Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: The relationship will sustain you through the bad times as well. Sometimes clients will only stay with you when the results aren't what you want. They'll stay with you if the relationship is strong, or they'll stay with you for a bit longer. If you don't have a relationship with them that's strong, they'll leave and go elsewhere. They might get terrible results elsewhere, which is what we've seen a number of times. But they felt more cared for and so they moved.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Welcome to the Agency Hour Podcast where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, their families and their communities. Communities Today we're joined by one of our clients, Josh Moore from Duo plus in New Zealand. They're essentially an ad and SEO agency. They've been around for about 11 or 12 years. Josh has been with us for about three years now and today we are talking primarily about his journey. Starting the agency as a freelancer with a couple of contractors doing some dev work for him offshore to now being the CEO of an agency with a team of 14 people and what he's had to learn about leadership along the way to get him out of the weeds and get him working on the business instead of in the business. This episode of the Agency Hour podcast is proudly brought to you by E2M Solutions and WP Remote. They are our two partners that we recommend all of our clients use. E2M are a white label web development and content and SEO agency. So if you have any any web development, WordPress, Shopify, high level work that you need done for you or your clients, or you have any AI that you want to roll out in your agency or for your clients, or you have any copy or content or SEO work you want done for yourself or your clients, please go and have a chat with Khushboo Manish and the team at E2M Solutions. We'll leave a link near this episode.
With our link you can go and check them out and get a discount off your first month. We don't get paid an affiliate commission to recommend them. They are partners of ours and they sponsor the podcast so we have plenty of clients using E2M. They're the only white label development agency that we recommend because they do a fantastic job. And our other partner of course is WP remote. If you are managing multiple WordPress websites for yourself or clients, then just go and plug WP Remote into those websites so that you can manage all of your WordPress websites from one dashboard. It also comes with a backup solution blog Vault. It Also comes with Malcare to keep your websites secure from any malware. And it also comes with Airlift, which is their WordPress performance plugin. So go and check out WP Remote again. They're great partners of ours, and they're the only solution that we recommend. All right, without further ado, let's dive into this week's episode of the Agency Hour.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the Agency Hour podcast, Josh Moore from Duo plus in New Zealand. Hey, Josh, how you doing?
[00:02:54] Speaker A: I'm doing good, Troy.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: Thank you so much for joining us here on the Agency Hour Podcast. Now, full transparency. You are a client of ours and have been for how long now?
[00:03:03] Speaker A: Oh, just over three years, I think it is.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Wow. There we go.
And you're in our top tier program. You're in Mavericks Club. We've hung out at live events. You've been to the Gold Coast, You've been to. Where else? San Diego.
[00:03:17] Speaker A: Yeah, I went to San Diego, Gold Coast a couple of times. And Bali this year.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: That's right. Bali. Yeah. That was amazing, wasn't it?
Now, so before we dive into.
I just want to give people a bit of context. Why, where were you when you within the agency, when you joined us, and what were you looking for? And this is, by the way, just for people listening. This is not going to be an ad for what we do here at Mavericks Club. This is. I just want to give people a bit of context as to why the challenges that Josh had in the agency before you reached out for help.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: Nice. So I think I had either six or seven staff on the team, and we. I'd already had business coaching, but I'd been coached by a generalist business coach. And that was fantastic.
It was one on one. I had meetings with him every. Every week, and then later on, we changed it to every fortnight. They were able to drill into a whole lot of the things going on in the business as we grew and just help. Help me grow as a business owner and learn a lot of things and also really developing that mindset of what is. What does it take for the business to work without me? And so that was a huge journey. I grew a lot, but really I came to the end of what I felt was the. What the value I was getting from that coaching program. And so I'd finished up with my business coach. I said, hey, I love the. I think we did about three, just under three years with him. I said, I love what I got out of it, but I'm really not feeling like I'm getting that value anymore. And so I went looking for something more specialist. And because. So I knew the value of business coaching, but I wanted something that was a bit more agency specialist because he coached a lot of different companies.
And when it. There was just that limitation of applying it to agencies. So that's what I was looking for when one of your Facebook ads popped up on my feed.
And I had been to an event years before where you had spoken, and so I think I had occasionally followed WP Elevation here and there. Oh, yeah. But then.
[00:05:12] Speaker B: Was that the Entourage event in?
[00:05:13] Speaker A: That was it. Yeah.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: There you go. Wow.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: Yeah. And so. So I'd followed you a little bit off and on since then, but when. When the ad popped up on Facebook, it was what I was looking for. It was just like it was agency specific. And there was. As I worked through the process, I could see that there was a big list of things that were really agency focused around what could be improved. And that's. That's what I was missing before that. So that's why I jumped on in.
