Scale Your Business From $10k to $100k Per Month - Matt Gray

Ali Abdaal 0:00 Hello, Matt. Welcome to the podcast. How you doing?

Matt Gray 0:02 Good to see you.

Ali Abdaal 0:03 I was really hoping we could have this conversation as a bit of a mini coaching session where you help me understand what it takes to get from, let's say, 10 to 100K a month, and then 100K to a million a month.

Matt Gray 0:12 Let's do it. I'm looking forward to it. Let's just say it's an hour team meeting, and about 45 minutes of it is dedicated to issues, opportunities, and awarenesses. If you're not coming with any of these things, I literally don't know what you're doing.

Ali Abdaal 0:23 That is a good point. All you've basically done is just, like, name systems for each step of the process, and already, it just feels like I have way more clarity.

Matt Gray 0:31 Inevitably, like, the best people to sell are people that are referred by an existing customer, and your best leads, your hottest leads, are your referred leads.

Ali Abdaal 0:40 This is just, like, like, mind-blowing to me.

Matt Gray 0:42 And I think for you, too, one of your big models when you think about anything new is can I do this for the long term?

Ali Abdaal 0:47 Yeah.

Matt Gray 0:47 And the answer to that is hell yes, you can if...

Ali Abdaal 0:52 Hello, Matt. Welcome to the podcast. How you doing?

Matt Gray 0:54 Welcome to Dubai, Ali. Good to see you.

Ali Abdaal 0:56 Good to see you, man. Um, okay, so we have done lots of episodes on this podcast so far sort of about the starting point of entrepreneurship, like how to go from zero to, for example, 10K a month, with like, you know, your concept and your audience and your avatar and your offer and all that, and a sales system and all that kind of stuff. You seem to specialize, from previous conversations that we've had and, you know, me being on your podcast and the stuff you've posted on socials, you seem to specialize in helping people get beyond the 10K a month point. Um, our business at the moment is, you know, we did, like, five million last year and w- we wanna get it to 10 million. And so I was really hoping we could have this conversation as a bit of a mini coaching session where you help me understand what it takes to get from, let's say, you know, 10 to 100K a month, and then 100K to a million a month, which is the sort of kinda scaling that you seem to help, help founders with.

Matt Gray 1:43 Let's do it. I'm looking forward to it.

Ali Abdaal 1:44 Um, before we dive into that, can we summarize your backstory for people who might not be familiar with who

Ali Abdaal 1:49 you are?

Matt Gray 1:49 Yeah, so started four different profitable businesses over the last decade. First business was called BitMaker. We trained full stack software engineers, got them jobs at Shopify, Meta, Google. Trained over 2,000 engineers over a few years, and the company was acquired by General Assembly when they came north of the border to Canada, which is where I'm from. Um, since then, started a couple other businesses, uh, one more recently. It's called Founder OS. Uh, we help founders with proven systems to scale their audience, brand, and community. And so yeah, the general mission I have in life is to really help 100 million founders accomplish their dreams through proven systems. Been through the ups and downs, the valleys and the mountains, you know, involved in building businesses, understand kinda how hard and, yeah, just difficult it can be. And over the years, I've learned that there's, you know, there's systems and that success is really an OS, and there's ways to build an audience, monetize, build a team, hire, onboard. There's, these are all systems, and the tighter those systems, I think the stronger your business. And so, um, yeah, excited to dive into some of those today, I'm sure, to help you get to that million a month milestone.

Ali Abdaal 2:53 Nice. Okay, so, um, I first read The E-Myth Revisited in, like, 2019. This was two years into starting my YouTube channel, and that was the book that really gave me the first, like, like, the terminology of systems.

Matt Gray 3:05 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 3:06 Where I was like, like, I'd, I'd had a business when I was in med school, sort of 2012 to 2019, and knew nothing about hiring. I was doing all the admin myself and getting super overwhelmed, and it just, I didn't even have the... It's, it's like in, in my brain, there wasn't even a room for, like, systems or, like, business or anything like that, and I never really thought to read any books about it. And then seven years later, I discovered The E-Myth Revisited, and I was like, oh my God, like, I've re- I've, I've been missing out on so much valuable insight by not having read books about this stuff already. And that was the book that really told me that, oh shit, I can delegate and I can hire and I can sort of build a sort of franchise model around my business so that if, uh, someone else were to try and replicate it, it's like, what are the systems and the standard operating procedures and stuff? And so really, that was my first introduction to the world of systems. How, how did you, how did you get, get into the world of, like, system, like, business as a system?

Matt Gray 4:00 Yeah. So like you, I'm an avid reader, whether it's books like, you know, Systemology, E-Myth Revisited, Traction, uh, you know, Rockefeller Habits, the list goes on. I'd be lying if I said it was just some, like, linear process. You know, just from kind of being in the mix of building businesses, going through the struggles, inevitably, any time something went wrong, I realized it was because we didn't have it documented properly. We didn't actually know what the smooth process for that thing was, who the owner was, who was accountable for it. And so after kind of, you know, running into these blocks, making these mistakes, you know, I eventually started to realize if I could just have, you know, from the starting point of a customer's journey all the way through to the promise that we're looking to deliver on, um, and then through to referral, all sort of systemized, all processed, um, selfishly, it would just lead to a lot less headaches. And I think one thing that we're both into is, like, aside from building businesses, I think we love living vibrant lives. We love to travel. We have different hobbies. I enjoy playing paddle tennis and hanging out with friends and traveling around. And so, you know, m- the more my business is systemized, the more it's just like a calm company, the more sustainable it is long term, and the more I can selfishly just go do other things in my life that I enjoy doing.

Ali Abdaal 5:15 Nice.

Matt Gray 5:15 So yeah, that's been a bit of my journey.

Ali Abdaal 5:17 Sick. Okay, so, um, let's say

Ali Abdaal 5:21 I were to, you know, w- we, we were to somehow end up doing, like, a one-on-one coaching session where I was like, "Hey, Matt, can you help me grow my business?"

Matt Gray 5:30 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 5:31 How, how would we, how, how would we go from there? [laughs]

Matt Gray 5:34 Yeah, so what business do you wanna start with, I guess?

Ali Abdaal 5:38 I guess kind of my, I think of my business as, uh, my content and courses kind of thing.

Matt Gray 5:45 Sure.

Ali Abdaal 5:46 So we've got kind of the YouTube channel. We've got social media. We've got the podcast. We've got my email list. And then the course that we sell right now is our YouTuber Academy, where we've got a $1 product, which is like a self-paced, very quick course on how to start a YouTube channel. That upsells people into $1,000 product, which is a self-paced course on how to Kickstart and grow your YouTube channel, and then we have a YouTube Accelerator, which is a more higher ticket, like, at the moment, 5K a year, but we're upping the prices depending on when people hear this. And that's, like, a 12-month program that has support from my team, and weekly office hours from my team, and I do a monthly Q&A. And we have, like, account managers, and we're working with Ethical Scaling to build custom success for that. Uh, we have... So we have that vertical for products, i.e., helping people start, grow, and monetize YouTube channels, but we are about to launch a productivity thing. At the moment, it's tentatively titled Productivity Lab, and we want it to be, like, a sort of 1 to 2K a year, like, community-type thing, where the pitch is sort of like Peloton for productivity.

Matt Gray 6:49 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 6:49 A community for ambitious entrepreneurs, creators, and professionals looking to double their productivity, focus, and consistency so they can do more of what matters to them in work and in life. Where the idea is, like, it would be... There, there, there would be, like, a live cohort element where I would teach a course in productivity for the first four weeks, uh, probably just as a one-off, and then make that evergreen. And then we would have 12 months where every day there are Zoom co-working sessions. Every week, there's a facilitated weekly review, a monthly reflection, a quarterly planning session, uh, regular workshops on, like, vision and goal-setting for your personal and professional life. Just something that can... That's s- sort of t- targeted at, like, yeah, entrepreneurs, professionals, and creators who want to, I guess, double their productivity. We're in the process of, like, building that up to launch it probably end of Q1 2024. Um, at the moment, most of the business revenue comes from the YouTuber stuff. Um, we do ab- We'll, we'll probably do about a million from our content arm, a million pounds, so, like, $1.3 million, and probably around 2.5 million pounds from the YouTuber stuff.

Matt Gray 7:51 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 7:52 And we're hoping to do the, do at least 2.5 million from the productivity thing or stuff, and that's just sort of been the, the... That's the sort of back-of-the-envelope math that I'm doing to get, try and get us to 10 million.

Matt Gray 8:05 Okay.

Ali Abdaal 8:05 If any of that makes sense.

Matt Gray 8:06 Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. So appreciate all the context and, yeah, just your vulnerability, too, over the years of just being open with your numbers and allowing others to learn from sort of the specifics.

Ali Abdaal 8:14 Yeah.

Matt Gray 8:14 'Cause a lot of people, I think, are nervous to just, like, divulge the in and out, so appreciate that. So first things first, I think when we start to about think, you know, systemizing a business, it can feel a little bit, like, daunting and overwhelming, right? And so I like to use a couple principles to start off with, which is, like, number one, the 80/20 rule. Like, what's, like, the 20% of the business we can systemize to reduce, like, 80% of the headaches and make this thing run pretty damn smooth? And then the second aspect is, before moving on to anything new, let's make sure that just the existing foundation is running like a well-oiled machine, so that we almost afford ourselves the ability, the time, the freedom to, yeah, either do it, doing things we love, or building that next business arm to get yourself to, say, a million a month. 'Cause the last thing that we want is to start up this whole Productivity Lab side of your business, and then right while that's getting up and going, the other side of the business just starts falling apart.

Ali Abdaal 9:11 Yeah.

Matt Gray 9:12 And now you're just burning it on both ends and going crazy. And, you know, I think it's oftentimes a recipe for burnout. And so I think to start with, let's just talk about sort of that core journey that someone in your existing business-

Ali Abdaal 9:28 Yep

Matt Gray 9:28 ... would go through. So if we put yourself in the actual customer's shoes-

Ali Abdaal 9:32 Yep

Matt Gray 9:33 ... right? So I'm someone that maybe has first arrived on Ali's YouTube channel because it showed up on my homepage of YouTube, and I clicked on a video.

Ali Abdaal 9:43 Mm.

Matt Gray 9:44 What's that journey that that person goes through from, "Oh, this Ali Abda- Abdal guy is really interesting, and I love this productivity video I've seen," all the way through to, you know, the end of that journey. What's that kind of... What's one example of where someone would go?

Ali Abdaal 10:00 Nice. That is... That's just a really, a really good question which I've never once thought about, so thank you for that. [laughs]

Matt Gray 10:06 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 10:06 I'm just, like, thinking, damn, I should, I should really think about this more. Um, okay. So what's one example of the journey? One example of the journey, they see one of my videos pop up on the homepage. They, like, watch the video. Maybe they'll, I don't know, watch some percentage of the video, and then they're like, "Okay, cool. Close YouTube. Forget about it. Move on to something else." And then because they've watched a bit of my video, the next time they go on YouTube, maybe the algorithm recommends them another video. And so n- now they're in the sort of the Ali Abdaal ecosystem as it relates to the YouTube algorithm, and they're watching a handful of my videos. At some point, one of two things will happen. Um, most likely, uh, they'll just continue on as a, a regular viewer or whatever.

Matt Gray 10:43 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 10:44 But they might see a plug for my email list, which is like, "Hey, I, you know, send emails every now and then, every week. Sign up to my newsletter," or something. Unlikely. They might sign up to one of fo- They might sign up for one of our lead magnets.

Matt Gray 10:57 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 10:57 So we have a video that's gone viral this year called How I Manage My Time with a Trident Calendar Method, this year or last year, whatever, um, where people enter their email, and then there's a little tick box, "Would you also like to sign up to the email list?" Um, and then I think they get the template, and it asks them a few questions, "Hey, are you interested in, like, productivity? Are you interested in this? Are you interested in growing your YouTube channel?" kind of thing. Um, or they'll happen, happen to stumble across one of my videos around how to start and grow a YouTube channel, and within those videos there'll be a link to our YouTuber Academy, and they might click on that to be like, "Ooh, this is kind of interesting." So either they'll end up directly going to the YouTuber Academy website, or they'll end up on the email list, or they'll end up signing up to one of our lead magnets, some of which are productivity related, some of which are YouTube related, some of which are, like, random, like, journaling stuff, just 'cause we thought, hey, might as well. And they'll end up on the email list somehow. And then in theory they will be post-sign-up segmented into, based on their interests, into they, they like productivity, they like YouTube, they like both, they like entrepreneurship. I think we have a few buckets, which as I say, I'm, like, unsure of-

Matt Gray 11:59 It's okay

Ali Abdaal 11:59 ... so I need to look into that.

Matt Gray 12:00 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 12:00 And if they end up in the YouTube thing, then we send them, I think, some nurturing emails-

Matt Gray 12:06 Mm-hmm

Ali Abdaal 12:06 ... that have a pitch then, "Hey, would you like to sign up for one of the courses?"

Matt Gray 12:09 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 12:10 And then hopefully if they're a complete beginner to YouTube and they're like, "Oh, actually I've wanted to start a YouTube channel," they sign up to our $1 course. Which gives them the option to upsell into the $1,000 course. Um, and along the way, hopefully they'll see an Apply Now button for our YouTube Accelerator, where they... if, if they are an adult with money, they might be like, "Oh, actually, you know, it's really quite useful to have, like, Ali's team holding my hand through the whole process." And then they might apply for our accelerator program.

Matt Gray 12:32 Perfect. Yeah, so as I'm hearing you say all this, right, it's easy to kind of pull out from that, like, the core client journey-

Ali Abdaal 12:39 Yep

Matt Gray 12:40 ... and s- maybe, like, nine of the core systems that matter there.

Ali Abdaal 12:45 Yep.

Matt Gray 12:45 That if you can nail those, like 80% of the battle is won, right?

Ali Abdaal 12:50 Mm-hmm.

Matt Gray 12:50 So starting off, you have your YouTube system, right, which you know very well.

Ali Abdaal 12:56 Yeah, we've got a really competitive advantage-

Matt Gray 12:57 I think that's your competitive advantage right there.

Ali Abdaal 12:58 Yeah. [laughs]

Matt Gray 12:58 Right? So like, yeah, thumbnails, everything that you teach in Part-Time YouTuber Academy, like that side you got down. The question too is like, where's that documented, right? I think it's in Notion, which is I think typically your, knowing you, that's kind of like-

Ali Abdaal 13:09 Yeah

Matt Gray 13:10 ... one of your hubs. And then who owns that? So that down the road you're working on something new and something blows up on YouTube or something goes wrong-

Ali Abdaal 13:18 Yeah

Matt Gray 13:18 ... you know to go to that owner.

Ali Abdaal 13:19 Yep.

Matt Gray 13:20 Maybe that's Angus on your team, maybe that's someone else.

Ali Abdaal 13:21 Yeah, so that's Tintin, our YouTube producer.

Matt Gray 13:22 Tintin.

Ali Abdaal 13:23 That's a sick system. That's, like, dialed. Well, well, well, it's not dialed. We, we keep on trying impro- and trying-

Matt Gray 13:26 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 13:26 ... to improve it, but it's our bread and butter, and I'm very happy with our YouTube system.

Matt Gray 13:30 Cool. So Tintin owns that. That's documented in Notion. That one's down. Second aspect then, it, you talk a lot about lead magnets, right?

Ali Abdaal 13:39 Yeah.

Matt Gray 13:40 So each one of these different videos you have oftentimes leads to something like a ScoreApp page or a different landing page maybe in ConvertKit, where you're driving people then to that unique lead magnet. If it's the Castle Method, you drive them to a Castle Method for free. If it's the Trident Method, you're driving them to that for free. If it's a different personality quiz or something around productivity quizzes, you're driving that on the ScoreApp. So you've got a bunch of these, and it can sound a little bit amorphous and sort of like, wow, there's a lot of these going on.

Ali Abdaal 14:06 Mm-hmm.

Matt Gray 14:07 But the truth is, like, it's just a lead magnet system-

Ali Abdaal 14:10 Yep

Matt Gray 14:10 ... that, okay, the YouTube video's been made. Are we driving them to an existing lead magnet, or are we creating a new lead magnet for this thing? So what is our lead magnet system? Where is that documented?

Ali Abdaal 14:21 Yep.

Matt Gray 14:22 And who's the owner of the lead magnet system?

Ali Abdaal 14:23 Yeah. So it's so funny that you say that, 'cause literally as of about a month ago, we moved one of our team members who was previously on the podcast and had been working on the podcast for, like, two-plus years to become the owner of the lead magnet system.

Matt Gray 14:36 Great.

Ali Abdaal 14:36 'Cause we, we were like, "Hey, Amber, we, we need to take e- the email list really s- like, super seriously." Amber didn't have much experience, but she's absolutely smashed it with the podcast over the last two years, super detail-oriented, like, super quick learner. So we're just like, "All right, take these courses, read these books, talk to these people, and get up to speed on how email works."

Matt Gray 14:53 Great.

Ali Abdaal 14:53 And now she owns our lead magnet system and has documented it in Notion, where we have, we now have-

Matt Gray 14:57 Perfect

Ali Abdaal 14:57 ... for the first time a database of all of our lead magnets, and she's leading the charge to be like, "Okay, guys, what are the new lead magnets we wanna create, and why do we wanna create them, and, like, what's the goal of the lead magnets?" and all of this sort of stuff.

