James Dooley: So today I'm joined with Mads Singers. Today we're going to talk about management systems and delegation. So let's dive straight in, straight into it. Delegation, let's go straight into that. What do you find? Majority of people when they're coming to hire yourself, what do you find the most common problem is with regards to specifically delegation?

Mads Singers: Yeah, the number one thing is that people delegate tasks. So when you're listening to people online, when you go to most courses, they're telling you figure out how to do something, put it in a process, hand it to someone. But the problem is giving people tasks doesn't help them take ownership. It doesn't take it off your plate, it adds more stuff to your plate. And when you do that, every time you hire people, you have more people to look after and you have more work to do. Whereas really, what you want to do is you want to delegate responsibility, right? So you want to take a specific area, let's say link building. You want to hire someone or find someone in your existing team, say, "Hey, you know, we're busy. I don't have the time to spend. Focus on link building. I want you to take and own the link building, right?" Our goal is to make sure we build a certain amount of good links and all of this stuff, but you want to give it to someone for them to own it, not just hand them a process and say, "Do this thing." So most people, they're really struggling because they say, "Oh, I give this stuff to people, but they don't come back with suggestions. They don't tell me how we can improve. They don't get better at it." And that's because they're not being given the ownership, right? So when you work with your business partners, like I see it constantly, like you're giving them a ball, you give them something to run with and figure out, and that's why you succeed as much as you do, right? Because most people, first of all, they tend to hire very cheap, low-cost labour, and that's okay to some extent if you hire great people. But if you hire cheap, low-cost labour and just hand them tasks, you're not likely to get people who are going to be able to grow your business with you. So today I was on a podcast and I was getting asked a lot of questions, which, to be fair, are perfect questions for people like yourself. So they were saying, "At what point do you start to decide whether you need like a middle management structure in place?" So is there like a number of members of staff before you start to say, "Okay, I now need to have this middle management put in place?"

James Dooley: Yeah?

Mads Singers: Yeah, so I typically work with a couple of different numbers. So I say as a business owner, if you run a business, you generally don't want to have more than five or six people reporting to you, and that's because as a business owner you also need to have time to think of strategy, vision, all the really high-level stuff. If you're a manager within a business, I typically say eight to twelve people. The difference in number tends to be: if you're managing a marketing team with people doing different things, then I would say on the lower side, so around eight or nine is a good number. If you're managing twelve people all doing customer support, all doing the exact same work, it's easier to manage that, right? So but that's typically the numbers I go for. Now, when you're looking at it in general and went to middle management, and my feeling generally is as soon as you've two people doing the same job. And what I mean with that is, let's say you have two link builders. Well, instead of you have two people report to you, make one of those people the team leader. That helps them learning how to manage early on, because learning how to manage one person is a hell of a lot easier than learning how to manage ten. So as soon as you have two people doing the same job, find the one you think is best or find the one that you feel have the most future potential, make them the leader, a team leader or manager or whatever you call it, and then you have one person less reporting to you, which is important, and it helps start growing their leadership skills early on.

James Dooley: So let's talk about something a little bit off subject now, with regards to the owners. So sometimes they can put certain things in place and they can try to delegate the responsibility and the middle managers come in and they start to take ownership of the SOPs. But talk to me about a perfectionist and procrastination when it's at the top. So the top person is a perfectionist and procrastination, and how that can kind of end up falling down into the managers and into the staff and stuff like that, because that's a huge problem that I seem to find with businesses.

Mads Singers: Yeah, the person at the top is actually the person that sometimes they need to let go. They, the entire organisation, that's what happens, right? So fundamentally, and a lot of the time when you look at people who are very detail-oriented, they're typically the ones that are the worst in terms of delegating tasks, yeah? Because detail-oriented people think in terms of what is it that needs to be done, and they literally have a to-do list of a hundred things and they take one thing and they give it to someone, they take one thing, give it to someone else. And the problem is they're not giving ownership, yeah? They're too control freaky with it. And a lot of it really comes back down to understanding really, um, the value, right? When you're looking at delegation, like you have to think of a company as a pyramid, right? The way you grow a company is to increase the value of the different stones in the pyramid. If you're at the top of the organisation and you're sitting doing things that someone getting paid five bucks or ten bucks or twenty bucks an hour could be doing, you're actually hindering the growth of the business. So a lot of time people like, "Oh, that only takes five minutes. Or oh, I can do this, I can do this quickly." But it's not about that. It's fundamentally about when you are doing those things, there's other things you're not doing that can actually get you paid more. And I think this is probably the biggest issue you see. People are very busy thinking about what should be done.

