AL EP 41: Flynn Zaiger – Listen To Your Team

Show Notes

As CEO of Online Optimism, Flynn Zaiger spends his day keeping his employees happy, his clients happier, and the office pups happiest. Flynn launched Online Optimism, a creative digital agency, by himself in 2012 with nothing but a laptop and endless cups of coffee. Over the years, that client base expanded and the team grew to over a dozen Optimists. In 2021, he moved with his fiancée Christine to Washington, DC, to bring a bit of big easy creativity to our nation’s capital.

Connect with Flynn Zaiger & Online Optimism here –
Web: https://www.onlineoptimism.com/
Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/flynnzaiger/
Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/online-optimism/
Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/flynnzaiger
Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/flynnzaiger
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/Onlineoptimism
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@onlineoptimism

#howto #socialmedia #podcast #agency #startup #marketing #digitalmarketing #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurmindset #consulting #startup #hiring #teammanagement #ceo #management #leadership

Episode Transcript

00:00:04:05 – 00:00:11:05
1
Everybody is adjusting to your agency and transformation coach and founder of Mission Control, creator of Leverage for Growth.

00:00:11:09 – 00:00:18:21
2
And I’m Lucas James, founder of Twist that I am, which scaled from 0 to $200000 a month with my own agency.

00:00:19:27 – 00:00:45:26
1
We are the hosts of Leverage for Growth, podcast Agency, Leverage and episodes. We know that in order to scale your agency successfully, there are multiple shifts that need to happen within the founders mindsets, skill sets and leadership styles. We are on a mission to interview marketing and PR agency owners on their journey to six, seven and eight figures and leverage the lessons from their journey to save you time, energy and money in order for you to get your agency to the next level.

00:00:46:10 – 00:01:08:22
1
If you find value in these episodes, watch the case, study video to learn more about leverage for growth and how we successfully scale agencies quickly at Niche in control outcomes Case study at Niche in Control eCommerce last. You are now listening to Leverage for Growth. Hey everybody, this is just Happy Gilmore, founder of Niche and Control and creator of Leverage for Growth.

00:01:09:01 – 00:01:26:06
1
Welcome to the Agency Leverage Edition. Today I am here with Flynn Zager, the CEO of Online Optimism, a creative digital marketing agency on a mission to help businesses across North America get optimistic about their marketing. Thanks for coming to our show today.

00:01:26:17 – 00:01:27:22
3
I’m excited to be here. Jesse.

00:01:28:12 – 00:01:32:01
1
Awesome. Can you tell us a little bit about the history and background of your agency?

00:01:32:25 – 00:01:52:10
3
Absolutely. About 11 years ago at this point, I had a job that I wasn’t particularly comfortable in, I suppose, at six months after college. And I figured if you’re going to spend 40 to a lot more hours a week in a organization, you should try your best to be happy there so that I’d give a shot at doing my own thing.

00:01:52:11 – 00:02:17:24
3
And we’ve grown pretty successfully over the past 11 years to multiple offices, a lot of work from home employees, dozens of clients that we do work for every month, essentially helping businesses with any sort of marketing of advertising and communications online. So website design, social media searching content, Google ads, all that fun stuff. Essentially, if it touches the screen, we help a business with that awesome.

00:02:17:24 – 00:02:39:02
1
Awesome. And so there was a kind of a need for starting an agency, if you can remember back to like that aha moment where, you know, you weren’t comfortable in the job, you wanted to start your own thing. Did you always know that you were going to be an entrepreneur or is that something that kind of you stumbled upon or talk a little bit about that kind of leap.

00:02:39:15 – 00:03:07:18
3
Of pure, pure stumbling, followed by crawling through darkness? And I think if I had done the proper research, I would have realized what an absurd idea it was. But I was very lucky to realize that I had my family, my parents run their own business for 50, 40 years. Now, and I also had several opportunities in college when I didn’t go to work for them full time after college, I chose a different opportunity.

00:03:07:19 – 00:03:31:08
3
They reach back out to me and when I mentioned that I wasn’t really happy where I was. Rather than offer me full time positions, they said I did consulting. They would be able to bring me in that way. And so as I stumbled into Cloud, my first year of entrepreneurship, I had the safety net of a couple previous clients, which was great because it really does take 6 to 12 months to get your feet under your feet.

00:03:32:00 – 00:03:43:12
1
Mm hmm. Absolutely. So you had started off on a consulting route and then did you did you kind of get to a point where you couldn’t handle the work and you had to start hiring and that kind of had that transition happen?

00:03:43:24 – 00:04:09:07
3
Yeah, I think that’s one of the biggest moments in entrepreneurship, is when you run the numbers and you can afford some. I actually didn’t necessarily hire my first person when I ran out of time. I ran hired the first person when I had enough funds to do so profitably. I could kind of see that this company will grow as long as I put smart people into it.

