Skot Waldron:
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What do race cars and inbound marketing have in common? Amanda Martin, that's what. Amanda just launched her own inbound marketing agency. If you don't know what inbound marketing is, then you'll learn a little bit about what that is. But more, we talked about people. We talked about her past experiences with companies. She is forming her own company now, and she's worked for other companies in the past.
And she, like all of us, I'm sure, at some point in our careers, have learned things about what we want to bring with us to our next job or our next opportunity or our next company we launch, or what we don't want to bring with us. We're like, "Oh, I'm never going to run my company that way." Or, "Ooh, I'm going to run my company that way." We think about these things as we are progressing in our careers, as we're maturing in the position that we're in, how we want to lead and how we want to be led.
So this is really interesting. I want you to listen up as we talk through this segment and understand a little bit more about how you can unlock the potential in your people to make sure that they are being as productive as possible and helping you grow as a person and as a company. All right, ready to do this?
What do you think it takes to be a great leader, because you've been in small, you've been in the big, and now you're on your own. And now you've been able to, in the background, say, "Oh man, if I have my own gig, I'm never going to lead my people like that, or I'm never going to do this, or I'm going to do this." Right? And now you are in your own. So expand on that a little bit. What are some lessons you've learned and what are some things that you've planned and hoped to implement?
Amanda Martin:
So I think the main thing I've learned is that your people have to be able to feel comfortable enough with you to come talk to you about stuff, right? If something's bothering somebody and they don't feel like they can come to you and talk to you about something, then that's a huge disconnect for me, especially in a smaller agency. I've worked at a couple of smaller agencies, and like you said, I've worked at one pretty substantial agency and I don't feel like I ever had that. Maybe one [inaudible 00:03:22] I had where I could actually go talk to the person and feel that I was heard. So I feel like that's a huge opportunity for a lot of leaders to just take advantage of, just to make their people feel comfortable enough to talk to them about anything that comes up.
But at the same time, having the leadership to challenge people and help them grow. And that's something I've never really experienced is being like, "Okay, well, what do you want to do? What's your end goal? Where do you want to end up so that we can map out how you can get there?" So I think those two things have always been just a pain point for me. I've never felt comfortable enough with my agency owner or my supervisor to just be able to talk to them about the things that were bothering me. And then just never having that roadmap, look at my hopes and dreams and seeing what I can do to get to where I need to get to. And those two things... I mean, I'm sure there's lots of other little things, but those two big things are really the things that always put extra stress on me as an employee.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay. So you want to feel heard. Number one, right? There's a stat that I put out with my coaching clients that 82% of people feel they're not heard, valued or understood. Right? And that's a huge part of feeling psychological safety inside of an organization. So number one, you want to feel heard. Number two, you want to feel invested in, right? That's what I heard. Is that right?
AMANDA MARTIN:
You're not disposable. They can't just kick you to the curb and somebody else come and take your place and do your job just as good as you can. That's probably true. But if you fit within your team, I feel that's a huge part of being a leader too, just putting together a team that gets along, supports each other and wants to help each other. So that was a huge component.
SKOT WALDRON:
Good. So taking those things, now you're an agency owner. Now you're the boss. What are you doing to make that happen?
AMANDA MARTIN:
So I'm a personality test nerd. I am a firm believer that there are certain personality types that work really well together and others that don't. Regardless of how your outward personality comes out, sometimes taking a personality test, like a Myers-Briggs or an Enneagram or whatever, I think that gives you a lot of insight into how you can build a team, and taking a look at how people interact with each other and what their personalities are and how they want to be supported. It's the love languages thing, right? Like in a relationship. You have to know what your love language is to know how to help somebody feel appreciated and supported. So I feel like those three things are something that when you're building a team, you have to really look at that stuff and see how everybody's going to work together.
So that's something that I'm focusing on is I'm really reading a lot of books and just really deep-diving into the whole personality and psychological side of things, because I feel like that's super, super important. There's only been one agency I worked at and it was the first agency I worked at for a length of time, that even did that. They had you do Myers-Briggs before they got hired. So to me, that's really interesting. And that's probably the agency I've worked for that has the best culture. So it's really interesting that was the case for that agency. So that's something I'm keeping in mind.
So right now there's a lot of people who are freelance, that have decided or otherwise that they are on their own now. And there's a lot of people who are out there who are great at their jobs that don't have a job. So I'm trying to take those people who I'm connected with, and either helping them find somebody else if they're not a really good fit for me, or taking them and slotting them into spots where they can help me, if not in a full-time basis right now, at least in a contract basis. So I can start building that foundation. So those are the things that I'm doing right now. I'm trying to take my time and do it slowly, not really diving into anything too quickly, because I am still navigating this for the first time. So I think those are the biggies that I'm focusing on.