So the same when I go in and work with many agencies, they have a SOP with a hundred different things. Every time they have a new site, they go through a hundred different things, yeah? The first question I ask them is, "What is the ten things that move the needle?" Yeah, literally take the other ninety and park them somewhere, yeah? Because the thing is, if you're spending so much time and you know that it's only a small percentage that's actually going to give you the gains, I know a lot of people say, "Do all the things," and that's fair to a certain extent. But everything, like business, is about return on investment. If you're investing hours and let's say you spent two weeks trying to speed-optimise a website, well, if you had spent those two weeks producing more high-quality content, in most cases you would get significantly stronger returns. So with you guys, if I've got a business partner there that's procrastination, perfectionist, is there anything I can do? Or is there anything that you can try to help develop them to get rid of that?

James Dooley: Yeah, so the number one thing for me is really going through the mindset of it, because everyone knows they should delegate, but people don't have this mindset in terms of increasing their own value, and they often don't understand the whole how they bring the team down. One of the key things is what you see a lot of time with procrastinators: they are also really kind humans, which have a different side effect, which is they're afraid to hand work to their staff because they don't want to overburden them, yeah? But here's the thing, and this is relevant for everyone: you are in the position you're in now because at some point someone gave you ownership and responsibility, yeah? Right, every SEO I've ever met, they've learned SEO the same way: someone was like, "Hey, you know, we have a website. Can you figure out how to get us traffic?" Or, "Hey, can you figure this out?" Yeah? No one has ever become a great SEO by being given a pile of processes and say, "Do this stuff, do this stuff, do this stuff," right? And it's the same with business owners, right? So the whole thing is, when you're looking at a lot of these people, because they're too kind, yeah? They're afraid to overburden people. But here's the thing: if you ever ask them, "Oh, I have this task I really need help with. Would you like to help me?" They say yes every time, and they love it. They love growing, they love developing. But what they don't realise, these people, is they're holding back the growth of their business and of their people, yeah? So and the problem they come back with is saying, "Oh, but, you know, I would love to delegate, but none of our people are good enough." Yeah, and the reason they're not good enough is because they're not being delegated to, yeah? Right, so it's, yeah, you could say it's a two-way thing, right? But the problem is that both when you're being perfectionist and when you're being too kind as a leader, the challenge is you're not even giving people the option, right? Here's the thing: if you're uncomfortable, if you feel, if I was working with you and I felt you were really busy, I would ask you the question. I say, "Hey, you know, I have this new reporting I would love to set up and you're so good with technology. Would you like to help me with it?" Yeah, right? Like, I give you the option to say no and say, "Oh, I'm too busy, I can't do it," right? But at least give people the option, yeah? Because here's the thing: most people sit around, they do the same stuff most days. If that boss comes and say, "Hey, I have this new task, would you like to help with it?" The answer, in most cases, is yes, yeah? It excites them. They want to do it. Change is as good as a holiday, sometimes to say that.

James Dooley: So that's good, yeah? Another one, right, you've got someone at the top, the leader, and he likes to say that he's frugal, but actually, they just do not want to spend. They don't want to reinvest, yeah?

Mads Singers: Have you come across that all the time?

James Dooley: All the time. So again, it's mindset, right? Most of the stuff I teach is mindset. So frugal often comes from a place of fear. It's not necessarily fear here, but it's fear here, right? And the thing is, business is about one concept, which is return on investment, yeah, right? Like, people are like, "Oh, well, you know, my client only wants to pay one thousand or two thousand." That's not what matters, right? Here's the thing: if you give them enough value, they pay you a lot more money, yeah, yeah, right? It's all about return on investment. So the thing is, yeah, you can sometimes go and hire a bad person for five hundred quid or a great person for three grand, right? Now, sometimes the person you hire for three grand might not make you more than three K, and then it's a bad investment, yeah? Sometimes a person you hire for five hundred quid might make you a thousand, and then that's a bad investment, yeah? But in many cases it's about understanding. It's not about what thing costs. It's about what has the return, yeah, that we get from doing this, yeah? Right, you can always do things cheaply, but the thing is cheap often have a very limited growth, yeah, right? So when you're looking at trying to do everything from scratch, like, when you, like a lot of SaaS tools, for example, they're always like, "Yeah, we're bootstrapping," but bootstrapping is great. I love companies that are not just, you know, raising a billion dollars, go and build big things, right? But I love bootstrapping. But it's about how are you utilising the resources you have right now? Because you see a lot of business owners out there that hire the cheapest people. Cheap doesn't necessarily mean bad. It's very, very important. But the problem is, if you're not great at hiring and you're going after the cheapest people, you are very likely to get not-good people.

