and fulfillment team were at once just an entry level hire, right? They've been raised up and gained experience and built credibility within the team as they had put time in and showed that they were a good performing team member. So yeah, uh, we invest greatly in our people. I fully agree. It's way once you find and we hire more and you're getting a little bit higher and we hire more for character and attitude than I do for skills. We can always teach the skills if we find the right person. John, do you recommend um, agencies use any type of personality profiling in their hiring practices?

Speaker A: I have found a higher success rate coming from just building, building a hiring funnel that is customized to the role you're trying to find. Another limiting belief that I hear CEOs give me a lot lane is I don't know where to hire this person from. And guys, I'm here to tell you that there's not like a magical oasis somewhere where all the A players are hanging out waiting for you to hire them, right? It's not about fishing in the right pond, it's about using the right fishing rod. The fishing rod is your hiring funnel. And if you can build a really strong hiring funnel then you could drop that into LinkedIn, you could drop that into indeed you can drop that on your social media and, and you will attract, you will get the right A player personality tests. I know people swear by them. In my personal experience, I would rather build a hiring funnel that stress tests and specifically looks for the exact personality of somebody who's going to be successful in the role, whether that be ops, account management, sales.

Speaker B: And that's really good. Give me an example. Just give me an example of you. Uh, say you're hiring funnel. Give me an example. Let's say we're trying to hire for the account manager role.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: Give me some examples of things that you would look for, vet for put in that hiring funnel. That would actually help me find the right candidate.

Speaker A: Totally. So one step that we have in our hiring funnel for every single role is a custom skill assessment. We'll build that skill assessment custom to the role we're hiring for. So an account manager skill assessment would test for the core competencies that would make for an effective account manager. Things like communication skills, things like conflict resolution skills. Right. Is your account manager escalating all of the fires? That's because you didn't hire an account manager who can handle fires. So what we do in the skill assessment is that we hypothetically simulate a client fire. You receive this angry email from this client. What do you do? You want an account manager who can handle it? Test for it in the hiring funnel. We get feedback. The skill assessment M. Lane will weed out automatically 85% of the candidates who come through your application process. We don't Even look at 85% of those candidates because again, you're dropping this fishing rod into LinkedIn. We get a thousand candidates applying for our role sometimes and we look at 20 of them. Um, right. We do that because we've created such a rigorous and robust hiring funnel, including a skill assessment that stress tests for the exact skills and competencies that we're looking for in the role. And only once somebody has made their way through the entire thing will we look at them. Let me give you another example. For highly detail oriented roles like operations, account management, we'll put a code word into the job description, just in a random sentence, and then we'll ask them for the code word in the application. Anybody who doesn't get the code word right, we automatically disqualify. Right. So you can build, you can get creative. You can build a custom hiring funnel to stress test for exactly what you're looking for and it will automatically kick 85% of candidates out. And that's what you want. You want that because it means you're not wasting your time with the 85% of the people who are actually unqualified and wasting a bunch of time and getting really confused because maybe their resume is great, but they don't actually have the skills that are Going to be required to be successful in the role for sure.

Speaker B: And shout out to my former co host, Lynn Askin. Lynn developed a, an automated hiring funnel, high level and for multiple, multiple roles. And it's phenomenal like, and you can, so you can automate a lot of this.

Speaker A: Whether ours is totally automated. Again, like our last hire, we had 1100 candidates. I looked at two of them because the rest of it was fully automated. And then my team did one interview. Right. So it can again, highly in your interest to not waste 50 hours on a hire when you could spend two hours. A hiring funnel is the difference between one of those realities or the other and, and it's going to get you the right candidates ultimately sitting in front of you. When it comes to building out a hiring funnel lane, we have one guys, reach out to me if you need it. We've taken our exact hiring funnel for the ops manager role and we have it all built out in trainings and tools and templates and it's totally plug and play.

Speaker B: Amazing, amazing, awesome. Yeah, really good share there. Just in terms of the difference between hiring funnel and filtering there versus trying to use a personality profile to filter out. Um, and there's a, probably a case to make for, especially for bigger hires, more expensive hires to use a personality profile. Excuse me, in addition to the hiring funnel and filtering there to really make sure. And uh, I also like, personally I like the disc test because it also gives you an insight into some of the nuances of the personality and it helps you as a CEO, as a manager really figure out how to communicate best with people.

