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EOS Implementer Leslie Camacho explains why AI makes agencies faster at everything, including what's broken, and how core values, honest check-ins and learning to be a great boss keep a team healthy as the work speeds up.
Agency Forward explores the future of agencies as tech and AI drive down the cost of tactical deliverables. Topics include building competent teams, developing strategic offers, systemizing your business, and more.
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Chris DuBois 00:01
It's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is Agency Forward. Okay, so you say that AI exposes weak cultures. What do you see first?
Leslie Camacho 00:30
I so at the core of things when I'm working with a client, or even in my own life when I'm using AI for myself. But since I work with a lot of clients, I get to see clients of like all different sizes. And typically, what happens with AI is that they will implement in into do something more effectively, be more productive, get the code out, design, add like whatever thing that they're doing. It really, it it legitimately can enhance a lot of output, and so what happens is that if the company is able to grow faster, but the culture's weak, then essentially what happens is that you have a incremental or exponential, sometimes increase in people problems associated with that. So the basic definition I use of culture is culture is how you do everything. And so if you're able to do more of everything, but your culture is weak, and specifically with what I do, I associate culture a lot with your core values. Then what essentially what your what happens is you start building a company you don't really want to be a part of faster, or your key team members may not want to be a part of faster because your productivity is outpat you know outpaced your ability to be healthy. The the way we sometimes talk about it as EOS implementers is we want you we want our clients to be both healthy and smart, and rarely do I run across an agency of any kind that has a problem being smart. And so it always comes to that healthy part. So that's kind of the crux of it: is that if it does make you faster at everything and gets those output, and if it does relate to financial growth that you want, if you are not healthy surrounding that in how you do all the things around it, it just increases the amount of leadership and management problems that you have. People people problems essentially,
Chris DuBois 02:33
right? Yeah, I imagine it's like your AI is adding like a stressor and almost pressure, and so even if there's just like a crack in your culture that normally would be like it's fine, like we will get there eventually, but like when there's that extra force, it's like it just stretches it much faster. And now it's like oh, like we have a a hole like within the middle of our business that that's going to be impossible to overcome. Yeah,
Speaker 1 02:59
yeah,
Leslie Camacho 02:59
and it may not have it may not have been there before either. I like if you have I I come I I've had I've had the privilege of working with a lot of exceptionally great developers and designers in my career. So one of the things that AI can impact is you know it replaces or or whether it's legitimately replaces, or just feels like it, a person's individual expertise that might really mess with their identity. So they may no longer actually enjoy their job, even though technically the job being done is more valuable to the business. And so a you know a core value, a core tenet that might have really impacted the culture is now diminished or eroding, and no one's saying that part out loud. And so, even though you might be getting the business results, the productivity results, if people are now unhappy or dislike the job, and there's not an intentional conversation about how to switch or change that, or do we still have like what does it actually mean when we say what are the values we want of the people that work with AI? If there's not a system in place or an intentionality to have those conversations, you just continue to grow and grow and grow in terms of outputs without dealing with the human components. And then, if you are the type of agency or organization that will say something like, "We we don't necessarily want to do the VC thing of like cutting three fourths of our staff, but let's not grow past 10 people or five people. Let's see how we can do that. That means that every single human on your team becomes literally more from just using a cold-hearted sort, and I hate talking about people this way, but as a cold-hearted metric, each of your, you know, everyone on your team becomes more valuable financially, and yet they become less and less likely to stay if they're if they're not getting the work environment. That culture that really makes them feel at home, so to speak.
Chris DuBois 05:04
Yeah, let's take a moment to theorize for a second because there's one audience members might get annoyed, so I'm going to repeat something that's come up on a bunch of episodes, but it has to be here for the theory. I promise. That's right. So with AI, right? You get it comes out. A lot of people start cutting, doing huge like cuts on their team because they're like, "Well, AI can do the work of five people, so why don't I reduce my team of five to one? And now we have the same output. The I've always had the opposite belief of, "Well, why don't I just give AI to my five people, and now we got 25 on the team? And really, it's more like 30 because they're all getting a little more value, but I think there is something huge here. Like just going off what you were talking about, where like if if the culture is actually like is isn't set and like and working with AI, then that 5x that we're looking at could actually be a 4x or maybe a 3x because even though it could give them the output that we're looking for, but because they're not working their best, because you know they're not feeling great, different things like that. It's like there's actually going to be less output, and a lot of bigger corporations probably felt that you know as they were moving into AI, where it's like, well, we're not actually seeing the huge benefit, but it's because everybody's fearing their jobs about to go away, and like different things like that, so I guess how do you help them with making sure that the culture is strongly set so that that 3x can actually remain a 5x?