[00:05:40] Speaker B: Yeah. I think there's a lot of merit in having, like, the generalist business coach, because I think you can learn a lot from what other people are doing in other industries. You can, as much as we are very much 100% focused on helping digital agencies, but I think sometimes even our clients, I would encourage them to look at what other other industries are doing, because otherwise you can kind of get stuck in a bit of an echo chamber. Right. Where it's hard to see you have someone from a completely different industry comes in and says, well, why the hell are you doing that? Like, we would never do that in our industry. Right. So it's good to get that perspective. Also, do think there is some merit in having a community of other agency owners that have very similar problems and very similar challenges. So. So you're probably the ideal fit for us because you'd already had coaching, so we didn't have to kind of educate you through that process.
So that's good. And also, you'd already. You're already at six or seven staff before you joined us, so you'd solved a lot of problems that. That people don't. I'm curious, when you.
When you first started hiring, did you start as a solopreneur and then hire someone, or did you start the agency with a team?
[00:06:46] Speaker A: No, I started solo. So I was in corporate marketing roles. Before that, I was the national marketing manager of a large education firm. And before that I would have been a national marketing manager of a Smaller real estate firm and then other marketing roles. So when I left that job, I wanted to be in business for myself and I just, I just loved everything digital. So in the corporate roles I did, we did all marketing except for really billboards and tv. Yeah. So we did, we did radio brochures. Newspaper advertising was still happening back then.
And then. And of course web and Facebook ads were still had the right hand feed. They didn't have any mobile ads back on Facebook.
[00:07:24] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:07:24] Speaker A: Way back in the day. And, and so I could see even back then. So Google Ads was going well, but digital advertising was more measurable and more cost effective than anything else out there. So when I launched my own agency, I wanted to just be exclusively digital advertising. And I launched with me. So I found this couple of subcontractors because I'm not a web developer, I'm a marketer. And so I needed somebody else to actually do the coding. And so I initially outsourced overseas and that came with good cost efficiencies, but a lot of time in terms of monitoring, quality management, looking at it and going back to them again and again saying, please fix this, please fix this. And so after doing that, I think that might have been the first eight to ten months. And then I was just frustrated with that, needed to have efficiencies and wanted to build a team that would actually do it the way I wanted with proper processes. And so that's when I started hiring a team.
[00:08:21] Speaker B: Wow.
And okay, so I think you may have answered the question that you weren't a developer so you needed someone to do certain things that you couldn't do. Was there any?
Was there any? Was there ever any? Was it. Was there sort of a moment for you where you're like, you know, growing a team and hiring staff? I mean, let's be honest, right? It's a headache. It's a pain in the ass. Right. Like, was there a moment then or are there moments now? And I hope your team aren't watching this. Are there moments now where you're like, ah, it would just be so much easier if I was a freelancer?
[00:08:51] Speaker A: No, I'm sure there's maybe at times, but we have focused on building a really, really strong culture. I have had times like that in the past and we've, we've shifted our culture and now I love my team now. It's, it's brilliant. There are certain people, though, I find, like, I meet business owners and we want to work with business owners that want to grow, and I meet some business owners that say, no, I don't want any staff. I've done that.
I picked this business because it's just me and we often don't work with those guys unless we can get leverage in some way because we want to work with growth orientated businesses. So yeah, I do get it. I meet a number of people who are like that. But I've learned over the years, I guess and we've worked really hard on building a culture that I love the team with, how we're functioning now. So yeah, we've got 14 on the team now and we're a bit unusual. We are all onshore, so we're all local. Thirteen of us in the office and one one remote, just in a different city. So different.
[00:09:52] Speaker B: That's fantastic. And you've just expanded the office and taken over the building next door, is that right?
[00:09:56] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. We just doubled because there's multiple tenancies in this one building that we're in and we just, we've just doubled our office space. So we've got 260 square meters now, plus kitchen, toilets, shared area. So yeah, that's great. That's great. And also just hired our first sales and marketing manager who was just in charge of sales and marketing of our own agency. So that's a huge step as well.
[00:10:17] Speaker B: So, so what's your role look like in the agency these days and how has that changed over the last three or four years?
[00:10:24] Speaker A: Yeah, my, over the last three or four years my aim is to extract myself from the, from as much of the day to day like the Deliverables as, as I can. So my role is leading the team.
It's also, I'm still highly involved in strategy and sales for the clients but we're slowly exiting me out of that as well. So we've just had a couple of clients come on in the last month who I still haven't met and they're already up and going and that's a, that's a pretty, pretty good feeling.
[00:10:54] Speaker B: That's very cool.
[00:10:56] Speaker A: My focus is the team managing, managing the managers, helping them, supporting them, holding them accountable and in helping us on the sales and marketing side. That's where I'm putting most of my energy then. Plus the consulting aspect, there's still, I'm still involved in that for now.