Speaker A: I would, we use disc as well, but we use it as part of our team onboarding process once the person's already in. When it comes to hiring guys, I would use a personality test. I would use it to not hire someone. Like if somebody comes in with a personality test that is totally at odds with what that role is going to need, that's good enough reason to kick somebody out of the hiring funnel. But I would never use it as a reason to hire someone. I would never just send them a disc like this. One size fits all, generic personality test and they get the right score. So now you're hired. That to me makes no sense for sure.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a tool to help aid in the decision making process. Not a kind of a yes or no, ah, red light, green light type of tool.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: Awesome. Uh, if an agency owner is sitting here listening to this and going, I know I need this. I'm way overworking. I don't get my time. I just, I didn't take nearly enough time off last year. I missed some of my kids key events. I know those kind of thoughts are going off as some of you are listening and watching this, if that's happening and that they're still. Hey, I just don't know what to do. The direction here, I know I got to move north, but is it northwest, Is it northeast? What do you recommend if an agency owner finds himself in that position where a little bit feel a little stuck? I'm going to say number one, reach out to John, reach out to Jon.

Speaker A: I was going to say hop on a call with my team. I don't know. No, it's really true. First off, because we're always going to start with the discovery process and make sure that the issue that you're experiencing is actually operations and it's actually the solution for you. If you're not ready to hop on a call yet. I would direct you towards my social media where I drop free trainings every single week on operations best practices and how to incorporate some of this into your business. So other than the educational component, which is what the heck is operations? How does it help me grow? What does it look like? How should it look? How can I do it? That's all part of the again, the learning the new skills that you're going to need to learn in terms of actions. Lane, I would start with your time. The lowest lift, highest leverage thing that a CEO can do when they're just a little bit stuck is start to look at how are you spending your time. Running a super quick time audit, which means for three days, set an alarm or a reminder on your phone that goes off every 15 minutes and write down what you're doing. That's it. Right? Just gather data for three days and then look at all of the stuff that you are spending your time, um, on every day and rank it by value. So one of the ways of doing this land is that effective hourly rate, right? Like highest value tasks are what would cost the most to replace. All the way down to the lowest value tasks. And you rank it top to bottom and then look at the low value tasks, look at them, start delegating what's in there, right? What's in there. And with that list, with the lower 50% of that list, you have four options. You can streamline it. I still need to do this thing. So how do I just do it, but do it faster. You can automate it. Like, I don't have to do this thing. But neither does anybody else. Let's build an automation. Let's get it done. You can delegate it, which is, I can give this to somebody, but maybe you don't have that member of your team yet. Or you can eliminate it. Like, the real hack here is that most of us are spending again, 80, 20 rule, 80% of our time doing shit that doesn't actually move the needle, shit that doesn't actually matter, or grow your business. And so it is totally fair to just cross it off, to just not do it anymore and not give it to anybody else to waste their time on either. So streamline, automate, delegate or eliminate. These are your options. But you will immediately start moving.

Speaker B: More leverage, um, on your time, for sure. Yeah, Immediately.

Speaker A: You will immediately start getting time back. You will immediately start growing again because you are being relentless and systematic in how you are utilizing your time.

Speaker B: Uh, I want to bring all of you back to one point that Jona made, and it was around the effective hourly rate. If you're doing things that are below what you demand of yourself to make and want to make, or your spouse demands of you to make, whatever that case may be, and you're doing tasks that are below that hourly rate, uh, you're costing yourself money. This is not just, oh, I could hire somebody who could do it for cheaper, so whatever. No, you are actually, you're actually, you're departing money from your business. You're losing money. You're. There's opportunity cost there. And so you, uh, have to get that point. John made a really kind of an emphasis on that. Once you get this. I remember you saying it, Once you get this. Yeah, um, you look at everything differently. And that's how I look at everything. Once that mentor taught me that, I was like, damn, like, why am I sending faxes now? That day I just dated myself by saying, why am I sending.

Speaker A: People are listening.

Speaker B: Back in the day, we had to send faxes. Still, that was one of the, that was one of the examples. If you're sending faxes and emails, then what are you doing? Like, why. What are. You're not building a business. You're just becoming. You're your own employee. How do people get a hold of you?

Speaker A: You guys can find me on my website, spyglassops.com or if you just have any, like, comments or questions off of the conversation Today, Lou Lane. Best way to get in touch with me personally is through my social media. Shoot me a DM. I'm on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, whatever your preferred platform is. But again, I Drop as much value, add educational content there for free as I possibly can. And if a question sparks for you around, how do I take this and implement it for myself? Just shoot me a dm.

Speaker B: Awesome. I'm gonna. I have one more, one more question I think will be applicable because some of the agencies that will listen to this are agencies that don't really aspire to build an ops team. They don't want to build this big team. They really do value time, freedom, more, things like that. And so their idea of building an agency business is let me outsource many of the key areas like ops and fulfillment, but let me really handle sales and things like that. So when you have an agency who's, who's in that position, they're like, hey John, I'm, um, I'm doing 80k a month right now, but I'm, um, I've got two white label partners that are handling most of that. But I'm now still, I'm still too busy. We've got to the point we've got enough clients where I'm getting sucked into this and that. Have you encountered agency situations like, or scenarios like that?