Leslie Camacho 06:32
So one of the like in preparing to have this conversation, one of your brand promises is consistency. If you do this consistency, and I feel like there's a huge carryover, so I want to borrow that word. It's consistency in really talking about your core values, and in the entrepreneurial operating system EOS, which is what I do, we teach core values as these should be real and pragmatic? They're not aspirational. So you want to be able to hire, fire, review, reward, and recognize based on your core values. The simplified version is that your values should describe the people that you want around you, where we feel like we have each other's backs along the way, and then we want to challenge those values consistently. So once a quarter, and for sure every year. And as you know, the way that we work changes, the values we need to help you know to live together might need to change as we go. And so, just the ability to say, "Hey, here's our values. We're actually using them in real life. We talk about them, and and they're true. Are we missing one? Do we need to bring something front and center? Do one of these go like what is actually changing? And just have those open, honest conversations about what is it actually? What what's my experience of working here versus just what are my job? You know, what's my job? What numbers are responsible for? Processes, whatever, code design, like the tactical part of what we do or the expertise side. That is going to happen because client work demands it. Our inner, you know, normally we are surrounding ourselves with people that have a lot of inner drive. So again, going back to healthy and smart, the smart part is going to happen due to the nature of the work. So the healthy part is where I love when teams can consistently just have those open, honest, honest conversations in a structured way. So it's not meandering, but oh, we want to really be intentional about how, like, like what are expectations professionally speaking about how we do things together, both as individuals and as teams? And so, having those conversations just consistently in a structured way, as a minimal way, can put you ahead of so many of just people that don't never have that conversation to begin with.
Chris DuBois 09:04
Yeah, agreed with everything. the The part of like the practical, pragmatic, actual values. So I mean, I've loved EOS for part of that because I've worked with so many different companies where it's like they throw some value up, and it's like integrity. It's like, oh, really? Yeah. Like, what what company would say the opposite? Like, no, it doesn't make sense. Yes. And so, like with mine, like I, my first one is no martyrs, no kings, and like just the idea when
Speaker 1 09:36
we're working
Chris DuBois 09:37
on a project, it's like no one should be sacrificing themselves for the benefit of everyone else, like we work together, we figure that out, right? No kings, like anyone can bring up an idea, like we want, right? We there is no one person who's going to make the decision on everything. We will have owners for tasks, but but like just with that, it's like we can see how that plays out with anything, and so even as we're incorporating AI. Into this, it's like, can we still see those values playing into our day to day, or do we need to change something? So, like, yeah, I love that that concept around
Leslie Camacho 10:11
it. I think the other thing that I wanted to pull out is how someone's job changes, and then that also gets tied into the owner, and in a small company, the owner we're often right in there, rolling up our sleeves with everyone else. So I might use hierarchical language, but in a lot of agencies, especially if you're like 20 people and less, you're you're right in the weeds with everyone else the majority of the time. Is that a lot of the work that I do, I'm very fortunate to work with clients where they will self-disclose having ADHD or autism or some other you know mental health condition, and so going back to the idea of AI exposes weak culture, one of the things that AI really accelerates is the number of decisions you need to make. So, if I'm a developer, I'm an agency owner who runs a dev shop or a designer. I'm. I might be very, very. It might be very normative for me to make 1000 decisions an hour that are all design related, and serves as a client, the spec of work. I'm focused in. I'm in the zone, and if AI shifts that, so that now in addition to that, I'm also needing to make hundreds of other decisions. What feels like in parallel, like the oftentimes we don't stop and ask ourselves, "Oh, my job has actually changed rapidly without me really thinking about it, and like the impact of effective AI, you can really feel like I'm I'm in a different job within like days. Sometimes, most of the time, it's more like a month or two before you really normalize it, and so you might just feel like there's an increase in decision fatigue. And so, if you have like, and full disclosure, I have ADHD. I also have complex post traumatic stress disorder, and so the combination of these things. When my like just speaking for myself, when I started using AI, and suddenly the the acceleration of things, where it's like preparing for a client session really changed because now I could do analysis and I could actually like ask AI, and suddenly I'm real. Why? Why am I tired at the start of a session instead of excited? And so as I began to dig into that, is because oh, because I asked myself to be a data analyst, and then I asked myself to do strategy in a way that I normally do, and was it and and when I started looking at that, I realized I wasn't being intentional about any of that. I wasn't setting myself up. When