All right. All right. Welcome to Creating Culture. Joining me today is Greg Hickman. I'm so excited to introduce you all to Greg, because Greg is, he's my coach. Greg and I have been working together for a few months now. He has an agency called Alt Agency, and it is all about helping agency owners like myself create leverage. Leverage is the word of the year over at Bajillion Agency, and that's really why we met and why I signed up for his program because he's helping me to figure out how to leverage in different ways and create a business that can scale without having to scale a ton of team members. Because we've already scaled by adding a ton of team members and now we're looking for ways to scale that will leverage all of those people. Thank you so much, Greg, for joining us.
Greg Hickman: It's such a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. We are really excited today to hear from you about, specifically, you have grown your team remotely and I'm so fascinated by this. It's something that a lot of people are having to do as a result of pandemic and it's not by choice. But you've grown your team remotely by choice. Talk to me about making that decision.
Greg Hickman: Yeah, I mean, when I got started, at least the influences that I had in business when I was launching my business, it was on the side. I launched it on the side and the help that I got at the time, not really thinking long-term, were remote. The first person that we really brought on was in Oregon, I'm in Colorado. She wasn't full-time, she was part-time, 20 hours a week. At that stage of the game, I have to be honest and say that I didn't know what it would look like. But as I started following other online entrepreneurs, it just seemed like that was the way that everyone was doing it. I'd come from traditional agencies and before I went out on my own I was on the client side so I was very familiar with going into the office and seeing everybody.
I think with the launch of the business, especially on the side, it was refreshing to not have to go into any sort of office. I have to say that there was a moment, and there sometimes still is a moment, where I wish we were all in person. We probably will eventually have some people in one location. But I've realized the power in the ability to operate autonomously and asynchronously as an entire team, because I get to focus on what I'm best at with zero distractions, and so does everybody else.
I started taking a lot of guidance, and I'll say direction, from the guys at Base Camp. They've written multiple books, Rework and a number of others. They had that hybrid. They had an office, you weren't required to go in there. I was like, "Well, we'll grow to that." But, in order to do that, you need to operate as if you were remote anyway, so that was kind of when I just put the stake in the ground and said, "That's how we're going to grow."
Speaker 1: I love it. How long ago was that?
Greg Hickman: Well, the business was formally launched, well, version one of the business was launched on the side in 2012, went to full-time in 2014, and then we completely flipped our model and our focus 2015 and 2017. 2015 is when the team really started growing from just beyond myself and a virtual assistant to like core team members. We went from one to two people to, at most we were 13 or 14 with a few independent contractors.
Speaker 1: So today, you've had a lot of ebbs and flows and this year you've scaled up to match demand because you've been growing really quickly. How many team members have you brought on just this year?
Greg Hickman: Yeah. As of April, we were three people and now we're, so we're recording this October-
Speaker 1: Okay. Yeah.
Greg Hickman: ... of 2020 and we're at 10.
Speaker 1: You've added 17 members in five minutes? Awesome.
Greg Hickman: Yeah. Since really the sales teams really, which was where we started, they were hired on the 30th of April and they started on the 1st of May. So, from may to now, we've added seven.
Speaker 1: Wow. The sales team is working out, I guess.
Greg Hickman: It is, yes.
Speaker 1: That's awesome. Well, tell me about recruiting in a remote work environment. You don't get to do face to face interview so much. How does your recruiting process go?
Greg Hickman: Yeah. Well, face to face via Zoom like this. We've been doing this for a long time. We're used to doing online meetings. When the pandemic happened that wasn't really any [crosstalk] to us. But from a recruiting perspective, it started out through different job boards. Like Lisa, who was my first real major hire, who started off on the fulfillment team, implementation account manager type role. She's now the head of operations and helps run the entire business. I found her on Upwork and it took 47 interviews to find her. I was about to hire somebody else and one application squeaked in, and I was like, "All right. Well, I'll just interview this person because it was on my calendar for that day," and it was Lisa. There was definitely no method to the madness on that one outside of I need help and I put a job description up and I interviewed as many people.
Now it's become more formalized. Thankfully, for a handful of the roles that we've needed, there have been, I don't want to call them recruitment companies, but I guess you can call them a recruitment company, but they specialize in finding, training, and grooming specific roles. For the sales team, we went through a company that basically is a two-sided marketplace. They have online training for sales reps, so they train sales reps and then they go find it companies that need sales reps and they have a matchmaking service.
Speaker 1: That's so cool.
Greg Hickman: [crosstalk] that's where we found basically our entire sales team. Then there is another service like that that is ... That company is called Coaching Sales, by the way, for anyone if they're curious. Then there was another company that we brought on Amanda, who started as my executive assistant and now she's become a sales coordinator and wears a bunch of other hats. But, there's a company called the Great Assistant. It's a very similar service.
Speaker 1: Cool.
Greg Hickman: They go and find former executive assistants, project managers that are looking for, in the beginning, part-time work virtually. We found Amanda through that. Those are great because when you don't have a interview process or anything formal, which we didn't at the time, they have all of that embedded. You're not only going to one of these services because they're going to find you the person, but they're bringing you three candidates and they've weeded out a bunch of the wrong ones. You're basically paying for their hiring process, you know?
