The Creative Agency Success Show: Episode 147
If you’re invisible online, you’re losing clients before they even know you exist. In today’s competitive market, your digital presence is your storefront.
In this episode, Agency Consultant & Executive Coach Karl Sakas of Sakas & Company explains why being invisible online is costing you clients and what you can do to fix it. He shares practical strategies on leadership, delegation, and long-term planning that help you attract more clients and strengthen your agency.
Tune into the episode of ▶️ Improve as an Agency Leader and ‘Calm the Chaos’ with Karl Sakas.
Jamie Nau: [00:00:00] All right, recording has started. So we will start in three, two, one. Hello, everybody. Welcome to today’s episode. Very excited to have our friend, Carl Sakes, back. Sometimes at the end of our podcast, we say we’d love to have you back, and sometimes we mean it, and sometimes, we don’t. This was one where we definitely really mean it. Carl’s a good friend, a good friends of us here at Summit and Anders, and so we wanna make sure that we had Carl back to talk about his new books. So welcome back to the show, Carl. [00:00:27][27.1]
Karl Sakas: [00:00:28] Great to be here. Glad to be back. Looking forward to helping people. [00:00:31][2.3]
Jody Grunden: [00:00:32] Yeah, Jamie, when I say that we appreciate people coming on, it always means we appreciate, not just Carl, but everybody we appreciate coming on. Just want to throw that out there real quick. But to add to that, I don’t know if everybody knows, but Carl actually was at one of our team retreats and spoke with a bunch of our CFOs and kind of went over a lot of good stuff with them. And so Carl not only writes books, does podcasts, but also does engagements such as that. Does a lot of consulting. [00:01:01][29.4]
Jamie Nau: [00:01:03] Yeah, we actually were lucky enough to record that event. And so that event is something that all of our new CFOs and new team members watch when they start here at Anders. And so it’s very helpful for us to have that information. And again, all of the. A lot of our CFOs do listen to our shows or tell us they listen to our shows. They’ll be very familiar with you. So let’s jump right in. So you recently opened or released a new book, Calm with the chaos or Calm the Chaos. Yeah. And so why don’t you just give us a little bit of intro? I mean, we worked with agencies long enough. And I think the last two years, especially there’s just been so much chaos in the agency world. And So I think that the title of your book and the topic of your books is very relevant to what’s going on. So you want to just kind of intro the book for us a little bit here. [00:01:46][42.7]
Karl Sakas: [00:01:47] Absolutely. So my previous book was Work Less, Earn More, How to Escape the Daily Mind of Agency Ownership, which is one of the focuses we talked on at the team retreat in supporting the virtual CFOs. One of the keys, if you want to work less and earn more, is to improve as a leader and manager. I talk a bit about that in Work Less Earn More and my prior book Made to Lead, but I wanted to dig deeper. Because most agency owners didn’t get into the industry to become a boss. The reality is if you own an independent agency, you are a manager and a leader. And, you know, there are things you can do, whether you were born to lead, or you’ve grown as a leader, the things you can do to get better results from your team. And that’s what Comm to Chaos is all about improving as a leader and a manager so that all of the weight of running the business isn’t solely on your shoulders. [00:02:41][54.7]
Jody Grunden: [00:02:44] Yeah. And I think you talk about what 10 different, uh, 10 different leadership moves. And then I know you do. I don’t think you do, I know. You do. And just kind of, you know, detoxing your calendar, defining your role, delegating more effectively, training your team to think like owners, you’ll stop the revolving door, which, uh that’s goes, I think with not only with clients, but more, more so with employees, uh super important creating a gage business plan, measure the right things, set boundaries, the clients, solve problems at the root and then lead like a human, uh love all the titles. Jane, what’s your favorite one there? [00:03:15][30.3]
Jamie Nau: [00:03:16] Oh, I love delegation, you know that. I think that the delegation is something that we’ve been preaching since day one here at Anders. And so I think, that one really, really spoke to me because I think especially as a business owner, you need to make sure that you’re not. Doing everything and at certain times in your career and certain times your ownership point you you jump in and okay Why am I still doing all this? Why am i still doing this part of it? I need to delegate that’s that that’s personally my favorite I think it’s been one of the secret star success, but I’m car. I’d love to hear you kind of talk I know you can’t choose a favorite, but you know, which which one would you like to start with here? [00:03:51][35.0]
Karl Sakas: [00:03:52] Well, you know, you’re talking about a tip number six out of the 10, delegate not recklessly. Um, you know, one of my favorites is, you know, the hard to pick out of the 10 would be number two, which is accept that you are no longer the sole doer or answer person at your agency. You know, in the early days, agency owners are doing everything. They’re doing the client work, they’re doing behind the scenes work, we’re doing sales, you doing everything else. And that’s totally normal. But if you grow, it’s hard to keep that up. I’d spoken at the Soda Academy, the society of agencies almost a decade ago, and was talking about leadership and management. And one of the attendees said, you know, if you have to be the answer person, you’re never gonna grow your agency beyond 10 people. Now, in my consulting, I’ve worked with agencies anywhere from people just getting started to 100 plus team members. There are definitely changes as you go. There are different shifts, but if you’re trying to get to 25 or 50 or 100 people, or if you focus more on revenue growth, you’re not gonna grow if you were insisting on being the doer for everything and or the answer person for everything. [00:05:05][72.9]