[00:11:12] Speaker B: So how have you, how have you, what have you done? Because I know there's a lot of people listening to this who are just terrified of building a team or growing the current team. They've got. There's a Lot of people listening to this that would be thinking, I would just love to fire my whole team and go back to being a freelancer. But we know that that's a trap, right? Because then you're just trading time for money. What have you done from a tactical point of view that has allowed you to bring on team members, get them on board and get them performing to the level that you're happy with.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: One of my focuses for myself is to grow in leadership. So I studied leadership in tertiary level. I did that for two years.
But it's more than just study, it's applying it. So most of my growth, most of my personal development growth is all around leading teams.
How can I get better? What are the things I can do to lead my team better? And that's crucial. Like if you are a great technician, that's a world of difference from being a great manager and a great leader. And so focusing in on how to learn to become a better leader has been a real key part of it. I think on a practical sense, what we've done is some of the lessons along the way is to build a culture of accountability.
And so some people I find delegate or some of the lessons I've learned along the way. If you delegate something, that's the aim. You want to delegate something. But if you don't have accountability wrapped up with that, delegation without accountability leads to failure. And I've done that in the past. I've delegated something to a staff member and then haven't checked up on them. And three months later I find out it's not happening, the client isn't happy, this never got done. And so I've built in a culture of both delegation and accountability. And what that looks like for like for each of my managers is that they have a meeting with me every week. So I have one hour with each of my key my head of ads, my head of SEO, my sales and marketing manager, and my project manager. So I have individual meetings with each of them each week. And we're going through what they are currently responsible for. They're reporting back to me on that, whether things are on track or not, what the results are. And so that's been really key. But we started that well before I had managers in place. At first I was managing everything. And so we would do we have a Google Ads or do Facebook ads as well? So just an ads review goes for an hour and a half every Monday morning. And it is the team have to present what the results are for the past week. And we have Some really good reports now that make that nice and quick to collate.
But they have to present in front of their peers. They are presenting what's happened, what's not going, what's going well, what's not going well, what they're going to do to adjust. And then there's also team brainstorming as well. So we have like a troublesome clients list. Which clients are we struggling to get the best results that we think we can get. And then the team will chip in together, the ads team around brainstorming, assessing the landing pages, assessing the campaign together. And so there's this culture of accountability but also being results focused as a team. And so we do that for the ads team. The SEO team also has their own meeting the same way. And I used to run that as well. Whereas now the SEO, the head of SEO runs the SEO meeting, the head of ads runs the ads meeting. But it's building in that, that focus on results the whole way through and accountability. If somebody's slacking off, they have to present their numbers that next week for what's happened with their client. And we have all sorts of measurements. It's not just about the leads, but it's about the leads. It's about the percentage of optimization score within Google Ads, for example. That's all checked. The ad scores. There's a whole range of things that are checked within that meeting to make sure that we are giving the best we can for our clients.
[00:14:52] Speaker B: Do you find that if it was just you or if it was just an ad campaign manager checking in with the head of ads versus them presenting in front of their peers, that's like joining book club and then like not reading the book. Right. You don't want to turn up the book club and go, well, I haven't read the book. Sorry guys. I mean, you're wasting everyone's time. Right? So, so that kind of publicly sharing your results, that's radical accountability.
[00:15:17] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a great leadership saying that I love which says people respect what you inspect and so people will respond to basically if. Well, here's a real practical example. How many agencies struggle to get timesheets done? It's like, oh, they're constantly chasing people to get their timesheets done. Well, something we do in our, what we call our hit list, which is basically our stand up in the morning, it's just a 10 minute meeting, we pull up the list of timesheets for the day, the day before. Hey, has everybody done their timesheet for the day before? It takes 30 seconds and we just name the people that haven't put all their time in for the day. It's like, hey Andrew, you need to do your time. And hey John, you need to do your time. Oh yeah, yeah. And in general there's this, there's this thing of oh, I need to get my timesheet in before the meeting, which is good. So it takes 30 seconds, but it's just there. Yeah. People respect what you inspect. So same when it comes to that. The ads reports what, what we inspect, the data that we're looking at. That's, that's one of the key things that people know they don't want to be on the list of like so our percentage internally for Google Ads, for example, we don't want any campaign to be less than 90% of the optimization score. And that's really annoying because Google are constantly suggesting things to improve and a lot of their suggestions are rubbish. So you have to either go and dismiss them or apply them. Some of the suggestions are good. But every week in the ads review, we just bring up a filtered list of any campaign that's below 90%.
The ads managers, they don't want to be on that list.
And so, so it's just one of those things, just easy check. But keeps people focused in on results.