James Dooley: See, what I also mean on this though is, because I'm doing a lot of investments into a lot of, um, businesses, and there's a lot of different business partners that are in there that are the founder of the business. They're very proud of what they've made, and we're trying to then help them elevate it, to take it on to the next level. So they do need a lot of time, a different mindset, and these different people are all over the world. There could be in India, there could be in Pakistan, Bangladesh, could be in Philippines, could be in the UK, US, like literally all over the world. So they are very, very different in the way that they think. But some of them now, it's not just about it being cheap, right? Then they understand return on investment. But there are certain things that you invest in in business, like branding, mm, that you don't see a direct return on investment, but you need to build up your reviews, you need to be on the present and stuff like that. And sometimes you go, "We need this, this, this, and this," and even though short-term it's going to be one step back to go two steps forward, yeah? Sometimes they're too focused on return on investment and not enough on branding. Now, I don't, I definitely don't, I'm frugal, yeah, but I think some of these people are just damn right tight. They just don't see the bigger picture, the going to take this on to another level. You need trust, you need branding, you need to be building that up because that could be the difference between you winning or losing a job.

Mads Singers: I think fundamentally that's has much to do with business experience, yeah, right? The thing is, if you've never built a business before and this is your only baby, if you haven't seen it, like you, because you've seen it happen so many times, right? But you still know, okay, you know, I'm making this investment and in the future we will get a bigger return, right? So you're still looking for ROI in principle. It's just the period of return and potentially the measurement is harder, right? But you're still, like you're still always in business, you always think return on investment.

James Dooley: Oh yeah, for sure, yeah, I completely agree on that. I'm always looking at it, but I'm always seeing it as being, "This is not going. I spend fifty thousand on this and it's not going to make me eighty thousand this year, but what's going to happen is it might make me twenty thousand this year, but then twenty thousand next year and twenty thousand after. And if anything, it might keep growing up as the brand then starts to snowball and kind of grow from there. Then long-term, you're going, 'This is a great investment.'" But like you said, to be honest with you, the two business partners that I'm thinking of at present that I've got that are like that are very naive in business. They are new to businesses and it is their little baby, and they are proud of what they have. But it's difficult to try to, I mean, to the point of being I might have to put my own money into to do it, just to go, "I know it's going long-term, it's going to work." But at that point I'm like, "I shouldn't have to do that. I'm putting extra risk into my investment." Yeah, to build a brand where I'm not my investment, angel investor maybe twenty-five to thirty-five per cent, yeah? So I'm not even the majority shareholder, yeah? And then going, me to be putting in a lot of extra, and that's, and you're not supposed to.

Mads Singers: And again, right, like I always say, I take responsibility for everything that happens around me, yeah, right? So there's two options: either I can find a way to teach these guys or girls, yeah, what it is, or alternatively you can put your cash down, or third option is do nothing, right? Now that's options, right? So, like, again, I always take ownership for everything that happens around me. So what I mean with that is fundamentally everything comes back to me, right? That doesn't mean I'm going to go and invest the money per se. It means I make a decision of saying either I'm going to put in the effort to try and educate these people and get them some teachers or get them some training or get them something to help them, which might be the best idea, right? Or alternatively, looking at putting in your own money, or alternatively, saying, "Hey, you know, this is going to grow without the branding. It'll probably grow slower, but I still think it will keep growing. So let's just let it keep going," yeah? Yeah, right?

James Dooley: So, obviously, as an entrepreneur, consultant, as a business mentor, great with dealing with teams and looking at specific members of staff that might not be in the exact positions. When someone's coming to you, what would you say the most common faults or issues are? And the biggest part on this: does the person that comes to you with the problems, are they normally the biggest free problems that you can identify? Or are you finding they come to you with, let's say, three issues and you're going, "Well, they're not the issues. It's something over here, and they're the issues." And what are they?