Jody Grunden: [00:05:08] Yeah, 100% agree. And I think that was one of the things that when we started 20-some years ago, creating what we created, that was the one thing I wanted to make sure happen out of the gate. I didn’t want to create an agency of one or accounting for a one. I wanted a create accounting for it a lot. And I started right from the very beginning with just the naming convention. We called ourselves Summit CPA Group, which is me. You know, and with the idea that, you know, hey, it wasn’t gonna be Jody Grundin, CPA. Then when I brought Adam on, you’re really shortly after it wasn’t Grundin and Hale or Hale and Grundin. It was some of the CPA group too. With that, we could have hung our hats and just say, you know hey, I’m gonna be the doer and NAMM’s gonna be a doer and we’re gonna make a good living and we’ll get a book of business of $300,000 each and you know maybe have a receptionist or maybe someone helping out and you make it, you really create a nice little job for ourselves. And that wasn’t my game plan or my thinking from the very beginning was like, hey, how can we leverage people? And in order to leverage people, you’ve got to be able to learn how to delegate. And I think the big thing with delegation, and correct me if you think I’m wrong here, Karl, but a lot of people are afraid to delegate for a lot different reasons. One, that they think that, hey, I can do it quicker, faster than anybody else can do. So why would I give it to somebody else? You know, that’s one thing. And then the other thing is that what if they get it wrong? You know, what happens and you talk about this in one of your other chapters there, but it’s like, you know, it’s why I’m getting it wrong. I must go backwards. They’re getting it, wrong. It’s okay to fail. You know people fail all the time. Let them fail, let them figure it out. And that’s how they’re going to succeed. If you’re protecting them the entire time, you know that’s, you’re not going to develop what you want, no different than kids. You got to let your kids fail. You can’t protect them all the times, right? And then the other thing is that, you you’re delegating. Of course you can do it quicker, faster, stronger than anybody else. But the idea is that you wanna push it onto them so that you don’t ever have to do it again. If you can spend an hour or two hours teaching somebody how to do a task that’s repetitive, then you never have to it again, you just have to learn how to check it, put some controls in there. You don’t abdicate it, you delegate it. And I’d like to get your opinion on that and your thoughts on that as well. Because I think delegation. Is really the cornerstone of how we were able to grow and become what we’d become. [00:07:37][149.1]
Karl Sakas: [00:07:38] You’ve captured a lot of key things there. For instance, delegation, not abdication. Abdication would be telling your team, figure it out, don’t ask me any questions, don’t tell me till it’s done and it better be perfect, right? But that’s not delegation, that’s abdication. One of the challenges that a lot of agency owners run into in my work is they’re like, well, my team doesn’t know how to do it. Or as you mentioned, you could do it factor. True, you can always do it faster than your team the first time, but what if it’s something you’re doing every month, every week, what have you, eventually they’ll get up to speed. And importantly, regardless of how long they take, you can focus on higher value things rather than doing that particular thing. You know, when someone’s saying like, oh, I don’t know about delegating it to my team, I think of a Venn diagram that I call desire, competence, and capacity. And you need all three of them to overlap is if something’s not getting done. If they don’t have the desire to do it, they’re going to avoid it. If they didn’t have competence to do, they’re gonna do it poorly. And if they don’t have the capacity, the time to do it, it’s probably never gonna get done. And if you’re missing any one of those or two or three, it’ a problem. So one of my questions when someone’s like, oh, I can’t delegate. I’m like, do you have someone who could do it? Do they have desire, competence, capacity? If they, then they’ll have to sort that out. But if they do, that’s a you problem, not a team problem. [00:09:04][85.6]
Jody Grunden: [00:09:07] Jamie, let’s hear your take on this, because that’s really what your job is, teaching the team how to delegate, right? I mean, that is your job. [00:09:12][5.4]
Jamie Nau: [00:09:13] Yeah, no, I think that everything that that Carl said there is 100% true is like, and that’s what makes teaching delegation so hard is, is, you know, you really run into kind of the, you run into the two people when it comes to delegation, the ones that give everything up and never review it and never look at it. And then when something’s wrong, don’t take the blame for it. Like, Oh, I delegated that. What’s, what’s, it’s fine. It’s gone. And there’s the, then there’s a people that are like, Oh no, Jody can never do that. Only I can do that and they hold on to too much. You kind of have those, those two camps of people. And so that’s, in my role and in our operations, that’s been the biggest challenge is getting both of those groups to kind of move to the middle where like, yeah, you have to be able to pass something on, hand something on to someone, but still take ownership for it and understand exactly what’s going on there. So that’s really the challenge of delegation to me. [00:09:59][46.4]
Karl Sakas: [00:10:01] One of the solutions is to define what I would call the values, goals, and resources of VGR. You want your team to make more decisions without you, they need to understand what are the values to follow, what are the goals you’re trying to achieve, and what are the resources available? Time, money, people, software, so on. And BGR, Values, Goals, and Resources, could be agency-wide. They could be for their particular role. They could for a particular client. They could even be at the client project or engagement or retainer or campaign level. If people know what those are, they can make better decisions without having to go to you every time. 100%. [00:10:36][35.4]
Jody Grunden: [00:10:38] Which leads kind of in that, in what your number seven or your follow-up point there is, you know, letting them fail, you know, and as part of delegating, you’ve got to accept the fact that there’s a high likelihood they’re going to fail, especially on the first time you give it to them. You know, how many times you give it to him before you realize maybe this isn’t them, maybe it’s too high for them, maybe I’m not teaching them well enough, maybe they’re just the wrong person. [00:11:04][26.9]