00:04:09:16 – 00:04:25:25
3
And so once we could afford to do that, we put it in so that we could get the flywheel going a little faster. And it looks the coolest thing. And the first time you ever have someone to work for you, where you assign someone to something and it just gets done, it’s feels a little magical.

00:04:26:07 – 00:04:37:20
1
Yeah. What were some of the first positions that you ended up hiring for? If you can remember back to those stages, do you remember what those first positions were?

00:04:37:28 – 00:04:55:16
3
Yeah, they were a real jack of all trades positions. We we came up with fancy names like Digital Media coordinator and strategy ist and but they really meant was you’re going to need to do everything that we need. And I think that’s probably the same for most startups. If you’re the second or third or fourth person at a company.

00:04:55:27 – 00:05:13:29
3
Yeah, a business card cannot be in long enough to contain all the job titles you should have. They definitely helped with social media and creative in particular, and it’s kind of embarrassing to say to somebody, you want to create a digital agency, but I don’t have the best visual. And so that was one of the quick fixes that we immediately needed to solve.

00:05:14:00 – 00:05:31:07
3
I was very lucky that M.L.S. Web design was super popular in 2012 2013, which does take an eye for design, but I could basically just delete all of the design elements and the CSF sheets on the site and it would just look really good to us. And I was like, Great, that’s that’s what we’re going to be until we hire a proper designer.

00:05:31:17 – 00:05:32:23
3
That was one of my first hires.

00:05:33:16 – 00:06:01:28
1
Awesome. And I’ve always been told from mentors that I kind of like. Corporate culture is usually defined by the first five people that you’re hiring. And then that kind of extends out. AM And taking a look at your website, you have a really cool company culture. Can you talk about what what have you done to kind of unite the people under either like a certain vision or purpose and kind of keep your people having like a culture by design?

00:06:02:20 – 00:06:30:10
3
Yeah, The answer’s always been to listen. And that took a long, long, long time to do. It. Sounds really is a right. It is. Listen to your staff. But pretty much all of our best culture ideas have come from bigger team meetings. I think the classic story of how that happened on my optimism as I was four or five years and I went to one of the business workshops or consulting things that we got, and they said, You need a mission and vision.

00:06:30:10 – 00:06:49:05
3
And so no problem. I’ve got up at Mission Vision over the weekend, came in on Monday and said, Hey team, here’s our new mission vision. And my team, thankfully, who was very smart, looked at me and left me out of the game. And that’s not our mission vision. And I said, okay, well, wasn’t everyone try it? And we all wrote down restaurants and missions and we all had five different ideas.

00:06:49:26 – 00:07:12:12
3
Then we tried to solve it in a nice half hour meeting. That should be enough to solve a company mission ambition. I think I stormed out of the room after 30 minutes in frustration, but we agreed to continue the conversation. We had weekly meetings for a year until we can agree on what our mission and vision is. And it’s a lot of time, it’s a lot of money that cost to put a whole team in a 30 minute meeting every week.

00:07:12:12 – 00:07:44:13
3
But at the end of all of that, we had all of us agreeing on what common optimism we’re working toward, which we clearly didn’t agree on a year earlier. And I think bringing in all of your staff and getting them to contribute on bigger things like that and deciding your company values to even smaller things like what your PTO policy should be and how do you handle sick days has really helped help people feel invested in the culture, you know, and not as frustrating as that initial meeting was.

00:07:44:13 – 00:07:56:13
3
I’ve learned to be really, really thankful when your staff gives you ideas or pushes back because that means that they’re also trying to build the company and that is so key to successfully growing an organization.

00:07:56:29 – 00:08:19:04
1
Mm hmm. Absolutely. I like the the collective approach to it where they’re doing it individually, coming back to a group and then kind of figuring it out from there. I know that working with agency owners, there’s two main retention strategies you have one that’s employees, one that’s clients, and obviously both of them are equally beneficial towards long term growth.

00:08:20:04 – 00:08:31:13
1
Did you always kind of know retention was kind of a main thing that you wanted to focus on, or was that something that also kind of came from, you know, trial and error?

00:08:31:27 – 00:08:52:22
3
Yeah, I think client retention was always key and main. You have monthly revenue coming in new. You don’t know what to do if that goes away. So even from day one, I was like, yeah, we got to keep our clients employee retention. I think I learned the first time you lose a staff member that you don’t expect to lose, which thankfully doesn’t happen too often on an optimism.

00:08:54:11 – 00:09:14:22
3
And I have a very, very proud that 11 years were pretty much of our full time employees. Everyone’s giving us two weeks notice. I’ve never had anyone quit, which is really helped the transition. But still those we’ve gotten a lot better at how we handle those two weeks, and it’s still never enough time to to really transition knowledge out of people’s heads.