Matt Gray 15:07 Cool.

Ali Abdaal 15:07 So we have... are in the, are in the process of building out a lead magnet system.

Matt Gray 15:11 Great. And then the one aspect there too that I think is useful is... So all that's amazing, is then what is the one core metric that would determine that person's success? So as an example, with lead magnets, you're plugging these into YouTube videos. You may know that, okay, traditionally, when we've plugged that lead magnet in two strategic spots in a 15-minute video, we drive approximately, you know, 10% of viewers to signups for that lead magnet. We want you to improve that metric and get it to 13%, let's just say.

Ali Abdaal 15:48 Hmm.

Matt Gray 15:49 Right? And so you may know what is your steady state lead magnet conversion from YouTube video-

Ali Abdaal 15:54 Yeah

Matt Gray 15:54 ... and try and give them now a stretch goal of now that you're solely focused on this area, we'd like to see that 10% improve to 13%, which over a year that, you know, that could equal, you know, hundreds of thousands of-

Ali Abdaal 16:08 Yeah

Matt Gray 16:08 ... newsletter signups.

Ali Abdaal 16:09 Absolutely. That's a really good point. What is the metric? Yeah, a, a, a question I've been thinking about a lot with a lot of areas of our business is what is the metric that matters here?

Matt Gray 16:18 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 16:19 'Cause for example, for lead magnet stuff and for the email list, we were thinking... So we have, like, a weekly scorecard, which actually I might bring up the laptop and just do a screen share-

Matt Gray 16:27 Yeah, of course

Ali Abdaal 16:27 ... so people, we can, we can bring it up.

Matt Gray 16:28 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 16:28 But, uh, so we have, like, a weekly scorecard where, um, based on the traction principles-

Matt Gray 16:33 Yep

Ali Abdaal 16:33 ... uh, we track all these metrics week on week, and one thing we don't really track yet, which we are now starting to, is, uh, like, how many emails, how many email subs came from which lead magnets and which sources.

Matt Gray 16:49 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 16:49 We have all of those in, like, some combination of Google Analytics, Looker Studio, ConvertKit Analytics. They're all over the, all over the place.

Matt Gray 16:55 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 16:55 But just getting them all in one place is, like, the job for the next, like, week for the team.

Matt Gray 16:59 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 17:00 And then UTM linking all these lead magnets, because our social media people are also driving traffic to some of these lead magnets.

Matt Gray 17:05 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 17:05 'Cause one thing that we've thought about is that... Actually, I'm cur- I'm curious to get your take on this. Someone who subscribes to Sunday Snippets, my email newsletter, versus someone who is an actual lead. I was speaking to, um, Eric Partaker, I think you know about this.

Matt Gray 17:21 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 17:21 And he was like, uh, he, he, his, his view on this was that a lead is someone who's expressed explicit educational intent for a, uh, in, in the vertical of a product that you actually have.

Matt Gray 17:31 Yes.

Ali Abdaal 17:32 So for us, it's like if they sign up to our YouTube crash course or our Grow Your YouTube Channel scorecard, all that kind of stuff makes them a lead for our YouTuber stuff. But if they're just the people who sign up to Ali Abdaal's newsletter, or if they've signed up to, for example, The Castle Method, which is a business thing, and we don't yet have a business product, then do they count as a lead? Do they just count as a subscriber? What's the metric that matters here?

Matt Gray 17:53 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 17:54 Or I've just thrown this at you. Any, any thoughts? [laughs]

Matt Gray 17:56 Yeah, so let's get that actually at the end.

Ali Abdaal 17:58 Okay.

Matt Gray 17:58 Um, because I think we can talk to that more in, like, the dashboard system-

Ali Abdaal 18:01 Ooh

Matt Gray 18:01 ... which will be, like, the final one.

Ali Abdaal 18:02 Okay, sick.

Matt Gray 18:03 So the next aspect, um, after nailing the lead magnet system, which we talked about, again, having what's the source of truth, and for you, I think it's Notion. The second aspect is then who's the owner? And then what's the core metrics of success? Keep it simple, right?

Ali Abdaal 18:19 Yeah.

Matt Gray 18:19 If we have those three things for each of these systems, like, we're, we're moving in a nice direction.

Ali Abdaal 18:23 Yeah, we really are.

Matt Gray 18:23 So the next one then is, okay-

Ali Abdaal 18:24 I guess for the lead magnet system, it would be sort of weekly leads, and we can, we can just-

Matt Gray 18:27 I think from there it goes, like, to your newsletter system.

Ali Abdaal 18:30 Oh, okay. Right. Yeah.

Matt Gray 18:30 'Cause as they're signing up now to, like, the newsletter-

Ali Abdaal 18:32 Sure, yeah

Matt Gray 18:32 ... they're in there.

Ali Abdaal 18:33 Yeah

Matt Gray 18:33 And we'll keep going down the flow.

Ali Abdaal 18:35 Yeah.

Matt Gray 18:35 So then it becomes, okay, well, who's the owner of the newsletter?

Ali Abdaal 18:38 Yep.

Matt Gray 18:38 Who's owning the newsletter calendar-

Ali Abdaal 18:40 Yep

Matt Gray 18:40 ... over the next bit? Because you've also got the brand side that gets integrated, so it can't just be this thing where week to week you're just scrambling per newsletter. Oftentimes you need to have a level of planning there, uh, so that, yeah, things are organized and you can kind of see in the future, okay, hey, these are the next, like, 12 weeks of newsletters coming out.

Ali Abdaal 18:57 Yep.

Matt Gray 18:57 So who's the owner there, and, like, what would you say is the core metric? Oftentimes it's something around, like, say, click-through rate.

Ali Abdaal 19:02 Mm. Nice. Yeah, so at the moment the owner is Nadia. Uh, and she sorts out the upload calendar, puts the sponsorship in the thing, sends me a Slack message each week being like, "Hey, Ali, here's the ConvertKit template ready for you to populate." And then every Sunday, usually every Sunday, I sit down and write the newsletter. I didn't do it yesterday 'cause I was here and busy with stuff, and so I need to do that today at some point. Uh, so sometimes it becomes not really a Sunday email but a Monday or Tuesday email, depending on how, like, busy I am. And we're always like, "You know, it would be nice if we were a few weeks ahead," but then I don't write things that are a few weeks ahead. And I think the team have written some sort of backup options if, like, Ali really doesn't wanna do a newsletter one week. But Nadia owns that system. The metric, well, I mean, we track subscribers on the Sunday Snippets newsletter.

Matt Gray 19:47 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 19:47 We track open rate. We track click-through rate. But we don't think to... Like, none of these really have a target as such because it's also, like, my personal newsletter, and so how should I be thinking about, like, uh, yeah-

Matt Gray 20:04 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 20:04 ... metricizing the newsletter, if that makes sense.

Matt Gray 20:06 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 20:06 Yeah.

Matt Gray 20:06 So I just think with any of these, you know, it's part art, part science, right? So there's not like, oh my gosh, this is the way it has to be and I've been missing out all over these years, right?

Ali Abdaal 20:15 Yeah.

Matt Gray 20:15 I think my personal approach to this stuff is, you know, if you have the data, great. If you don't, like, let's back an app in it. Like, how many newsletter subscribers have we gotten each of the last, say, three months?

Ali Abdaal 20:28 Mm.

Matt Gray 20:28 And then what is a reasonable growth rate of that to hit on a monthly basis, you know, for the next year?

Ali Abdaal 20:34 Yeah.

Matt Gray 20:35 Right? So that we have kind of targets and actuals-

Ali Abdaal 20:37 Yep

Matt Gray 20:38 ... over the next year, and we know, okay, like, we're looking to hit 12,000 in February, 13,000 in March, so on, and, like, where do we get to? Um, because the success of, um, you know, the lead magnets, the newsletters, and you're obviously growing a lot on YouTube too.

Ali Abdaal 20:53 Yeah.

Matt Gray 20:53 So we should be funneling more people-

Ali Abdaal 20:55 Mm

Matt Gray 20:55 ... to the newsletter over time. It shouldn't stay stagnant.

Ali Abdaal 20:58 Yeah. That's a good point. Um, yeah, so I g- I guess a metric for Nadia could be newsletter growth.

Matt Gray 21:07 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 21:07 But Nadia doesn't really... She's more involved in, like, the system for newsletter creation, which is different to, I think, I would think it would be Amber who's on the lead magnet system-

Matt Gray 21:17 Yep

Ali Abdaal 21:17 ... which would be more newsletter growth.

Matt Gray 21:18 Yep.

Ali Abdaal 21:19 So maybe for Nadia, it's like, hey, let's just keep open rate at, like, 50% if we can-

Matt Gray 21:22 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 21:22 ... or something like that. And then if we-

Matt Gray 21:23 There's that, and then there's also things like it could just be... Like, I like that you're thinking about, like, SMART goals, like specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound.

Ali Abdaal 21:30 Yeah.

Matt Gray 21:30 The other side too is, yeah, maybe it's just that at all times there's a 12-week schedule and calendar that is made.

Ali Abdaal 21:38 Mm.

Matt Gray 21:39 And they are the source of truth to always know that, like, there's 12 weeks organized, like, they're ahead of the ball so that, you know, as we're planning different launches and everything, it's very easy to know that, like, oh, the newsletter stuff is not some scrambling thing.

Ali Abdaal 21:51 Yeah.

Matt Gray 21:51 We know exactly where we wanna plug these things, uh, into. So it could be something like that. Yeah, it could be open rates. It could be a combination of these things.

Ali Abdaal 21:58 Okay, cool. So we've got YouTube system into lead magnet system into newsletter system.

Matt Gray 22:03 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 22:04 Um-

Matt Gray 22:05 And so workshopping this with you, I think the next stage that you may consider off the top is now your, like, lead system.

Ali Abdaal 22:13 Mm.

Matt Gray 22:14 Or, like, it could be called a couple things. Your lead system. It could be called, like, your low-ticket product system, your funnel system.

Ali Abdaal 22:21 Yep.

Matt Gray 22:21 Any one of these, you know, we could workshop around. This is where now someone's seeing the newsletter or seeing your content and now kind of raising their hand and becoming a lead-

Ali Abdaal 22:32 Mm

Matt Gray 22:32 ... and getting now into one of the streams of products you have, whether it's the $1, $100, $1,000-

Ali Abdaal 22:38 Yeah

Matt Gray 22:38 ... whatever it may be. And now, as Eric had mentioned to you, like, that's where we start, like, these now people are leads.

Ali Abdaal 22:44 Mm.

Matt Gray 22:44 So we're taking people from the broad audience of YouTube. They've been in the newsletter, which is still a pretty massive audience of people that just may be interested in all these thoughts week to week.

Ali Abdaal 22:52 Yeah.

Matt Gray 22:52 And now they're sort of raising their hand going, "No, I actually wanna potentially purchase something from you." And so it's that person that's managing things like what are those low-ticket products, what are those email sequences, what are the text message sequences, if there are any eventually. I don't think you do that yet. And what updates need to be made to the existing low-ticket products, and what potentially new low-ticket products need to be launched or are we considering launching? Which we don't need to get into that too, too much, but follow, follow me so far?

Ali Abdaal 23:26 This episode of Deep Dive is very kindly sponsored by YNAB, which stands for You Need A Budget. Now, for many people, money is a cause of guilt and anxiety. You're never entirely sure where all your money goes, and you're left feeling guilty about purchases, big or small. Money is often associated with restriction, fear, and uncertainty, but your money is an extension of you in many ways, and it's obviously not ideal to feel so bad about it. Now, YNAB is an app that's helping millions of people change their mindset around money. It's built on four simple habits which could transform the way you think about money. These habits are, firstly, give every dollar a job, two, embrace your true expenses, three, roll with the punches, and four, age your money. Now, these habits are actually really simple. Giving every dollar a job basically just means that you plan out the different things you want to spend your money on after you've been paid. Then all you have to do is stick to the plan knowing that you already have enough to cover everything. Your true expenses refers to those big non-monthly outgoings, like trying to buy a car or a holiday deposit. You want to break these down, and you want to save in advance so that hopefully you're not hit by a big charge that you were not expecting. And one of the things that I really love about YNAB is their idea of rolling with the punches. 'Cause sometimes life does throw things at you, like a piece of tech breaks and you need to have it fixed, or you get your stuff stolen from the back of your car, like happened to me, or a pipe bursts and you have to call a plumber. YNAB helps you set money aside in advance to help cushion you from life's unexpected expenses. They also recognize that we can feel really guilty for spending money, so if you do spend more than you planned, that's totally okay. Just move your money to wherever it's needed. It's yours at the end of the day. And you can even age your money, spend less than you earn, and have a nice stack of saved money waiting for your bills as they come in, not the other way around. In an ideal world, money really shouldn't be scary or stressful for us, and we actually have way more control over our money than we often think. So if you're interested, you can try out YNAB today, and you can see if this approach to budgeting can make a difference in the way that you think about money. So thank you again, YNAB, for sponsoring this episode of Deep Dive. This episode of Deep Dive is brought to you by Brilliant. Brilliant is an amazing learning resource that allows you to level up your skills and your knowledge and understanding in maths and data science and computer science. Now, what I like most about Brilliant is that it's a super fun and engaging way to learn. It's not based on dry lectures and dry theory. Instead, what it's based on is engaging and interactive quizzes and games and problems to solve. And so you try and solve a problem, and then they give you the information you need, and through the process of getting that information, you then learn enough to be able to solve the problem. And so it's a really engaging and dynamic way to learn that's actually really fun. Now, some of my favorite courses on Brilliant are the computer science ones. When I was applying to medical school back in the day, I was torn between medicine and computer science. And even though I went for med school, there was always a part of me that really wanted to learn more about computer science. And so thanks to the courses on Brilliant, I've been able to satisfy that curiosity, and I've been able to learn the fundamentals of computer science, like algorithms and programming with Python. And actually recently, they've added a bunch of AI-themed things, including a course on how large language models are built, which helps you understand a little bit more about how things like ChatGPT work, which is pretty cool. They've also got a really good course called Thinking in Code, which is like a sort of computer scientist's way of looking at the world, and it shows how you can apply thinking in code or like code-like thinking or programmer thinking to problems in real life. So even if you don't intend to become a computer scientist, there are things that you can take away from that course that can just help you level up in life. And with data skills getting more and more in demand, the data analysis courses are really good as well. So for example, Data Analysis Fundamentals teaches you to draw fascinating conclusions from the data that you're given and could actually transform the way that you think. Whatever your interest or skill level, Brilliant is for you. It matches you up with the courses that best suit your ability. So whether you're a complete beginner or you're a pro when it comes to computers, for example, they'll definitely have something for you. If you're interested, then head over to brilliant.org/deepdive, and that will let you sign up to a completely free 30-day trial. And if you're one of the first 200 people to use that link, you'll also get 20% off the annual premium subscription. So thank you so much, Brilliant, for sponsoring this episode. Th- this is just, like, like mind-blowing to me because, like, all you've basically done is just, like, name systems for each step of the process, and already it just feels like I have way more clarity.

Matt Gray 27:14 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 27:14 The fact that you were just like, "Oh, yeah, there's these nine systems." I'm like, "Are there?" And it's like, "Yeah, there's the YouTube system." I'm like, "Yeah, that's a system." There's the, you know, the LeMag system. Yeah, the system, you know, the system for these letters lead them. Like, oh, just thinking of it as a system, like a, uh, sort of a, a system that's strung together with other systems-

Matt Gray 27:30 Mm-hmm

Ali Abdaal 27:30 ... just makes the whole thing feel a lot less black boxy, a lot more manageable.

Matt Gray 27:34 Good.

Ali Abdaal 27:34 Um, so that's just, like, nice on a, on a sort of meta level. I guess, okay, so for our leads system, this is where it starts to get a bit muddy because we have, like, Jakob, our marketing guy. We have Gareth, our product guy. We have Saf, who is helping b- who's building our CRM. He's like our sales and marketing RevOps kind of guy. We've just transferred to HubSpot as of, like, a month ago and are trying to use that to track leads and stuff. But now we're running into the issue of, like, well, we don't want to bring every newsletter subscriber into HubSpot because that's freaking expensive. [laughs] And, like, what if we bring everyone who's put their hand up into HubSpot? That's still really expensive. Hmm, should we pay someone for, for HubSpot? And we, we start to get into these ROI calculations. My instinct is that we should just bring all leads, official leads into HubSpot. Um, and I'm... Yeah, between Gareth on product, Jakob on marketing generally, and Saf on, like, sales and marketing RevOps, I'm not like... I, I wouldn't be able to say who is the owner of the lead system.

Matt Gray 28:28 Okay.

Ali Abdaal 28:29 Do you have a sense of... Yeah.

Matt Gray 28:30 Yeah, so it's a great... You know, this, this comes up, right? Like, this is natural where as we get in, some of them are super clear, like YouTube. Tintin obviously-

Ali Abdaal 28:39 Yeah

Matt Gray 28:39 ... is our guy.

Ali Abdaal 28:39 Yeah.

Matt Gray 28:40 And now we're into, um, more like the funnel.

Ali Abdaal 28:42 Yeah.

Matt Gray 28:42 And we're a little bit confused there as to who the person... That's actually a great part of this whole sort of thinking exercise, right? Is like, oh, damn, like, who actually is owning that thing?

Ali Abdaal 28:51 Yeah.