Karl Sakas: [00:11:06] I’ll discover that or uncover that with clients where I start my agency growth diagnostic. This is an initial 8 to 10 week project, looking at where they’ve been, where they are, where they want to go at a range of areas around strategy, clients, team, time, and so on. And sometimes there’ll be team members who just aren’t getting the job done. And I’ll note, for instance, that they’ll mention someone struggling and I’m like, They’ve been there for a year. That’s enough time to figure things out. I had a client years ago where she said her salesperson wasn’t hitting his quota and he’d been there for 18 months. And I said, Oh, like how long has he been missing his quota the whole time? [00:11:48][42.2]
Speaker 4: [00:11:50] Never, never, never. [00:11:51][1.2]
Karl Sakas: [00:11:52] Originally, she had built some incentive problems where he was getting a base and then a draw against future commission. It’s normal to have a draw, right? Because they need to get started and all, but she never reduced the draw. So he basically had higher guaranteed money and he didn’t have an incentive to go out and actually earn the commission. So that can be a challenge. I don’t know, what have you seen across your clients? [00:12:18][25.8]
Jody Grunden: [00:12:20] Gene, what’s your thought on that, across clients or across? [00:12:23][2.7]
Karl Sakas: [00:12:23] Or just in general. Yeah, I mean, it’s a perennial topic. [00:12:27][3.5]
Jody Grunden: [00:12:27] Yeah, because we are really quick to fire people. And what I mean by that is, you can tell pretty quickly if the person’s cut out for what we’re doing. Remotely, we work with digital agencies. We work with other service-based companies. Do they understand it? Are they willing? Are they curious? Do they have the mental capacity to work with multiple companies versus just simply one? You know, so I think a lot of times you can kind of figure that out pretty quickly, Jamie, I mean, would you [00:12:59][31.3]
Karl Sakas: [00:12:59] You can if you’re looking, yes. [00:13:01][1.6]
Jamie Nau: [00:13:03] It’s about your onboarding process and not just your onboard process but what your post onboarding process is. Because a lot of people can do great for 90 days, you know, a lot people can do great with one or two clients and really do a really good job with that. But it’s what happens when they get a full book or what happens when they hit certain milestones. And so we have a process in place where we do full evaluations of their books at certain milestones, okay, so they just hit 500,000. Let’s look at this. Are they doing this for the clients? How do the CFIs feel about them? Because yeah, it goes a little bit beyond that onboarding stage. But I think the funny thing when it comes to the agency world is the number of times I’ve had this conversation with the client, it usually comes around a time when they need to do cuts, right? Like, OK, the business isn’t doing as well as they think. Let’s, let’s, Let’s evaluate the team. That’s the time when I actually discover that, Oh, we have three or four team members that are pretty easy to cut because they’re not performing well. And it’s like, why did it take a financial crisis for us to get rid of three or four team numbers that weren’t doing what they were paid to you, right? Like that happens so often in our, in when I have those conversations. So I think it goes exactly what to what you’re talking about here is like, you need to, you needed to build a team that you wish you’d had, right. And I know you talk about that in your book. And so I think just talking about that, I think that A, there’s kind of two points that I’m thinking about when I read that is, is one is like, it’s really easy to think about it conceptually. Like if I was gonna exit Anders and build my own company, like really, it’s a really good time for me to think about, okay, what would I want my team to look like? But that’s the easy time to do it. How do you do it when you’re in deep, right? I’m already running a 30 person agency and I wish I had different things. How do make those changes at that point in which I think a lot of our agencies are at? No. [00:14:39][96.6]
Jody Grunden: [00:14:39] Oh and add to it and I’m working like 80 hours a week and not getting anything done [00:14:43][3.9]
Karl Sakas: [00:14:44] Right. Right. Not a great combination. And so there is light at the end of the tunnel, but it does require making some changes in how people work. You can’t keep doing what got you to 10 people to get you to 25, and that won’t get you 50, and it won’t you to 100. Some of it’s bringing in outside support and advice, so you’re not having to make it all up from scratch, but it does require some changes. It won’t magically happen. [00:15:10][26.3]
Jamie Nau: [00:15:13] Well, I think the interesting part is I think a lot of if you looked at 10 of our clients and walk through a 10 of our agencies, I think agency owners are very creative with how they want their leadership team and how they want their team to look. And so I think oftentimes, it’s, it’ allowing them to use that creativity and try it out. Like you said, it’s okay to fail. It’s okay to say, you know what, I think I need a person that only does this one thing, and they hire him and it’s like, well, you know, that’s, this is not enough for that one. Make a change for it. Yeah. What steps would you recommend if I’m a leader in an agency right now and I’m like, huh, yeah we’re doing well, we’re at 30 people, we’re doin’ really good, but this isn’t how I want my business to run, this isn’t how I think my agency should look. How would you go from point A, where you’re doing okay, but it’s not how you want it to look, to point B, where you like, this is what I want to my agency to look like. What steps did you take to move it from those stages? [00:16:01][48.8]
Karl Sakas: [00:16:02] I would start by identifying what is your ideal agency, because that is going to be unique for each agency owner, and usually that involves, if I’m working with clients on this doing a future vision, I have my advanced retrospective tool where you write about a future day as if it’s already happened, usually, for instance, looking something like five years in the future. I mean, you could look further out, you can look more closely, but five years is good timeline. Because it’s distant enough that you have time to figure out how to get there, but it’s also not so far away that it’s like, oh, we’ll have flying cars at that point. So the idea is to say today is December 31st, and then it’s whatever year, five years from now, it’s a great day because, and you just go from there. And you’re probably gonna identify things about your day that maybe you didn’t realize now, like who are the people you’re working with? What are you making decisions about? How are you spending your time? What are the things that you’re not doing five years from now that you are currently? Um, when people go through that exercise, uh, they