SKOT WALDRON:
Cool. Love it. I love it. So, yeah, and talking about the personality assessment stuff, some people are like, "Oh, that's just fluff." Right? "It's just a lot of fluffy stuff, and let's just get down to it. Just get it done." And I think you miss out on a lot of what makes a culture great, is the fact that we can communicate and that we feel safe communicating and that we can effectively communicate and understand and sympathize with other personalities that are not like ours.
AMANDA MARTIN:
So I'm a very extroverted... I'm an ENTJ, a hundred percent. I have been for the last five years now. If I'd taken the test 15 years ago, I definitely would not have been an ENTJ. And if I'm not at work, I'm probably more introverted than extroverted. But if you hire two people, even though outwardly they don't seem... For instance, if you have somebody like me who's ENTJ and you have a much more aggressive ENTJ who's much louder than I am, even though I am extroverted, then we're going to conflict with each other, regardless of how different you think we are on the outside. Internally we're basically the same person. I just don't vocalize as much as she does or he does. And so, I feel like there's a friction point there. So that's something you have to think about, especially when you're thinking about hierarchy and leadership roles and stuff like that. It's hard to have two people in that same personality lane that's not going to conflict with each other if they're crossing paths every day.
SKOT WALDRON:
Okay. How would you talk about workplace culture? What is workplace culture to you? How do you define that? I know a lot of people, for years and years it was the environment, right? Not the environment as far as personality or how we got along. It was, we had the beer on Friday, free beer Fridays and things like that, right? While that does add to the atmosphere or whatever, a lot of us are working remote. In a remote environment, you don't have ping-pong tables and other stuff. Right? You still have company culture. What is that to you? What does company culture mean?
AMANDA MARTIN:
So like you said, I think the way I always think about it is, it's not whether you have ping-pong tables in the break room, or if you have video games to play while you're on break. To me, it's always been, how flexible are you? My daughter plays soccer, so we travel. We have games at weird times. There's times where I have to leave work at three o'clock to get to a game that's two hours away. Having that flexibility to be like, "Hey, Wednesday, I've got to leave at five, and my stuff's going to be done, but don't make me sit here until five o'clock and punch my clock when I'm really just going to be sitting here and wasting time, because I'm going to make sure my stuff's done."
SKOT WALDRON:
So things like that. I think flexibility, especially now with everybody working from home, and I feel like it's unheard of to be like, "Oh, you have to come into the office every day." I mean, even before COVID, especially in an agency culture, having the ability to work from home a couple of days a week if you need to, or if you feel like you're too distracted in the office and you have a project you've got to get done, or if your kid's sick, you don't have to worry about, "Oh my gosh, what am I going to tell my boss?" That, to me, is completely undue stress on employees. If you're hiring somebody and you don't trust them, then maybe you shouldn't hire them. If you don't trust them to be able to do the work and get it done and work from home and be a responsible adult, then why are you hiring them to begin with?
AMANDA MARTIN:
So I think things like flexible schedules and flexible vacation time. I mean, benefits are great, but I mean, that's not a culture thing, right? People are always like, "Oh, we have all these cool things." And I'm just like, "To me, it's irrelevant." So I mean, developing a culture where it's low stress and if you need to take off and your kid's sick, or if you're sick and you don't have to bring me a doctor's note. I worked at an agency once where I had to bring a doctor's note if I had a cold. It was terrible. I was like, "Why? I don't even understand."
Before I was in marketing, I worked in call centers a lot, doing customer service and tech support. And I never even had to have a doctor's note for that. And I go work in this really creative, cool agency and they required me to have a doctor's note if I was sick. And it just didn't make sense in my brain. So I think those are the things that really build a solid culture. And yeah, things like beer Fridays and having ping-pong tables, yeah, that stuff's cool. But is that really helping contribute to the actual wellbeing of your employees?
SKOT WALDRON:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Because-
AMANDA MARTIN:
[crosstalk 00:12:55] back with a beer on Friday and work, but...
SKOT WALDRON:
Yeah. Yeah, right.
AMANDA MARTIN:
If everything else is out of sorts, it doesn't really matter, right?
SKOT WALDRON:
If you think about the end goal, the end goal is to create loyalty inside that organization to the point where people want to stay because they love it. Right? They want to stay because of the way they feel when they're there. And they're just like, "I love this place. I love my boss. I love the people I work with. I love the organization. I love it." Now we say that as employees. We also say that as customers, right? "I love this company. I love their products. I'm never going anywhere else." So that loyalty is on the outside. So you work on the outside marketing aspect of stuff a lot. Right? How do you coordinate or think about how those two work? You're marketing to the external world for your clients, helping them build loyalty and recurring revenue and those long-term customers. On the internal side, how do you think about that as a business owner now? Because you've got to think about both. "I've got to drive customer loyalty, but I also have to drive employee loyalty now in my team." What's the correlation there?