Matt Gray 28:52 And maybe what we have right now is, like, a few different stakeholders that are generally aligned-

Ali Abdaal 28:57 Mm-hmm

Matt Gray 28:57 ... but also are sort of sometimes swimming in different directions-

Ali Abdaal 29:00 Yes, 100%

Matt Gray 29:00 ... and are not totally aligned in their thinking.

Ali Abdaal 29:02 Exactly, yeah.

Matt Gray 29:02 So, you know, that may be cause to like, hey, we need to create a bit of a funnel system here. Let's get everyone in the room. Let's determine who's the core owner of this, and then almost like the sub-owners maybe of the more minute parts of it.

Ali Abdaal 29:17 Yeah.

Matt Gray 29:17 Right? So let's decide on what is the core metric there in terms of maybe leads per month.

Ali Abdaal 29:24 Yeah.

Matt Gray 29:24 Right? Let's determine who's like the overarching, like, when one guy is saying, "Hey, we should do this," and another guy is saying, "No, no, no, no, like, we're not using HubSpot and piping those leads in there yet. It's too expensive. We're doing this."

Ali Abdaal 29:37 Yeah.

Matt Gray 29:37 Who's the one that can just say, "No, we're doing this"?

Ali Abdaal 29:40 Yeah.

Matt Gray 29:40 And it's not you.

Ali Abdaal 29:41 Yeah.

Matt Gray 29:41 Right? It's like that owner needs to be able to say, "Hey, I respect both these directions, but we're doing this."

Ali Abdaal 29:46 Nice.

Matt Gray 29:46 Right? So-

Ali Abdaal 29:47 Yeah, that would be so nice. [laughs]

Matt Gray 29:48 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 29:48 That would be a breath of fresh air.

Matt Gray 29:50 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 29:50 Yeah.

Matt Gray 29:50 So we need to kind of... We don't need to solve that right now, right?

Ali Abdaal 29:52 Yeah.

Matt Gray 29:52 But I think in a room, you, you've got a great team and you guys are all super close and you guys go on, like, team trips every quarter.

Ali Abdaal 29:57 Yeah.

Matt Gray 29:57 So maybe this is a good topic for the next team trip you guys are on.

Ali Abdaal 30:00 Yeah.

Matt Gray 30:01 Uh, so figuring out who is owning this sort of like funnel system, right?

Ali Abdaal 30:07 I'm just gonna think out loud here. So lead, lead magnets get some people onto Sunday Snippets the newsletter, but also get some people to become leads-

Matt Gray 30:18 Mm-hmm

Ali Abdaal 30:18 ... uh, by raising their hand for like a YouTube product or a productivity product or whatever. Um, to what extent then would Amber, who is our lead magnet system owner and responsible for growing the email list generally- Should, w- to, to what extent would she be also then in charge of, like, the leads system? Like, what is, what is the point of a lead system?

Matt Gray 30:39 The, well, the, where what I'm categorizing, let's just call it the funnel system to be clear.

Ali Abdaal 30:43 Funnel system. Okay, cool. Yeah, funnel system.

Matt Gray 30:44 Those people are then taking the, you know, people that have raised their hands-

Ali Abdaal 30:48 Yes

Matt Gray 30:48 ... and are now leads, and now they are now directing them to the different products in our product suite.

Ali Abdaal 30:55 Oh, fine.

Matt Gray 30:55 So some of these people are determined to be, like, for the $1 product, and they help facilitate that through email sequences. Some people are determined that they're right for the $100, the $1,000, the new Productivity Lab product you have coming out, right?

Ali Abdaal 31:06 Yeah. Okay.

Matt Gray 31:07 There's this whole sort of architecture of different email sequences, hand raisers.

Ali Abdaal 31:12 Yeah.

Matt Gray 31:13 You know, just-

Ali Abdaal 31:14 Nice

Matt Gray 31:14 ... kind of nurturing that goes on there-

Ali Abdaal 31:16 Yeah

Matt Gray 31:16 ... that people are responsible for on your team.

Ali Abdaal 31:19 Sick.

Matt Gray 31:19 And that someone now, it's like, "Okay, I've brought you that individual. Now you need to now filter them to the correct product that we have," and that's a whole other beast of a thing.

Ali Abdaal 31:28 Yeah. Okay, fine. So Amber's job would be to put the leads into the system.

Matt Gray 31:33 Yes.

Ali Abdaal 31:33 And once they are in the system, once they're in, let's say, HubSpot-

Matt Gray 31:35 Yes

Ali Abdaal 31:35 ... then someone else on the team takes over, and it's like, "All right. I've got this."

Matt Gray 31:38 Yes.

Ali Abdaal 31:39 And that person is building out, like, the email flows and the-

Matt Gray 31:41 Yes

Ali Abdaal 31:41 ... if/then automations and all that stuff-

Matt Gray 31:43 Exactly. Exactly

Ali Abdaal 31:44 ... to funnel them into the right place.

Matt Gray 31:45 Yeah, all those ConvertKit automations that I think you likely have.

Ali Abdaal 31:48 Yeah. Okay, so it's probably gonna be-

Matt Gray 31:49 They're like the owner of ConvertKit.

Ali Abdaal 31:50 Yeah, yeah.

Matt Gray 31:50 And they are just-

Ali Abdaal 31:51 ConvertKit, he owns all those things.

Matt Gray 31:52 Yes.

Ali Abdaal 31:52 He's absolutely, absolutely sick at that.

Matt Gray 31:54 Exactly.

Ali Abdaal 31:54 So he would own, like, the funnel system.

Matt Gray 31:55 Exactly.

Ali Abdaal 31:56 Nice.

Matt Gray 31:56 Exactly.

Ali Abdaal 31:56 And then you said determine the metric that matters. So presumably it's not, like, number of leads generated from week because that would be Amber's lead gen metric.

Matt Gray 32:05 Exactly. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 32:05 So it would be something else. What, what, what could that metric be?

Matt Gray 32:08 I mean, inevitably, I think that if they're doing a good job, there's a level of, like, how many of these leads are we converting to paying customers?

Ali Abdaal 32:17 Oh, yeah. Nice.

Matt Gray 32:17 Right?

Ali Abdaal 32:17 Yeah.

Matt Gray 32:18 Um, because inevitably, if they're doing a good job, these email sequences filter people into the right product for them.

Ali Abdaal 32:24 Yeah.

Matt Gray 32:24 And those people convert.

Ali Abdaal 32:27 Yeah.

Matt Gray 32:27 And if they, whether it's a conversion rate from lead to product-

Ali Abdaal 32:30 Yeah

Matt Gray 32:31 ... could be one. Um, second, it could just be straight revenue.

Ali Abdaal 32:34 Yep.

Matt Gray 32:34 Right? Like, if they're just, you know, doing a good job and their sequences are correct-

Ali Abdaal 32:38 Yeah

Matt Gray 32:38 ... they're ideally just getting people monetized from lead to transaction.

Ali Abdaal 32:43 Nice. Yeah, so in, in our case, two metrics come to mind. One is just straight revenue, uh, but straight revenue from, uh, products that people could have just, just, like, purchased with a credit card, but also number of sales calls booked for our high-ticket thing, which, or, or, or number of applications received for our high-ticket thing-

Matt Gray 33:02 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 33:02 ... which would also be, like, uh, an at, at the end point of the funnel system, I guess.

Matt Gray 33:06 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 33:06 So either they make, either they convert into revenue, or they apply for the thing.

Matt Gray 33:10 Yeah. And what you could have, too, is just, like, an overall, like, revenue number-

Ali Abdaal 33:13 Yeah

Matt Gray 33:13 ... but then be able to, like, double-click into that-

Ali Abdaal 33:15 Yeah

Matt Gray 33:15 ... and see, like, okay, where is this coming from, right?

Ali Abdaal 33:18 Yeah.

Matt Gray 33:18 So it's like, oh, like, how much of this is the dollar product?

Ali Abdaal 33:20 Yeah, exactly.

Matt Gray 33:21 The $100-

Ali Abdaal 33:21 That kind of thing

Matt Gray 33:22 ... the $1,000, so on and so forth, right?

Ali Abdaal 33:24 Yeah. The funnel's... Man, this is good shit. Okay.

Matt Gray 33:26 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 33:27 So the funnel system. Yeah.

Matt Gray 33:27 So the next one, I think we're on number six, I hope-

Ali Abdaal 33:29 [laughs]

Matt Gray 33:30 ... is the sales system.

Ali Abdaal 33:32 Yep.

Matt Gray 33:32 Right? So now you have people that are now been piped into HubSpot. Um, some people have converted to a low-ticket product, which is-

Ali Abdaal 33:39 Yeah

Matt Gray 33:39 ... handled in the funnel system-

Ali Abdaal 33:40 Yeah

Matt Gray 33:40 ... by your ConvertKit owner.

Ali Abdaal 33:42 Mm.

Matt Gray 33:42 Some of them now are moving on to a high-ticket, you know, close and are being passed to a salesperson or-

Ali Abdaal 33:50 Yeah

Matt Gray 33:50 ... whatever you may call it in your business to then have a conversation with people and convert them to sale.

Ali Abdaal 33:55 Yep.

Matt Gray 33:56 So who's the owner of the sales system? A sales system, in your case, may consist of things like who owns the sales script.

Ali Abdaal 34:02 Mm.

Matt Gray 34:03 Um, who's ultimately in charge of the pricing of that product potentially.

Ali Abdaal 34:08 Mm.

Matt Gray 34:08 Who's in charge of hiring more people-

Ali Abdaal 34:10 Mm

Matt Gray 34:10 ... on that team? Who's in charge of the setters, people that may be setting leads in other areas that we haven't discussed-

Ali Abdaal 34:17 Yeah

Matt Gray 34:17 ... which not to confuse us, but, you know, you get it, and also the person that's, like, inevitably responsible for, like, running a well-oiled sales machine.

Ali Abdaal 34:26 Nice. Okay. Oh, this is good. So at the moment, it is we, it is unclear who owns the sales system. So we have this amazing guy called Kevin who works for us as a freelancer, as a high, as a, a sort of sales closer. He took our YouTuber Academy years ago, and, like, and, you know, enjoys working with our team, and he's amazing. And we also have Saf, who is our kind of HubSpot guy on the sales and marketing side, who is sort of working with Kevin to build, be like, "Hey, Kevin, you know, what, what, what are the fields that you need to be populated?" Um, and then Kevin's giving him feedback to be like, "Oh, actually, you know, some- sometimes, oh, you know, we've got a bunch of unqualified leads. So how do we qualify them more, more before they hit the sales call?" And, you know, all that kind of stuff. But if I were to ask, you know, who would be responsible for hiring another closer or for setting pricing and stuff, it would be like, "Oh, don't really know. Sort of Angus, sort of Ali, sort of everyone." It d- it doesn't, the sales system does not have a clear owner right now.

Matt Gray 35:17 Cool. Yeah, so what I would say is, you know, this isn't that uncommon, right? Um, oftentimes I think people like ourselves that are very, like, we're creative, we're into building, like, beautiful things and serving people, and, um, oftentimes we're into, like, the content side of things. I think at heart, like, me and you are both artists. It's oftentimes, like, that sales end of the business that-

Ali Abdaal 35:40 Yeah. [laughs]

Matt Gray 35:41 ... it's like, "Oh"-

Ali Abdaal 35:42 Yeah

Matt Gray 35:42 ... like a little bit of an afterthought.

Ali Abdaal 35:43 What's going on there? [laughs]

Matt Gray 35:44 Yeah, exactly, right? It's not, like, our innate sort of default to go and be like, "Oh, I'm gonna build a badass sales team."

Ali Abdaal 35:50 Yeah.

Matt Gray 35:51 So I've been there in m- my own career. Um, years ago, you know, I had every other part of the business running just beautifully, but that piece I just couldn't figure out. And for me at least, what I realized was best, like, I had to get a good handle on that myself. Inevitably, one of the core metrics it sounds like as a overall business you're looking to get to in 2024 is to a million a month.

Ali Abdaal 36:19 Mm. Yeah.

Matt Gray 36:20 And so a million a month, like, [laughs] it's largely a sales thing, right?

Ali Abdaal 36:24 Yeah.

Matt Gray 36:24 Like, you're great at product. You're insanely good at content. You've got the YouTube system, the lead magnet system, all these things, like, I'm very confident-

Ali Abdaal 36:32 Mm

Matt Gray 36:32 ... you guys got down. This sales one, right? Inevitably, that's gonna be really damn important if we're gonna get to a million a month.

Ali Abdaal 36:39 Yeah.

Matt Gray 36:39 Right? Number two, like, we gotta have a badass owner of that. I think you need to have an understanding of it.

Ali Abdaal 36:46 Yep.

Matt Gray 36:46 Angus needs to have a strong handle of that, who's your general manager.

Ali Abdaal 36:50 Mm.

Matt Gray 36:50 Because inevitably someone on the leadership team needs to, like, really know that in and out so that they're not just being told some BS by the sales organization, and then believing it to be true, when sometimes, like, you dive deeper into the numbers and you realize, oh, it's not that we need more leads. Our close rate is an abomination.

Ali Abdaal 37:07 [laughs]

Matt Gray 37:08 Right? Or it's not that we need a b- more closers. We have the worst show rate ever. Only 20% of people are showing up to calls.

Ali Abdaal 37:16 Yeah.

Matt Gray 37:16 We need to fix the show rate. I'm not just hiring more and throwing more closers at a problem that-

Ali Abdaal 37:21 Yeah

Matt Gray 37:21 ... you know, that's not the problem, right? So you need to have someone on the team, on the leadership team, that can understand, like, the root causes and be able to be a bit of a sparring partner with whoever that sales leader is-

Ali Abdaal 37:32 Nice

Matt Gray 37:32 ... from my perspective, or else you really risk, like, the organization kind of running away from you.

Ali Abdaal 37:37 Ooh. That's great.

Matt Gray 37:38 Uh, and you, you see this a lot. Like, I think in terms of the stage that you're at, and that not all that different than the stage that even I'm at in some of my businesses, is that you're not gonna die because you don't have enough business. You will die because you get too much business, and the whole thing just collapses in on itself.

Ali Abdaal 37:58 Mm.

Matt Gray 37:58 Either the sales team just becomes a mess and they're closing the wrong people, or they scale too fast.

Ali Abdaal 38:04 Yeah.

Matt Gray 38:05 And then the next stage, which we'll get to, customer success and delivery, that just falls flat on its face, 'cause you have more customers than you know what to deal with, and it can be a reputation ruiner.

Ali Abdaal 38:15 Yep.

Matt Gray 38:15 And everything can just fall flat.

Ali Abdaal 38:17 Yeah.

Matt Gray 38:17 So that sales piece, I think you have a couple options. Either Angus learns that piece, puts his, gets his own hands dirty and starts building that up himself, or he just gets more of an understanding and then promotes someone from within to own that piece of your business.

Ali Abdaal 38:34 Mm.

Matt Gray 38:34 Maybe it's the closer and sales guy that's been there for a little bit-

Ali Abdaal 38:37 Yeah

Matt Gray 38:37 ... and it's now time for him to be a sales lead.

Ali Abdaal 38:39 Yeah.

Matt Gray 38:40 Um, or you bring someone from the outside, which has its pros and cons-

Ali Abdaal 38:43 Mm

Matt Gray 38:43 ... to then own that area.

Ali Abdaal 38:46 Mm. This is very good. Yeah, so I realized a couple of months ago that I had zero handle on what sales even meant.

Matt Gray 38:53 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 38:54 And at the time we had access to Cole Gordon's closers course-

Matt Gray 38:57 Yep

Ali Abdaal 38:57 ... 'cause we took it last year, and so I just sort of blitzed through a lot of that and I was like, "Oh, okay." I feel... I s- I s- I sort of get it a little bit more now. Um, watched a bunch of YouTube videos about it. Haven't read any books about sales systems yet, although I know that there are some on the market. Um, so yeah, in my own head that's like a whole, a, a bit of a whole of knowledge where I, I know for example what a setter is and a closer is, and speaking to some creators on this in here in Dubai, it's like, "Oh, you can do DM closers as well and DM setters. Interesting. Hmm, we're not really doing that." And like, you know, all this, all this sort of stuff. Yeah, definitely needs an owner. Um, do you think... So for example, Saf, who is our HubSpot, uh, sales and marketing RevOps guy at the moment, doesn't really have experience with, like, building a sales team as such, but has a lot of experience with, like, kind of the RevOps side of, of, of things. Do you think he would be reasonable to promote into sales lead, or is it, for this sort of thing, just better to get someone with experience, so either promoting Kevin if he wants to join our team, uh, like full-time or bringing someone in from the outside?

Matt Gray 40:03 Yeah, so there's a lot of ways to slice the pie here. I think that I've seen both work successfully, both, like, getting an existing A player and then elevating them-

Ali Abdaal 40:14 Yep

Matt Gray 40:14 ... which I think is generally my default.

Ali Abdaal 40:15 Mm.

Matt Gray 40:16 Um, or if you feel like you don't have the right person internally for that-

Ali Abdaal 40:20 Yeah

Matt Gray 40:20 ... then looking to get someone from the outside. I think the benefit from promoting people within is, number one, it's just a great culture builder.

Ali Abdaal 40:26 Yeah.