Mads Singers: So delegation, as mentioned, is probably the biggest, and the issue people come and tell me is, "We don't have the right people," or "How do I find good people?" Or they're like, "You know, uh, can you recommend where I can find reliable, trustworthy people?" Or, "Where can I find A players?" And it's not like there's not a job board for A players, yeah, right? Like, there's not a secret place where all the A players are hiding, right? Finding great people, I mean, that there's a skill in definitely finding great people, but there's also a lot to give them a vision they buy into, yeah? There's a lot to managing them well. Like, this is the biggest problem in most smaller businesses is the person starting the company have no management experience, yeah, right? And they're suddenly starting hiring, they're starting managing people. And sometimes they read a few things or they do some get some advice from friends and so on, but reality is most of them don't have basic management training, right? So it's like, if you again start SEO today without anything, if you just start from scratch, right, it's going to take you a long time to learn, right? So just like with anything in any business, right? If you hire a new sales guy, you're going to give them training, right? It's the same thing for business owners. Most business owners are busy, investing in SEOs in particular. They're busy reinvesting in SEO skills and SEO training, but they don't realise, and this is probably number two, this people who want to do the job because they don't know any better. So I have so many people that come to me and say, "I just want to do SEO. I don't actually want to manage people, yeah?" And the number one, a technician running the business, right? But here's the problem: one is, if you want to run a business, you have to run a business, yeah, not do SEO, yeah? Like, that is not the same thing. And I mean, when I first started working with people like Matt Diggity and so on, like, he was in the exact same frame of mind, right? But the key thing is, when you really get into the right mindset, you turn at three-sixty, right? And you're like, "Hey, wait a minute. Now when I have a great idea for building a new site, you know, I send a message to someone, and the next morning I suddenly have stuff happening without me doing it, yeah, right?" And the thing is, doing SEO is, I mean, I'm sure it's fun, but you have to make up your mind: am I a business owner or am I a SEO, right? Like, that's two very different things. Now, when you, if you do want to be a business owner, you don't have to say, "Well, how can I upscale myself to become a better business owner?" Because, again, most people have no training in it.

James Dooley: So I've got a random question for you on that. Like, for me, I'm not the, I'm a business owner, right? But if I was an SEO and I understood that I wanted to do the SEO work, but I want to also run a business, do you ever find it that they find it very difficult for them to bring in, they're not a business owner but someone to run the business how it should be run? And they're almost an entrepreneur. Like, they're an employee to this person even though they own a hundred per cent of the shares. Have you ever tried to set that up for people?

Mads Singers: Uh, yeah. I mean, I know a few people that have done that successfully. Here's the biggest problem: if you don't know how to hire people to work for you, hiring people to work above you is significantly more difficult. Like, hiring a great CEO is miles harder than hiring a great SEO or hiring a great sales person or a great customer service person, right? So that's, of a good in the SEO community, someone like Michael Suski from Surfer is a great example of someone who's like, "Hey, I'm the tech guy, right? And that's what he likes doing," and awesome, I love it, right? So I definitely don't believe people have to be the business owner. But reality is most people want to build a business, yeah, right? And reality is that, again, you might not be the best business owner right now, but one of the key things is, if you can learn to be great at sales, if you can learn to be great at engineering, if you can learn to be great at SEO, you can learn how to be a great business owner, yeah? Being a great business owner is a skill, right? It's like developing your SEO skills. And that's why most of the people I work with, as soon as they get into it and realise the power of good management, they jump on it, right? Because it's just like when you do SEO, the first day it just looks like a big black hole. You have no idea what the hell it is. When you start with management and you don't know anything, it's the same thing. But as soon as you start getting some understanding, it gets super interesting. And you're like, "Oh wow, you know, if I talk to people like this, they actually end up doing the stuff I wanted them to do." And, "You know, if I treat people well, here's what the output, and if I'm being too nice, here's the problems that happen, or if I'm being too much of an," here's the problem that happen, et cetera, right? So, so I want to wrap it up, right? But I want to ask you a question. I don't want this to turn into being a sales pitch kind of video, because that wasn't the case of it to be, but when do people need to understand they need to hire a Mads Singers to kind of look at the whole portfolio of businesses that they have? Of they've got single business, and I find a lot of people seem to ask me the same question where they get to maybe ten staff, twelve staff, and normally they've not set up the middle management structure in place, and they start getting overwhelmed and they're trying to deal with twelve different people and stuff like that. So I can clearly see the problem, but I'm not there to be a consultant or business mentor like yourself. What kind of the tell-tale signs are, it when they should be looking to hire a Mads Singers? Like, what are those tell-tale signs?