should I do these things? How do I need to pick this apart? How? And so, your best employee and and or your relationship to work as an owner, your identity might be doing a shift, and an ADHD, or if there's any trauma. The the stats behind these two things, just in the general population, and then the and in the creative workforce, it's at least 50% of us, where it introduces these extra complexities. That again, if we don't pause and take a step back to actually think about, oh, right, I'm now making decisions outside of my own area of knowledge, I don't really have a way to evaluate these things. And so, what is happening in the background is fight, flight, freeze, fine. Like it might be triggering some response in some decisions that are really critical to the company, but because they're coming fast and furious, and we haven't said, "Hey, time out. How do we? How are we being intentional about how we stay healthy in the face of all these new decisions and the shift of these things? Your entire team can feel fatigued, and the initial instinct that I see is say, "Oh, it's because we're doing too much, and pressure might be happening in terms of pricing, and it's a business model thing, and and those things may 100% be true, and that's why like the positioning work is so valuable, the pricing model work you have to do, and also your identity as a professional might be shifting, and no one's saying anything because you don't you don't know how to ask that question?
Leslie Camacho 14:21
So again, the idea to slow down, starting with values or just your experience at work, and having those intentional conversations to examine, like what we, you know, Michael, do I still get this job? Has the job shifted? Can I still wrap my arms around it? How is my process? How do I have to pull things apart? And so that's the part that becomes very important to the long-term health of the owner and and the team is to be able to just take that step back and say, how is this actually changing my identity, what I'm doing, how I'm doing it, and not just fall into the trap of more faster. For and especially if that more faster better is working, we can go so fast and then get so burned out without even knowing it. And and again, going back, if we have a small team, that's where it becomes really important to have that healthy scale along with the smart part.
Chris DuBois 15:20
Right. So, what is like? I like saving this towards the end, but I want to right now. The if we're going to do an 8020 rule here, where where should agencies be focused for like that 20% of their effort to make sure they're going to have an outsized impact on make sure the culture is set so that they're not burning out the team, they're adopting AI appropriately, and all that. It
Leslie Camacho 15:43
sounds it sounds almost too simplistic when I suggest it, but I really do mean it as a great starting point. Is that if you don't have core values or some equivalent that where they're actually tangible and pragmatic, that's the that's the starting point where where we say what is it about working together that really makes us solid makes builds this level of open honest and trust? If we're working together and I'm feeling burned out, can I actually express it to you, or do I have to feel like I've got to hide that or not? And then so so we have shared language and how to talk about it in a professional context, and so just getting some initial knowledge. You don't have to buy any special. I mean, there's plenty of books and stuff out there, but just taking a pause to do that, and then just building that into a normal part of either your quarterly reviews or a monthly review, or have a specific time and place where you can bring those up. If you're a remote company, a dedicated Slack channel, or just having virtual lunches together, where you can prompt these conversations, and even if it's a just an awkward three to five minute conversation because you've never had this before, just kind of breaking the ceiling on being able to talk about that. Just man, I hate this part. I love what's happening in terms of how we're growing or how this is changing, but I'm having a rough time dealing with this. And let me just express it here in this place that's set aside for it. Versus, you know, if you and I are heads down on a project and we don't have this space, and suddenly, like, ah, Chris, I, and like, pretty soon, I'm just there's a rupture that happens in real time, and if we've never had that conversation, you're like, oh, what do I, what do I even do with this? And I see that happen sometimes in meetings or get reported back, and so like have that core values discussion. What is it? What do we mean by a value? Can we define it somehow? And not to get rigid or dogmatic, but just have the discussion versus not having it, and then set aside time consistently. Just talk about your experience at work. What could we do better? How could you different? How are you feeling? It sounds a little bit touchy feely, and the answer is yeah. It's supposed to be touchy feely, so that when we get back to like the roll up our sleeves and deal with the client fires and the work itself, we are we have a much more headroom to actually go through the increased number of decisions together. I know that Chris has my back, and if I start feeling it, like oh, you know, it's a right now it's Tuesday 930. I'm on Pacific time here outside Portland, and I know that oh, tomorrow morning I'm meeting with Chris, and we're just going to experience share and get on the same page, and so I can I can hold this thought because I've got this healthy time to talk about it tomorrow morning, you know. So some sort of cadence to talk about those things and document them.