Matt Gray 40:27 People realize, "Hey, wherever you start in this company isn't where you're gonna end up-

Ali Abdaal 40:30 Yeah

Matt Gray 40:30 ... over time." Like look at s- you know, Angus started-

Ali Abdaal 40:32 Yeah. [laughs]

Matt Gray 40:33 ... as a writer here-

Ali Abdaal 40:34 Yeah

Matt Gray 40:34 ... and scripting with me in my apartment five years ago, and now he's running the whole operation.

Ali Abdaal 40:37 Yeah.

Matt Gray 40:38 And I'm sure that's a great sort of thing that a lot of people-

Ali Abdaal 40:40 Yeah. I love that. Yeah

Matt Gray 40:40 ... are like, "Oh yeah, wherever I start, like, man, there's so much career mobility here."

Ali Abdaal 40:44 Mm.

Matt Gray 40:44 So I generally like that, and I know you're about that as well. And so I would say that's where you'd m- probably wanna default to. If you determine that-

Ali Abdaal 40:53 Mm

Matt Gray 40:53 ... the gentleman that you would consider-

Ali Abdaal 40:55 Yeah

Matt Gray 40:55 ... isn't then fit for it, then yeah, we need to look for someone from the outside. I would still say that no matter what route you go there, Angus, your general manager, still needs to get a hell of an understanding over that system.

Ali Abdaal 41:07 Mm. Nice.

Matt Gray 41:07 Because, again, if the core metric of the company is to get to a million a month-

Ali Abdaal 41:10 Yeah

Matt Gray 41:11 ... like, we need to make sure that that sales system-

Ali Abdaal 41:14 Yeah

Matt Gray 41:14 ... is down pat, um, and really strong, and it's, I don't think it's something that you w- are gonna wanna dive too into-

Ali Abdaal 41:21 Yeah. Probably not

Matt Gray 41:21 ... yourself, just knowing you-

Ali Abdaal 41:22 Yeah

Matt Gray 41:22 ... like, as friends. And so I'd say, like, Angus needs to get a good understanding, go through some of Cole Gordon's stuff-

Ali Abdaal 41:29 Yeah

Matt Gray 41:29 ... really get a good understanding of, like, how this stuff all works, as if he was almost running it.

Ali Abdaal 41:33 Mm.

Matt Gray 41:33 He should be on the sales calls. He should be part of making the projections.

Ali Abdaal 41:37 Mm.

Matt Gray 41:38 It should almost be as if Angus is running it and so is this other gentleman.

Ali Abdaal 41:42 Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Gray 41:42 So you almost get, like, a couple people on what is probably one of the bottlenecks right now in the company as we-

Ali Abdaal 41:48 Nice

Matt Gray 41:48 ... look to scale it.

Ali Abdaal 41:49 Nice.

Ali Abdaal 41:51 Um, just to for a bit of a sort of context for-

Matt Gray 41:54 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 41:54 ... people, and also for me, actually, this, this is helpful. It, it's, it's only recently become apparent to me that, like, sales is a thing, 'cause before I was always just like, oh, you just... I don't know. As a creator you have a big audience. You just make a product. People buy the product. Like, what? Like, hop on a call? What the fuck? Why would anyone need to hop on a call to, to buy anything? Dot, dot, dot. Like, w- why, why do you think... W- why do you feel that sales is like, like... Firstly, what does sales refer to and why is it so important in getting to a million a month?

Matt Gray 42:26 Yeah, so there's no one-size-fits-all sales model first off, right?

Ali Abdaal 42:31 Yeah.

Matt Gray 42:32 You could run your business whereby there is a very limited sales function.

Ali Abdaal 42:37 Yeah.

Matt Gray 42:38 And all sales are just made through The funnel system we talked about-

Ali Abdaal 42:42 Mm

Matt Gray 42:42 ... and the sales system actually is almost in many senses eliminated-

Ali Abdaal 42:47 Mm

Matt Gray 42:47 ... whereby just all sales are happening online without ever speaking to anyone.

Ali Abdaal 42:51 Yeah.

Matt Gray 42:53 In your existing system right now, you have some more high-ticket products-

Ali Abdaal 42:56 Mm

Matt Gray 42:56 ... that are, say, over a couple thousand dollars.

Ali Abdaal 42:59 Yeah.

Matt Gray 42:59 And you've determined that having, you know, someone that people can s- talk to as it's a big investment in their life would be useful.

Ali Abdaal 43:06 Yep.

Matt Gray 43:07 Um, I tend to agree with that general approach. And so, yeah, there I think it's as follows: it's like you're looking to have a more high-ticket product.

Ali Abdaal 43:20 Mm.

Matt Gray 43:21 With those products, we know that oftentimes people wanna speak to someone because they have questions.

Ali Abdaal 43:26 Yeah.

Matt Gray 43:26 And the salesperson, I don't think in either of our cases in what we're running, needs to be, like, a sales salesperson.

Ali Abdaal 43:33 Yeah.

Matt Gray 43:34 And I think maybe whether it's us or others in the audience, when they hear sales, oftentimes they think it's like, "Oh my God, this person is super aggressive, just trying to persuade me. Maybe that person's unethical, like, just telling me lies," when really I think especially in what we're doing, a lot of the people that you're selling are people that have followed your journey for years.

Ali Abdaal 43:54 Mm.

Matt Gray 43:55 They know you. They know what you're about. They trust you. They even know what they're about to buy. They just need someone to kinda answer some questions, help them get a little bit of a deeper understanding on how the community works and, uh, what the process will be from kinda start to finish-

Ali Abdaal 44:10 Mm

Matt Gray 44:10 ... and then make the purchase, right? And so I think why sales is important is because, you know, you've got all of these warm leads that you've generated through the lead magnet system, and you funneled them to the right product now through the funnel system, and now they're at that final step, and we wanna make sure that all that investment that you've made in your content, which I believe is, like, upwards of 150K or so a month-

Ali Abdaal 44:36 Mm

Matt Gray 44:36 ... that we need to make sure that that investment pays off in spades, not just so that, you know, Ali can live the lifestyle he's hoping for, but because you've got a team of 12 people that we've gotta feed. We've got other products that we wanna launch. We wanna continue to invest in these existing products that you've made, and we can't do that unless those sales in that area are carried through from hot lead through to close.

Ali Abdaal 45:01 Mm.

Matt Gray 45:01 So that's how I see it as important, not just for the end customer so that their questions are handled and they can find themselves in the right product that's meant for them. It's also important for us as a business to make sure that we're then able to use the profits from those sales to reinvest into people-

Ali Abdaal 45:18 Mm

Matt Gray 45:18 ... the product, and back into the processes and systems of the business to make sure this thing runs like a well-oiled machine.

Ali Abdaal 45:24 Nice. That's great. Yeah, the other thing that I found really nice about having sales as being, like, a thing and, yeah, r- f- A, I think I, I, I immediately had that, like, kind of gag response to the word sales-

Matt Gray 45:36 Mm

Ali Abdaal 45:36 ... just because the word sales feels a bit like a dirty word.

Matt Gray 45:39 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 45:39 And then I sort of realized, oh, actually it doesn't, it doesn't have to be like, like that. You can have kind of salesmen th- than salespeople that are pushy, or you can have salespeople that are really nice and very kind of educational and very-

Matt Gray 45:49 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 45:49 ... like non-pushy, like, y- yeah, that, that kind of thing. It's also been really helpful in terms of just, like, expectation setting 'cause previously we were, we were, we were allowing people to buy the 5K product just on the website. And so some people would buy it through the website, but then they would, because they hadn't actually spoken to someone-

Matt Gray 46:04 Mm

Ali Abdaal 46:05 ... they would have this, a slightly wrong expectation around what to expect from the thing, and we realized actually making everyone apply, apply to join the accelerator, and then we, uh, uh, allows us to kind of say no to people because there were some people who just had wildly unrealistic expectations, like, "I'm a total beginner. I'm 50 years old. I've never used a computer in my life, and I wanna be able to quit my job within three months by starting a YouTube channel. You guys are gonna help me." It's like basically never gonna happen, so, like, uh, either we have a conversation to realign expectations, or we just say, "Sorry, I don't think, I don't think this is the right fit for you."

Matt Gray 46:37 Mm.

Ali Abdaal 46:37 Whereas previously we would've got those people in just through the, the checkout link on the website.

Matt Gray 46:41 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 46:42 And now they're in, and now our customer success girls are like, "Ah, okay, Alice has wildly unrealistic expectations, but she's already in, and, like, now it's a bit awkward." And st- so we found actually that expectation setting is also a really, a useful part of the sales process.

Matt Gray 46:57 Yeah. No, exactly. I think a lot of these sales folks are actually more, like, kind of product specialists or strategists, right? Making sure that the right people get to the right product, and if someone's not right for this or they have the wrong expectations, either get to a common understanding as to whether it's right for them or not or just turn them away if it just doesn't make sense and it's not the right fit because we don't want someone, you know, coming into anything that we're creating that just doesn't seem aligned with-

Ali Abdaal 47:24 Yeah

Matt Gray 47:24 ... the general mission, the general kind of flow of what we're trying to create.

Ali Abdaal 47:27 Mm.

Matt Gray 47:27 So yeah, the next system then after that is your delivery system, right? Now you've sold something to someone, and you've made generally some sort of promise as to what they can expect from joining the product that you've created.

Ali Abdaal 47:43 Mm.

Matt Gray 47:43 And so now we need to make sure that the actual customer success side of things and the delivery is down pat-

Ali Abdaal 47:49 Mm

Matt Gray 47:49 ... so that now when they're in, they wanna stay in, and they're super happy by the end of that experience that they wanna be upsold maybe to something else you have, or when you release Productivity Lab, this new thing that you're about to, you know, drop soon, they're eager buyers for that because when they signed up for the existing thing that you sold them, they were blown away in terms of the value. And so, you know, anything new you launch must also be worth-

Ali Abdaal 48:13 Yeah

Matt Gray 48:13 ... joining as well. You've kind of kept that promise and then some for them.

Ali Abdaal 48:17 Nice. Cool. So we've got Alison, who's in charge of our customer success system. Um, she has an amazing team underneath her working on that. Uh, our, like, accelerator clients are super happy. We have a tiny, tiny refund rate. We've got, like, ridiculously happy customers, which is-

Matt Gray 48:31 Great

Ali Abdaal 48:31 ... which is all amazing, and we're working with your friends at Ethical Scaling to help systemize the customer success side of the business and figure out, like, you know, depending on is someone a complete beginner- S- uh, uh, a non-complete beginner, intermediate, or advanced YouTuber, like which path they need to be taken down

Matt Gray 48:48 Mm-hmm

Ali Abdaal 48:48 ... what are the key touchpoints and milestones along that path. A big realization from this whole process is that we have way more beginners than I thought we did. And therefore, actually, you know, where I was... where I'm thinking, "Hey, we're talking about systems to scale a YouTube channel," actually, a lot of our people have not even started, because they're held back by limiting beliefs and imposter syndrome and fear of talking to the camera. And so we were like, "Ah, okay. We actually need to zoom into the beginner end of the, the thing to really dial that out." 'Cause I'm very experienced with, like, helping someone scale a YouTube channel, but, like, for a complete beginner struggling with emotional issues, I'm prob- I'm actually n- not the right person to be talking to them. Um, uh, but whereas our customer success girls are amazing at that. Like, they j- love that shit, accountability, the support. So we're, like, zooming into that and really, like, dialing in the customer success system. Question on this front. Um, we have, for example, our $1,000 self-paced course and our $1 self-paced foundations course and our, like, $27, like, templates and stuff. At the moment, improving on a self-paced product feels like it doesn't have a clear owner, because customer success feels like it's for the accelerator, which is our high-ticket thing that has loads of things. But, like, that more, like, product side of things, like, just, like, improving the core things that are part of the funnel system, the end products of the funnel system, we've got Gareth, who's our head of product, I guess, that he could sort of be in charge of. Like, where does improving on existing self-paced stuff fit into this system?

Matt Gray 50:13 Yeah. I, in my own brain, see that as part of the funnel system a bit.

Ali Abdaal 50:16 Mm. Nice.

Matt Gray 50:17 So you have the owner of the funnel system. They're driving people to either leads for high-ticket-

Ali Abdaal 50:21 Yeah

Matt Gray 50:21 ... or selling them direct to these low-ticket offerings.

Ali Abdaal 50:24 Yep.

Matt Gray 50:24 And the product guy that you just mentioned would sit under that person-

Ali Abdaal 50:27 Nice

Matt Gray 50:27 ... likely. So this person's orchestrating ConvertKit, sending them to the right things.

Ali Abdaal 50:31 Yep.

Matt Gray 50:31 And then with those low-ticket offerings, the improvements of those or creating-

Ali Abdaal 50:36 Yeah

Matt Gray 50:36 ... new ones, that product guy-

Ali Abdaal 50:38 Product guy

Matt Gray 50:38 ... sits under the funnel guy.

Ali Abdaal 50:39 Nice. Perfect. Cool. Yeah. That is sort of what we have at the moment.

Matt Gray 50:41 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 50:42 Nice.

Matt Gray 50:42 And so, yeah, that makes a lot of sense on the customer success side. It makes sense that you have a couple different journeys. It doesn't surprise me that you have more beginners than you thought. The reason being is that, well, you're creating this massive audience on YouTube, which is your primary lead funnel to all of your products, and it's just natural that there'd be more beginners-

Ali Abdaal 51:02 Yeah

Matt Gray 51:02 ... in something than advanced people.

Ali Abdaal 51:03 Yeah. No, exactly.

Matt Gray 51:04 So it makes sense.

Ali Abdaal 51:04 Just like there's a law of physics.

Matt Gray 51:05 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 51:05 There are more, there are, there are more beginners than anything.

Matt Gray 51:07 Yeah. More people haven't started YouTube than people that have.

Ali Abdaal 51:08 Yeah. [laughs]

Matt Gray 51:08 So it just makes sense that, yeah, hey, there's quite, uh, a lot of leads on that side. So yeah, you're right. You could have, um, you should have a couple pathways there in terms of the product to make sure that there's people that are, you know, not started YouTube yet are getting certain experiences, and then those that are starting and scaling YouTube get sort of a different experience and maybe probably skip a couple of the fir-

Ali Abdaal 51:28 Yeah

Matt Gray 51:29 ... intro modules, as an example.

Ali Abdaal 51:30 Yeah.

Matt Gray 51:32 And so from there, yeah, that area, very similar to how we just mapped out your overall business system, it's almost like the customer success journey has its own journey-

Ali Abdaal 51:46 Yeah

Matt Gray 51:46 ... and system to it.

Ali Abdaal 51:47 Yep.

Matt Gray 51:47 So as a customer now of you, when I'm in the program-

Ali Abdaal 51:51 Mm

Matt Gray 51:51 ... what are all of the different touchpoints I get along that journey? Right now, when you map it out, it could actually surprise you that there's maybe, like, 80.

Ali Abdaal 51:59 Yeah.

Matt Gray 52:00 Right?

Ali Abdaal 52:00 It's like loads. Yeah.

Matt Gray 52:00 Between, like, the intro email, the onboarding call, the first module, then this exercise they complete, and so on and so forth.

Ali Abdaal 52:06 Yep.

Matt Gray 52:06 And then the question is, okay, now that this thing is mapped out, whether it's on a whiteboard, Miro, Notion, Google Docs, doesn't matter, just wherever, how do we kind of simplify that?

Ali Abdaal 52:14 Mm.

Matt Gray 52:15 So that maybe there's a lot of touchpoints and it gets a little confusing, and we maybe wanna just, like, condense it slightly. 'Cause obviously, the value oftentimes of these educational resources like you're building is getting people from where they're at to where they're looking to go as quickly as possible. And so if we can kind of reduce and simplify those steps and then make them more delightful, we've created a great product.

Ali Abdaal 52:36 What do you mean by more delightful?

Matt Gray 52:38 So I think, say, you get those 75, 80 steps down to 60, right? And we're like, "Okay, these are the core parts of the journey." You know, The Power of Moments is a book by Chip and Dan Heath, uh, the same authors as M- uh, Made to Stick, and they talk about, you know, when someone looks back on a experience in their life, it's oftentimes these sort of peak moments that they really remember. And so after we've gone and shown those maybe 60 core steps that make up an amazing part-time YouTuber academy or amazing YouTube accelerator, we wanna go and then look at, like, maybe that journey and go, "Okay, what are maybe a few of, like, the key moments that we're going to kind of break the script, we're gonna double down on, that when they look back on their experience inside of this container, this product, this educational experience, whatever, they are just like, 'Wow, that was something else.'" So, you know, maybe it was, um, getting their first YouTube video reviewed by a customer success person in a really cool way, or maybe it was a, a graduation call they were on that was a great celebration, or maybe when they published their first three YouTube videos, they got a surprise in the mail from you guys. Or-

Ali Abdaal 53:58 Yeah

Matt Gray 53:58 ... I don't know. Something.

Ali Abdaal 53:59 Yeah.

Matt Gray 53:59 But you can start to then look at those things-

Ali Abdaal 54:01 Nice

Matt Gray 54:01 ... and go, "Okay, we're gonna, like, spice up these key moments a little bit and go from, you know, maybe this being, like, an 8 out of 10 to an 11 out of 10-"

Ali Abdaal 54:09 Mm-hmm

Matt Gray 54:09 ... in terms of just delight. Um, and also then just going and filtering those touchpoints too. Like, one thing that I think is really, really important to think about is a lot of the time when people purchase something, and I'm sure you've been there in your life, you buy that thing, and there's a slight sense of buyer's remorse.