discover new things. I had a agency owner say, I realized that I want to sell the business. You know, I’ve been doing this for 20 years. It’s time to move on. I’m like, great. So now we can work on scaling up, making you optional, getting the finances in place so that you can have a great exit and move on It’s important to recognize that sooner rather than later, rather than finding out that you’re desperate to get out of the business, but it’s too late to do something. I noticed that here in North Carolina recently, the local business journal wrote about a recruiting firm that had been in business for a couple decades, husband and wife owning the business. And they just shut it down. They laid everything off or told them to find new jobs. It was a profitable business. They had been getting various awards. They’d had a record year recently. But the founding couple just was tired of doing it. And one, the CEO, he was saying in an interview that he had hoped to pass the business to his kids. They didn’t want to run the business. And he said, you know, as I looked at selling, everyone said I would have to stay for two or three years. I’m like, well, that’s how it works. Like they, usually they expect you to stay for multiple years. It’s unusual to leave sooner and and so I was thinking like what if he had started that process Five years earlier rather than just go to the kids. My estimate is he walked away from at least three million dollars maybe more [00:18:36][153.7]
Jody Grunden: [00:18:38] Yeah, we always tell clients prepare to sell from day one. You know, that you wanna build your business to sell. Whether you sell or not, that’s completely irrelevant, but you wanna to build it in a way that it’s a marketable business. Cause you never know, life happens, right? COVID hits, you know, you might, your wife or spouse might pass away. You know some things might happen in your life outside of the business world itself that may want you to move there. And if you’re not ready to there, you, you know it’s hard to take six months and. Magically change your business, your processes, your profitability, you know, everything overnight. It just doesn’t work that way. So I mean, building it from the very beginning to sell, I think is really the key to doing it. You know, and it’s never too late, right? You know like you had mentioned, you now, they may not have been interested in selling five years ago and it took them five years to get to the point where they wanted to but building it along the way, like you said, it cost them $3 million plus. Yeah. For not doing that. That’s a big ouch. [00:19:35][57.7]
Karl Sakas: [00:19:37] You know, in my work with clients, I’ll ask one of the first questions is, do you lean toward what I would say an equity oriented agency or a lifestyle oriented agency, pre COVID it was about 50, 50, you know, between lifestyle versus equity. Now it’s about two thirds to three quarters exit oriented. And the numbers have gone up, you know, pre-COVID people were like, sell for three to $5 million. Now it was five to 10 million. I have a client who just received an offer for over 30 million and they’re getting that even higher. I have another client whose goal is to sell for $120 million. The goal had been $100 million, now it’s up to $120. Now, that’s a bit further away, that that’s not immediate, but it helps to know where you want to go so you can work backwards. So, planning ahead is important, as one of my clients observed, when I was like, let’s start the annual planning process sooner and sooner, like not in December, you know, like you probably should start some of your annual planning in September of the year. But his observation was like, planning takes planning. [00:20:42][65.8]
Jamie Nau: [00:20:45] It’s definitely true. I think the the best part about this all is I think you need someone to hold you accountable to having these conversations Because it is it or have some systems in place to have these conversations, right? Because it’s very easy to get on the carousel and be like, oh, it’s November again. Okay, we didn’t do it this year let’s just and then you get in that carousal and it’s you get to that parent where it’s been three years since you’ve had a conversation of even just asking, someone asking you, what are your long-term goals? What are your short-term goals? Where do you see business in 5 years? And that’s that, you know, that’s something that we do with our forecasting process, is our forecasting process is more than just building numbers. It’s us re-asking some of those questions of, Where do we see yourself in 5-years? Where you see yourself in 3 years? What do we want next year to look like? What is your team going to look like? And it’s all those questions that come into that forecasting process that holds teams accountable to have those conversations once a year, because it’s crazy how many things change in 12 months. And going back to that recruiting company you talked about. I bet that they were doing that conversation every year, maybe three years ago, that have been like, oh, you know, we talked to our kids and one’s majoring in medical school and one is in this, so that’s not gonna happen. So we’ve probably gotta think about what our exit strategy is and they may have not lost out on $3 million that way. [00:21:50][65.4]
Karl Sakas: [00:21:52] Exactly. And you know, my sense is they, they had taken enough money out of the business over time that they were going to be okay. But you know it’s risky to depend on a big exit and you know if it needs to happen at the exact time rather than being more flexible, you’re not going to get as good of a deal. But, you know when I’m working with clients, as I mentioned, I talk about your exit or lifestyle oriented. If they’re focusing on an said. I’ll often recommend they get a valuation to know where they stand now and things like that so that they’re not surprised, right? A client mentioned, for instance, they wanna sell for $8 million, their current valuation. I said, do you know what your valuation is now? They’re like, well, no. I mean, it definitely wasn’t eight. You know, I did the rough numbers and it was probably one and a half to $2 million in valuation. So like- Oh, geez. Well, not that for how long they’ve been in business, but, you know, there are ways to go. And so although they aren’t going to figure out all of that in the next couple of months, I laid out some targets and other things they can work toward to toward getting there more smoothly. And then of course, if they do executive coaching, I’ll be reminding them about it’ll get done and perfect each year and all that. [00:23:10][78.5]