[00:16:51] Speaker B: So this is interesting because the idea of having a team that when you say, and I'm glad you mentioned that because it sounds like, you know, the idea of having 10 or 12 or 15 staff that have KPIs that I as their manager have to go and check in on every week, that sounds like I'm a kindergarten teacher. Right. And that sounds like a nightmare. But having a filtered list of campaigns that are below 90%, you go, well, that's, we just saved that filter once in Google Ads and we can just pull it up every week it takes five seconds. Here it is. Oh, guess what, Andrew, you got five campaigns on the list that are below 90. Are you napping? What's going on? Right, so building something there which allows you to get visibility over the team's performance without you chasing people for reports.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's it. One of our other reports that we, we have what we affectionately call our over engineered sheet, which is a Google, a Google sheet that we've added on and added on and added on. But we pull, we pull data, live data in there from Google Ads and then I've built a reasonably complex report. But at a glance we can see every, every campaign we're running, we can see the conversions and the cost per conversion and the ad spend for last week, the previous week, the previous six weeks, the previous six months on average, and then a comparison to this time last year. And so we all see that at a glance per client. It's an automated report. And it means that that's one of the things the team review and the ads review every time when they're presenting the numbers. So we, so our team haven't spent hours chasing numbers. I'm not a fan of that. I'm a big fan of automated reporting. But intelligent conversations around it, that's where I think the human value comes in. And so, yeah, then they stand up and they present their numbers, and at a glance, we can see if we're doing better than we were for the average of the last six months or not. Or was it six months? Was that better than what we're currently doing? Hey, what, what's going on? And so that level of reporting at a glance enables us to really hold the team accountable for what we say is getting things done right or delivering really being results driven.
[00:19:01] Speaker B: And how do you help your managers, your head of SEO, head of ads, how do you help them become better leaders? Because ultimately you want to be able to step away, take a vacation, and know that your lieutenants are driving the ship, so to speak. And they're doing it in a way that is congruent with how you would do it if you weren't in the building. So what are you doing in order to sort of impart your leadership training and leadership skills into, into that layer of management?
[00:19:29] Speaker A: Yeah, we have, on a training level, I have leadership conferences that I go to that, that I take them to as well. So they come to those with me on a weekly level. When I meet with them, we're looking at, hey, how are they doing and how are they, what are they wanting to take through into their team? What, what are they wanting to develop in their team? And I have conversations with them because as you've alluded to staff, the bigger the staff numbers, the challenges that naturally come with that. And so we talk about, hey, how do we bring this up with this team member? And rather than me jumping and rescuing, it's, I will guide them through how to do that. I'm a big fan of talking really quickly to issues rather than letting them escalate and so just addressing things quickly. And I will talk to them, I'll show them how and then I'll check in with them to make sure that they have actually done that. So, yeah, there's Lots of things like that. That I'm still growing as a leader, too, but I want to impart what I have learned into them so that they can. That. That they. That they can grow into that. And I guess the other thing is that I back them. Even if they do it a little bit different than what I do or if they made a mistake, they know that's okay. We're not precious about being perfect. I would rather that they take action and give it their best go, rather than feeling like they have to check in with me on every little thing.
So empowering them to make those decisions.
[00:20:50] Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. Otherwise, you become the conduit through which every decision needs to be made, and then you're the bottleneck, right?
Yeah.
[00:20:56] Speaker A: And it's a really interesting thing. When I said about my growing in my own leadership, I was listening to about, you know, delegation and delegating the authority to make decisions. And so I remember with my former head of. Head of ads, when we were just growing him into that, and there was something. I think it might have just been a landing page thing or something to do with a campaign.
And it was one of those decisions that I'm like, oh, we can do either way on this one. And so I was just giving myself some practice, and I was like, well, what do you think? You made the decision?
And then he said what he thought, and I was like, no, I don't like that. I'm like, nah, I think we do the other way. And then I kicked myself straight afterwards. I'm like, I just shot myself in the foot. I was trying to let him make a decision, and he didn't make the decision I wanted, so then I corrected it.
And that's just part of growing as a leader, I guess. Whereas now I make sure, if I'm like, hey, well, why don't you make the decision?
Then I have to back whatever they just decided. And so there's a growing thing for me, especially because I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I love getting things done. Right. And so letting someone make a decision that is different than what you would have made, that's a challenge. But it's really important as a leader, because as you say, otherwise, everything keeps coming back to me. Making the decisions.
[00:22:10] Speaker B: That's right. You have to let them make decisions. Sometimes their decisions will be better than the decisions that you make. Sometimes they will make a decision that's not the best decision in the moment, but they'll learn. They'll get feedback from the marketplace, from the client, the Campaign, other staff, whatever. And they'll not fail, but they'll learn and they'll make a different decision next time. But you need to let them make those decisions. It's kind of like parenting, right? You need to let your kids fall over. That's how they learn. Oh, that hurts. I'm not going to do that again.