Ali Abdaal 54:27 Yeah.

Matt Gray 54:28 I personally, like, for some reason, [laughs] when I buy clothes, afterwards, I'm like, "Ooh, did I wanna buy this, th- these clothes? I don't know," like, "Did I make the wrong decision?" Luckily, I have a girlfriend with great style that's like, "No, no, no, Matt, you definitely made the right decision."

Ali Abdaal 54:40 Yep. Nice. [laughs]

Matt Gray 54:40 I'm like, "All right. All right. All right. Thank you. Thank you."

Ali Abdaal 54:41 Yeah.

Matt Gray 54:42 Um, but it's a natural thing in humans just to feel, like, that little bit of uncertainty.

Ali Abdaal 54:46 Yep.

Matt Gray 54:46 And so I like to think of that onboarding call that they have As the goal of the onboarding call is to deliver a 2X ROI on their initial investment in the program.

Ali Abdaal 54:59 Yeah, nice.

Matt Gray 55:00 So say they invested 5,000, how in the initial call do you deliver $10,000 of value?

Ali Abdaal 55:05 Yep.

Matt Gray 55:05 So that instantly they're like, "Oh my God, this intro call itself just paid for this entire program."

Ali Abdaal 55:10 Yeah, nice.

Matt Gray 55:11 Not to mention whatever else Ali's got planned here for the rest of this experience.

Ali Abdaal 55:14 Yeah.

Matt Gray 55:14 See, we just completely smash any c-

Ali Abdaal 55:17 Yeah

Matt Gray 55:17 ... possibility of people being like, "This wasn't worth it," right?

Ali Abdaal 55:21 That's a really good way of thinking about it, yeah.

Matt Gray 55:22 And so that would be an example of kind of like, you know, with that customer success system, once we get the initial part down pat, we've simplified the system, we have an owner of it, it's documented, then giving it another scrub way through to delight and add some peak moments, and then maybe giving that intro sequence another scrub through to make sure that the onboarding call in it is just an absolute banger-

Ali Abdaal 55:42 Yeah

Matt Gray 55:42 ... and people are blown away.

Ali Abdaal 55:43 Nice. Oh, that's super inspiring. I love that. Um, yeah, I can, I can al- already think of a lot of different things that we can do just on that call that would help people get that experience of, of delight, of like, "Oh, shit, this, you know, th- th- this is already really good." Um, one thing that I'm, I'm kinda thinking as we're talking through all this stuff is that on the one hand, I'm like, "Damn, this is a lot of work," but on the other hand, I'm like, "It's so good that this is a lot of work," because we are actively doing a lot of this work-

Matt Gray 56:11 Mm-hmm

Ali Abdaal 56:12 ... and actively finding ways to do this. And, like, the more time that passes, as long as we're just focused on improving these systems over time, the more of a moat we build around our own business, where for someone to compete with us on this, bloody hell, that's gonna be hard.

Matt Gray 56:24 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 56:24 Like [laughs] my goodness.

Matt Gray 56:26 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 56:26 I'm imagining someone listening to this and thinking, "You know, I, th- this idea of starting, like, a YouTube 12... Accelerator 12-month program seems kinda funky. Like, let's make it happen." And I'm like, "Okay, good luck." [laughs]

Matt Gray 56:36 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 56:37 Yeah.

Matt Gray 56:37 When we talk about too with folks like yourself that are looking to get from, you know, say, 500K per month to a million a month-

Ali Abdaal 56:44 Yeah

Matt Gray 56:44 ... there's a couple frames that I often have experienced when I do this exercise in my own businesses. Number one is you've got amazing people in your business. Folks like Tin Tin-

Ali Abdaal 56:54 Mm

Matt Gray 56:54 ... Angus, and, um, yeah-

Ali Abdaal 56:57 Yeah, that's right

Matt Gray 56:57 ... the other folks I met on your team, like, are just next level, right? So while this may seem a little bit overwhelming to you, I think this clarity, this structure may actually feel very enlightening and just really, yeah, nice for them, right?

Ali Abdaal 57:10 Mm.

Matt Gray 57:10 'Cause now they're like, "Oh, I own this area. Yeah, I've already got most of these things around me. I just need to kinda package it up."

Ali Abdaal 57:14 Yeah.

Matt Gray 57:15 Which leads to the second thing, which is you've been running this for quite some time. When I'm building these out, I generally try to default to copy and paste versus building something net new.

Ali Abdaal 57:25 Yep.

Matt Gray 57:25 Like, this process that you're about to implement in systemizing this, it's probably more of a process of simplifying and eliminating than it is, like, creating some new stuff.

Ali Abdaal 57:34 Yeah.

Matt Gray 57:34 Maybe there's a couple things, like in the sales system you mentioned, like, there's some stuff there potentially, but most of those other areas are just like, "Oh yeah, let's just amalgamate what we got and, you know, sequence it all right and, and just put it all there and clean it up," but it's not anything, like, net new you really gotta build.

Ali Abdaal 57:50 Yeah.

Matt Gray 57:50 Right? So yeah, getting back to the customer success side, I think there are generally three core metrics there, uh, to consider. Number one, um, is if and when you have something that can be upsold-

Ali Abdaal 58:05 Mm

Matt Gray 58:05 ... to someone, that team is almost like a backend sales team.

Ali Abdaal 58:10 Yep.

Matt Gray 58:10 So if they're doing a really good job, the people that join the YouTube Accelerator would be super stoked to then join the Productivity Lab-

Ali Abdaal 58:17 That's a good start

Matt Gray 58:17 ... as an example.

Ali Abdaal 58:18 Yeah. So customer success becomes a profit center rather

Ali Abdaal 58:20 than a call center.

Matt Gray 58:20 Exactly.

Ali Abdaal 58:21 Right, yeah.

Matt Gray 58:21 It should be a massive profit center if you're doing it right.

Ali Abdaal 58:23 Yep.

Matt Gray 58:24 Um, oftentimes if that division is working properly, um, they are doubling your revenue and more than doubling your profit.

Ali Abdaal 58:31 Wow, okay. Yeah, nice.

Matt Gray 58:31 Uh, because you already have this whole infrastructure, and then they're just adding more revenue to that existing infrastructure-

Ali Abdaal 58:37 Mm

Matt Gray 58:37 ... without adding much more cost. So upsells, number one. The second aspect, um, is testimonials.

Ali Abdaal 58:45 Yep.

Matt Gray 58:45 So just keeping those testimonials great. Y- your landing pages, I'm always inspired by the-

Ali Abdaal 58:50 Mm

Matt Gray 58:50 ... testimonials you have there. Uh, you know, yeah, it's awesome to see, like, where people start, and then you got the cool graphs as to-

Ali Abdaal 58:56 Yeah

Matt Gray 58:56 ... like, where they are now.

Ali Abdaal 58:57 Yeah.

Matt Gray 58:58 They should be responsible for getting, say, each of them, say 15 of those a month.

Ali Abdaal 59:02 Yep.

Matt Gray 59:02 So if they're doing a good job, you know, peop- they're recording where people started at-

Ali Abdaal 59:06 Yeah

Matt Gray 59:06 ... and then they're, like, tracking their growth over time, whether it's people that they're working with now or the alumni of the program, and making sure that we constantly have a fresh batch, so when I scroll through your landing pages, it's almost just this endless scroll of-

Ali Abdaal 59:18 Yeah

Matt Gray 59:18 ... graphs at the bottom of just, like, overwhelming social proof-

Ali Abdaal 59:21 Yeah

Matt Gray 59:21 ... that you can also be using in your funnel emails as well.

Ali Abdaal 59:24 Nice.

Matt Gray 59:24 So they're constantly getting-

Ali Abdaal 59:26 Yep

Matt Gray 59:26 ... all these new fresh ones versus people constantly seeing, oh, I keep seeing the same testimonials over and over again, say two years down the road. It's like-

Ali Abdaal 59:32 Yeah

Matt Gray 59:32 ... no, we want a fresh batch constantly because that stuff is the best content possible for things like your lead magnets in your funnel system.

Ali Abdaal 59:38 Nice.

Matt Gray 59:39 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 59:39 Cool.

Matt Gray 59:40 And then the last thing there, not to overwhelm you, but just things I've learned-

Ali Abdaal 59:43 No, that's good stuff. Yeah

Matt Gray 59:43 ... so just sharing it in case it's useful, is your referrals.

Ali Abdaal 59:47 Yep.

Matt Gray 59:48 Right? So inevitably, like, the best people to sell are people that are referred by an existing customer, and your best leads, your hottest leads, are your referred leads, right? So making sure that these, this customer success team in the interest of making them a profit center are ideally asking people at strategic moments in time, which you should map out inside of that client journey map, where they're gonna ask them, right? And so that each month, whether they're on a one-to-one call or maybe they're on a group call and at the end they're just saying, "Hey, you guys got a lot out of this. We'd really appreciate it if you could just dump an email into the chat of someone that you think would get a lot out of this. We'd love to go and give them a free resource that we've just created and see if they're interested in hopping on board like the rest of you, assuming you've got a lot out of this. We'd appreciate it."

Ali Abdaal 1:00:35 Yeah. One, as, as you're saying this, I'm thinking one of the things that holds a lot of beginner YouTubers back, and actually pro YouTubers back, is the fact that no one around them is doing the thing. And I think everyone has a at least one friend who they think, "You know, this person should probably start a YouTube channel." And so, like, I think an individual's chances of success are way higher if they can also bring in a friend and have a friend to go through the process with, because now it becomes a social activity and not just an individual thing you do on your own computer. So I think there's something around there. Similarly with Productivity Lab, yeah, referrals I think is something I haven't really thought about just yet, but- Definitely something to think about.

Matt Gray 1:01:10 Yeah. And so I think we're on the final two systems now, uh, so let's roll up our sleeves. So the next one is your finance system.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:17 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:01:18 Right? There it's things like making sure that we're collecting the cash, um, if you have things like payment terms for what you're doing. We wanna make sure that we're modeling out the business over the next year.

Ali Abdaal 1:01:29 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:01:29 So if our goal is to hit a million a month, we need to forecast, you know, when are we gonna hit that, and then each month be able to review, are we on track, off track?

Ali Abdaal 1:01:37 Yep.

Matt Gray 1:01:37 What were our actuals versus our forecasted revenue? The home run that I've learned over time is, again, I think we're similar, we're artists, things like sales and like finance sometimes [laughs] can take a bit of a back seat-

Ali Abdaal 1:01:50 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:01:50 ... because we're just build- busy creating and, and doing that side of things. So I think that's okay, and you can actually kinda turn that into a strength. What I do is I require any CFO in any of my businesses to text me a CEO scorecard on- to my phone every Friday.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:06 Oh.

Matt Gray 1:02:07 So I get a text message from the dif- different CFOs of the-

Ali Abdaal 1:02:10 Mm

Matt Gray 1:02:11 ... portfolio companies I run, and they send me what's our monthly profit this month, which, what's our monthly revenue, what are the monthly expenses.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:19 As in month to date?

Matt Gray 1:02:20 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:02:20 Okay. Yep.

Matt Gray 1:02:21 What were we at last month-

Ali Abdaal 1:02:22 Yep

Matt Gray 1:02:23 ... in those areas? Um, what are we at based on projections?

Ali Abdaal 1:02:27 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:02:27 So what percentage of the target?

Ali Abdaal 1:02:28 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:02:28 What does it look like we're gonna make this month?

Ali Abdaal 1:02:30 Yep.

Matt Gray 1:02:30 Like, based on what you're seeing so far. And if you were to give me, say, three to five implications of the financials-

Ali Abdaal 1:02:37 Mm

Matt Gray 1:02:37 ... what do you think I need to be most focused on over the next week? And so they are then looking... Like, I don't need someone just to bubble up numbers to me. That's one part of it, 'cause I can then discern implications of things. It's also important that, like, you are owning the finances as a CFO, and I need you to then look at these numbers and let me know what are you seeing that I should be aware of. So an example of what they may be seeing is they're looking at the metrics, and they're like, "Oh, 63% of people are showing up to a call. We agreed that there should be an 80% show rate for calls."

Ali Abdaal 1:03:11 Oh.

Matt Gray 1:03:11 And so-

Ali Abdaal 1:03:11 So they're looking not just at the P&L metrics, but also at, like, the-

Matt Gray 1:03:15 Everything

Ali Abdaal 1:03:15 ... all the metrics.

Matt Gray 1:03:16 Everything.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:16 Oh.

Matt Gray 1:03:16 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:17 Interesting.

Matt Gray 1:03:17 Yeah. And so everything. They should be able to see everything.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:20 Nice.

Matt Gray 1:03:20 And so they're then... What may have happened there is that you looked at, into this example-

Ali Abdaal 1:03:26 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:03:26 ... like revenue wasn't right, and then was able to then go a layer deeper, and versus just saying, "Matt, make more revenue."

Ali Abdaal 1:03:32 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:03:32 Right? It's like, no, what's going on here? Okay. I'm able to then look at the metrics and dissect what's happening with revenue. Okay, there's enough calls being booked.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:39 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:03:40 There's enough leads coming in. Oh, the show rate looks off.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:44 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:03:44 Okay, Matt, the show rate's off. We wanna get it to this. I know we're implementing these things right now.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:50 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:03:51 I, you know, again, it's not necessary that the CFO has all the context on what we're existingly doing in the business to impact show rate.

Ali Abdaal 1:03:58 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:03:58 But now can at least point me in the right direction to say, "Hey, this revenue thing's important to us. This show rate thing looks like it's the bottleneck right now. Go and look at that, and go fix that area." And now at least I'm like, okay, over the next week, when I get that on, say, a Friday afternoon, my personal goal generally is, like, before I sign off before the weekend, I instigate and start the action plans and let the owners know that, hey, I've seen this area-

Ali Abdaal 1:04:26 Mm

Matt Gray 1:04:26 ... that I think is a bottleneck right now, and I want you to go into next week knowing that, like, we gotta fix that thing.

Ali Abdaal 1:04:31 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:04:32 So basically, I know right away what something's stuck, and I've been, had it fed to me, like, just, hey, these are the areas I'm seeing. And before I sign off for that weekend, I know, okay, those owners that I trust are aware of this being a bottleneck in the business, and next week, Monday morning, maybe even over the weekend, depending on the kind of weapon you bring on board, they are executing that thing with full force and eliminating that as a bottleneck of the business.

Ali Abdaal 1:04:55 Sick. That's great.

Matt Gray 1:04:57 So yeah, so someone owning the finances, owning projections, owning cash in bank, and added bonus is owning that CEO scorecard text message I think-

Ali Abdaal 1:05:05 Nice

Matt Gray 1:05:05 ... folks like me and you should be getting.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:06 Yeah. So Angus definitely owns that system and works with our fractional CFO and also our accountants and stuff.

Matt Gray 1:05:13 Great.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:13 Um, and has recently started sending me, like, a weekly Slack message at the end of the week that has, like, all the different areas of the business with, like, red, amber, green in terms of concern level and just a quick description. But month to date finances is not on that list right now, and so the only handle I ever get on finances is every month when the management accounts come through, Angus gives a little bit, bit of a Loom presentation on it kind of thing, but they're all for the previous month. And so I always feel like I don't really have a handle on what our finances are looking at right now.

Matt Gray 1:05:46 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:05:46 'Cause it's always, like, a month out of date based on, based on management accounts. So I love this idea of, like, a weekly, like, p- as part of the weekly message, just like, hey, what are the key, what are the key finance metrics, and what does that tell us about what we need to do?

Matt Gray 1:05:58 Yeah. Exactly. And so yeah, I like the idea of, like, red, yellow, green sort of going on. The next step to that would be, so what do I need to do?

Ali Abdaal 1:06:06 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:06:07 Like, if you were in my shoes, you were the CEO of the business-

Ali Abdaal 1:06:09 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:06:09 ... like, what do I do now that this is a yellow, or this is a red?

Ali Abdaal 1:06:12 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:06:12 Like, what do we need to do? And if they can then serve that to you, too.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:16 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:06:17 And also, like, what they are gonna do.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:18 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:06:19 So that you're almost just like, "Yeah, looks good."

Ali Abdaal 1:06:20 Yeah. [laughs]

Matt Gray 1:06:21 "Sounds good."

Ali Abdaal 1:06:21 Yeah. Exactly.

Matt Gray 1:06:22 You know? [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:06:22 So that's what Angus does at the moment. He'll be like, "You know, this area is a, a yellow, but actually it's fine because we're in the process-"

Matt Gray 1:06:26 Great

Ali Abdaal 1:06:26 "... of hiring this person," or-

Matt Gray 1:06:28 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:06:28 ... "This area is a red, uh, and what we are doing about it is we're having a meeting on Monday with this person, this person, this person to get together-"

Matt Gray 1:06:33 Perfect

Ali Abdaal 1:06:33 "... and figure out why it's red," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Matt Gray 1:06:35 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:35 So often I'm just like, "Cool."

Matt Gray 1:06:37 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:37 "I'll just keep making videos." [laughs]

Matt Gray 1:06:38 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:06:38 "You, you guys carry on 'cause it's under control."