Jody Grunden: [00:23:11] Well, the executive coaching part, that is so important. I mean, I don’t know how an agency can actually, or really any company can actually operate effectively without having an executive coach just to bounce ideas off, be part of the leadership meetings, that sort of thing. Because it really does keep you accountable. Even with our VCFOs, we’re there with the client every single week. It’s the cadence that’s the most important part about it. It’s not somebody there, it’s meeting with them on a regular basis where you’re actually… Going through the same stuff, figuring things out, talking to them, being part of the process. Because like you had said, that $2 million, and first of all, everybody thinks their company’s worth more than what it is. I mean, I would say 90% of people do. So the eight million, the two million, that doesn’t surprise me. I just had a client that thought he could get $100 million, and they’re coming back at 30 million. He’s like so disappointed. Well, really, that’s what it was. He didn’t believe him, so he went to another person and they said the same thing. So it’s like, okay, well, now that that kind of that was the valuation they should have had a few years back and then his expectations have been more tempered. But, you know, kind of getting back to it, the, you know, it’s that reoccurring meeting, you know, setting that goal out there, that $8 million goal is definitely attainable for that client. I mean, that’s not, if that’s what he wants for his business, you know what, let’s figure out how to get there. And that’s where your, your coaching is going to do. You’re going to meet with them on a regular basis. You’re gonna figure out what he’s doing right. What he’s wrong. You know, eventually he might not want the sacrifice it’s gonna take to get to eight million. He may say, you know what, Carl, I’m willing to go five million because I don’t wanna go through the steps that gets to eight millions. Perfectly cool. But at least he knows, or she knows, and it can drive towards that goal. I think it’s unbelievably important. [00:24:54][103.4]
Karl Sakas: [00:24:55] It helps have options. I’ve worked with my own coach for 11 years. So like she has 11 years of history of everything shared. And I mean, that’s part of the value of working with someone on an ongoing basis, because you’re like, oh, such and such was happening with so-and-so. They don’t have to be like, who’s so-so, right? They know the people you’re talking about and the backstory and all. And they can also notice patterns. Like I’ll see if clients are avoiding certain types of things. I’ll call it out. No, maybe not the instant I notice it. But if they seem to be avoiding something for a couple of the monthly meetings, we can talk about it. I mean, that’s one of the nice things about coaching is that you can have those kind of meta conversations about how it’s going. And you know, another another benefit is I know what their business and personal goals are. So I’m able to tie things back to that. [00:25:51][56.1]
Jody Grunden: [00:25:52] Yeah. And I think the candid conversation is the big part, right? I mean, when you have that coach, you know, they’re not technically your employee. They’re not meeting with you on a daily basis and they don’t know. You’re not going golf with you every day. They don’t, you they’re not doing all that stuff and so kind of be a little bit more distant. You know, we had a CFO, Adam, my my business partner. He was you know Adam pretty well, but he he he was talking. He had a conversation just this week where the CFO wasn’t didn’t feel comfortable saying no. You know, I’d like to take another $5,000 out. I’m going to do this, this, and this with it. The forecast didn’t justify that. So instead of going through and saying, you know Hey, here’s your forecast. You know, here is what’s going to happen. If you take this out, here are the levers that you can pull to do that. You’re willing to do it. And she just said, it’s okay, I’ll do it or you know that type of thing. [00:26:42][50.2]
Karl Sakas: [00:26:42] Okay. [00:26:42][0.0]
Jody Grunden: [00:26:43] And then that becomes a problem. That becomes a significant problem. And so the coaching up that Adam will have to do with that CFO is just making sure that, hey, let’s be candid with them. Give them options. If they want to do that, they’re the business owner. They can do whatever they want. It’s their business. But let’s let’s, let let’s speak candid and show them the outcome. Here’s what the outcome is going to look like if you go this direction. Here’s here’s what it will look like you go that direction. And you know what, let them make that choice based on informed information. And [00:27:13][30.0]
Karl Sakas: [00:27:34] Exactly. Like it’s a gradient and you know, I talked about that concept in the common chaos book as intelligent disobedience. This comes from purpose dog training. Basically where, you know you want to do something and your team’s like, wait a minute. You said you wanted to accomplish this, this or this. This thing you’re thinking of doing or that you’re asking us to do is contrary to that goal. Are you sure? I mean, I do that with my team all the time. We’re all sure something I’m considering. They’ll concerns. Because of course, keep in mind if you asked your team to share potential concerns, if you don’t listen to them, they’re gonna stop sharing concerns. So if the team, you know, maybe shares concerns, but I’m not going to follow those, I’ll explain why, right? Because there may be some other factor involved or things like that. [00:28:21][47.7]
Jamie Nau: [00:28:23] We use a lot is, is yes, but right? Like, so when Adam’s talking to the CFOs, it’s like, yeah, we don’t really want to say no to our clients, but you have to make sure you’re giving a yes, But so like if the client wants to spend 5 million on a new building, yeah, you can do that. But it means you’re not going to be able to do all these other things that are in the forecast, right? Or, um, yeah. You can spend 5 billion on a building, but it means you’re probably putting you’re pushing your sale back three years, you know, so we can always like give them a yes and follow it with a but what it actually means for your company and your bottom line and your your goals. And that’s why it’s really important to have those goals in the back of our mind and really understand that. And so one quick thing I want to do here is I want a real quick shift because I think our listeners would be mad if we didn’t talk about the meeting audit that you recommend in your book. So can you talk about that? I think this is a, this is a huge thing. And I think a lot of people complained about too many meetings. And, I think, this meeting audit is a really good idea. Can you just talk a couple minutes about that. And I’m sure Joey and I have some follow-up questions, but let’s chat. [00:29:19][55.3]