Speaker A: Totally. And this is something to know about me, guys, before you reach out to my team or think about working with us. I don't believe that there is a quote, unquote, right way to grow your business call. I don't believe that. I think there is only the version of your business that will achieve your personal definition of success. If your personal definition of Success is an 80k per month agency that runs on 10 hours a week, we can build that. But it's going to be a totally different system and team than the 800k per month version of your business that runs on 10 hours a week. Both are possible. They're possible, but it's about what do you choose and what do you want and what are you willing to go through and to get there. So yes, we see that all the time, Lane. And one of the greatest things we're able to do for our clients is help them realize that their dreams are way closer than they thought they were. Because you don't actually need a 500k per month agency to achieve freedom. I don't care who tells you elsewise, you don't actually need to grow to be free. Some of the most free agency owners that I know have a 20k per month agency at 96% profit margins. And they're chilling and they're having a great time with their lives. Right?

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: So what is it that you want, what do you actually prioritize and value? And are you building a business that aligns with that? If so, then we can build you the systems in the team to get you out of those low value activities, maintain your profit and get you to where you want to be. But no two agencies can or should look alike because no two CEOs want exactly the same thing. So why are we all so busy building cookie cutter businesses?

Speaker B: Yeah. Amen to that. I always say gross revenue is vanity. It's really about what you keep, about what you put in your pocket and that has to align with what you really want to build. You know, I mean, and there are

Speaker A: so many creative solutions out there, including yours, Lane. Right. White label is a brilliant solution to taking a massive amount of pain and headache off of your plate. Right. So again, it's about what do I really want? What are the constraints I'm willing to put on myself to get what I want? Like how do I scale a seven figure agency with only 20 hours a week?

Speaker B: Huh?

Speaker A: Cool. That's a forcing agent you put on yourself. I promise you you're going to figure it out, but you're going to get more creative and you're going to learn different skills first. You're going to learn thought.

Speaker B: I hope though, for all of you agency owners out there that watch listen to this episode if you've made it this far, that you feel the freedom of what John is saying, because I think it really is a freeing, it is um, place of coming from in terms of, hey, I don't have to build this cookie cutter agency that everyone else is building because I've been told this is what, uh, a seven figure agency, an eight figure agency or a fulfillment team? No fulfillment team. It's really about what do you want? What is your dream? What do you want to build? I talk to agency owners and sometimes they hate sales. Like they really jam on some of the technical stuff. Okay, if that's what you like and that's what you want to build and you want to be that technical person in your business, then great then. But if you don't fill the other roles, you're not going to go very far. So you just got to fill the other roles, the sales maybe you got to fill the CEO role maybe in your business and hire that, you know, or find that future CEO. But again, I'll leave everyone with this principle of, uh, building a digital marketing agency is an incredibly liberating experience. If you do it right and you build it, it can also be incredibly frustrating. Experience that actually works in almost a slavery type of component in your life because you can be a slave of your business. I know that. I've talked to agency owners who are just working themselves with a bone. They're not making enough money, they're not taking enough time off and it's really frustrating. And so if you find yourself in some element of that, I would really encourage you to reach out to Janna and her team and, and go through a discovery call with her because I think I know, I don't think I know that there is a solution if you're feeling that way. It's just sometimes it's outside of our skill set and sometimes we just need an objective person to come in and look at our business because we get so the blinders get on because we're so into the day to day and we just can miss some of the bigger lessons that are out there. For someone who can come in objectively and look at and go, oh, this is definitely an area. You're like, wow, how did I miss that?

Speaker A: And so much of it is the. I don't know what I don't know. Right. Almost everybody in your audience probably this is the first time that they've run a business as big as the business that they're currently running and they have no idea, because they've never done it, what it's going to take to 2x that business, to 3x that business. They have no idea what's coming down the track and how could they. And so a huge part of this is also being willing to invest in. This is why people use coaches, consultants in the people who have been there, have done that and can tell you, here's what's coming for you. My disclaimer with that is make sure that they aren't giving you the cookie cutter quote unquote, right way to scale your business because then you're just going to end up with their business, not yours, not the business that's actually going to make you happy for sure.

Speaker B: Awesome, awesome stuff. Really appreciate you taking the time out of your day.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: Uh, to share with our audience here and really can't wait for us to get this episode produced and get it out for everybody. So thanks again, John. I really appreciate it everyone. I saw also in the, in the ticker down there, spyglassops.com that's how you can reach out to John or on social. We have a wealth of episodes and educational information on the Marketing center of Excellence on our website, on our podcast. So be sure to check out our full library of episodes that we have from the past. And, uh, we'll. We'll get this episode out asap. Jon, thanks again. Really appreciate it.