Matt Gray 1:06:41 Doesn't surprise me 'cause Angus is a beast, so that's great. So yeah, the next and the final system, um... And I wanna just caveat this with saying I'm sure there's a lot of people that are looking at all this and going, "Well, what about this system, and what about that, and what about that?" That's probably the case. I'm sure there are some things that are being missed here, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:06:56 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:06:56 But I do think that when we've outlaid this thing-

Ali Abdaal 1:06:59 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:06:59 ... we've caught about 80% or so.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:00 I mean, I can't think of anything that we've missed here, so I'm, [laughs] I'm like, this is a, a 100% of what we're trying.

Matt Gray 1:07:04 Right.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:04 We haven't really talked about our social media system, but we can-

Matt Gray 1:07:06 Yeah, but I kinda put that under the YouTube system-

Ali Abdaal 1:07:07 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:07:07 ... or if you-

Ali Abdaal 1:07:08 If you bucket, yeah

Matt Gray 1:07:08 ... and then, yeah, that's like your pillar content that would be filtered to your other platforms.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:11 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:07:11 So exactly, though. Like, there's these little minute things We can get to those

Ali Abdaal 1:07:14 Mm

Matt Gray 1:07:15 Let's just at least we-

Ali Abdaal 1:07:15 Yeah, focus on the main system

Matt Gray 1:07:16 We really got this nailed

Ali Abdaal 1:07:17 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:07:17 All that just becomes, yeah, like, a little bit of, you know, stuff that we just also gotta fine-tune.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:21 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:07:22 But we've got a good amount of, like, structure in place here-

Ali Abdaal 1:07:24 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:07:24 ... that that's not gonna become overwhelming, and, like, the core of the business isn't gonna fall apart.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:28 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:07:29 So the last one that I see for you, which is cool that your team's working on this over the next week or two, is your dashboard system.

Ali Abdaal 1:07:34 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:07:35 Right? And so all of these areas have owners and have metrics, maybe one metric, sometimes a few, and we need to have a core source of truth whereby we can measure their performance, and that we can easily in a snapshot see the health of the business. So that when we're looking at that, you could just be on your phone on a Friday on a beach chair in Thailand-

Ali Abdaal 1:07:59 Mm

Matt Gray 1:08:00 ... and just sort of, like, look at your phone, scroll through these metrics, get your CEO scorecard, and understand, okay, my finance team or Angus is telling me, "Hey, these are the things you need to be focused on, and this is what we're doing about it," and you're like, "Cool. Go, go, go for it."

Ali Abdaal 1:08:13 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:08:13 And then you're also able to see a snapshot of the core metrics across this entire system and go, "Okay, cool. We got cash in bank. Things are moving nice. We're above projections for the month. Awesome." And you can sleep at night knowing that-

Ali Abdaal 1:08:24 Mm

Matt Gray 1:08:24 ... like, you have a nice picture of the business.

Ali Abdaal 1:08:26 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:08:26 And I think between, you know, having a good team in place that's owning their areas, getting your CEO scorecard, and having your CEO snapshot, you've kinda got a well-oiled machine. And so the core thing now that we've outlined each of these steps of this system is that we know now the core metrics that determine the success of those pieces.

Ali Abdaal 1:08:43 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:08:43 And let's just make sure that's all captured in the dashboard.

Ali Abdaal 1:08:46 Sick. This is our [laughs] ... Yes. Actually, I wonder if we can... Yeah. Do, do you, do you just wanna have a look and scroll through? Yeah. So the idea here is that we have a, um, biggies sheet, which is sort of, like, the big numbers that I, I think I care about, which seem... It's, it, it's on 6.0 because we've had so many iterations of me trying to figure out what are the metrics that matter to me. And then for each person or each area of the business, we have their own sheet where they input the metrics for that week, and some of them feed into the bigger score- the sort of my, my view scorecard, which is, like, the biggies. Uh, y- I think at the moment, uh, I don't know. Like, it's, it's, it's, it's very rare to actually get feedback on this because, like, I, like n- uh, no one ever shows what their internal scorecard looks like, so I don't know if we're doing a good job or, like, what are the g- what are the quick wins, what are the, what are the areas where... Like, at, at the moment, I do feel like there are too many numbers. At least, at least for me, I feel like I have to scroll through a bunch of different sheets just to see what I really care about. But then I think, "Well, we could just make a master sheet where I can see what I really care about," but then I don't really know what I really care about. And so th- there's a lot, this, like, circular thing of we have all this data that we're tracking week on week. I'm not really sure what are the core metrics that matter. The ones w-... If I think of, well, let- let's, let's make YouTube weekly views the, the thing. Then I'm like, oh, but it doesn't cover all of it. Like, subscribers is important, but also watch time's important. And then I start to get into a bit of a, oh, I might as well just look at the whole YouTube scorecard. Then I look at it, and it's all these numbers, and I'm like, fuck it, I can't be bothered to look at the whole YouTube scorecard. If that makes sense.

Matt Gray 1:10:20 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:21 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:10:21 Okay. So yeah, there's... So first off, I think this is in a, like, a solid state. Like, it's certain... it's, it's pretty obvious that this is on, like, a V6.

Ali Abdaal 1:10:30 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:10:30 Like, it's, it's solid. Uh, given that it's a V6, I have, like, some more, like, nuanced feedback to it, um, that is nothing overly drastic. Um, so yeah. The, the couple things I'd say is, so you got this tab, the Biggies 6.0-

Ali Abdaal 1:10:49 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:10:50 ... which I love. Uh, minor change that I would personally make, uh, maybe it's just how my brain works, is I would invert it. So I would make the dates the columns-

Ali Abdaal 1:11:01 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:11:01 ... so that I could easily see a row and see, like, you know, is it going up or down?

Ali Abdaal 1:11:05 Sure.

Matt Gray 1:11:05 You know? So I just, like, look across the sheet, and I can see that pattern-

Ali Abdaal 1:11:08 Yep

Matt Gray 1:11:08 ... versus looking down.

Ali Abdaal 1:11:10 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:11:10 It, it's kind of... And then that way w- the rows could be s- eight metrics, or it could be 50, and it's just easy to, like, kinda scroll down and see, okay, these are the rows, versus, like, scrolling to the side of a sheet-

Ali Abdaal 1:11:21 Mm

Matt Gray 1:11:21 ... and it's, like, you know, massively long and I'm scrolling left and right to try, "Oh, what was this over there? What was that over there?" It's kind of-

Ali Abdaal 1:11:28 That's interesting. Yeah

Matt Gray 1:11:29 I would... Personally, how I make these generally is just invert those.

Ali Abdaal 1:11:31 Interesting.

Matt Gray 1:11:32 So-

Ali Abdaal 1:11:32 'Cause in our Biggies 1.0,

Ali Abdaal 1:11:33 we... In, in our version one, we had the, had them that way. But then it, it sort of felt like we had to do a lot of horizontal scrolling to see the pattern.

Matt Gray 1:11:42 Okay.

Ali Abdaal 1:11:42 But as I'm saying that, like, that would've been solved by just having a graph.

Matt Gray 1:11:45 Yeah, or just-

Ali Abdaal 1:11:46 To see a pattern

Matt Gray 1:11:46 ... or just, like, hide some, uh, columns over time.

Ali Abdaal 1:11:49 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:11:49 So it's like, oh, okay, like, we have, like, all of 2023 and '24 now. Oh, but it's a new year. We'll just hide 2023 for now so we can just see 2024. And if we so need to, we can unfreeze those columns-

Ali Abdaal 1:12:00 Yeah, that's good

Matt Gray 1:12:00 ... and look at them.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:01 Okay.

Matt Gray 1:12:01 So-

Ali Abdaal 1:12:01 Interesting. Yeah

Matt Gray 1:12:01 ... yeah, th- that's just how my brain works. It's not, like-

Ali Abdaal 1:12:04 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:12:04 ... the biggest thing ever, but I think it kind of leads into number two, which is it sounds like you're still in the stage of understanding what are the metrics that matter.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:12 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:12:12 We just went through all of these core systems, and so I think it's about now going into those core systems and-

Ali Abdaal 1:12:17 Mm-hmm

Matt Gray 1:12:18 ... understanding, you know, YouTube, it's subscribers and watch time.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:21 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:12:21 Lead magnets, it's, you know, uh, conversion rate and email signups.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:26 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:12:27 Lead system is conversion rate and, uh, you know, revenue.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:31 Yep.

Matt Gray 1:12:32 You know? Sales is revenue.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:33 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:12:33 Customer success is upsells, reviews, and, um, referrals.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:38 Sales. Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:12:38 Uh, so on and so forth.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:39 That kind of thing. Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:12:39 Right? So then we kind of look at it, and then it's like, okay, well, what else is missing? Oh, I'm a bit weird, and I also love to see views per week. Cool.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:46 Cool.

Matt Gray 1:12:46 Add that in there.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:47 Yep. Nice.

Matt Gray 1:12:47 Um, oh, I actually just also love to see team size. Sure. Add that in there, too. And so now you kind of have all these rows of all these metrics that you wanna see in the Biggies 7.0.

Ali Abdaal 1:12:58 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:12:59 And I think then, like most things in life, you know- Sometimes we want, like, a quick, like, light bulb moment for things like this. I think it's very similar to, like, people that want a product idea to come out of the blue or are hoping to figure out their niche out of the blue. I personally believe that things like this are more of a process of refinement over time, hence why this is The Biggie 6.0.

Ali Abdaal 1:13:21 [laughs] Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:13:21 Right? So hopefully on your rows now, you've got, like, a good amount of metrics that, like, this feels good. It might be too much, but it's pretty easy to see it. Like, you know, maybe there's between 15 and 20 max.

Ali Abdaal 1:13:35 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:13:35 And then over time, you're looking at this every week, maybe a couple times a week, just to feel like, get into it a bit, feel out Biggie 7.0 and how-

Ali Abdaal 1:13:41 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:13:42 ... it resonates with your brain. And then if you're like, "Okay, you know, this metric, I actually don't need this or this," don't, then just delete those rows.

Ali Abdaal 1:13:48 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:13:48 And then suddenly you get to, like, hey, maybe, like, the 10 core metrics that are needed to understand the health of the nine core areas of your business, and you're in a good spot.

Ali Abdaal 1:13:57 Hmm.

Matt Gray 1:13:58 That's how I would do it personally.

Ali Abdaal 1:14:00 Nice.

Matt Gray 1:14:00 And I don't think... And d- the good news is, like, I don't think you're far off of that at all. I think you have the metrics here. Just like you need to refine the systems, you just need to kind of double-check that you are measuring the right thing per area.

Ali Abdaal 1:14:11 Mm-hmm.

Matt Gray 1:14:11 And you're welcome to send me this over-

Ali Abdaal 1:14:13 Hmm. Nice

Matt Gray 1:14:13 ... when you've completed it, and I can just give you my sense on, like, the documentation, the metrics-

Ali Abdaal 1:14:17 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:14:17 ... all that good stuff. And then, uh, and then from there, when you've agreed on it, just input those core metrics into the rows, um, the dates week by week into the columns.

Ali Abdaal 1:14:27 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:14:27 And, and then, yeah. And then you can also, if you really want to, like, with each of the metrics, label, like, who is the owner-

Ali Abdaal 1:14:34 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:14:35 ... of each of those.

Ali Abdaal 1:14:35 Mm-hmm.

Matt Gray 1:14:36 So that if you see for some week it's off, you know, if you really wanted to, you could ping that person, or I think in your case, it's much better just to probably ping Angus-

Ali Abdaal 1:14:43 Yeah, ping Angus

Matt Gray 1:14:43 ... and let him handle it. [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:14:44 Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:14:44 [laughs]

Ali Abdaal 1:14:45 Yeah, already people, like, the people who own the metrics are putting a comment in the Google sheet anytime a metric is off.

Matt Gray 1:14:49 Yeah. Okay.

Ali Abdaal 1:14:49 Either it's, either very positively off or very, like, uh, negatively off, they're just leaving a comment to be like-

Matt Gray 1:14:54 Oh, great

Ali Abdaal 1:14:54 ... "Oh, this is because blah, blah, blah."

Matt Gray 1:14:55 Oh, great. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:14:56 Um, question, should every metric have a target?

Matt Gray 1:15:00 I think so. Yeah. Uh, whether that's in, like, the main dashboard-

Ali Abdaal 1:15:05 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:15:05 ... like the Biggie 7.0, I'll leave that to you. Um, I think that you could have an area at the bottom of it, which is just, like, forecasts. So you have, like, actuals.

Ali Abdaal 1:15:16 Yep.

Matt Gray 1:15:16 You know, this eight metrics, and then below that, you just have a section that just is, like, your forecast.

Ali Abdaal 1:15:20 Yep.

Matt Gray 1:15:21 For the year, so if you really wanted to, you could just, like, scroll below, see how we're doing.

Ali Abdaal 1:15:25 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:15:25 So-

Ali Abdaal 1:15:25 You know, at the moment, like, for our YouTube, uh, for, like, like, for example, we have, like, a weekly target-

Matt Gray 1:15:30 Nice

Ali Abdaal 1:15:30 ... and with, with conditional formatting that makes it go red anytime it's off that.

Matt Gray 1:15:33 I love that. Yeah. That's great.

Ali Abdaal 1:15:34 Um-

Matt Gray 1:15:34 I would do that.

Ali Abdaal 1:15:35 And then we can just sort of see at a glance and be like, "Weekly shorts views is under target. Do we care? Well, no, because we're not really doing... We're not okay, and we're cutting back shorts. Cool. Whatever."

Matt Gray 1:15:42 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:15:42 So I guess that kind of thing. But also, huh, email open rate was, like, 10% lower this week than last week compared to normal. What's going on there?

Matt Gray 1:15:48 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:15:48 That requires some zooming into, you know, that kind of vibe.

Matt Gray 1:15:50 Yeah. Well, it's interesting, right? Like, I think that, you know, you bring up your YouTube metrics there. You know, not knowing a, a lot about you, but know a decent is, like, I bet you that area of your business is probably one of the strongest.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:00 Hmm. Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:16:01 Right? So if, like, your color coding and that works well, and that gives you a lot of data to then look into things, like-

Ali Abdaal 1:16:05 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:16:05 ... imagine you could have that level of detail with every single part of your business.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:09 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:16:09 It would all be insane.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:10 Yeah, that'd be sick.

Matt Gray 1:16:11 You know? So yeah, I think if that's working for you, the color coding, I would double down on it.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:14 Nice. Um, and then one thing that Traction says, for example, is anytime a metric is off for, like, two weeks in a row, it automatically becomes an issue in, like, the weekly team meeting and stuff.

Matt Gray 1:16:24 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:24 Like, what's your take on that approach?

Matt Gray 1:16:26 Yeah. I think that's a good way of doing it. I think, yeah, your team meeting cadence, having a weekly team stand-up, ideally with, like, the core owners, like the core leadership team.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:38 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:16:38 You don't want it to be too big. You want it to be... I don't know. I just kinda like that Jeff Bezos two pizza rule.

Ali Abdaal 1:16:43 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:16:44 Uh, I like to keep it to that. And so, yeah, maybe have six people in that meeting. You know, we start off with maybe going over wins from the past week that people wanna share, and then ideally leaving, like, around 45 minutes or so to the meeting to awareness, issues, opportunities, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:16:59 Hmm.

Matt Gray 1:16:59 And ideally, people, after maybe having the team go through the scorecard and just see what's well, what's not going well, we're just, yeah, pulling any of these red or yellow areas into the sort of opportunities-

Ali Abdaal 1:17:10 Hmm

Matt Gray 1:17:11 ... section of that meeting so that the majority of the meeting is solving the bottlenecks that we're seeing and working through it together.

Ali Abdaal 1:17:18 Awareness, issues, and opportunities. That's like a... Can you kind of zoom into that, and yeah, how, how do you think of the difference between these three things?

Matt Gray 1:17:25 Yeah. So in terms of awareness, I think it's spending time as a team making sure that, hey, maybe there's something that we have coming up in four months that's not really an issue. It's not an opportunity, but it's, like, something that we should start talking about and be aware of because it's coming down the pipeline soon. Maybe Oli's taking a month off for his wedding, and we should be planning for that now because it's coming up quite soon.

Ali Abdaal 1:17:51 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:17:52 Or, uh, you know, there's a launch of this new product, and we gotta kind of, like, start thinking about that now, right? So it's good for that kind of thing.

Ali Abdaal 1:17:59 Hmm.

Matt Gray 1:18:00 Uh, issues are just like, yeah, we're looking at the metrics. There's something that has been red now for two weeks.

Ali Abdaal 1:18:05 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:18:05 We've gotta address this, and so that would be an issue.

Ali Abdaal 1:18:08 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:18:09 And then an opportunity could be, hey, something's been in the green for four weeks. It's growing like crazy. Who knew it? But as fast as YouTube's growing, our LinkedIn is blowing up.

Ali Abdaal 1:18:20 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:18:20 And we're barely doing anything there. This seems like a big opportunity that if we pay more attention to LinkedIn, we can 10X that platform, as an example.

Ali Abdaal 1:18:27 Nice.

Matt Gray 1:18:27 And so opportunities is kind of like, hey, are people seeing any big things that we should be paying attention to? 'Cause I think if you pay attention to any one of these things, you're missing out. If you're only paying attention to opportunities, well, what if something's blowing up in the business, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:18:40 Mm-hmm.

Matt Gray 1:18:40 If you just pay attention to issues, your leadership meet, meetings quite, tend to be quite kind of negative-

Ali Abdaal 1:18:45 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:18:45 ... and it's just problem-solving the whole time, and there's, where's, like, the positivity and the optimism to them? And then awareness is like, okay, yeah, maybe we've dealt with issues, and we've seen some opportunities, but, like, where's, like, the broader awareness, maybe the bird's-eye view of, like, what's coming down the horizon that we should just also be aware of?