Karl Sakas: [00:29:20] So if you’re an agency owner or executive, you likely have a lot of meetings. And I sometimes have clients say something like, I could get my job done if I weren’t in so many meetings. The reality is this. If you are a business leader, part of your job is having meetings. The meetings aren’t going to go away entirely. But if you are the boss, you get to make your meetings better. You get to define which meetings you attend. Which meetings you lead versus those that you’re just showing up for, which meetings that you get an update afterwards rather than having to go there live and things like that. So it starts by doing a meeting audit, which is to take a look at your calendar. You could look historically, say over the past few weeks, or you could look ahead to the coming week, two, three weeks, and look at where you’re spending your time. And as you look at those meetings, you could think, do I need to be there? You might have some meetings that have just been going out of momentum. You don’t have to attend them anymore. You might’ve some meetings where you’ve been the person leading it. Maybe you can create some professional growth opportunities for your team by having someone else lead the meeting. So you could just show up and share input and things like that. Some meetings could happen asynchronously where people share updates through a dashboard or something else. And then maybe the meeting is just about questions or clarifying things, something like that. There may be some meetings where you don’t have to join as often. Maybe you sit in on a department meeting once a month rather than sitting in every week, things like that, there’s also a question on timing. For instance, if you have some sort of an all-hands meeting Monday at 8 a.m., that’s probably not the most popular meeting. You also probably don’t wanna have it every Friday at 5 p.m. Or something like that. But would shifting it a day in either direction or maybe to later or earlier in the day or something that, would that make it a better experience for everyone? For instance, maybe you have a weekly meeting on Thursday mornings where you’ve reviewed how things have been going. You identify what should get done by the end of the week and what’s coming up. That way people have a day to get it sorted out. Rather than having to push quite as hard. You need to find what’s right for you and your agency and your client base and things like that. But you don’t have to keep the meeting schedule you’ve been doing right now. When you’re the boss, you get to define what your meeting commitments are and it starts by doing that meeting audit. [00:32:03][163.1]
Jody Grunden: [00:32:05] I think that meeting on it’s really, yeah, I think it’s real important. I mean, the one thing that you mentioned is time zones and that sort of thing. I, you know, we’ve got the same issue with ours. You know, we’ve gotten an employee in Hawaii, you’ve got them on the East Coast, West Coast, North, South, you now, all over the place. We’ve got some folks that are out of the country. You know? How do you include those? How do include those because they’re in completely different time zones. Jamie, what’s your, you’re a big spearhead on that with us, because we used to have our meetings. All based on Eastern time, you know, that’s because that’s where the majority of our clients were, majority of employees were at the time. And then as we got bigger and bigger to now we got over 200 plus clients. And I don’t know how many employees 70, 60, 70, something, a lot of employees. You know, you were a big spearhead of changing that making it more, I guess, friendly for everyone. Can you tell me a little about that? Or what was your damage. [00:32:57][51.7]
Jamie Nau: [00:32:56] Motivation. I’m gonna turn this question around on you, Jody. So we used to have our, we used to have a leadership meeting, which was, you know, 10 people, all leaders, which I am one of, and we used have it at seven o’clock mountain time, which I’m in mountain time. So seven a.m. Mountain time on Monday morning. And so I, you know, I’m a good soldier and I participated and I would be there, but I don’t think I was my best self in that meeting because obviously I just came off a Sunday night long dinner with the family coming in. The first thing I do on Monday morning is have to jump into that meeting. And I don’t think I as the best participant. So I voiced that for a couple of years and then I think we’ve shifted it now to being end of day Monday. And so, I gonna turn this question on you, Jody. Do you feel like I’m? A better participant in that meeting since we’ve made that time shift than I was when it was at 7 a.m. [00:33:42][45.2]
Jody Grunden: [00:33:43] I honestly, no, I don’t think you’re any different. I think you were professional enough or you gave it 100%. I didn’t notice any difference. I still don’t notice a difference. I mean, the Jamie at seven in the morning, you may have felt tired, you may not have felt, but you are super professional. And I think some folks can do that, others can’t. So if I were to give that to other people on the team, yeah, they’d probably show up half the time, look disheveled. You know, maybe with all the excuses in the world why their alarm clock didn’t go off, you know all that kind of stuff that never once happened with you. So, professionalism, you know that, and the uniqueness that you have in your abilities, no difference at all. Now if Carl was there, Carl would be the problem kid for sure. [00:34:26][43.0]
Jamie Nau: [00:34:28] I will say like I feel different like I think that yeah, I was always professional. I never missed it. I was there but like, I feel like I bring more to the meeting now that it’s in the afternoon like I’ve always paid attention but I’m just I have more energy and I feel like energy is one of my strengths is bringing energy to stuff and I always hated that 7a meeting because I was like I’d be talking, I’d do my report, but it was more like just kind of monotone where now I’m like, do my report, and I’m all excited and animated about it. So I do feel, I do feel a little different about it, so I think that, yeah, it’s important to us as a, as a distributed firm to make sure we’re, we’re thinking through all that. And so I do think that yeah, it’s really important to do that meeting audit, especially as a leader. You know, what meetings do you need to be in? And that’s something that I’ve, as I’ve grown more in my leadership role, I’ve looked at and be like, OK, that’s probably a meeting I don’t need to be in, but this meeting I do need to be in or this meeting is something I just need to have. A five minute meeting on afterwards to summarize what’s going on. So I’ve done a lot of that within my schedule over the over the past couple of years here. And it’s very helpful for me because I there’s so many of those days where you’re like, oh, it’s five o’clock. Now it’s time for me to actually get my work done because I’ve been in meetings all day. [00:35:32][64.4]