Chris DuBois 18:49
Something I had done when running an agency, and I'm not sure if this is so. We had ran like a version of EOS. I mean, it was mostly EOS, but we had our own things that like kind of worked their way in over the years. Yeah, yeah.
Leslie Camacho 19:06
You you never have to qualify that. Like every my specialty is agencies, every single one. Like yeah, we run. Yeah, that's that's that's normative. It's what's supposed to happen. I understand. We're normal.
Chris DuBois 19:18
But something that I ran was like every quarter when we would do our reviews. I also had a document that had the duty description, responsibilities, like everything. Like how do we determine success for this role? And it was kind of separate from the evaluation piece, where like I'd go through the evaluation. Let's make sure you map to the values. Let's make sure you're you know you're growing. You got was it wants it gets it capacity to do it, but yeah. So we go through all that, but then in this doc, we would say, okay, so this is what you were hired for, right? Here's all of these things, but every quarter we come back to and say like, how are these going? And we could look at it and say, okay, well your role has actually. Changed a bit over this quarter. You had to step into more client projects for whatever reason. Maybe we actually move you up into this position. Does that feel right for you? Yeah. And then we can set new goals for them every quarter. And so that feels like it might be a great approach. Like as as AI is influencing things, to be able to just look at someone's job and have them say, "I don't like this, right? Like I've had to do a lot more of these tasks. Maybe we hand it off to to Bill, who loves these types of things, and so we can kind of restructure. Yeah, I guess. What thoughts on that play or other tactics that you think? I
Leslie Camacho 20:37
think that's fantastic. We like the term we use for that is delegate and elevate, and that's a great thing. That's a great way to capture. Here's how my jobs change. We make a list. We put them into these four quadrants, and it's love great at the top, like good in the upper right, and then don't like but I'm good at in the lower left, and then I don't like it and I'm not good at it in the lower right. And when your job shifts, delegate and elevate is a great way as you're preparing for that one-on-one or as just to have a an open, honest conversation. Oh, these things are new. I don't like them, but I'm good at that. How can I? Can we shift it? And how you describe that is such a healthy way of just making sure that happens, especially in that don't like but good at category. That's where burnout happens. So, in a lot of small agencies, like the the harder problem is not that we don't like each other, but that we really like each other. And no kings, no martyrs. Is that how you described it? Yep. Because we will. I love that value because we will default to martyrdom when we like each other, and so I will just put up with a lot of stuff so that no one else has to do it and sacrifice myself, martyr myself, and so that can be that can lead to very bad cultural outcomes. And so, just having that intentional discussion about how we deal with those things can be very powerful. The other thing that makes me think of that can be that I also like to talk about owners in the early stage of their business when they're like three to five people and even going into 10 to 20 is that a word that almost every owner that I work with, or or just encounter out there in the world, hates is management. We don't want to be managers. We hate management. Someone always has like a bad story. Maybe that's even why we started the business in the first place. Is that we had a bad manager, and the healthy version of management becomes so incredibly powerful because what you just described is being a great manager, and one of the one of the most undervalued relationships, in my opinion, is a great boss. And when we start an agency and starting intentionally asking myself, how do I be a great boss? How do I be a great leader? How do I be a great manager. What's my versions of those things, and start learning about those things. Because again, if we have less people doing way more, our ability to be a great boss begins to even have a larger and larger role in our in our long term success of getting what we want from the business, and just embracing that as a real opportunity, because like a bad boss can really ruin multiple lives and leave this lasting baggage and damage. And a great boss changes your life forever. It's one. It can be one of the most powerful relationships. And again, if AI lets us do more than let's make elbow room to be great bosses to the people around us,
Chris DuBois 23:44
right? There's probably some ways to leverage AI to do that as well.