Ali Abdaal 1:19:00 Man, the, like, just those three words is ridiculously helpful, and I'm, uh, th- the reason it's, it's ridiculously helpful is because Traction uses the word issues, and so we were using the word issues for, like, two years. And then we were finding that everyone's like, "Well, it's not really an issue, so I don't really want to bring it up," and like, "It's not really an issue. It's a small thing. You know, I don't want to call it an issue." And then our issues list would be, like, basically zero because people didn't want to bring things up because it's technically not an issue. And then we were like, "All right. No one's bringing up issues, so let's rename issues to awarenesses." So now we c- then over the last year, we've been calling them awarenesses. And now Angus is still like, "Guys, please fill out the awarenesses before the meeting." Crickets. All right, we've been through aware. Any, any other awarenesses? Crickets. No one s- speaks up because it's like, "Oh, is there, is there really an awareness? It's like, well, we talked about the awareness." But just framing it as awarenesses and issues and opportunities where the metrics are automatically issued- issueified, just opportunities gives me a chance to be like, "Hey, I just spent two days in Dubai with Matt and with Erica," and like, "Oh my God, there's real opportunity for us to use ManyChat to set up Instagram closer DMs" kind of things. Like, let's talk about that. Like-

Matt Gray 1:20:03 Mm-hmm

Ali Abdaal 1:20:03 ... that gives me an, an outlet to do that, whereas it's not really an awareness and it's not really an issue, and so I wouldn't normally bring it up and it would just sort of be in my mind of like, "Ah, someone should be thinking about this," but like I don't wanna bring it up to the marketing guys because they're all busy, and I don't want to anger these already busies. Just gives me a nice out- outlet.

Matt Gray 1:20:17 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:17 So I just love that framing of aw- awarenesses, issues, and opportunities.

Matt Gray 1:20:20 Yeah, totally. No, I, yeah, it's something, I'm in the same position over the years. Like, yeah, it, it was issues, opportunities, and I heard awarenesses through Daniel Priestley.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:27 Oh, yeah, yeah.

Matt Gray 1:20:28 And so-

Ali Abdaal 1:20:28 He's the one who told us about awarenesses.

Matt Gray 1:20:29 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:29 And we were like, "Oh, sick." [laughs]

Matt Gray 1:20:30 Yeah. But, but of itself-

Ali Abdaal 1:20:31 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:20:31 ... it didn't feel like enough.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:32 It's like-

Matt Gray 1:20:32 So I was like, all right, I'll just smush all these things together, and at least you get, nothing can get missed I feel like if you got all those three in-

Ali Abdaal 1:20:38 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:20:38 ... into it.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:38 AIO's.

Matt Gray 1:20:39 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:40 Just need A-E-I-O-U or something.

Matt Gray 1:20:41 Yeah, exactly.

Ali Abdaal 1:20:42 It's a bit much.

Matt Gray 1:20:43 No, and I think the other thing too is, I mean, everyone has their own, own style and things. My style is just my style. But, you know, on those meetings, because let's just say it's an hour team meeting, and about 45 minutes of it is dedicated to issues, opportunities, and awarenesses. If you're not coming with any of these things, I literally don't know what you're doing. Like, because if you are working at the company-

Ali Abdaal 1:21:06 Mm

Matt Gray 1:21:06 ... and you don't see any issues anywhere, you don't see any opportunities anywhere, and you're not aware of anything that we need to know about-

Ali Abdaal 1:21:13 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:21:13 ... like, are you working?

Ali Abdaal 1:21:14 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:21:15 Right?

Ali Abdaal 1:21:15 That is a good point.

Matt Gray 1:21:15 And I don't mean to be an asshole or anything like that.

Ali Abdaal 1:21:17 That is a good point.

Matt Gray 1:21:18 But it's just like, you know, with all due respect, like-

Ali Abdaal 1:21:19 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:21:20 ... you know, we're all weapons here. We're like A players. We have, we are here for a reason. We are leaders for a reason.

Ali Abdaal 1:21:25 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:21:25 And so as a leader, if you're not seeing anything we can improve, anything that s- others should be aware of, or any opportunities on the horizon-

Ali Abdaal 1:21:33 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:21:33 ... guys, like-

Ali Abdaal 1:21:34 Like, what's going on?

Matt Gray 1:21:34 ... come on, we're better than this, you know?

Ali Abdaal 1:21:36 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:21:36 And so I think it just, that kind of like, guys, like let's do this thing. Like, we have big ambitions here, and this is not a million a month team.

Ali Abdaal 1:21:43 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:21:43 A million a month team doesn't sit here with crickets for an hour-

Ali Abdaal 1:21:46 Yeah. [laughs]

Matt Gray 1:21:47 ... wondering, hey, is there anything anyone should be aware of or any opportunity in this business? So like, let's, let's do this thing. Like, we got some big goals here. We're all jamming. We got our big meeting in Morocco or wherever you guys are going next in your quarterly meeting, and it's like, let's, the same level of camaraderie we have when we're in person, let's bring that to these meetings and come with some real implications of stuff everyone should be aware of, and let's get after it.

Ali Abdaal 1:22:08 Mate, I'm gonna clip this and send it to Angus, because Angus ha- has this frustration every week where he's like, "I keep telling people to fill out the awarenesses, and no one's doing it. Like, what the hell is going on?"

Matt Gray 1:22:15 Yeah, I would tell them not to show up if they don't fill it out.

Ali Abdaal 1:22:17 Yeah, nice. [laughs]

Matt Gray 1:22:18 Yeah. I, I mean, like in a-

Ali Abdaal 1:22:19 That's good. That's good

Matt Gray 1:22:19 ... yeah, just, yeah, just straight up.

Ali Abdaal 1:22:20 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:22:20 It's just like we're not, this is not a spectator sport.

Ali Abdaal 1:22:22 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:22:22 This is like this is a sport. You're on the court.

Ali Abdaal 1:22:25 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:22:26 Be active, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:22:27 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:22:27 We're not showing up to the basketball game just to sit on the sidelines. This is the leadership meeting, and the leaders of the business should be being active in these meetings and actively bringing up stuff. And if anything, hopefully you and Angus can kind of sit back there while other departments are sort of sorting through-

Ali Abdaal 1:22:42 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:22:42 ... things they need to be aware of, and you guys are just kind of moderating a conversation versus the ones just feeling like you gotta pull stuff out of others. And I've been there before in companies and it's no fun as a leader-

Ali Abdaal 1:22:52 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:22:52 ... because you feel like you're just kind of putting on this like charade-

Ali Abdaal 1:22:56 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:22:56 ... every week, and kind of like it's very performative. 'Cause you then, then just sometimes feel like you've brought your two issues or opportunities, and now you just have to pull more out of the hat 'cause no one else [laughs] has anything to say, right? So yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:07 Nice.

Ali Abdaal 1:23:09 Um, one thing I'd love to get your take on. So at the moment, Mondays are sort of our meetings day, in that we have a team, an all hands team meeting, which is like all 14 of us, and then we also have a commercial team meeting, which is like the six or so people who are in the commercial team, plus Angus, plus occasionally me. And then we have a content squad meeting, which is like the six or so people in the content team and me. So it's like a- a- and like e- each, in each of these, in like the team meeting, there's like team-wide awarenesses and issues and stuff. In the commercial meeting, it's more stuff related to the commercial side of the business. Content team, more stuff related to the content side of the business. And it feels like a lot of meetings because all of Monday is basically taken up with meetings. And we al- we also do like a nine-day fortnight, so every other Friday is off. And so what a couple of team members have recently been saying that, yeah, so like all of our Mondays are meetings, and then Wednesday afternoon we like have two hours set aside for like a thinking block just where everyone just g- g- gets on a Zoom call with a pen and paper and just thinks with like some few journaling prompts about their area of the business, and a level up hour, where it's like the, the objective of that hour is to take a course or read a book about something, whatever. So it's like Mondays are gone, Wednesday afternoons are gone, uh, every other Friday is gone. Mm. That lives, leaves us like two days a week to actually do the work, and then some people have like office hours with the accelerator students, and like Tin Tin films with me every Tuesday. So he's like, "I've basically just got Thursdays to do my work." Like, what's, what's going on here? [laughs]

Matt Gray 1:24:32 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:24:32 What's your, what's your take?

Matt Gray 1:24:33 Yeah. So first off, it's great that you're just like aware and like have the, yeah, self-awareness, and you've obviously got a good relationship with your team to kind of understand like what feedback is being bubbled up here, right? People saying, "Ooh, I only have like a day or half a day to really like get into what I gotta get into." And you may actually be seeing some like sort of side effects of this in those leadership meetings-

Ali Abdaal 1:24:56 Mm

Matt Gray 1:24:56 ... where people aren't bringing up much, maybe because they're not actually getting really into things enough to then have much to bring up, potentially.

Ali Abdaal 1:25:04 Yeah, yeah.

Matt Gray 1:25:06 I would personally make the following changes. Number one, my only meeting day would be on Tuesdays.

Ali Abdaal 1:25:13 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:25:14 I like Tuesdays because people are coming fresh off their weekend, and Mondays are sacred.

Ali Abdaal 1:25:19 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:25:19 You're like fresh. That is scientifically your most productive day of the week. You've just like been able to like rest your brain and chill. Don't slam people into meetings. Let them just work, 'cause they got all this pent-up motivation and juices, and they're ready to go. Let them just rip, right? Leave like a Tuesday afternoon- For like the meetings, right? And I would sandwich all of your meetings as the CEO into just my Tuesday-

Ali Abdaal 1:25:44 Yep

Matt Gray 1:25:44 ... as best I can. Right? And so the f- team huddle, the leadership meeting, your commercial meeting, whatever, that's like Tuesday afternoon. So all of your team now has the first day of the week to slam through stuff, all that first half day on Tuesday to also get through it, and then they sync on Tuesday now that they've, you know, had a lot of stuff they could churn through, and then are able to kind of like discuss with the squad. I would try to look at, okay, Tuesday afternoon, let's say that's from noon till 5:00 PM back in Appcan, there's like five hours there. Anything that can't fit into those five hours, we're gonna try like two months of deleting it.

Ali Abdaal 1:26:22 Hm.

Matt Gray 1:26:23 You know, you don't need to be that strict per se, but like what would that look like?

Ali Abdaal 1:26:28 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:26:28 And what stuff then gets removed? Level up hour, you know, there's one world where it's like your culture values this stuff. You only bring on people that are sel- you know-

Ali Abdaal 1:26:38 Mm

Matt Gray 1:26:38 ... constant learners, all that. You don't need to designate an hour-

Ali Abdaal 1:26:41 Mm

Matt Gray 1:26:41 ... for these people to do that potentially. They just do it naturally. They read before bed, or they learn- they're going through a course on the side or whatever. So maybe you just determine, like we're gonna just remove that. There's some other i- items there that you may determine aren't all like the core meetings-

Ali Abdaal 1:26:57 Mm

Matt Gray 1:26:57 ... that like we're like, "Okay, we're gonna try two months off these, and let's all revisit, guys. You know, from March 1 to May 1, we're gonna delete 50% of our meetings, and let's revisit what ones we then wanna put back, if any, come May 1. And if there's none that need to be put back, then wipe at the back."

Ali Abdaal 1:27:15 Yeah. Nice.

Matt Gray 1:27:15 And at least now things are simplified.

Ali Abdaal 1:27:18 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:27:18 You don't need to be on as many... People hate meetings.

Ali Abdaal 1:27:21 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:27:21 Right? And I think, too, it's like, hey, in lieu of us removing meetings, if you feel like there's things that people need to go, or, or need to know, sorry, we have a squad channel or a team channel inside of Slack-

Ali Abdaal 1:27:31 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:27:32 ... and just send a Loom to people.

Ali Abdaal 1:27:33 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:27:34 And ideally people are just using asynchronous platforms like Loom to avoid having to have everyone all in one room, 'cause meetings are pricey as well, not only on your time-

Ali Abdaal 1:27:43 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:27:43 ... on your energy, but like if you literally look at the people that you have in that meeting and you give them all an hourly rate-

Ali Abdaal 1:27:49 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:27:49 ... of, say, $250 an hour-

Ali Abdaal 1:27:49 That'd be pretty expensive, yeah

Matt Gray 1:27:50 ... you know, you're maybe spending like three, four grand on a meeting-

Ali Abdaal 1:27:53 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:27:53 ... where you're just trying to pull stuff out of people and-

Ali Abdaal 1:27:56 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:27:56 ... you know, they could just be doing a lot, especially if your team's saying like, "Hey, I feel like I don't have a lot of time." Like, you can imagine the things that they want to get through-

Ali Abdaal 1:28:04 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:28:04 ... if they weren't on meetings. They clearly wanna crank on some stuff that is kind of quickly like piling up.

Ali Abdaal 1:28:09 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:28:09 So I would just give them the space just to get that stuff done, give them the mental peace, the ability-

Ali Abdaal 1:28:13 Mm

Matt Gray 1:28:13 ... to kind of get through that-

Ali Abdaal 1:28:15 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:28:15 ... and keep it all kind of minimalist in terms of meetings, so that the ones that they are on, it's like, this is very important and it's important that you come prepared-

Ali Abdaal 1:28:23 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:28:23 ... 'cause we only have two a week.

Ali Abdaal 1:28:25 Yeah. That's good. Um, what's your take on like a weekly sync meeting and then a weekly wrap-up of the week meeting type thing? Or do you just do like one, one meeting a week with like the team or whatever? Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:28:38 Yeah. Um, so in all the companies I run, I like to have a writing first culture.

Ali Abdaal 1:28:43 [coughs] Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:28:44 It... A lot of that is selfish. Like, I just don't wanna be on a lot of meetings. If I can be on one meeting with the leadership team a week for 45 minutes to an hour, that's good.

Ali Abdaal 1:28:53 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:28:54 Assuming that everyone's A players there and they know what they're doing, like there's no need for us to be meeting a lot. You know, Jeff Bezos said, you know, "Communication is chaos." If people are always having to communicate with one another and be on so many-

Ali Abdaal 1:29:05 Mm

Matt Gray 1:29:05 ... meetings, like something's wrong.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:06 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:29:07 Right? You probably don't have clear systems. People don't know what area they own.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:10 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:29:10 They don't actually know what they're doing.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:11 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:29:11 So they're just trying to communicate all the time and be on a million meetings-

Ali Abdaal 1:29:14 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:29:14 ... because at the core, they have no idea what they're doing.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:16 Yep.

Matt Gray 1:29:17 Right? So if people have core metrics, they know what they're doing, it's piped into a dashboard, like all that area that we started talking about is nailed-

Ali Abdaal 1:29:23 Yeah. Yep

Matt Gray 1:29:24 ... people should then just be able to go do deep work each day just to make sure that the issues and the opportunities they're seeing in their area are, are taken care of. And so how I approach things is you have that, yeah, you could have your Tuesday leadership meeting. From there, I personally don't see a need for like a team-wide meeting every week. Um, I know that, uh, Brian, uh, from the co-founder of HubSpot, I think he talked about as they were building HubSpot, which is now a multi-billion dollar company, they would have like one team-wide meeting a month.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:52 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:29:53 So I personally think you can leave those kind of all hands meetings to like once a month.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:58 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:29:58 I don't think you need them every week.

Ali Abdaal 1:29:59 Yeah, we don't get through a lot of them.

Matt Gray 1:29:59 'Cause what will happen too is it's redundant with the leadership meeting.

Ali Abdaal 1:30:02 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:30:02 Like the leadership meeting should be like, "We're on the same page. Now go."

Ali Abdaal 1:30:05 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:30:05 And in their respective areas, they could run like a department meeting-

Ali Abdaal 1:30:09 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:30:09 ... that you don't need to be on.

Ali Abdaal 1:30:10 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:30:11 Because they're aligned with the general thesis of what's going on in the company. To, yeah, so I would delete that. Um, and then in terms of the end of week, I personally like to just see, and this is something you could help create or Angus could create for everyone, is like I want everyone to give me a thorough end of week update. So I wanna know if you're, say, customer success, give me a detailed breakdown of who are the key people you spoke to this week, who did you upsell this week, who got, you know, what were the testimonials you got this week? Give us like five of the best ones. Um, what are some opportunities that you're seeing? What are you working on next week? I don't need to have a meeting with you.

Ali Abdaal 1:30:45 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:30:45 I don't need to do whatever. Just like give me a detailed thing so that on Friday or maybe on Sunday, because I got really tired on Friday-

Ali Abdaal 1:30:50 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:30:50 ... I just take an hour over breakfast and I'm just like scrolling through or maybe I'm in the back of an Uber, I'm just scrolling through the end of week update channel in Slack, and I'm just able to see everyone's end of week, and if I want to, I can comment under it, or if not, I don't. And it's not, by the time I'm even seeing that, their manager has seen that.

Ali Abdaal 1:31:07 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:31:07 So it's gone through a couple filters, and I feel like I, it's much more thorough if someone's writing their update than just updating on a meeting.

Ali Abdaal 1:31:14 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:31:14 Like you've really had to think about it. You've had the time and space to write what's on your mind.

Ali Abdaal 1:31:18 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:31:19 And now I'm just kind of reading through them whenever I want.