Jody Grunden: [00:35:33] I think it’s also important, I think record them, record them and have them transcribe. You know, with AI nowadays, I mean, it should be a no brainer for Urban was called to be recording all their meetings. And to give you a perfect example, Adam was in St. Louis the last couple of days, wasn’t able to make her Monday meeting. And you know what? He listened to it on the drive home. And with that, didn’t miss a beat. You know? He picked up on everything, asked questions, you know, he doesn’t have to then rehash that or what did they talk about, you know? That sort of thing. Then I can make funny jokes about him during the meeting and just to see if he’s actually listening. [00:36:05][31.4]
Speaker 4: [00:36:06] To bring them up. [00:36:07][0.7]
Jody Grunden: [00:36:08] But no, I think recording them, I think in transcribing them, it’s a tool that everybody on this call should be using. [00:36:17][8.6]
Karl Sakas: [00:36:18] For sure. I tried a couple of tools, did Fireflies. I use Fathom now, which is great. I love that I can send a recap instantly. I’ll double check to make sure it’s captured. It’s fairly good at capturing actionables down to the person. You’re getting 90% of benefit in almost no time, which is, which is great. [00:36:44][26.5]
Jamie Nau: [00:36:46] Awesome, so we have reached the point of our show where we can have a fun question. So I’m here with two very intelligent people, so I have to ask this question because it’s one of my favorite questions. And something that I feel like most people are doing nowadays is just doing deep dives, right? Like with the YouTube culture and with the chat GPT and with just TV and stuff like that, I think people are like, this is something I really wanna learn more about and we have more access at our fingertips than we ever have. So I am kind of curious for both of you guys, what’s the last topic that you’ve done a deep dive on? So Jodi, I’m gonna start with you. So is there a topic that you’ve been curious about lately and really deep diving into? [00:37:21][35.2]
Jody Grunden: [00:37:22] A deep dive, and it’s kind of funny that you talk about this because it has really nothing to do with virtual CFO or really nothing to do that sort of thing. But I’ve been getting really heavy into rental properties with my wife. So the deep dive there is, first of all, what do I want to do when I’m no longer working at Anders and no longer doing accounting stuff and finance stuff and that sort thing. You know, is that going to be a year? Is that going be 10 years? I don’t know. You know whatever happens, happens, right? But what’s my second career? And I really had a lot of fun working with my wife and doing a deep dive into those rental properties. I mean, how much to buy them for, what the key metrics are, you know, how to fund them, how to find them without having a lot cash out of pocket. You know what are the right and wrong things to do? You know the first one we bought, it was like, you now, hey, this is great. And then we had to put $100,000 as a frickin’. There’s some stuff in it anymore. You know, it’s really great. And it’s like, oh my gosh, you know, another one we bought, you know, we found out that went through the licensing, went through all the different tests and stuff like that beforehand where we’re in it, we’re in it for three, four months. It’s running out really great and then we find out it’s had termites for the last five years and has to be rebuilt. It’s like so a couple of things, you know, just those things that, you know, a seasoned veteran would have probably came in and they’d have figured that out. No, no, no doubt about it. Yeah. And it’s just that the learning experience is to me is a lot of fun. You know, I, you know, that’s to me, that looks like a negative, but to me it’s really positive. So what we’re going to do is we’re gonna tear it down and we’re going to put a really nice one in the same, in the same lot and it’s going to make even more money, you know, where we may not have done that before. You know the first one, you know, we may get it to a point where we flip it instead of running it out because now it’s worth a lot more money because all the modeling put into it, you know, so there’s a lot of positives we can learn from that. But I think just digging into. How short-term rentals work, how long-term rentals, work, you know, getting different areas of the country. We’ve got some rentals in Vegas, we’ve got some rentals. In Indiana, we’re looking in Florida, you know, looking in Tennessee, so some of the different areas there. And it’s just, it’s a lot of fun doing that deep dive and really investigating, you know, hey, what’s the benefit? What’s the taxes? What the cash flow? What are the KPIs? What is going to make us happy in the end? We’re going to the big you know, 50 door company, or we would have a 100 door company or do we just want to have a 10 door company? So those are the types of things that my wife and I are able to really take a deep dive in and have a lot of fun doing it. [00:40:00][157.5]
Jamie Nau: [00:40:01] Well, I can tell you the house across the street just went up for sale, so Colorado Springs is kind of a pretty good rental town, so if you’re ever interested, I could I can send you the Zillow address. Here we go. [00:40:12][10.9]
Jody Grunden: [00:40:11] The [00:40:11][0.0]
Karl Sakas: [00:40:15] There we go, they have to keep it together, there we go. And actually two resources on that topic. So my parents were both career army after they retired, they had some rental properties and they put the kids to work. I’m the oldest of five. Turns out in the U.S. Child labor laws do not apply if it is a family defense. So like in elementary school it was helping. It built character, they said. Two websites, one would be MrLandlord.com, which is a terrible website design, but great content especially on the rental income side of things, and then also the REIA organizations, Real Estate Investors Association, REIA, if you go to NationalREIA, so NationalREia.org, it’ll help find chapters near you. I have a number of clients who do real estate investment that can be a good resource. Obviously, every chapter is different. Some people will show up hoping to sell random things to new members, but great content worth exploring. [00:41:25][70.3]
