Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
How do world-class agencies continue to grow profitably and hit their goals, even through the choppy waters and challenges of agency life?
How do leaders like Tiffany Sauder, Marcus Sheridan, Jay Acunzo, Shama Hyder, David C. Baker, Nikole Rose, and Zeb Evans think?
Join Agency Journey host Jakub Grajcar as he interviews agency operators and leaders to share insights, actionable tips, and hilarious stories from the builders who live in the agency trenches.
Each episode focuses on crucial aspects of growing an agency like building the right team, delegation, project management, client success and retention, and operating frameworks like EOS.
Brought to you by ZenPilot: we help lead your agency through the final project management implementation you’ll ever need. Book a call to learn more at ZenPilot.com/Call.
Don’t forget to rate + follow the podcast if you enjoyed it!
00:00
All right, welcome back to Agency Journey. This is your host, Gray McKenzie from Zenpilot. And this week, I've got the pleasure of bringing on our very own Jakub Kuba, Grazar Jakub. Welcome to the podcast. This is really a moment for me because I was listening to this a couple of years ago as I first discovered Zenpilot. It was a great way for me to find out about the company and now I'm a guest. Well, hello, Gray. Pleasure to be here.
00:25
Welcome aboard. So I said zero context for folks, but Kuba, and you want to explain Jakub versus Kuba here, but you you joined us, Zenpilot as our new head of marketing. We're coming up on three months in the role. Explain the name, explain what you do in the day-to-day right now, and then we'll dive right in. I've got a whole bunch of things I want to grill you on today. Awesome. Okay, so for the name, everybody calls me Kuba, and it's a typical, you explain the best, Gray. It's like a Robert...
00:55
Bob type of situation. So, legal name Robert, go by Bob. My legal name is Yakuba, I go by Kuba and it's as simple as that. And with the story of how I joined ZenPilot, shall I go through the thing? Let's dig into it. Okay. So, before I discovered ZenPilot, I discovered ClickUp and the way I discovered ClickUp was my previous company was a software development consulting company, Software Development Services.
01:22
really kind of grew in the consulting direction during the time that I was there. And the way it happened was I joined as the first marketing hire on a new marketing team. And initially, I was responsible for everything. Blogging, email campaigns, website copy, social media, sales presentations, you name it, I wrote it. But the fortunate thing at STX was that STX Next is the name of the previous company. Shout out to them.
01:51
The fortunate thing there was that there was good investment in marketing. I really appreciated that. And as soon as three months into the role, I was already hiring for kind of my first, you know, first intern to join, first junior marketer to join. That was amazing, honestly. And the team grew quite quickly. So when I found myself hitting, you know, four or five team members, I really saw the need for some project management tool to help get us organized because previously we were using.
02:20
me and my manager were using Wunderlist, which some people might still remember that. I think that's been sunsetted now. Just shut down Microsoft To Do. Yeah, that was Microsoft To Do. Well, Wunderlist was wonderful, but it didn't scale. So we switched to Asana for two weeks, after which... Yeah, very, very boofy. After which I happened upon ClickUp and they caught me through some SEO play.
02:50
like Astana versus Trello, and they kind of got that keyword with some ClickUp content. They've always been smart about that. So trying to make a long story short here, I fell in love with ClickUp and as the team grew, we used it more and more, we got the sales team on ClickUp as well, at least partially. And I just decided that I like it so much that well, to promote STX and a little bit of myself and just to do something fun, I reached out to them and basically said, make a case study out of me.
03:20
which they graciously said yes to. I became a case study on ClickUp site. Then when I saw another kind of blog post on their site about project management tips for marketers, I pitched myself as a guest expert on there. They said yes. And one of the other guest experts there was Graham McKenzie. So I noticed you there, reached out on LinkedIn on a whim. And then we spent
03:48
What was it? Two years going back and forth about me joining ZenPilot one day, potentially. The stars is kind of aligned near the end of 2022 and I joined at the beginning of March 2023 full time. So, that's kind of the the shortest version that I can muster of this story. Yeah. So, you'll be hearing a lot more from Kuba as he's taken over marketing and fired me from the head of marketing seat here at ZenPilot, which has been wonderful. Thank you for firing me.
04:18
Pleasure. So, I've got a couple different things I want to talk about. One is, I think this, you know, for us, from our perspective, I'm looking for folks who have a passion around project management technology and have a first-hand agency experience and really a love for helping agencies, you know, fulfill our promise of helping teams build more productive, more profitable and healthier operations.