Ali Abdaal 1:31:21 Yeah. So w- I think we do a good job of end of week updates, um, in like a nice Notion database and blah, blah, blah.

Matt Gray 1:31:26 Cool.

Ali Abdaal 1:31:27 Um, at the moment, the end of week meeting is like either on a Friday or on a Thursday, depending if it's a nine-day fortnight, and it's like kind of more of a vibey personal and professional wins, and like someone in the team is giving a presentation on something they've learned and stuff. And I've been in those a handful of times. And I've always felt like, mm, I'm not sure how valuable this is, but also now that we, we used to be s- hybrid and now we're, like, fully remote, like, does the team actually like getting on a call each week and talking about-

Matt Gray 1:31:53 Mm

Ali Abdaal 1:31:53 ... what's going on in their personal lives and stuff?

Matt Gray 1:31:55 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:31:55 Yeah. What do you reckon? [laughs]

Matt Gray 1:31:57 Yeah, so I mean, I think at the end of the day, there's an opportunity for you to just ask the team, right?

Ali Abdaal 1:32:01 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:32:02 Like, maybe send out a bit of a team-wide survey-

Ali Abdaal 1:32:04 Mm

Matt Gray 1:32:04 ... of just like, "Hey," you know, maybe the purpose of the survey is that we've noticed that there's a little bit too many meetings-

Ali Abdaal 1:32:10 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:32:10 ... and we're trying to simplify the company. Uh, these are the core meetings that we believe must be there.

Ali Abdaal 1:32:15 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:32:15 Like, and, you know, you name the, say, three or four that you think must be there.

Ali Abdaal 1:32:18 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:32:19 Is there anything you think we're missing, you know, is there any other meetings you think should be still in place?

Ali Abdaal 1:32:24 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:32:24 You know, how can we still ensure that the culture is maintained with the removed meetings? And then just see what people bubble up-

Ali Abdaal 1:32:30 Yeah, true

Matt Gray 1:32:30 ... in a survey. And then-

Ali Abdaal 1:32:31 Easy enough

Matt Gray 1:32:31 ... you know, again, like, just experiment maybe with reducing a bunch of them for two months, see how that goes. Survey them again at the end, "Hey, is there anything that you feel like we're missing in this two-month period that you'd like to see us bring back?" And then also just make some executive decisions.

Ali Abdaal 1:32:43 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:32:43 You're not gonna make everyone happy.

Ali Abdaal 1:32:44 Yeah. [laughs]

Matt Gray 1:32:44 The same way if, like, someone goes through y- your education program, some people love it-

Ali Abdaal 1:32:48 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:32:48 ... some people are like, "This was solid," and some people are like, "Oh, these things could be improved," and you just gotta make some executive decisions-

Ali Abdaal 1:32:52 Mm

Matt Gray 1:32:52 ... around some stuff. But I think the area where people get mistaken, I think, sometimes is when you have a great team, it's not like you're having a meeting or they're doing nothing. It's they're either you're on a meeting with them or they are in deep focus working on core areas that they know need to move forward in their collective-

Ali Abdaal 1:33:16 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:33:16 ... you know, workload-

Ali Abdaal 1:33:17 Yep

Matt Gray 1:33:17 ... to push the business forward.

Ali Abdaal 1:33:19 Yep.

Matt Gray 1:33:19 And so them being in their flow is one of the most valuable things you can get out of anyone. So breaking that flow for a meeting, like, you better have a damn good reason to do that, because a one-hour meeting is not one hours. It's three hours, right? It's the one hour getting ready for it, prepped, then getting to the meeting for an hour, then kind of getting back situated after-

Ali Abdaal 1:33:38 Mm

Matt Gray 1:33:38 ... and getting back into the flow. And so it's just very costly. And more than anything, I think it's better to just free up people's time and allow them just to focus.

Ali Abdaal 1:33:47 Mm. What are your thoughts on... So at the moment, Angus does m- every other week one-on-ones with everyone in the team, basically. Um, what are your thoughts on, like, manager one-on-ones and cadence of those and stuff?

Matt Gray 1:34:01 Yeah, I think that's good. That's a good cadence. Like, I don't see any issue with that. And yeah, like, you know, in, in your book, right, like, Feel-Good Productivity, and in a lot of my own sort of trial and error with this stuff, I don't know how you see it, I think we see it very similar though, which is, like, I know in my life, my greatest happiness comes, and it's proportionate to the amount of flow-

Ali Abdaal 1:34:22 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:34:22 ... I get in my life.

Ali Abdaal 1:34:23 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:34:23 Right? The amount of time I just, like, get to do my thing.

Ali Abdaal 1:34:26 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:34:26 I get to work, I get to be creative.

Ali Abdaal 1:34:28 Yep.

Matt Gray 1:34:28 I don't have a lot of distractions. I get to just, like, live a nice open calendar day and-

Ali Abdaal 1:34:33 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:34:33 ... do my thing, and your team's no different, right? And so the more that we can just allow people to embrace whatever flow looks like for them without interrupting them too much-

Ali Abdaal 1:34:41 Mm

Matt Gray 1:34:42 ... you know, I think you're just gonna get a better place. And there's a culture oriented with that as well, right? Like, just happy people in flow working on what they believe is important is-

Ali Abdaal 1:34:53 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:34:53 ... I think, a good, healthy culture too.

Ali Abdaal 1:34:55 Nice. While we're here, one other thing. I, well, I mean, or one of many things I want to get your take on. So e- currently, as part of our YouTube Accelerator, which is our 5K a year, 12-month program thing, um, we have, like, everyone, all of our students are in a Slack channel where we've offered, like, unlimited support, and so they ask questions. And we've basically said to everyone in the team that, "Hey, everyone in the team spend 15 minutes a day in the Accelerator Slack," like, responding to questions and stuff, which students find super valuable because now Ali's team is responding to them every 24 hours in Slack. Everyone in the team also has their own weekly office hour for the Accelerator students. So we have one that Tintin does for YouTube, one that Saf does for video, one that-

Matt Gray 1:35:31 Cool

Ali Abdaal 1:35:32 ... Dan does website, and so on. So we end up with, like, sort of 10 pot- po- potential office hours a week that students can join, basically unlimited for the whole year. But one thing we're finding is that it seems like not a lot, but getting everyone on the team to spend 15 minutes a day just looking at the Accelerator Slack and replying to questions is a thing that takes them away from, like, their core thing, and it's like, it's always a thing we, it feels like, "Guys, come on, let's, you know, respond to the Accelerator Slack." I've w- I've been kind of thinking that, like, is there a better way to be-

Matt Gray 1:36:00 Yeah

Ali Abdaal 1:36:00 ... able to deliver good customer success, uh, have the students' questions be answered, but without our team having to go into the Slack every single day to answer the questions. [laughs]

Matt Gray 1:36:08 Right.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:08 Any thoughts come to mind around that?

Matt Gray 1:36:09 So here, here's a, uh... I'll give you a quick thought experiment.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:12 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:36:12 If I told you that, you know, you're making a YouTube video, or like, you gotta make a YouTube video a week, and you're spending 15 minutes on that YouTube video every day-

Ali Abdaal 1:36:22 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:36:22 ... what do you think you should change? What would you change about that process?

Ali Abdaal 1:36:25 Oh, I would do it all in one go.

Matt Gray 1:36:27 Right.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:27 Like, once a week.

Matt Gray 1:36:27 Yeah. That's the same thing.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:28 Yeah, batching.

Matt Gray 1:36:29 Batch it.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:29 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:36:30 Right?

Ali Abdaal 1:36:30 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:36:30 So what I would do is I would, um, assign, say I have 10 team members.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:35 Yeah. [laughs] I've forgot that.

Matt Gray 1:36:36 I would give each of them, each of them get a day a week.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:38 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:36:38 Just one day a week.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:39 Yep.

Matt Gray 1:36:40 So Tintin and Angus are Mondays.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:42 Yep.

Matt Gray 1:36:42 And, you know, so on and so on.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:44 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:36:44 Uh, like Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, so they each just get a day.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:47 Yeah, nice.

Matt Gray 1:36:47 And they're not answering it all day.

Ali Abdaal 1:36:48 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:36:48 They just go in there for 20 minutes, 30 minutes that day. They have a little calendar thing and-

Ali Abdaal 1:36:53 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:36:53 ... oh, this is my day, so I spend 20, 30 minutes that day answering my sort of questions that are in there and whatever, and just ans- answering the general stuff coming through. And, and then, hey, if some question comes through within the community that's relevant to them, yeah, maybe it doesn't get answered till the next Monday. But that's just, like, the sustainable way to do this, right? Um, because inevitably too, I think what all of the students in the program are paying for is beyond having their questions answered timely, which this would still allow you to answer most of them timely. I think they also need to make s- they're also paying for your team to progress very fast in your given area of mastery, and then to share those lessons with them.

Ali Abdaal 1:37:38 Mm.

Matt Gray 1:37:38 And it's hard to become a master in what you're doing if you don't have time to focus and to be in flow. And so if the team's constantly feeling, "Oh, I'm in meetings. Oh, and then I need to go into the Slack. Oh, and then as an afterthought, maybe I get to keep on perfecting my craft," then they never really get to go as deep in their craft as they get to go or they could go.

Ali Abdaal 1:37:58 Hmm.

Matt Gray 1:37:58 And thereby they don't have as much insane deep learnings to share with the community as they could if they had tons of time to go really deep, and then yeah, just a couple times a week they're assigned to answer some stuff in Slack, and they're there as well. So I would just kind of batch it the same way you would do anything.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:14 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:38:15 And I think everyone in the community will understand that because you're teaching them batching with YouTube.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:19 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:38:19 And then you're also applying that level of thinking and psychology to how you guys are dealing with the community as well.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:26 Nice. That's great. It's a great idea. [laughs]

Matt Gray 1:38:29 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:38:29 Um,

Ali Abdaal 1:38:30 anything else that comes to mind around things that we should be thinking about in our quest f- good to go from 5 million to 10 million? [laughs]

Matt Gray 1:38:35 Yeah, so I think that, uh, one mental model that's useful when you do this stuff, so, you know, you may start going through this system, and you're implementing this whole flow and everything that we spoke about, and sometimes it may come up like, "Damn, this is so much work. Like, why are we even doing this thing? Like, I just wanna move on to this productivity product that we wanna launch," as an example. I think that when you're building this stuff out, a useful mental exercise to consider is you are building that product now when you do this because you are basically going to replicate this entire flow-

Ali Abdaal 1:39:17 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:39:17 ... for that product. You're just gonna change some minor things. So, like, one of the most complicated things we brought up I think that were like the stickiest for you were like the funnel system and the sales system.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:27 And the sales system. Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:39:28 Once we nail those perfectly for what you're already doing, then just kind of, you know, changing the sales script for the new product.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:35 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:39:35 It's not that much work.

Ali Abdaal 1:39:36 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:39:36 And making sure that that owner is also ready for it, it's not that bad. Once we take that funnel system and we then, "Okay, this is the existing one. Oh, we just gotta add in two more flows now for productivity stuff. Okay, that's not that bad." So it's kind of like you already are building probably like 70% of that new product-

Ali Abdaal 1:39:53 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:39:53 ... by laying this thing out properly, and I just think that's a useful mental model to think about so that the truth is you are building that product now, and by getting this thing right and making this thing strong now, you've built like 70% of that new thing, and it will be that much more sturdy, sustainable. And I think for you, too, one of your big models when you think about anything new is can I do this for the long term?

Ali Abdaal 1:40:16 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:40:17 And the answer to that is hell yes, you can if all of this stuff is formidable and strong. Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:24 Yeah. Weirdly, like I, I guess it's not that weird, but since finishing the book and since, like, that's kind of been off my, off my shoulders, I have felt like a newfound, like, interest in diving in and, like, building and perfecting the systems and stuff because I think before, even like up until, up, up until a few months ago, while, while book mode was still, was still going on, it, it really felt like every month for the last, like, seven years of doing this thing, I've sort of been running a little bit faster than I can, uh, than, than is comfortable.

Matt Gray 1:40:57 Mm-hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:40:58 Because it's sort of, it, uh, when you're starting a YouTube channel, it's sort of like, "Oh, shit, like, you know, we need to get this thing working," and then the thing starts working, and it's like, "Oh, shit, like, gotta stay on top of it for it to keep working." And then it keeps working, and it's like, "Okay, cool. Gotta make money now. Gotta hire the team." And it's this sort of, like, frantic thing because my mental model was I am, I am a YouTuber, and YouTubers don't last very long.

Matt Gray 1:41:17 Hmm.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:18 Whereas I think what I've realized now is, no, I'm, I'm an entrepreneur. I have a business. The business generates results for clients broadly without my input, and YouTube is just one aspect of the system, and I can see myself doing this literally forever. And it's, it's now hard to fathom a world in which... Like, previously I would've said, "Oh, but, like, what if I w- what if the YouTube channel dies over time?" It's like... I mean, if it's, if it's at risk of dying over time, we'll, we, we will see that based on the numbers. We'll pivot. We'll have the strategy. We know everyone in the world who is good at YouTube. Like, it's, we'd have to really screw things up royally for a serious, a, a major area of the business to just die suddenly.

Matt Gray 1:41:54 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:41:54 And even if it does, like, we've got the systems for everything else to be able to have another system for Legion.

Matt Gray 1:42:00 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:42:01 And now it feels like, oh, we're actually building a business that can survive years if not decades, rather than, "Oh, shit, I need to make the next video for the algorithm, otherwise my channel's gonna die."

Matt Gray 1:42:09 Yeah.

Ali Abdaal 1:42:09 And just that sort of reframing from I'm a YouTuber to I'm an entrepreneur and this is a business.

Matt Gray 1:42:13 Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's, I mean, yeah, profound. I mean, I think we can go and work on all the systems in all this area, right? But if we don't have like a core identity for ourself-

Ali Abdaal 1:42:25 Hmm

Matt Gray 1:42:25 ... that matches, like, what we're trying to create, it can lead to a lot of, like, disarray, right? And so just thinking that you're a creator and, yeah, at any moment this whole thing could collapse, it's terrifying.

Ali Abdaal 1:42:35 Yeah. It gets you into really short-term thinking, like-

Matt Gray 1:42:37 Right

Ali Abdaal 1:42:37 ... "Shit, I need to maximize all my sponsorship revenue because what if I can't make money in the future?"

Matt Gray 1:42:40 Yeah, exactly.

Ali Abdaal 1:42:41 It's like-

Matt Gray 1:42:41 Versus like, you know, no, you're a, you're a founder. You're an entrepreneur.

Ali Abdaal 1:42:44 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:42:44 And, yeah, right now the lead source in the, is the YouTube system we have, and we have all these other areas of the business and, um, yeah, being able to view yourself as like, yeah, this is, this is a business, and, like, this will operate for the long term, and I think then being able to focus on, like, the systems.

Ali Abdaal 1:43:01 Hmm.

Matt Gray 1:43:02 Right? The stronger the systems, the stronger your business. The last thing is, like, you're looking to build something for the long term. I think that the sort of fear mindset can be just super destructive, right? And but it happens to all of us, right? We get scared about, oh, well, what if this goes wrong?

Ali Abdaal 1:43:18 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:43:18 What if that goes wrong? That's where I've always come back to the systems of the business, right? If you have strong systems, your business is anti-fragile. I've built businesses, and I currently have a couple businesses that are in industries that are cold as hell. Every business in that industry is dying right now, but our business has never grown faster because, like, we have this system mapped out correctly. We have a strong funnel. Any leads we do get, we convert them. The sales system is incredibly strong. We're feeding back in bottlenecks to the respective area, so the owner is aware, and they're fixing them within a few days. And because that whole business and system is strong, it can weather any storm. And so I think if you can focus, like, on that aspect of things, you know, you build a business that doesn't matter what happens on YouTube, you'll be okay. You know? Because yeah, maybe YouTube, in the worst case, sure, it dives a bit and your leads aren't going as strong as they were. Then we just make sure that, you know, X or LinkedIn or one of these other platforms-

Ali Abdaal 1:44:20 Yeah

Matt Gray 1:44:20 ... that you're also big on, that we start for- making sure that the lead magnet system-

Ali Abdaal 1:44:25 Hmm

Matt Gray 1:44:25 ... is dialed in correctly on those platforms and plug it in right there, and it's no big deal.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:29 Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:44:29 You'll figure out a way.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:30 Yeah. Mate, thank you so much. This has been incredibly helpful. Uh, where can people learn more about you and, and what you do?

Matt Gray 1:44:35 Yeah, and the last thing I'll say, too, is-

Ali Abdaal 1:44:37 Oh, yeah

Matt Gray 1:44:37 ... if there's anything you ever need help with this stuff, and if I need to fly out to the team in the UK or do whatever, you know, you got a friend in your corner.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:44 No, thanks, man. Appreciate it. Yeah.

Matt Gray 1:44:44 Here to help you guys and, um, yeah, enjoyed your journey over the years.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:47 Thank you.

Matt Gray 1:44:47 Yeah. And for those that are looking to check out what I'm doing, you can find me on, you know, Matt Gray on any platform, YouTube, X, LinkedIn, and, uh, anything I'm doing with Founderos, you can find on founderos.com. And yeah, appreciate you, man.

Ali Abdaal 1:44:59 Sure.

Matt Gray 1:44:59 Thanks for having me on.

Ali Abdaal 1:45:00 Thank you so much. All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching. Do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.