Two books I want to mention here. I don't know whether you've read them, but there are two books that I think are absolutely required reading when it comes to leadership. One is Good Authority by Jonathan Raymond. I think it's the book on leadership. And the other one, particularly around team, is help them grow or watch them go. And I cannot remember the name of that author but we will put a link, someone will put a link in the show notes to those books because I think they're required reading when it comes to leadership. The other one I think is worth mentioning is Radical Candor by, again, the name of the author escapes me, but she was, she worked at Google, I think, at one point, under Sheryl Sandberg. And yeah, fabulous books on Radical Candle is really all about how to have really straight up conversations with team members and not beat around the bush and just be, you know, radically transparent and honest.
Good Authority is just the blueprint on leadership. It's a fantastic book. Jonathan Raymond. Definitely worth checking out.
Couple of things I want to mention. What.
What's been the biggest shift over the last couple of years that you've seen in the agency space as you've grown your team, as you've kind of elevated to a different role in the business? What are you seeing happening? Because now, hopefully you're kind of hovering at a higher level where you can see what's happening rather than being stuck in the trenches so much. What are you seeing happening that we need to be aware of as agency owners?
[00:23:59] Speaker A: I think the huge obvious one is AI, which is. Which has affected so many things for agency owners. I think our challenge is to not spend too much time getting sucked into chasing every little thing. So to still choose to focus on what you're really good at and yet at the same time, don't get left behind. I think it's this challenge I've seen some people chase after everything and they just seem to change their focus or their mind every month or every couple of months they're trying to do something else.
And I think if you do that, you really lose the core of why your customers are coming to you and the referrals that you're getting. So that's. That's one risk. But then on the other side, if you don't embrace it, then you're ending up doing things far slower than what other agencies are doing. And then you end up, if you're still charging the same or wanting to increase your prices, but you're delivering less than what the guys down the road are because they've really enhanced a lot of things and the speed of things. With AI, I think that that's a real challenge. And so it's this development of working that old adage of working in your business versus working on your business. And I think a lot of the systems and the changes and that having that dedicated time to work on your business, to improve and to embrace these things, that's a consistent challenge. But in the world of AI, it just feels like things are running so much faster than they ever were before.
[00:25:24] Speaker B: I'm not sure it's a good thing. I mean, I think there's a desire amongst a certain group of, maybe I'm just old, but I think there is a desire amongst a certain cohort of entrepreneurs that we just want to slow down.
There's this great story about Arianna Huffington that she will only take a meeting if you are prepared to go for a walk with her. She will not sit down in her office or a boardroom and have a meeting. She won't have a meeting with Ariana to get her out for a walk. Right.
And yeah, and I think.
So there's a couple of things here. I think what I'm observing is that AI is allowing us to move faster. But I think any time that is freed up, I'm seeing a lot of people just use that free time to go down more AI rabbit holes and explore what they can. You know, it's like, what's.
[00:26:11] Speaker A: It sounds like a confession draw, right?
[00:26:15] Speaker B: Oh, no, no, no. I've got quite a bit of spare time in my hands. I have lots of guitars that need playing, Josh, so.
But I do see we are in a bit of an AI rabbit hole, I think. And I think there will be an inflection point where something will happen.
And we may be a couple of years away from this, where we realize what AI is supposed to actually be doing for us. Because at the moment, it's like AI is mopping the floor. And so now all we're doing is opening the cupboards and trying to spring clean the cupboards and then trying to find AI to clean the cupboards. And it's like we're not actually spending any more time with our kids. Do you know what I mean? Like, we're just filling up the extra time with finding more shit for AI to do, right? I think the, I think the opportunity, and I see a lot of agency owners who are using AI dropping their price to try and be competitive because now we're using AI. I think that's a mistake. It's a race to the bottom. I think the opportunity is to use AI to add more value for your current, at your current price point. So, hey, did you know we can also now do this for you because we're using AI to speed up processes, but I think the real opportunity is to use AI to add more value and increase your pricing.
Right? Using AI and your, to augment your team so that your team can identify what needs to happen for your client next, become more valuable and build, you know, build that kind of brick wall around the relationship with the client and eventually, you know, become a premium partner because your clients don't have time. I think the big myth is that agencies think that they're going to be put out of a job because the client's going to figure out how to use AI, right, to replace us. So, you know, well, sure, Google Ads are going to roll out AI and Facebook ads have said by the end of 2026, you'll be able to use AI to run all your ad campaigns, but your clients still haven't got time to figure that out.