00:09:14:22 – 00:09:40:26
3
And it’s always almost always better to keep the employee and to continue that that institutional knowledge that they’ve had. And clients appreciate it, too. There’s really I’ve seen a strong connection between employee retention and client retention because that’s if you talk to in-house marketers who hire vendors like us or partners, it’s always the biggest complaint is they don’t want to have a new account exact every five months.

00:09:41:29 – 00:09:50:10
3
And it’s it’s noticeable to them and it’s really noticeable to the two are intrinsically locked together just makes them even more important.

00:09:50:28 – 00:10:13:21
1
Mm hmm. Absolutely. And so on your journey over the last ten, 11 years or so and having multiple offices, if you were to look back on the journey that you’ve taken to get to where you are right now, and you were to give advice to somebody that might be like one or two steps before you, what advice would you give them that might save them time, energy or money on their journey?

00:10:14:13 – 00:10:42:12
3
I think one of the more interesting things, particularly in the past few years, is going after it’s like a hybrid work environment, is thinking about your meetings and communication cadence and being really, really open to changing that. As long as that to set guidelines on how you do it. We’ve tried a bunch of different things with different weekly meetings and when people like me to check in to work, I feel like to get flexible hours and also how we talk to clients.

00:10:42:26 – 00:11:08:11
3
And we’ve been trying different things for three years. I don’t think we’re perfect, but whenever a team member said, Hey, I think this meeting should be every other week, we should change that sense of like asynchronous slack checking. It’s always a good idea. And that’s something that you don’t necessarily see. If you’re at the top because your schedule is typically so different than your lower level staff, But so they can have an idea that would make everyone’s lives better.

00:11:08:11 – 00:11:24:19
3
You’d need to be listening to that because new work environments are New World and we need to be adapting whatever strategies make sense. So I really recommend just thinking about your meeting cadence and never doing something because that’s the way we’ve always done it, always being flexible to change.

00:11:25:07 – 00:11:32:21
1
Hmm. Awesome. I love it. So what are you working on right now? What are you excited for with your agency over the next maybe 1 to 3 years?

00:11:33:17 – 00:12:03:08
3
Yeah, we’re working on really tying in different kinds of content together. I think you see this more in house, but there’s a lot of bigger firms that are building essentially in-house content. So that could be as much as literally creating a video studio inside your offices to smaller things. I know it’s cliche. I mean, I think that is really able to generate pretty good text is not perfect.

00:12:03:08 – 00:12:40:01
3
It absolutely needs a human to pilot it and pointing in the right direction. But I think that is going to make a lot of our content creation a lot more efficient. I do see images and video being slower. Images seem to be progressing wildly faster, video slower. And so I think the ability to create engaging multimedia stories is going to make the difference between real firms that are still connecting with people and the endless air travel that anyone’s going to be able to spit out at the hundreds of thousands of words a month, probably in the next couple of years.

00:12:40:07 – 00:12:50:05
3
You’re going to have to find a way to stand out and engaging content is going to be the way to do it. And in video format, I think. Mm hmm.

00:12:50:22 – 00:12:56:21
1
Awesome. And so what’s the best way for people to get in touch with you, or do you have any offers for them that they could take advantage of?

00:12:57:04 – 00:13:17:21
3
Yeah, that’s awesome. Is asking questions as much as you want. I love talking to other entrepreneurs or people in marketing, digital, anything online. I find our world fascinating. So you could always to send a DM to any of online optimism social channels and you’ll get to me from one of my amazing social media strategists. So you could do that.

00:13:17:21 – 00:13:34:21
3
Online optimism will pretty much find us anywhere. You can also find me on LinkedIn or send me an email. Excellent at online optimism dot com. Why and at online optimism dot com. I’m happy to chat to anyone in the industry or help you with your career. I have questions about that. I always just want to be exceptionally helpful to people.

00:13:36:07 – 00:13:49:27
1
And for anybody that’s listening, I’ll put the links to offline and online optimization or optimism in either way. Yeah, but then maybe in the show as well. And thank you very much for being on the podcast.

00:13:49:27 – 00:13:51:17
3
Nick Thanks for having me. Jessie.

00:13:53:15 – 00:14:27:18
1
Agency owners. If you want to transform your agency to sustain and grow without your direct involvement, where you can stop working in the business and switch to working on the business where you can regain control of your time to delegate effectively, get paid what you’re worth, and have your team run the day to day. Go to niche in control dot com slash case study right now to learn more about leverage for growth, you can book a free strategy session with us to look at your systems, understand what needs to be done in order for you to scale and get a free strategic plan for the next year to live the life of entrepreneurship that you’ve

00:14:27:18 – 00:14:35:25
1
always dreamed about. Go to niche in control dot com slash key city that is niche in control dot com slash case we now.

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