Speaker 1: Right.
Greg Hickman: We borrowed their process by investing in each of these services that then brought us the candidates. We got to interview and select from the final three. That was how we did sales and initially the assistant. The last handful of hires have been more like, I think what you'll call traditional. Which is job description, post them out to job boards, field applications. For us, we basically, in our application, we ask a couple of specific questions that require someone to pay attention to details, and if they don't they're immediately removed from the pool of applicants. That gets us from hundreds of applications down to a much more reasonable number. Then from that number, we're able to look at applications and then basically schedule, we did two rounds of interviews, one with myself and then one with the rest of the team. Probably what most people that end up listening to this are used to. But maybe that little gauntlet process of having them actually do an exercise in order to make it to the next round, is something that has always served as well.
Speaker 1: Gotcha. Tell me about systems for working remotely. I'm talking logistics here because you don't walk down the hall and hand someone a piece of paper. Tell me about the systems that you've had to implement that help your workflow be remote.
Greg Hickman: Yeah. We've been through pretty much every project management software that exists with a lot of failure. I'm not a software, as much as I love software, I love it too much that I can't stick with any one. So, really, the last handful of years it wasn't really based off any specific project management tool. It was actually really powered through weekly meetings and with Google doc and spreadsheets. Up until probably earlier this year we started using a tool called Notion, which we've now fallen in love with, and we've moved a lot of the stuff that was in Google Docs, et cetera, into that. But everything works for us off of our weekly team meeting. Every Monday, pretty much every team member shows up for the team meeting, and we follow, which has morphed from a framework that I learned from the book Traction.
Everybody quickly shares wins, personal and business, then we run through an agenda, we look at client wins, and then we basically say like, "This is what I'm working on and committing to this week," and everyone shares their top level commitments. At the end, there's an area where anyone at any time throughout the week can add to this agenda of, it's called IDS. Identify, discuss, and solve. If someone has an issue that's not urgent, we put it on that document and when we get to that part of the agenda sometimes there's nothing to discuss and sometimes there's a long laundry list of things that happened that someone has identified and now we need to quickly discuss it and figure out what the next step is in the solution. That usually will turn into tasks for someone or maybe even a follow-up meeting. But that's pretty much been that meeting.
Then every Wednesday and Friday we have a mini team huddle where we check in on the progress of those commitments. It's been that meeting cadence that has been really useful because I get to hear what everybody else is working on and they hear what I'm working on, and if we're stuck we only go a day or so before we're chatting again and unblocking whoever's blocked.
Now, backing up a little bit, every quarter we pretty much create goals for the quarter that the weekly meeting tasks and our commitments should roll up to. We have a few key things that we're trying to achieve every quarter. The things that I'm expecting to hear as the owner are like do those tasks align with the goals that we had stated at the beginning of the quarter? Yes or no. If no, then I'm obviously asking questions. But thankfully, everyone's been pretty focused. I think everybody enjoys being able to work remote, so they understand the importance of these meetings that, "Hey, if I can be clear and specific and transparent on these meetings, that's the less back and forth that we're going to have in Slack or whatever project management tool, and I get to do my thing, which is what I want to be doing anyway."
Nobody wants to spend a crap ton of time on meetings, but as we've grown we do have more meetings. But that's really been the core thing is just like, "Tell me what you're going to do. Did you do it? Are you stuck? Did you complete it? Yes or no. And iterate."
Speaker 1: Awesome. Just to recap. Explain your meeting rhythm again. How many times a week, or quarterly, or it's like-
Greg Hickman: Yeah. Every Monday is a one-hour long team meeting. The same team gets together on Wednesday and Friday, 15 minutes. Usually is about 15, no longer than 30. Now we're at the stage where we have a daily 15 minute sales huddle. It really is 15 minutes. That's just the sales team. I have a weekly 30-minute meeting with my assistant, who is that Amanda person, like 10% of her time is assistant role. We just sync up once a week, 15, 20 minutes on a couple of things. Then we now have a one-hour marketing meeting on Mondays as well. Mondays, to me, is like, "Let me equip and weaponize the entire team." Then we talk a lot less throughout the week. My Monday looks like 15 minute huddle, an hour management meetings. I forgot that one. Then a 45-minute team meeting and an hour marketing meeting and a 15-minute admin meeting, like the assistant meeting. Then outside of that it's the 15-minute sales huddle Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then Wednesday and Friday is the 15 to 20 minute team huddle. That's pretty much the meetings outside of one-off one-on-ones as needed.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That sounds like a lot of meetings, but I imagine that having those regular, even just 15-minute things help you avoid having to put extra, we just put hour-long meetings on the calendar when we're unclear about something. Is that the strategy?
Greg Hickman: Yeah. I mean, one, we don't try to tackle a lot, so that helps. But-
Speaker 1: Wait, wait, wait, what do you mean by that? "We don't try to talk a lot."