Right? They're still going to need you to figure it out. So how are you using AI? And you don't have to give away a secret sauce, but how are you using AI in the agency? And, and where are you not. Where are you deciding not to use it?
[00:28:20] Speaker A: We are using AI heavily in SEO content generation. So we've, and we've been using it since, since before it was chatgpt when it was just the OpenAI playgrounds. And that was mind blowing. But yeah, so we're using it a lot, a lot in that space and that certainly helped us increase the amount of content, but then also need to make sure everything is human read as well and edited. We don't just trust the bot to do its thing, but that's certainly increased volume there. We're starting to use it. We're just on the, we're on the beginning phases of really improving our sales process in terms of client interviews, paid discovery sessions, using transcripts, turning those into our roadmap presentations for clients as to what the strategies are. I've got some friends who also in Mavericks who are doing a really good job in that space. We're a little bit behind in that space. So we're doing, some of our presentations are taking five to eight hours to prepare and we are looking, we've got a project internally at the moment wanting to get that down to two hours and then down to 30 minutes as our aim. But so, so we see that as really being useful for speeding up that. So that's, that's really our focus at the moment. There's a whole lot of. And we're also using it in, in regards to processing things like social media comments. So for some of our clients we have, we are, we've got high level connected into their social media. We're pulling in the comments, processing it with AI, either posting back a comment automatically or using AI to assess it and then alert our client when they need to personally respond. So we have built some automation around that as well.
[00:30:01] Speaker B: Very interesting.
I know this is a tricky question, but I'm going to ask it again. Where are you choosing not to use AI and why?
By the way, I haven't, I haven't prepped Josh for this and this is a, this is a tricky question.
[00:30:15] Speaker A: It is an interesting question, but I'm.
[00:30:17] Speaker B: Just curious, like if I said, hey, you could use AI to do this, what would this need to be for you to go, no, we're not going to use AI to do that.
[00:30:27] Speaker A: I think I've seen some demos at the moment of like outbound AI calling.
I think it's just so phone calls. I just don't think it's there yet. I think the customer experience is still really important.
I don't think people like interacting with AI.
It's not quite fluent enough yet.
[00:30:48] Speaker B: It kind of feels like interactive voice menus. It's like, hey, you know, welcome to the national bank. And you feel like you're talking to a person. Like I press one for this.
[00:30:55] Speaker A: Here we go.
[00:30:56] Speaker B: Can I just talk to a human? Right. And then you just go. And AI feels like it's closer to that than actually talking to a human.
[00:31:05] Speaker A: Yeah, except it's pretending to be a human and then you realize. And then you feel frustrated with it.
[00:31:09] Speaker B: You feel duped. Yeah, yeah.
[00:31:11] Speaker A: I mean it might get there. It probably will get there. There's a whole lot of those low level jobs that AI will be replacing in the next while. But, but it's not, it's not there yet. I think the other thing that we're, we were not using AI as much as we would like or we're relying on Google's AI certainly in Google Ads and that type of thing in terms of optimization or large data analytics.
It's not that I'm choosing not to do it. We just haven't prioritized that yet in order to really dive in and find ways of optimizing with AI.
[00:31:42] Speaker B: So, yeah, you know, there's a book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I read a long time ago and didn't really understand because I was young. I'd like to read it again now, actually. I think it would make a lot more sense. But he talks about the.
He talks about creating something with love, right? Creating something, Taking the time to put energy and craft and care and love into a thing.
And I think the problem with AI is that. And I think this is what people can tell when somebody reads something that's written by ChatGPT, you just know that it's written by chat, GPT or AI, right? When you're on a phone with an AI agent, you just know. And I think that's what it is. I think it's the care, the listening, the empathy, which they're all manifestations of love.
It's that that's missing.
And so if you read an article that's written by AI, you just know that I'm quite opinionated when I communicate. And I can be very sarcastic and I can be, you know, very opinionated. I can be. I can play sort of multiple characters or I can do the grumpy old agency coach who's been around too long. And, you know, I can't get AI to be as opinionated as me. I can't get AI to.
I've tried. I cannot get it to. It just plays it safe all the time. Right? And I know that I can be grumpy with someone or I can. I can dish out tough love, but it's still coming from a place of genuinely caring about them. Right. I think AI is going to struggle to do that because it's subtext.
Right. And. And I think I'm not sure that AI is ever going to get there.
[00:33:30] Speaker A: Well, if I think of Mavericks, for example, coaching, like, why do I pay to be a part of Mavericks? The content's great, but the community is strong. And for me personally, the coaching structure where I am held accountable in order to hit my goals, that's what I get huge value out of. If I was just turning up to an AI avatar to have my accountability session, it wouldn't mean anything.
The fact that it's someone on the other end is a real person, that is a world of difference.