James Dooley: So, what I would say is, people can start learning management in many ways, right? Like, again, there's a ton of good books and, you know, reading books is not necessarily going to give you all of it, but you can start slow, right? Like, there's no point in waiting forever and then suddenly going a hundred per cent on it, right? Start slow. Um, generally what I would say for me personally, the first thing in a business is figure out your business model. So I have a lot of people who come to me and say, "Oh, I want to learn how to hire more and better," and so on, but haven't really figured out what they're actually selling. And the first thing in a business is, if your value proposition, if your offer is not clear, that's the first thing to fix, yeah, right? Because before you start hiring a bunch more people and before you start doing all this stuff, you need to figure out, "What is, what am I doing? Yeah, what is the business delivering? What is the problem we're solving for people repeatedly that I can execute again and again and again, right? What is that problem?" And you need to tie that down before you start investing a ton in management. That's my experience, because if you start hiring more people and managing better—I mean, managing better is always good—but the first step is get the right offer in place first, right? And then, as soon as you've done that, really, I tend to say, for me, like, if people are doing, I'd say, minimum three hundred K, and you know, they have a good offer, they have money running through the business, and they have at least a couple of staff, then it generally makes it a great time, right? Now, so getting that early, then yeah, just to set the systems and processes, I have people come to me with fifty, hundred staff, sometimes, and without having had it. The thing is, again, it's like cutting learning curve, right? It's like if you have a good SEO that comes in and coaches you or helps you how to do something, you can cut your learning curve, yeah, right? Now, most businesses, pretty much in any industry, it takes you three years if you start a brand new business to get from nothing to a sustainable, decent business, right? For most people, it takes three years. That's because that they have many steps and they keep falling over a lot of the time, right? And that's that journey you can shortcut, yeah?

James Dooley: Sounds good. So anyone who's watching this, Mads has massively helped me grow my business out for many different reasons. I think some little tell-tale signs of what you did one time was just telling me about you should always build a business to sell, even if you've no kind of aspect, you know, aspirations to sell it. Always build it with the mindset that you are going to sell. So you just have certain profit and loss, um, average customer value, always trying to make certain not only you're looking for new sales but trying to improve the average order value and stuff within what you've got, which we found to be brilliant when we started putting those KPIs together. Also, a big thing is a lot of people are like, "Oh yeah, you know, my accounting is pretty, but you know, I'll fix it when I start thinking about selling," yeah? And then it's too late, because you typically need good accounting for three-plus years before you can do that, right?

Mads Singers: Well, plus, when you actually gear up to sell and you start micromanaging the numbers, you start realising, "Wait a minute, this isn't working like I thought it was," and like, average order value and lifetime value of a customer. When you start understanding those figures, then when you're looking at your marketing budgets, and you can start going, "It cost me a hundred and fifty quid to acquire a new customer, but you know, average lifetime value is three thousand, you're saying, "Well, that's fine. I can spend that absolutely. I can spend it." But certain people only look at month one, and they're not looking at lifetime value. So there's always those little bits of what you've always kind of educated me on, which has been a massive help for our businesses. And then building every business as if it's a franchise, yeah? So it's franchisable, which then just means the systems and processes work without you being in the business. You take yourself out, which then means can get a much higher multiplier on sale and stuff like that. And it's been good. But also, also, the key thing for me of taking yourself out, I mean, I own multiple businesses, but the thing is, I still have a lot of creative visions for some of those companies. And the fact that I can, you know, I mean, I'm going to be travelling now for three months, and I'm not going to work very much, right? But the thing is, like, I can still do these creative sessions with my team where I'm like, I come in with some new visions or some new input. I go to an event and I get have some new input, right? And I can still take that and put it into the business. But the thing was, if I was operating the business day-to-day, one, I wouldn't have the time to go to conferences and meet people and really, you know, really growing the business, and second, I wouldn't have the time to think about all these visions and ideas, right? Yeah, because when you're doing operations day-to-day, like, you don't have the time for that, yeah?

James Dooley: When you talk about that, a lot of some of my businesses that are not dealing with day-to-day, when you talk about the creative vision, you know, being innovative, what I'll do is I'll get the three or four people that I deal with within the company, and I'll plant a seed to each of the four, and I'll say, "Go off and think of an idea about this," and they don't know I've said it to all four of them. And then, normally, then when we get on the call, all four of them have got an idea. Normally, it's a different type of idea that they have. And then we start negotiating and being like, "Well, do you think that's a better idea than this?" And then it's kind of good. You just sit, you put kind of plant the seed and then let them, and it's become their idea as well. And whoever then's got the best idea, then people then start doing. "Well, we should do this and we should add this on," and the next minute new products are made and new services are made within the business that they're so proud of because they've been part of the infantry of this is, and the creativity of, like, "This is now what we're going to start doing." And that's been a massive help for us as well. But, again, I wouldn't have that if I didn't have the clear scope of thinking, yeah, and been able to come in, plant the seed, go out of it, and come back together and discuss it. It's been good.

Mads Singers: If anyone hasn't yet hired Mads, I'd strongly recommend if especially if you're doing a significant amount of money or you do hire a certain level of staffing, um, get in touch with Mads Singers. He is an absolute legend. Thank you very much, James.

James Dooley: Cheers.