Greg Hickman: We don't try to, in a 90-day window, we're really only working on three to five projects in the grand scheme of things. Our meetings are pretty focused and as our company has grown, unlike maybe some of the folks that listen to this, we don't have a lot of, we don't manage clients like a traditional agency, where we're having a lot of meetings with clients and then we have to report back to the different departments of the company. We have a client tracking system that we cover in the team meeting. We just, actually, this will be week two. We now have a client success meeting that's an hour long with all the the client success-related folks. That's every other week. We don't really need it to be every week yet.
But I've found that the shorter team meeting that is high-level declaring what you're working on, allows me to know if everyone's working on the right things. Then the department-type meetings, if you will, don't need to be as frequent and/or necessarily as long in order to be effective. Obviously we communicate in between using Slack and then we have a lot of project templates, so to speak, inside of Notion, where there's asynchronous communication happening. Like, "Hey, here's the thing that I said I was going to get done. Assign it to somebody else and now they're working on it." We see the flow of work inside of that tool as well. But really it's just those 15-minute meetings. Because we just pull up the list of the 10 things that you said you were going to do, or five, or whatever, and I can see if Lisa's checked those off and she'll tell me why she hasn't, or if she expects to get them all done. We can navigate from there.
Speaker 1: You guys are all working in one, you can see other people's to-do lists essentially-
Greg Hickman: Yes, yes, yes, yes [crosstalk 00:00:18:19]-
Speaker 1: ... remotely. That's huge. You're not only talking, but you can also see each other's lists in each other's calendars. That makes a lot of sense. If you could give a piece of advice to people who are attempting to work remotely, but are trying to get it organized. What advice would you give to someone who's trying to get their business more efficient remotely?
Greg Hickman: Yeah. You can't operate the same way as you would when they were next to you. If you want to be successful, now, actually I should caveat this with if this is just temporary, I probably wouldn't worry all that much, if you're intending to go back to the office. But if you're truly like, "Wow, this is nice and we might actually move to remote full-time," and/or you foresee your situation being a long one, I do think, one, read the book Rework and everything by the guys at Base Camp. They have a whole podcast on it as well, about remote work. Actually, one of the books is called Remote. Sorry. Read Remote first and then Rework. But I think the key thing is understanding and knowing how to utilize asynchronous communication.
Whatever communication tools you choose to use, make sure that there is a standard and that there are rules for how and when to use them. So, like I said, we have this Google doc that has the weekly team agenda. If something can be handled on that meeting and is not urgent, I go to that document and I add an item to the list. Everybody has access to that document so they're doing the same thing. If I'm working on my own on Tuesday and I realize that there was something that I want to talk to Lisa about and it's not urgent and it can wait until Monday, it's not a big issue. I've now trained myself to go put it on that document and I know we'll talk about it on Monday.
Slack, most people that use Slack just treat it like a real conversation, but we actively use the snooze label. We close Slack. Slack doesn't need to be open all day. Everyone on our team optimizes their day around certain efforts, like deep work time. When you're in deep work time Slack is closed. I can't use Slack as if it were walking up to someone because they might have Slack off. It took a little bit of time to figure that out, but it really is defining, "Here's how we communicate. Here's when we communicate. Here's how we're going to use these tools so that we honor them and that we aren't doing the virtual version of knocking on the cubicle every five minutes when you have a question." Because that's really disruptive, especially if you have creative or developers, and people that are doing that level of work. You want them to be Bluetooth headphones, zenned out on their stuff, and not interrupting them.
With that being said, I would probably, step one is define how and when you're going to use each of those communication tools. Two, is then orchestrate and organize your calendars so that you have blocks of time to jump into those tools to ask the questions you have, to answer the questions that might be asked of you, so that you can then turn them off. Maybe that's three times a day for you. In the beginning maybe it needs to be five. Whatever your role is will probably dictate that. But I would literally schedule 30-minute blocks of like, "Hey, in the morning, I'm going to check everything. Make sure no one needs me. Shut it off. Go do the thing that you said you were going to do. Maybe before lunch, check it again. Before you leave, check it again." Whatever that number is that makes you feel comfortable, it'll probably be higher in the beginning. But work towards where it's like scheduled into your day and you're communicating also in a way where you're not going to hear back from people on certain things.
Yeah. I guess those are the two major steps. But it boils up to figure out a synchronous communication and embrace it as much as possible. Because you'll get more done. It'll just feel awkward in the beginning.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think we're all of us are experiencing the awkwardness, but you guys have worked through that. That's really helpful. I'm hearing rules and tools. Like, "Use your tools," and you have rules that you use those tools with. I love it. Well, Greg, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.
Greg Hickman: Absolutely.
Speaker 1: If people want to know more about what you do, where should they go and find more information?
Greg Hickman: You can check out altagency.com, and/or check out my YouTube channel. We have hundreds of videos talking about helping agencies grow. Just search for Greg Hickman on YouTube and you'll find it.
Speaker 1: Awesome. Thanks Greg.
Greg Hickman: Thank you.
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