[00:34:01] Speaker B: This is interesting. I had a therapy session this morning with my psychologist and we were talking a little bit about this, about embarrassment. And you know, I feel like if you turn. If you went to book club and. But book club was just on Zoom and there was five AI avatars and you. Well, I haven't read the book. What are you going to do? Robot? Who cares?
[00:34:22] Speaker A: You know what I mean? There's no disconnect in relationship.
[00:34:25] Speaker B: Correct. Whereas if you turn up and you meet with me or Jane or Emmy or whoever you're meeting with every couple of weeks and you haven't done your homework, you're a bit embarrassed, aren't you? You feel like you've let them down, Right? Well, you don't feel like you're letting a robot down because the robot doesn't have feelings. So we can't offend the robot. I've tried to offend AI. I mean, I, you know, I tried to offend Siri and she just says, I can't help you with that. And then she goes away. Right.
So I feel like that it's that layer of emotion that's intangible that AI is never going to replace. And I actually think if you were to ask me what's the one thing that we would not let AI do in this business, it would be have one on one time with clients. I'm building some AI. I'm building a lot of AI infrastructure at the moment. I think I spoke about this in the call the other day. Building a lot of AI infrastructure at the moment which will allow Jane and Amy and Yasi and whoever's in client success to get answers quickly based on what I would say if I was in that situation. Hey, if Josh asked me this question, here's how I would answer it. And that's training the brain on my IP and building a chat bot so that they've got instant access to it. But I won't replace those human interactions with.
I might deploy an AI bot that you can get an answer from in between your sessions with your client success manager. Right. But I'm not going to replace one on one client success management calls with AI.
[00:35:54] Speaker A: Nice.
That takes me back to pre AI days, but with automatic reporting. So I'm a big fan of automatic reporting. But I got a call from a client one day and said, hey Josh, we're moving.
And I was surprised because we were getting them great results.
Website was ranking well, ads were rolling in good, so the leads were coming in, it was working.
And I said, oh, really? He Says Josh, you haven't spoken to me in six months.
And I was like, yeah, you know what, you're right. This is back when I had a team of, I think I had four on the team.
And it was, he says, I'm not feeling the love.
And the results were fine, but the connection was lost. And so since then we built in. One of our core values is cultivating relationships, which is with our internal team, with our team and with our clients. And that is a crucial value of ours. Because I learned the painful lesson of thinking automated reports with good results are not enough to help a client feel loved. And so now we add AI onto this is even before AI, but we add AI onto that. It's that connection again. It's that sense of feeling cared for.
And I think that is for that personal connection with so account managers and agency owners connecting with your clients, that's what will sustain it through. And the lessons I've learned over the years is that the relationship will sustain you through the bad times as well. Sometimes clients will like, they'll only stay with you when the results aren't what you want. You're thinking, we're not quite hitting the mark. They'll stay with you if the relationship is strong or they'll stay with you for a bit longer.
Whereas the results can be great. If you don't have a relationship with them that's strong, they'll leave and go elsewhere. They might get terrible results elsewhere, which is what we've seen a number of times. But they felt more cared for and so they moved.
[00:37:46] Speaker B: Correct. In fact, I've heard this in a service based business, I've heard this so many times that the key to retaining this is an alliteration for you, right? It's all about the R's, the three R's. If you want to retain clients, it's about getting them results and building the relationship.
Results plus relationship equals retention. You can have that one now. So interestingly, I think this is where AI really helps augment the human effort and contribution. Right. I'm having a conversation with Agency analytics at the moment. We're going to partner on some stuff which I'm very excited about.
I started using Agency analytics when they were a product called my SEO tool. Right. That's what they were called when they first launched. And the whole proposition was it was very simple. You that you would plug in your Google Analytics, you'd plug in some social media accounts and they would build a report for you. It was white, labeled, you could put your own logo on it and it would order. And the killer feature for me was it would automatically send a PDF report to your clients whenever you wanted to.
I set it to go out every Monday morning, melbourne time at 09:00'. Clock. An automated report from their Google Analytics show them the increase in rankings and traffic right, for particular keywords. And it was branded up and it was great. And it was a email I wrote once, said, hey, Josh, you know, hey, insert first name, merge field. Here's your blah blah, blah analytics report.
You know, here are my details now. The reason I did it was just to stay top of mind with the clients every week. The problem was, and so it actually helped me, I built my first ten grand in recurring revenue. I had a team in India who were doing all of my SEO work. They were educating me about SEO. I had agents analytics doing the reports. I was charging clients a thousand bucks a month for SEO. I got 10 clients, I got my first 10 grand a month in recurring revenue. And I was like, happy days, I've made it right. The problem I realized is sending someone an automated report every week showing them that we were getting them results.
They eventually what happened is they started, people started calling me going, well, if I'm getting these results, why have I not got more money in the bank? Why have I not got more clients? Where are the inquiries? Right? And so what I learned is one, they can't really understand the report that you're sending them, right? If they did, they wouldn't need you. If they knew how to read a Google Analytics report, they wouldn't be hiring an agency to do it for them.
So what I started doing is I started calling my clients.
I'd send the report on a Monday, I'd call every client on Wednesday.
I'd say, hey, did you get the report on Monday? I just want to walk you through, you know, now, now what I'm excited about, and this isn't a plug for agency analytics, but what I'm excited about is they've, they're rolling out a whole bunch of AI. I think I can mention this, I'm not sure. They're rolling out a bunch of, a whole bunch of AI which will basically do the analysis for you.
So the opportunity now is that you, you'll be able to pick up the phone and call a client, have your regular check in with the client, and five minutes before that call, in fact, in 60 seconds before that call, you can read a sheet that will skill you up on that client's business, their results, the opportunities where things aren't working what they should do next. You'll be able to get an update on that client within a couple of minutes. Call the client, have a very meaningful conversation with them, upsell them more of your services. Right.
They will feel cared for. And AI is going to replace the hours of work that you would do researching that client's current results or the VA or the intern that you would have. Doing that research and giving it to your AI is going to put those people out of a job and it's going to make you as an account manager, way more knowledgeable and way more useful and valuable to your client because AI is doing all the synthesis and the analysis of that client's business.
[00:41:34] Speaker A: So that sounds amazing.
[00:41:36] Speaker B: Very exciting indeed.
Hey, this has been awesome. Well, I could, I could, you know, keep going for days here, but respectful of everyone's time and your time. You've been super generous with us here on the agency. How. A couple of questions for you. What are you most excited about over the next 90 days and what are you most frustrated by right now?
[00:41:57] Speaker A: Most excited about is that we've got our new sales and marketing manager for ourselves and so we are finally launching some of our own advertising campaigns. We have, We've. I've been running for 1112 years now. We've done very little ourselves. We've mainly just relied on word of mouth and it's gone well. But now we're starting to get prepared to put our foot on the gas. And so, yeah, very much looking forward to that.
[00:42:21] Speaker B: That's great. Awesome.
[00:42:22] Speaker A: What am I most frustrated with?
I. I think it comes back to wanting to replicate me more. And so there's the system development. We have so many ideas that we want to develop in the company and we've got, we've got a really good team that are working on all the daily execution and we've got a growing team that's working on like, the system development like myself. But I wish we could go faster. I think that's the, that's the challenge of every business owner is we. We can see further than, than what we have right now. We can see the weaknesses and we wish there was, there was more time in order to build the systems.
[00:42:57] Speaker B: Yeah, you can, you can see the next summit, right? The ne, like on the way up at the top of the mountain, you can see the next milestone, but you just got to put one foot in front of the other to get there. Right.
[00:43:07] Speaker A: That's it.
[00:43:08] Speaker B: Like, yeah, that is. Dude, that is the most common frustration of any entrepreneur I know is like seeing the vision and just not being able to get there quick enough.
And it's a reminder to enjoy the journey, isn't it? And enjoy every moment along the way. Because, you know, we don't. I know it's such a cliche, but we don't get those moments back. And I think since having kids. My kids are 8 and 5 now. It's like, man, they're growing up so, so fast. And I'm just trying to.
I can see the future, but I just want to try and enjoy the moment in every single moment, because that's all we have. Because once you get to that milestone, you'll be looking for the next one. You know what I mean?
[00:43:41] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:43:42] Speaker B: It's never ending. So, hey, thank you so much for spending some time with us on the agency. I got to say, your. Your setup here looks amazing and sounds amazing. I can't wait for you to start producing some more video content, because it looks 100 and sounds great. So congratulations on. It's not easy to get it set up the way you've got it set up, and I know you've put a lot of effort into it. That's been very intentional. So well done. Congratulations on that. Looks great, and I've got a little bit of. A little bit of envy, and I can't help myself. A little bit of fomo.
So I can't wait to see what happens in the future and can't wait to hang out again at our next mavcom.
[00:44:17] Speaker A: Sounds good. Looking forward to it.
[00:44:19] Speaker B: Unreal. Thanks, Josh.
Hey, thanks for listening to the Agent Tower podcast, and thanks again to Josh for spending some time with us and being very generous with his knowledge. And I can't wait to see how Duo plus continues to grow there in New Zealand. All right, Please subscribe. Share this with anyone you think may find it helpful. And remember, a lightning bolt is five times hotter than the surface of the sun. I'm Troy Dean. Let's get to work.
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