Jody Grunden: [00:41:27] Great. Appreciate that. Thanks, Carl. [00:41:28][1.1]
Jamie Nau: [00:41:28] And we can put those in the show links as well. So if everybody else interested in the real estate realm. All right, Carl, what’s your deep dive? Doesn’t have to be work. Doesn’t can be fun. Do whatever you want. What are you learning about recently? [00:41:37][8.9]
Karl Sakas: [00:41:38] Yeah, non-work topic, collecting art. Yeah, yeah. Um, you know, I, I like art, um, enjoy, you know, experiencing it and, and then building my, my collection. Uh, these are not by Mark Rothko. These, I painted those myself. So I don’t think the, if you’re seeing video, the painting is behind me. I’m not going to sell for millions of dollars. Uh, but, um, but yeah, so enjoying that, I, you know, there are a lot of books on collecting art. I recently just reread slash listened to a book called the art of buying art, uh, third time. So the first time is like, oh, okay. Early. And then I listened, you, you know, I think I read it. Then I listened a year or two later. Now I’d learn new things and I just re listened to it again. And so it, it’s one of those things, you It’s endless as to what you could learn, but every time you learn something new, you can make better decisions going forward. [00:42:40][62.4]
Jody Grunden: [00:42:42] That’s hilarious, because when we moved down here to Florida a few years back, we went to an art gallery and I fell in love with David Goddard’s stuff. If you’re not familiar with, he’s got all these little alas, little caricatures and [00:42:55][12.5]
Speaker 4: [00:42:55] Hmm [00:42:55][0.0]
Jody Grunden: [00:42:56] it was super cool because what it did, it brought a lot of humor out. Cause when I look at art, a lot it, to me, it doesn’t have a lot of meaning to me. And when I saw his artwork, where I got several of them actually hanging up in my condo here. And one’s a little coffee bean, getting coffee with a little saying on it. Another one’s little coffee being in a coffee cup. And I’ve got an angel in a martini glass, that… You can’t really tell. It looks like it’s the part of the smoke or whatever coming out of the glass. It’s actually an angel. Different things like that. It really drew a lot of meaning and it created a little humor to it too. And that’s what I really kind of attracted myself to him. And then as I really realized what I did like, then it was like, well, then what else does that person have? And do I wanna get all of his artwork or I wanna something similar to it? And then the next little artwork, I had a, I’m trying to think of the artist’s name, but it has two little chicks talking with a little rope between it. And it’s like my wife on the other end as I travel a lot. [00:44:01][64.4]
Speaker 4: [00:44:01] And we’ll be working on it. Yeah. [00:44:02][0.7]
Jody Grunden: [00:44:02] I was like, Oh, that’s a really cool and it brought meaning to, you know, what, you know, what we actually do. And so now my recommendation to anybody listening, you know, find, find something that just doesn’t look cool, but really truly has some sort of meaning to you and your life. It may have meaning to nobody else. That’s irrelevant, but have has meaning to you. You can look at your day and get a little of yourself out of it. I think it’s really cool. [00:44:27][24.7]
Karl Sakas: [00:44:29] It helps to have interest outside of work. [00:44:32][2.3]
Jamie Nau: [00:44:32] Yeah, for sure. My deep dive is going to sound way less sophisticated than both of you guys, because I have a… I’ve recently listened to a podcast with a mentalist on it. And to me, like as the most fascinating thing, like how in the world they, they do that stuff. And again, we did see a mentalists when we were in Vegas and I think I was able to figure out some of the way they, they did things. But when I see people, when I say people do things live, I’m like, how in world are they doing that? And so like I I’ve started to do like a lot of YouTube videos and reading on it and being like, I just, again, I don’t want to become a mental list. I’m just curious about how in a world are able to, cause they admit it, like we’re not psychics. We’re not, we don’t claim to be psychics, we’re just reading body language and we’re reading cues and we are listening to the words that are coming out and how they’re coming out and the way you react to stuff. And so it’s been very, very fascinating to me just watching over and over just different like mentalist videos of them doing stuff, you know, with sports people or with writers or readers and stuff like that. So that’s kind of been my deep dive lately. It’s just really like trying to learn more about that craft. So that has been my Deep Dive. [00:45:29][56.9]
Karl Sakas: [00:45:30] I do note in Calm the Chaos, your team cannot read your mind. But if you do hire someone who can, I have to succeed in that. Keep them. Keep them! [00:45:41][11.1]
Jody Grunden: [00:45:42] That’s right. You might have to re-edit that book a little bit. Maybe knit a new version out. A little disclaimer by it. [00:45:48][5.7]
Jamie Nau: [00:45:50] Awesome. I think this has been a great episode. I know we wouldn’t normally do, but that doesn’t surprise me with how much information was in this book and much we can talk about. But I think our listeners are really going to enjoy this and get a lot of it. So really appreciate you coming on today, Carl and you as well. [00:46:04][13.8]
Jody Grunden: [00:46:06] Wait, how can people get ahold of you, you know, because either to either to read your book or to sign up for some sort of consulting arrangement with you, or maybe even have you at a team retreat, which I highly recommend if anybody out there is looking for a guest speaker. [00:46:20][14.0]
Karl Sakas: [00:46:21] Oh, thank you. So, you know, I have a free chapter of Calm the Chaos, so if people want to get that, check it out before they potentially get their own copy. You can go to bit.ly, So bit.ly slash carlcas. So carl with a K, all lowercase. So bitly slash k-a-r-l-c-a for creative agency success. [00:46:44][23.5]
Jamie Nau: [00:46:47] Great, well, I appreciate that info. And like I said, we’ll put all, well, there’ll be a lot of links in these show notes because there was a lot talked about today. So there’ll a lot in there, but I appreciate both you guys. [00:46:47][0.0]
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