Leslie Camacho 23:48
Yes, very, very good, very, very much so. Yes,
Chris DuBois 23:53
yeah. What would you recommend people are doing to to interpret?
Leslie Camacho 23:57
So on the on the leadership and management side, one of the things I'm I'm going to borrow language from my friend Greg Story. Greg Story wrote he's been in agency land a long long time. He's known as Brilliant Crank, and he wrote this book called Creative Intelligence, and he talks. I love the way he talks about AI, especially if you're a leader or a manager, you need to you you want to use AI to help you think creatively. And his reminder is like, yeah, AI literally has every PhD, every MBA, every degree in the world, and it's like a eight month old puppy. And so, a lot of the reminders that with AI you've got all this knowledge, and you can just hey build me a deck to help me learn something. How do I ask better questions? And so you can work with AI in a in in a way as a manager where you can just leverage all build. Me a reading list, can and so have AI teach you like build a training curriculum, like an elementary 101, because one of the things about, especially when it comes to management specifically versus leadership, we teach them as separate skill sets. So when it comes to management specifically, there is so much businessy terminology around it, and this, and everything is research back. This like all all good things, but it uses all this language that if you are just, I just want to help. I just want to help the people around me can get in the way, and so AI as a learning tool can help translate that to your own tone of voice, the way you experience it. So, as a training tool for yourself, you can actually build yourself a be a better manager deck that strips away the uncomfortable business language or the business language that you just don't like, and still get you the basics. Because in most small businesses, you don't need anything complicated. It's just the small things done consistently with intention,
Chris DuBois 26:05
right? And I mentioned there are people taking it to the the opposite extreme. Oh yes, remember everything about this employee so that I can have a conversation with them. It just I was just having a was running an intensive right before this, where I I basically work through my model and stuff with the client, but it's two very in depth sessions, and and he just pointed out that he loved that I was asking all of these and having a conversation about it, and not just plugging things into AI. And I realized like that that is probably the the go ahead for for a lot of people is like just okay. Can I use this to do some of the harder work right now? But with people and culture, it's like the hard work is the necessary work in order to reinforce the culture, like to show people you care. Yeah, yeah. The
Leslie Camacho 26:58
way that we the way that we teach it in session is you really only need just two things to be a great boss. You have to want to be a great boss, so there has to be intentional curiosity so that you're willing to use AI, talk to experts, be involved in community. But you have a you have a you have a curiosity and a want to grow in that direction, and then the second part is your people have to know that you care about them. You have to genuinely care about your people, and they have to know it. And so, if those things are true, then you have the foundation to be a great boss. And then it's just making again the intentional time, and so like on that journey, leveraging AI books, etc. My recommendation is just carve out an hour a month, and like really doesn't take an outsized amount of time. It just takes intentional learning. How do I ask better questions? I I have like a short list of book recommendations, but the but the big thing is just making the time schedule on your calendar. Learn how to be a you know a great boss. Schedule an hour a month and just start there.
Chris DuBois 28:17
Yeah, yeah. I think there's even as we look at like productivity, it's like okay, I made this task. Hey, I can help me do this so much faster. It's like we keep filling that time now with like more work and stuff. But like you could take that time to go read a book and like and I've been deliberately trying to do this with myself. Like hey, I want to get better at this. Let me spend that hour I just saved learning something and like so that I can come back and actually be better at whatever I'm doing, not just adding more AI tasks. Yeah, good case for leaders.