04:46
and finding those folks who've got the shared passion. Like that pool is actually, I would have said if we were having this conversation a year ago, that pool is incredibly small. It's still small. It's actually larger than I thought that it was. But once kind of you landed in that pool, I was like, ah, this Kuba guy is really sharp, has a ton of experience like doing marketing the way that we've always approached marketing with a very inbound give first mentality.
05:16
And so there's a lot of vision alignment. Could you talk a little bit to from your vision for ZenPilot, maybe twofold, like where is the brand going? How does that play out in terms of day-to-day marketing? OK, well, that's a big question. I think we could spend like a full hour just to do this. We probably don't like it. Yeah, yeah. And some of it.
05:39
I will admit is still kind of, you know, I know the, let's say the high level vision, but the details, we're working them out as we go. But there's a few things I think where there's a bit of a shift of how we want the Zenpilot brand to be perceived. Because right now, and you know, I saw this kind of from the outside when I was coming in, is there's a very big association between Zenpilot and ClickUp and our expertise and ClickUp and it's true. I mean, I met...
06:07
I was the resident ClickUp expert at SDX Next and I'm a total new here at ZenPilot. When I see people like Alex, Maggie, Gabriel talk about ClickUp, it's on another level. They kind of know the software to the bones and that's great. But one thing that I recognized more as I was joining ZenPilot and talking more with you, Gray, is that we actually, we're not just the ClickUp.
06:33
implementation partner, but we help agencies just sort out their operations, period, and find the inefficiencies, find the waste, get the visibility into what they're doing to find where they're investing money wisely. And for example, which service lines are turning a profit versus where they might be wasting their investment. And by getting everything into one system, but also applying the kind of framework of thinking that we teach them,
07:00
they are able to finally get that visibility and to finally see what is actually happening when it comes to their agency's operations. And here I think is where we have a little bit of work to do, if I'm honest, to help the market at large recognize us as agency operations experts first and foremost. And then the tool, I want to say, is kind of secondary. Right now, I don't think it's a bad place to mention that we are branching out.
07:30
from just click up to also mentioning and doing some work in teamwork. So that's another tool. With that, we're trying to show that this result, this visibility, this level of insight into your operations is possible in more than just one tool. And the key here is for us to be recognized as agency operations experts, which looking at the training materials during onboarding, looking at the launch and learns that we've had, I can absolutely see here.
07:59
Now, how to do this, I think the details of that are being prepared and we're discussing them week by week. But one way that I'm looking at to get more reach for the brand and for us to become a more memorable brand is to focus more on the ZenPilot people. So now I'm going to say something that's a little hackneyed maybe, cliche, like...
08:27
when I joined and I am fairly fresh at ZenPilot, but the culture, it truly is great here. And the people that I met, I am maybe used to a certain level of cynicism that I haven't found here, and that's really refreshing. So immediately that brought to my mind the thought of, okay, I'm seeing people who have deep expertise in ClickUp and agency operations and other tools, and also they're quite charismatic. I...
08:54
love to look at through our Evoma recordings, for example, to see how we explain things, how we teach. Immediately what popped in my mind is we need to give the ZenPilot people more of a platform. So it's not about discovering ZenPilot, the brand, but it's about discovering Maggie, our friendly neighborhood clickup coach and seeing what she has to share and all the tips she has to share. I mean, whenever I see any content, video content, I mean from Maggie and even...
09:20
text content on her LinkedIn. It's like there's this style, this flair to it. It's really hard to replicate. And that's really important these days, right? Because a lot of stuff became a lot easier to replicate now with AI. So personality, and I've been talking about this personality, I think is the most. So we've got people like Maggie, we've got Jeff Seifer, our productivity professor who recently rejoined. He's putting out a lot of great content as well. And I think people are going to gravitate more and more towards that. They want proof of humanity.
09:50
They want to follow, you know, even in this B2B services, fairly niche space, they want to follow people like they follow YouTubers, you know, for the personality and the insight that people are sharing. So these are just kind of two aspects of where I think, where I see ZenPilot's marketing going in the near and midterm, long-term future. You hit a couple of things there. I want to come back and spend some time on the people side.
10:17
and promoting folks, but a couple things that I would tag on to what you shared. So one, for sure, if we are, we're the folks that you go to when we're trying to figure out, hey, we as an agency have figured out like how to sell. I've got clients coming in. We've got business here. I know that we are losing money by not being able to retain or we don't even have the bandwidth to breathe to go upsell or resell or go back to opportunities that are out there.
10:47
That's one bucket. The other bucket is, hey, things are going pretty well. But our team, we just have zero visibility into, I don't know how to do forecasting, resource management, capacity planning, any of those types of things. And as a result, from a management layer, it feels like we're constantly overstaffed. And from a delivery team perspective, they feel like we're constantly understaffed. So how do we get some objective truth here? Those are the folks who should be coming and should know.
11:14
oh, ZenPilot has the answer for this. They've solved this for thousands of agencies before. They can help me solve this as well. And so servicing, still the bulk of the business is doing that. We're still a strong believer in the power of focus. And the combination that solves these problems is technology is a big piece of that. Processes are a huge piece of that. And then people, change management and building healthy habits is the third huge piece of that. We've talked about that. And I'll probably beat that to death.
11:44
here on this podcast. And so the power of focus is great. ClickUp is an amazing tool, a second tool for the right use case that I think like the top two competitors in the space right now are ClickUp and Teamwork.com. And so building out, we've kind of earned the right by building a large enough team on top of ClickUp to have enough margin in the business to be able to expand and say, hey, these are both solving
12:12
There's a lot of overlap for sure, but they're both taking a very different approach. And so for some agencies, and this has come up in the past where we worked with agencies who are considering both, gone through the blueprint process and said, hey, actually for you, Steamworks is the better fit. For most folks, hey, here's where ClickUp is the right fit. And so being able to take folks and say, hey, let's not get so bogged down. And what is the exact, like, let's not prescribe the technical solution before we actually understand what the problems are and what the outcome
12:42
needs to look like. So, I think you touched on that point really well. And as we build that towards that vision, I love your approach of we want to feature our people at ZenPilot and we want to feature our people who are our clients and our audience and let them tell the story and bring their experiences, wisdom, expertise and highlight that. But a number of agency owners listening are going to have the common fear in the space around highlighting people.
13:12
And so there's both the practical side. So how do you saw, I'm gonna ask you yet another two-part question. The practical side is, how do we aggregate that? Does somebody really wanna subscribe on YouTube to seven different Zen pilot people or follow nine different pilots on LinkedIn? That's one. How do we centralize and aggregate that and make it easy to consume? I think that's an easy one because you've got a great answer for that. The second one is the fear of,
13:42
Well, what happens when Maggie leaves or Jeff leaves and now this followership that we've spent our time and money to go promote and build and we've accelerated their brands now walks out the door. And so there's good answers to both of those. And I think you've you've got some wisdom to share there. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the second question that you mentioned here, what happens if they leave? It certainly presents itself as you go into this sort of strategy. And it's a risk, I think, to be taken here.
14:13
strong loyalty and strong alignment with the brand of the people. So let me tackle this one first because the answer I would say is there's no sugar coating it. That risk always exists. But I see it like this. If you're playing the long game and if you're treating your people well, then you might actually end up being to some extent happy when they move on because they'll always have that brand and their previous content will always be...
14:42
Their personal brand will always be associated with you as you get bigger. That's always on their CV. I mean, hopefully they keep it there. And that promotes you kind of long-term. And second, what I would hope for here, although I don't have much to back it up, just the feeling is as people are discovering your brand, as they're watching Maggie or Jeff or you for example, or even me, somebody's going to present themselves as like a true fan of the brand.
15:11
And in the back of their mind, something's going to pop up like, I want to be the next Maggie, you know? Like coming in here, I'll admit, I was even looking at agency journey, I thought, that would be fun to host, you know? So that I can even say from my own experience, that is something, it's a thought that presents itself. Now for the second thought, for the question they actually asked first, first I'll ask you to kind of state it again, just so I can answer it more precisely and the listeners have the context again.
15:41
Yeah, how do we, if we've got all of our team members creating content, how do we then aggregate that or make that easy? Basically, how do we solve for discoverability? Does someone need to go subscribe to eight different people on YouTube and follow a dozen people on LinkedIn to be able to get content? Okay, so the way I see it is that the brand is the platform and the brand is the unifying element. But you mentioned two channels here, YouTube and LinkedIn. I think for both of those, really...
16:07
Tactically speaking in terms of the nitty-gritty it works differently So for example on YouTube and we were just discussing this yesterday with Jeff and Ian on the team on YouTube it's one channel But it has these kind of distinct series and you know the thumbnail tells you who is running this particular who is kind of hosting this video with the speaker on the video and The YouTube algorithm is smart enough to recognize that you know from the Zen pilot
16:36
channel, you're watching primarily videos by Maggie, videos by Jeff. It's going to serve that up to you again, especially if you give it a hint. And one hint that you can give the algorithm is to put these videos in distinct playlists. So we do have, you know, we're planning to have actually, this is something we're working on. We're planning to have like one big playlist of, you know, all ClickUp tutorials and webinars, but also for the people who love what kind of, who gravitate towards, for example, Maggie's personality, there's going to be a separate playlist.
17:05
just Maggie, separate playlists, just Jeff. And there are already separate existing playlists for Agency Journey. And this is kind of the advantage of focusing on particular people is that it allows you to also look at kind of the multitudes that your brand contains and map the aspects of your brand to the particular people. So here on Agency Journey, I know there's, you know, a lot is mentioned about ClickUp, but the main thing is, you know, how to win as an agency.
17:34
So if you're this high-level agency owner, maybe you've got a project manager who is more focused on the tooling and stuff, but you want to think about the mindset and the processes and the people, then you'll tune into Agency Journey. If you're looking to get the absolute most out of ClickUp, you'll tune into our ClickUp content. So this is YouTube for LinkedIn. And it's one of the first things that I kind of proposed as I was coming in.
18:02
This is something that I was also arriving at with the team at STX Next is that the company pages on LinkedIn are not really getting much in terms of reach. And we invested a lot of effort in the company page, like, you know, original content, long posts, lots of copywriting, multiple rounds of revision per LinkedIn post to just get this very limited reach. So gradually over time, and this is a lesson that took me entirely too long to learn.
18:30
over time, we started focusing more and more on the personal accounts. And the simple question to ask yourself is, you open this social media platform and obviously, you know, your algorithm is trained differently to other people's. But for LinkedIn, I would wager 98% you see people's posts. Same on Twitter. So just, you know, apply that thinking, which is why right now, the LinkedIn profile, and it's a simple play.
18:56
people post about things, you know, there's a big announcement, it comes out from your profile, right? There's click up tips, it comes out from Jeff or Maggie. What the ZenPilot LinkedIn company page does is it leaves a reaction and it reposts the content on so that it's kind of... If you want to check what everybody at ZenPilot is posting, then you go to the ZenPilot company page. But you would only go there when you have a keen interest in the brand.
19:24
already. That's not how you discover ZenPilot. You discover ZenPilot through posts like Jeff's recent post last week where he shared this AI process builder. And I guess we have to kind of drop that in the show notes now. He shared this AI builder that can build your processes for you and got 800 comments, 1000 reactions under that, and just a lot of traffic to our site. That's how they discover the brand. Then they can move on to following other people, getting to our newsletter, et cetera, et cetera. Right.
19:55
I think we need to do an opt-in for that. If anyone wants this AI powered process builder, which is a really cool Google Sheets tool that Jeff built out, email Jakub, J-A-K-U-B at zenpilot.com. Please spam him and make him reply. He'll send you the direct link. It might be the tip that you already gave, but what is the low hanging, actually, actually,
20:24
I've got two different places to go here. First one is I want to shout out and I want to ask you, are there other folks who you see doing this? Well, I think of our friend James Carberry at Sweetfish Media, and I think Sweetfish has done a really exceptional job of building team member brands or giving people the space and the, the ability to grow their brands, which then grow Sweetfish. I think of Connor and the team at Aptitude 8.
20:52
I think they've done a really nice job of this in the HubSpot ecosystem, but are there other teams that you look at as inspiration for, wow, this company, I've got a warm feeling in my heart because I see all their team members sharing this or some subset of their team members. I'm on LinkedIn a lot, so there's quite a few people that I would point to. And one person that I think...
21:16
Maybe is not the source of my thinking here, but very much is confirming my suspicions here is Mark Killens, K-I-L-E-N-S. He's the CMO at Airmete. So shout out to him because he's talking a lot about this creator first approach when it comes to your go-to-market strategy. And another great example and a really fun one is everybody should follow Lavender.
21:44
if you're in B2B, if you're on LinkedIn. The stuff that they're putting out, I want to say Todd Clauser is great with his Worst Marketer in the World series. It's really fun to look at. They're doing great with showing that you can be fun on B2B LinkedIn and you can show your personality. I wait for every episode of the Worst Marketer in the World. I just saw one today.
22:12
that really brightened up my day. And I shared it on Slack immediately. And not because of the kind of the wisdom that was imparted, because the message boiled down to have your own thoughts and not just regurgitate from other thought leaders. That's basic. But you put it in the format of this worst marketer in the world. It's funny. It's short. It's digestible. And you just get attached to the character. So I think more and more, even B2B brands are going to wake up to this, that you need to have these compelling characters, these personalities.
22:41
that's what's going to cut through the noise. So Mark Killen's, Lavender, and those are the two that immediately come to mind. I bet in five minutes I'm going to be like, okay, I got to stop you if somebody else came to mind. Let's leave it at those two for right. Give a shout out to Rev Partners as well, another awesome agency in the HubSpot space. So it might be the LinkedIn and getting your team involved, but maybe beyond that, I want to ask you about the low-hanging marketing fruit.
23:10
for most of the agencies who are listening. And I think when you think of the listener, so you're gonna have a whole range of folks listening. You've got the solopreneurs, the folks who are really early in their agency journey. They searched on Apple podcasts for either a specific name of someone they look up to or agencies, and they found this podcast and they're tuning in and listening. And you've got the other end of the spectrum that's the 600 person
23:40
firm owner and we've got some folks who listen, who are kind of well down the road, they're into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. But for the most part, there are a whole bunch of folks in a not too dissimilar range from where we are. You know, 20 people, hey, we're trying to grow, we maybe have a full-time marketer, probably for most of them, there's not a full-time in-house marketer right now.
24:10
what should they be doing to grow from a marketing perspective? All right. Yeah. I mean, no biggie, right? Just share advice for marketing agencies, how to do marketing. I can do that. I imagine this is the part that we'll be cutting clips from too. So I had a few things listed.
24:29
here, one I already mentioned, investing in personality. So I would reemphasize that, you know, find the people that, you know, when you're on calls with them, you know, you have a better day afterwards. You know, the people with charisma, with more and more video content and more and more of this call for proof of humanity in your content, you need those people. Treat them well, give them a platform, give them a very simple workflow of, you know, just hit record, we'll do the rest, you know, find...
24:56
freelancers to handle the rest or have like a solid process documented in ClickUp, for example, to do that, right? So just want to re-emphasize that tip. And my second tip here, second low-hanging fruit would be for the larger companies, invest in infrastructure. I think over time, you start having so much content as you're scaling your marketing operation that it's really worth.
25:26
going back to your content and updating it because that advice gets shared a lot. For example, in our Drip campaign that you get after downloading one of our assets or subscribing to the newsletter, what I did was just some of the emails, they just point, they're not like, because common advice is that you share some additional insights, you give additional tips, etc. But chances are when you're at this scale, anything you might talk about in this Drip campaign you already talked about. So it's a matter of kind of pointing them
25:55
to the other assets that you have or the other channels, they might be meeting you quote unquote through LinkedIn and subscribing to the newsletter, but make them aware that you're on YouTube, make them aware that you are on TikTok or Instagram or whichever other channels you're on. And in a more deliberate way than just putting that in the footer of your email is what I mean, because what you want is to be everywhere for them, right? If they're your target buyer, you can't predict very well.
26:22
which platforms are spending the majority of their time on. Maybe they're all linked in for half an hour every week, but they're on TikTok for two hours every evening. If you have a TikTok, point them in that direction. We just have so many more touch points with them. That's investing in infrastructure. It's an idea that came to me as I was watching a YouTube video about how countries should be run, to be honest.
26:46
And it said investing in infrastructure is almost always a good choice. I think it's true for some companies as well, especially as you've got scale. Now, looking at the other end of the spectrum, if you're just starting out or you've got a smaller marketing operation, and this is a piece of inspiration that I actually got from ZenPilot itself. At my previous company, we posted a lot of content and there was a certain standard of quality that we wanted to meet with that content. And we saw what worked, maybe revisited it and updated it, et cetera.
27:15
With ZenPilot, what I saw is that you only really need a few or maybe even just one really, really damn good piece of content and that can drive so much business. So for us, a huge part, well, not I wouldn't say a huge part, but like a big advantage that we have that I have coming in as head of marketing is our ClickUp for Agencies guide where we give away honestly a lot of more than I thought we would when I dug through this content.
27:45
our approach, the nitty gritty of actually how to set up ClickUp our way. You can do a lot of it just from the ClickUp for Agencies guide. For all the rest, if you need advice, you can always book a call with us. But especially as, think about it, the web is about to be inundated. There's going to be, it'll be overflowing with AI content. I sometimes try to reach for a word I'm not quite ready for. Inundated. OK, thank you. Thank you.
28:13
So it'll be overflowing with AI content, right? And there will be so many, the competition for keywords is gonna be so much bigger. So you just need to pick a few keywords that are the most important for you and fight hard there and really have truly the best piece of content for that keyword. Of course, it needs to have appropriate volume, right? It can't be too niche so that it doesn't get enough traffic. But if you find something that, you know, there is enough traffic and it's a really good fit with what you do,
28:43
If they're Googling this, you can educate them, but you can also sell to them. Just go all in on that because it really worked. For example, for a company like ours, so that's a piece of advice that I would share. And I mean, that might be a little bit flippant of me. I was just talking about investing in personality, but it can't be denied. You also have to invest in AI too on the other hand. I like AI for repurposing.
29:11
So look at all of the Loom videos that you've got, the YouTube content that you've got, even like recordings of internal meetings with awesome about ChatGPT. And one of my first purchases here was ChatGPT Plus actually for the company was take these transcripts and just tell ChatGPT to clean up the transcript, make a blog post out of it, clean up the transcript, make 20 tweets out of it. It honestly does such a good job of it.
29:39
especially now that you can also ask it to browse the web and find additional contexts because the browsing functionality is not more and more available with Chat GPT+. You shouldn't miss that opportunity when repurposing instead of taking two days, it takes 20 minutes. Yeah, those are awesome tips. Along the lines of giving stuff away, we've kind of taken... So what's cool about ClickUp for agencies and that keyword phrase maybe as an example is that started as a...
30:08
a long form blog post, spun into a 47 page guide. Both of them we give away for free. You can go find them on the ZenPilot website. And then we spun that, obviously, you know, there were services that led to that, but then we spun that into a newer offer that's more accessible for the early stage folks who just need, hey, we need what works and we need to get plugged in quickly and launched the ClickUp for Agencies Playbook.
30:38
So if you go to playbook.zenpilot.com, you can check out the Click Up for Agencies playbook. That site is a work in progress, but it'll walk through what it is and what's included there is a whole bunch of training. So you get to learn the nitty gritty, what works really well for agencies. You also get to learn a lot of the thinking of why, if you want to consume that as well. But then you also get a ton of pre-built templates.
31:07
as part of that. There's an option for some, for a little bit of hands-on help as well. But in the spirit of generosity, I thought this would be fun today if we gave away a copy of the Click it for Agencies playbook to celebrate you coming on here today. So, I didn't intentionally do not put this in the show notes. This is Cuba's welcome aboard present. If you...
31:33
would like to come up with a good prompt for this so you can get your chat tpt fingers ready but if you are someone who's either on click up or you're looking at moving to click up for your agency you want to get your agency ops in order send me an email for this one greg zempilot.com tell me a little bit about your agency situation and what your goals are we'll pick we'll take from all the ones that hey these make sense we'll put them in a hat.
32:02
we'll draw a name out and we'll give away a copy of the click up for agencies playbook to somebody, which would be awesome. That sounds great. I'm going to ask you, this is your, your go-to question. And the one that I knew I couldn't get away if I didn't ask you. So this is, I asked you about the loaning fruit for, uh, marketing related, but what's your best tip for agency operators? Oh, I dug, I kind of dug my own hole here or, you know, whatever the expression is.
32:31
So the context behind that is I used to run a live stream show for my previous company and kind of the signature question that I had was, what is your number one tip for tech leaders in this case, because it's a software development consulting company. I asked that always at the beginning and the answers to that were always kind of like a mini nugget of wisdom, not always related to what was the topic of the main episode. So I kind of suggested adding that to Agency Journey.
32:58
And I'm like, now I'm getting hit with that. And look, I'm going to hit here on something that I recently am extremely passionate about. And that's the issue of mindset. And agency operators, I think, they go here more often than people in other roles. My current kind of theme when you look at my LinkedIn is I'm sharing a lot about the mindset that marketers should have.
33:26
But I just wanted to underline the importance of mindset in general. You're thinking a lot through the day. You're thinking about the tactics that you're using, the strategy that you're following, whether you're investing in the right kind of places, whether you should increase investment here, decrease investment here. What I would urge you to do is... And I don't have a good way to do that for your people, but at least for yourself, anybody listening to this.
33:53
find more time to work on your mindset. If you're in a leadership position, your mindset is going to trickle down to everything else, everybody else. So it's extremely important that you have that figure out that you bring this. And this is honestly something that, for example, I'm seeing in pilot two, you know, when your mindset and your approach is devoid of cynicism, when it's genuinely optimistic, that really, you know, it has an effect that's not quantifiable, in my opinion, but it helps a lot. So...
34:23
And to not keep this just on the philosophical level, here's one exercise that you can try that will help you uncover more about your mindset and about what actually motivates you and drives you and what your values are. I really recommend it. It helped me a lot with discovering more about myself. Sit down with a piece of paper, Google Doc, ClickUp Doc, whichever you like. I personally just prefer typing on a laptop because it's faster. It's almost at the speed of thought. And think back on the top.
34:52
moments of your life, the moments that made you the most proud, the most happy, where you felt like you had this kind of peak experience in a positive sense. And a lot of us have those moments and remember them. What I'm calling you to do is to dissect and really ask yourself many, many times, why? Why did that make me proud? Why was I happy? What was it about this moment that made me feel these extremely positive emotions?
35:22
And what does that say about me? What does that say about what's important to me? And how can I use that to drive my decisions moving forward, do more of what fits those values? For example, for me, I was thinking a lot about my public speaking days. And I realized through this that I love to communicate, simplify the complex, inspire, teach. Now I'm looking for more and more opportunities to do that. And like being on this podcast is a perfect example of this. So I really invite you to...
35:50
to do this exercise to discover more about your mindset, think about your leadership experiences too, and that'll help you discover your values as a leader and just become a better leader in the process. That is a great tip. Kuba, as we wrap up, I often will give people the opportunity to, hey, what do you wanna plug or where should people follow you? Can you tell folks about the newsletter? Sure, yes, of course.
36:15
So one of the first things, even before I officially joined ZenPilot, so I joined in March, but even in January or February of this year, we were talking about the newsletter, the ZenPilot newsletter, which used to be called the Dispatch, and that might be news to some of you listening. Gray, we had conversations about potentially rebranding it, conversations about me taking it over, and that happened. And now I have these big shoes to fill to try and continue the tradition of the Dispatch.
36:45
The question of a rebrand came up and we decided, I decided to rebrand the dispatch into and give it a new name. So our newsletter, our ZenPilot newsletter is now called First Class Operations. And there's a few things contained here. I actually posted on LinkedIn just today about that. But in a nutshell, we're trying to, on the one hand, add more personality and flavor to it.
37:13
Also personal anecdotes and a lot of my own thinking within the newsletter. And then at the same time, to have a little bit more flavor in the sense of, I mean, you can probably see how it relates. Then pilot first class coming with this airline flavor, just because I think you need to stand out. And we are trying to do that to a larger extent here with first class operations.
37:41
Adding operations on the end there is just supposed to communicate what I was talking about at the beginning of this episode actually. When it comes to operations, especially agency operations, but not necessarily just that, we are experts that are worth talking to. If you're trying to improve that and bring it to this level of quality, that's kind of akin to a first-class experience on a flight. So that's the thinking behind it. And you can go to zempiler.com in the resources section at the top. You can subscribe.
38:10
to First Class Operations or at the bottom. I changed that today, by the way, Gray, so it's in the resources right now. Also in the footer at the bottom, subscribe to First Class Operations and you'll be getting emails from me every two weeks or so. That's awesome. Kuba, I'm glad we've now broken the ice. You are officially an insider on Agency Journey. Thanks for joining me today. Yeah, seriously, like I mentioned at the beginning, I was really excited to do this and I was kind of...
38:39
thinking and visualizing myself as part of this show ever since I first listened to it and we had our first conversations. So, very glad that I managed to have this moment. And hey, I hope this episode was helpful to you, dear listeners. If anything right here resonated or you have questions, reach out to me on LinkedIn, Jakub Grajcana or jakub.alzhenpila.com. Always happy to have a conversation and to talk with our listeners. Love it. Thanks, Kuba.