Happy Tuesday. I am writing this on the plane back from Portugal. This was my first international travel with 2 kids and man, never doing that again. Today’s newsletter will be a little different. It can be hard to come up with new marketing topics every week, so today I’ll share a bit more internal or operational and let me know if you like it.
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You can have all the best strategy in the world, but if your team is not executing well than it really doesn’t matter. Your team needs to be shipping fast, executing well, and consistently looking for ways to improve. Here are a few tips and tricks I’ve picked up that I think help us get a lot done with a lean team. Let me know if this is helpful.
Communication Hierarchy - We work a hybrid schedule. We have 3 days in the office and 2 remote days. The remote days are designated no (or low) meeting days. Everyone in our company is actively encouraged to spend as little time in meetings as possible. If it can be an email, it's not a meeting. If it can be slack instead of email, do that. Looms or voice notes are always encouraged. I’m also a huge fan of just popping in to ask a question or brainstorm something. I keep office hours where anyone can pop in and ask a question or show me something. I’ll often pull people in to discuss or give feedback on something then. I find that 5 minutes of a 30 minute meeting is actually productive, so I only do that part.
Chunk and Batch Busywork - I have adhd so I waste a lot of time and energy going back and forth between things naturally. I always have a lot of tabs open in my mind, and literal tabs open as well. Add to that having dozens of ongoing projects and responsibilities and the day can quickly get away from me and overwhelming if I don't have a system. I now batch my repetitive tasks as quickly much as possible. For example, I got back into the office today and I had about 10 ad concepts to review. In the old days, I would get them one at a time and I would do one review, then hop over into another slack channel, check emails, etc. Today I went through all 10 concepts in about 20 minutes, with zero wasted energy having to start and stop tasks and context switch. My assistant gets a list of things for me to review twice a week; and I have two hour blocks throughout the week to review things. I do review things at other times, but this is the one time I guarantee my team I will and it really helps me with efficiency by not needing to context switch.
I also have dedicated blocks for deep work that can't be scheduled over, as well as "office hours" where I encourage people to pop into my office to review things or discuss them quickly. They know when I can’t be interrupted for deep work, they know when my office hours are, and they know when I have set time blocked to review and assets or strategies. I highly recommend setting your calendar up in a specific way, especially if you have a lot going on.
Kill Legacy or Outdated Process - I guarantee you have a lot of stuff happening in your organization that no longer needs to happen. I recently dove into a few as we've done some restructuring and couldn't believe how much time was wasted putting together decks no one ever looked at or filling out full briefs for things that could have been a quick slack. People were legitimately filling out reports that someone requested a year ago that also were not looked at in the last year.
Kill Recurring Meetings - I used to say I hate meetings. I don't, I recently realized I just hate pointless meetings and I find that recurring meetings with no agenda are a complete waste of time. I have no problem putting a meeting on to hash something out, but many organizations have meetings as the default. Sometimes they get cancelled if there is no need, but the default is to have it. I would rather have the default be no meeting, and have it added only if it's needed. Shopify does something called Chaos Monkey where they cancel all recurring meetings every so often, and only add back what they decide they really need to. I love that strategy.
Partner Of The Week - We've hired 7 remote employees this year all through Proppel. If are looking to save costs while building your team but still want excellent talent, then look no further than Proppel. They are 5 star recruiters that specialize in remote, LATAM talent for marketing and creative roles. Why hire LATAM? First, you can get incredible talent that is experienced and hungry for a fraction of the cost of US roles. Secondly, you can get them to work your hours which is a huge boost of productivity. Sure you can go a little cheaper with Philippines talent, but you have to deal with time zone issues and in my experience, the output is not as good for most roles. We've been really, really impressed with the quality of roles Proppel has sourced for us. We've hired multiple video editors, designers, a retention role, and a creative strategist so far this year, and we'll save almost 500k compared to what we would have hired in the US. I can't say enough good things about working with Proppel. Check them out here and get 10% off their fee when you submit the form before June 3rd.
Let me know if you want to see more topics like this, or if you want me to keep it just marketing-focused. Have a great week.
P.S. Barry Hott just launched his second cohort of his Building Ads with Barry course, and I wanted to let you know about it. I got access to the course during his first run, and I was super impressed. Barry is a sharp and experienced marketer and he does a great job teaching creative and media strategies for all levels of marketer. I had my team go through the course as well. Check it out here and sign up while you can.
-Cody