AMANDA MARTIN:
So I've always... Client loyalty, I'm going to think of it that way. Because client loyalty in an agency is huge. I feel like if your clients don't love you and your clients aren't happy and they feel the same way your employees do, if they don't feel heard and they don't feel understood, then they're going to go and take their business elsewhere. So I feel like the company culture internally does filter to externally with an agency, just because you have clients you have to take care of.
And I've been an account manager, I've been a project manager, I've worn a lot of hats. And as an account manager, I was also the person who had to execute the work. So I understood how everything was going. And I was also a project manager if I had to deal with design or with development or anything like that. So I understood the client account backwards and forwards. And I had clients, when I left, that actually left with me because they didn't like the person who ended up being their account manager next, because I cared so much and did above and beyond for my clients because I wanted them to be happy. So I feel like I'm really good at that. I'm really good at the people part. I'm really good at getting people to understand, and listening. And I feel like that's such a huge part of even dealing with customers. If you don't listen to your customers, and if you see a problem and you don't fix it, then there's going to be repercussions. And it's going to be a ripple effect. Especially if it's a large community that you're serving for products.
AMANDA MARTIN:
That's mainly what I've dealt with. I've worked in racing, I've worked in automotive, I've worked with hobby companies. I've worked in all these different kinds of companies and they all have huge customer bases and communities that are built around these particular things. If you don't know your stuff and you're posting stuff for a client, they're going to see right through you and then that's going to look bad on the customer. So, I mean, there's just so much that goes into really solidifying a loyalty with a customer, regardless if it's a B2C customer or it's a B2B customer. I think that really knowing your customer, knowing who you're dealing with and knowing what your purpose is there and what your why is, is very important. It's very important to communicate all that to everyone. So you have to live, breathe, eat your culture.
SKOT WALDRON:
I love that. So that's what I want to end with, right? The idea here about how do you unlock people? How do you unlock the potential of people? And it's not just your external customer, because you started to blend them both, right? We started talking about this and you started talking about blending them together. And if I heard you correctly, it's about the why, right? Your purpose, your foundation, because that isn't only going to be sold to your customers and help them believe what you believe to help them purchase what you're offering, but your employees and your staff, they have to believe what you believe. They have to understand your why. And so if I get this correctly, you're talking about understanding that yourself, understanding what that is and how you want to impact the world, is really what's going to unlock the people that you work with, either your customers or your employees, right?
AMANDA MARTIN:
Oh, 100%. If you don't have a why as a person, then you need to figure out your why, because then that will help you figure out if you're in the right place or not.
SKOT WALDRON:
Yep. Killer. I love it. Besides your ever-changing hairstyles, which I absolutely love, what else can people get from you? What do you want to offer to individuals out there, and how do they get in touch with you?
AMANDA MARTIN:
So my website is AVagency.co. Like I said, we're very new. We're only two months old, but I've been in marketing for 10-plus years. I've shifted. Like I said, I used to work in automotive. We used to work in racing a lot. My fiance's company focuses mainly on racing. So I got to work with a real lot of really cool companies as a consultant and strategist for him. But I've shifted. I'm a nerd when it comes to sustainability and eco-friendly and vegan and all that stuff. So anything that's in that niche, I'm trying to shift in that direction, because I feel like that's where I can be most beneficial to people, especially smaller companies who are just starting out, really helping them dig into a purpose and getting their purpose out there to people. That's what I really want to shift towards. I don't know how realistic that is right now, but any inbound marketing and HubSpot-related stuff. That's my niche. I've worked in it for seven or eight years now. So that's where my core competency is with everything, is mapping out strategies and figuring out where they are lacking in using the software and finding those holes and building up a strategy around fixing those holes.
SKOT WALDRON:
Thank you, Amanda, for those nuggets of information. Lots of good stuff. I am interested to keep this dialogue going about how we bring people together. There's so much disharmony right now in the world. There's so much, especially with election year happening right now. And if you listen to this in the future, we're going to have more election years. And what happens during election year? Divisiveness happens. And yeah, we see it on TV. Yeah, we see it in the political space, but it also, I feel, creates some divisive conversations. And with us as humanity and things we're going through right now, we don't need more of that. We need more transparency. We need more honesty. We need more alignment in what we are trying to achieve as humans. And this is going to help us move forward.
Thank you for being here today. And remember, you can always find more of my interviews on my YouTube channel and at SkotWaldron.com on my blog, plus some other free resources there to help you build better teams, build a stronger brand and to move yourself forward again. Again, this is Skot with Unlocked. I really appreciate you being here and we'll see you next time.
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