Leslie Camacho 28:49
There's something way that you said that that reminded me of a conversation that came up yesterday. A group of us met where we support each other. You know, what are we learning about about where our own where we can improve, and so one of the things that came up is, oh, a lot of learning how to be a great boss or a great manager you can do through observation, and so if like you're making that intention to either read that book or do it, you can be at a restaurant and look how the waitstaff interacts with each other. You can see how whoever is running table service interacts with the rest of the staff. You can hear or watch how the cook or the chef interacts with it. You can be in a coffee shop, same thing. How does the how does the manager of the business? And so, as soon as you start looking for it, it's kind of the same thing. Like if you buy a red car, you start noticing red cars, and you buy a Jeep, you start whatever it is that may look like you just start noticing it more, and then you just keep a little journal, make some mental notes, and then oh yeah, I really like this interaction. I wonder how I could learn more about that, and that's where AI becomes very powerful because you might not have the language. And you can say, I saw this interaction. Describe it this way. Hey, Claude, or whatever your AI of choice is, what are the underlying management tools behind this interaction? And it will surface a fire hose. And then, if it knows you, then you can say, and Leslie, because I have a profile on you, I would start with this one. I think you might really like this one, and then you dig into that.
Chris DuBois 30:22
Yeah, two things on that. That I love everything that's coming out of this conversation. It's good. It actually came from a therapy session I had a couple weeks ago, where we're just like we we try to look back on the decisions we make, and we we're like justifying the decision in a way like, oh, I did this because of this, but it really in the moment, if you can just have that awareness of like, okay, well, I did this because of like, and you you just you're in it right now, so you write it down, and then later you can reflect back on on that. It's like as a leadership tool, like that's it's massive to be able to like in the moment. This is what I was thinking. This is what I was feeling. Here is why I did this, versus going back. Well, you know, maybe this person said this, and so I wasn't feeling great, or what? It's like you're guessing at that point. But so that was that was awesome. And then the other piece said like getting the language from everything. So with with my own like even just AI development stuff. One of the things that often heart is like you need context for AI and all these like everybody knows this stuff, but like how many tasks are you trying to get AI to start with, and it just doesn't have all the necessary resources and everything available? Yeah, and so we use a mise en place, like which chefs use in kitchens, right? To make sure all the foods organized before service, so that they can grab everything. And it's like, and the only reason I know that word is because my wife has like works in hospitality and like work some fancy restaurants that use that word, or multiple words, I guess, three words. But the but like having that language to now like I can go into any engagement, like it's another thing in my kit to just language-wise to be able to, you know, think differently about it. Okay, as we wind down, I'll hit you with two two last questions. The first one being, what book do you recommend every agency owner should read?
Leslie Camacho 32:20
You know, one book is is so so difficult. So, I I think in terms of this conversation, the one I would recommend the most is called "Heal to Lead" by Kelly Campbell, and it is a real deep dive that's helpful, practical about how mental health is impacting you as an owner, your leadership style, your management style, and or your employees, and it is robust and practical. I've never read another book like it. So if you're, you know, regardless of, even if you are just a solopreneur at this at this point, I would say it's it's still very very helpful. And as soon as you're working with just one other people, it's a just a good heads up on all those things. And if I'm allowed to do two, then the second one is out of left field, and it's called the Book of Joy, and it is a conversation. The author is a secular Jewish author reporter who facilitates a conversation between Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. So you have three distinct worldviews, and they talk about some of the toughest subjects in the world, and going back to the idea of you learn by observing, it is so beautiful how they facilitate conversations about life's hottest topic with joy. Find so it's one of the it's one of my favorite books to recommend to owners because it just in if you learn by example the language in the book, the setup by the book, how they talk to each other, how they make space for each other, it is is so gorgeous,
Chris DuBois 34:08
awesome. I got two more books added to my list. Then, last questions: Where can people find you?
Leslie Camacho 34:16
Right now, the best place is just LinkedIn. I don't currently have a newsletter or anything else out there, but if you reach out to me on LinkedIn or follow me there, that's easily the best place. You can just find me, Leslie Camacho. If you search, and you'll you'll find some version of this profile on there. It'll be look for the EOS agency guy. There's that's pretty much just me and maybe a handful of others, but I'm the only one named Leslie. Yeah, but
Chris DuBois 34:43
awesome. Well, Leslie, thanks for joining.
Leslie Camacho 34:46
Yeah, thank you for having me, Chris. I really appreciate the work you do, your community you build, and thank you for having me, man.
Chris DuBois 34:56
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai