Jack (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of 4Play Fireside. I'm here with Shabazz Kuchra from Venture Beyond. And what are we talking about today, Shabazz?
Shahbaz (00:08)
We are talking about how to build a awesome creative team to scale adds to infinity and beyond. I think the title is how to hunt, train and retain the top 1 % marketing talent. Cause that's like what I focus on all day, every day.
Jack (00:25)
Nice. Awesome. I'm personally very interested in this. mean, building out a marketing team here at 4Play, ⁓ it's one thing to bring on killers, people who've done incredible things in their careers. It's another thing to keep them around for a really long time, make sure that everyone's aligned and on the vision, if that's part of what you're going to be talking about, and on the same team, right? All heading in the right direction. And yeah, I like that team component as well, right? Feeling together. ⁓
and committed to the vision.
Shahbaz (00:57)
Yeah, absolutely. It's something that's ever evolving and something I'm always thinking about. And I think through my own self-improvement and personal development, it gets better and better. like, long as I'm moving forward, I'm happy. That's the main thing. I know I haven't got it all figured out.
Jack (01:12)
for sure, for sure, for
Shahbaz (01:15)
Cool, yeah, so shall I load a deck and just jump straight into it or like, how should we do this?
Jack (01:20)
Yeah, let's jump into it. We've got a few people in the room. Doesn't look like the chat's going yet, but I'll prompt people for some questions. But yeah, let's get started.
Shahbaz (01:21)
you
Cool.
Coolio. Give me a sec, I'll try and up the deck.
So.
Okay, can you see my screen?
Jack (01:56)
I can, yes. Yeah, I can see it. Yeah. But right now I see, ⁓ I see Riverside, think, right now.
Shahbaz (01:56)
at all. You can. OK, so you can see.
Okay, you can see the presentation now, right?
Jack (02:07)
No, it's still a riverside right now.
Shahbaz (02:09)
Okay, hold on. Give you a sec.
accidentally put it on the ⁓ okay
There we go. Okay. Is that okay?
Jack (02:33)
No, for some reason it's still on Riverside. It says, please keep this tab open. There we go, you got it.
Shahbaz (02:36)
wait, hold on, share this tab instead. Okay,
there we go, bingo. Cool, yeah, so main topic I'm talking about now is something that I focus on all day, every day, because I think like just straight to this point, Growing a company, ⁓ once you get past a certain scale, so once you've got like, when you have four, five, six people, you can manage them directly. And in a way, you're just an instruction giver. So you're basically saying, hey, do this, do this, do that, you do that, you do this. But overall, you've got the idea of what's happening, right?
and you're the person project managing, coordinating, getting things done. As soon as you go past a certain point, you're no longer working with executors and you have to actually build a team. So we have a team of 40 people. We've built that over the last three years. We pretty much went from three people to 40 people over three years. And in fact, we scaled the head count in the first 12 months to 40. And then through the process of elimination, we just improved the team over time. And for me, and I think I got this from Steve Barlet actually, rather than...
Steve Jobs is on the screen. I think he said that basically running a company is like running a recruitment agency. You are in effect basically just a glorified recruiter trying to find the best talent that you possibly can and convince them to come up the mission with you. And when he said that it really stuck with me and that kind of principles always been in my head for the last couple of years since I heard it. ⁓ And it means I put a disproportionate amount of time on recruitment personally. You know, so like I focus a lot my attention on that and
I still attend all of the interviews. I still sign off on every single person that gets hired, ⁓ even though it is time consuming. And I'm often reviewing all the challenges that people have done in the interview process, just because I know like I'm the gatekeeper to make sure that the quality standard keeps increasing. And my goal is just to every single year, every single month, or whenever we do a round of recruitment, it's just to continuously improve the standard of the company. And if that happens...
month on month on month, and we're going forwards. And as long as I don't go backwards, we get to the top of the industry. That's it. It's pretty simple formula. So that's why I've become really, really, really focused on getting this as good as I can. I'd like to think I've done my 10,000 hours on recruitment. I've done thousands of interviews. I've been through tens of thousands of CVs myself. Personally, I've done hundreds and hundreds of screening calls. ⁓
a crazy amount of like activity myself personally, and then also now my team who I lead on quite significantly, you know, they spend, they spent hundreds of hours doing different things themselves. Recruitment is hard, I'm going to say this, like I've done thousand plus interviews, definitely across different businesses, different industries. It's one of the hardest things because even after having done a thousand interviews, I still feel like I don't understand at the of an interview whether I should hire that person or not. I think overall,
just a straight interview process is not enough to make a decision on whether or not that person will improve or decrease the standard of your company. just, and I've come to the realization that I'll never get to that point. I'm not some kind of like magic mind reader who can know what's going on inside somebody's head. And as a result, you know, I got to have like a process around this, you know, and I've, I've kind of consumed different processes from different places and got like, you know, best practices from top grading and all, you know, other bits and bobs and mashed it into my own, my own process, right.
We all know this, like when you hire an A player, when you hire a really good team member, they just produce a disproportionate amount of value compared to people who are like Bs or Cs or whatever, right? So I think finding those A players who are like, in my opinion, one in a hundred, because by default, to get an exceptional person, they're going to be rare. You've got to put the effort in to find them. It's like collecting Pokemon, right? You know, you're only going to get the rare one if you really try hard to find them. And it's the same with teams. You know, you've got to go and find.
you've got to take the effort to go and find, you've got to kiss a lot of frogs before you find the prince or the princess, right? So recruitment is tough, it's time consuming, like, and hiring a bad person means, you know, it's going to have such a negative impact in your company, especially when you're small and starting up in an early stage. You definitely want to avoid, at all costs, a bad hire. In fact, I'd rather do the job myself than hire somebody bad and just assume that like, it'll get better because generally speaking, it doesn't.
And then, yeah, so like, it's just, I guess, like kind of points over here, it says it's hard to test attitude and culture fit, kind of comes back down to what I saying about interviews. I think that people perform differently when they're under observation as to when they're not under observation. So you need to find a way of observing them when they're not under observation. So that's kind of a key principle for me. ⁓ So we've overall been hacking the process and we've found a way which we feel is scalable, it's definitely repeatable, it doesn't involve like hours and hours and of my time like it used to.
⁓ And I've got it down to the point now where I can pretty much attend a final interview with a candidate, review some of their work, and it might take me, you know, 45 minutes basically for each candidate that I go through. And generally speaking, by the time a candidate comes to me, they're already very qualified and vetted and probability of us hiring that person is relatively high, you know, usually seven or eight out of 10. ⁓
Bit of background on me for anybody who doesn't know who I am. So CEO, co-founder of Venture Beyond, we're a growth marketing agency. We've kind of leaned away from being a marketing agency now. We're mainly focused on being an affiliate. So we spend our own money on ads. We spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every week on our own ads as an affiliate, a meta. And we've grown the team, three to 40 people in around about three years. And yeah, we work in, what does that say there? Can you see my face on the screen here? Is this showing? Can you see that?
Jack (08:18)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's fine.
Shahbaz (08:19)
OK, cool. So I think there's a bit blocked out, but it shouldn't be a problem. Some of the team, these pictures probably need updating because this is in our old office. Some of the brands we work with, blah, Yeah, always have to show this because people just don't believe you unless you show an ad account, right? So this is an account that we scaled from 30k a month in ad spend to 4.1 million over the four years working with them. And we got them into the disruptor category. So that means top 1 % of brands worldwide.
Jack (08:24)
I'm
Shahbaz (08:48)
There's around about thousand brands on that list. So we get special support for our meta and access to their like highest level elite team of agents or whatever you call them, meta agents. ⁓ So yeah, this is our general team structure. So, and I've shown this a few times before on previous presentations. So generally speaking, the growth team is like the brains behind the operation. You could think about it. And within that, the core roles are your creative strategists and your growth strategists.
So our growth strategists are data analysts, media buyers. In a way, they set the tone for what works and what doesn't work. And they give very clear instructions to rest of the team. say, hey, do this, don't do that, because this works, this doesn't work. They're very data-focused. So they fix all the tracking attribution issues. They work on scaling the campaigns ⁓ in a semi-automated way. use some automations in our media buying. And they work very closely to our creative strategists, who set the tone for what the strategies in the accounts, what's working, what's not.
So they shoot out briefs to our post-production team. And the post-production team gets assets from both our production team and from content creators. And now AI-generated stuff. We've generated a ton of stuff in AI. And then from the post-production team, it goes back into the growth team. They then launch the ads into the ad account. We then extract the data. We have a small data team. And then it comes back in a format which is accessible, readable, analyzable by the growth team.
So that's the general team structure. And I guess I'll go into like two of the core roles for the purpose of this presentation, the growth strategist and the creative strategist, because I feel like these are the two most important ones, you know, the sit at the heart of the strategy of everything that we do. So what am I looking for in a creative strategist? I'd say like the core skill, the number one skill I'm looking for as a base is direct response copywriting. If they've got that, we can teach everything else. Like that is one of the core things, right? Which within that comes research, understanding of consumers,
Having a level of empathy for customers, understanding how they work and operate. ⁓ And then from there, they're coming up with angles, writing scripts. ⁓ That's like number one skill. If they come already with that skill to us, they've already got a significant advantage when they start. Video editing on graphic design. So a lot of our Crip strategies start as video editors and then kind lean into learning copywriting. That also does work. But nowadays, if we have a primary skill we're looking for, it's mainly DR copywriting. ⁓
Yeah, they need to have a quantitative mindset. So they need to be creative, but at the same time, need to understand what the data is telling them. And they need to be accepting of the fact that, you want to make sure you've got somebody who's like, ego doesn't get too big if their creative idea doesn't work. So you need to do a of an ego check during the recruitment process. That's important. More so now is really important. Like I put it as tech savvy, sounds a bit watered down.
Check out people's typing speed. That will usually tell you how tech savvy they are. Check out what software they use for themselves. How much do they talk to chat dbt in their spare time? Do they generate any stuff in mid-journey or in any other gen AI tools just for fun? ⁓ Look at what games they play. Somebody who plays World of Warcraft or League of Legends is generally going to be in a certain cohort of people. You can make some generalizations about people, but there's truths to them. ⁓ And then just generally...
Jack (12:10)
So wait,
I have to check here. That one pricked my ears and I'm very interested now. So somebody who plays these video games, is that like a favorable interpretation or unfavorable? Is that a good thing or bad thing? Nice.
Shahbaz (12:11)
Yeah, cool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh yeah, certainly favorable.
The funny thing is, I'll just say the things that you shouldn't say, right, but the truth is, there's a certain mentality behind people who are willing to hack and do something continuously to get a result right. And to get good at those games, you've got to be able to really, really hack and sit there for hours and hours and hours, right? And so if someone's a level 200 in League of Legends or something, I don't know what the levels are, I don't play it. I can tell you now they've got a certain mentality and if you can align them towards a goal that...
puts money in their pocket and get them to apply that same logic as to like how they play games or that same feeling as to how they play games into the work they do and you can make them successful off the back of it you're gonna get an absolute fucking top performer.
Jack (13:06)
You know what, couldn't agree
more. It's interesting because I'll tell you a little bit of my background. Well, it is not so much of my background, it's just my past life. I had an ex-girlfriend that was a professional League of Legends player and she got me into it. I think it's the worst habit I ever developed because it's very easy to get sucked in. And then I realized I was running my business at the time. was like, I'm spending too many hours ⁓ playing League of Legends. I need to stop.
Shahbaz (13:20)
Hmm.
Jack (13:33)
So I had to separate myself from this little gaming addiction that I developed. It was good fun, and it was fun to climb up the ranks, but I couldn't agree more with the idea that you need that addictive personality that's always looking to ascend to get better. ⁓ But I couldn't, I think this, very similar thing of my little brother's a competitive bodybuilder. He's not so much of a little brother anymore, he's more like a big brother. ⁓ I think that young people going through university, their first jobs.
that ⁓ grow up with exercise as part of their or some sort of sporting endeavor or exercise as part of their foundation, have all of the component parts to being successful, right? The commitment, the total accountability, there's just a bunch of the hard work, right? Not particularly enjoying things, ⁓ still doing it even when you don't feel like it, all that, the resilience, right? But also the best excuse not to improve their lives.
Shahbaz (14:08)
Hmm.
Yeah.
there.
Jack (14:30)
because they're just going to maybe continue to be obsessed about this one thing, their physique or their sporting endeavor, their performance in the sport. Maybe that doesn't prove their lives. They become a professional sports person, but most people don't. I think that some of these things can be great indicators of a person's ability to be persistent and to have those attributes that you need to be successful in something. But then they can also be the best excuse for ⁓ not doing that thing. If you, for example, work with somebody who's addicted
Shahbaz (14:30)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Hmm.
That's an interesting... Yeah.
Jack (14:59)
video games, then maybe they're just trapped in video games as opposed to their work.
Shahbaz (15:04)
It's an interesting dichotomy. It's funny because for a remote team we use Time Doctor and we have screenshots so we can see what people are doing. And a guy was playing League of Legends on his second screen whilst he was meant to be editing videos and we had to fire him of course. And if there's ever an argument towards screen tracking and surveillance, that was definitely something that cemented it for me. ⁓
Jack (15:15)
Hahaha.
Shahbaz (15:24)
And people have mixed opinions on this. I have a pretty strong opinion on it now. I think it depends on the role. ⁓ But anyway, yeah, I totally agree with you. It can go one of two ways, right? But I think if you can show people a way that is better than the way that they're living, and you can give them a light towards something that's going to get them what they want, and you can be the person or the team or the company that provides that, you're going to go far. ⁓ And I think you just got to align people towards that. And it's a constant process. It's not like something you're like, hey, here's the vision. Here's what we're doing. Go and do it.
Jack (15:46)
Yeah.
Shahbaz (15:54)
It's like continuously beating the drum. Like this is what we're doing. at the edge of our industry. We're going to be the best. We're doing all this AI stuff that nobody else is doing. Like if you want to be elite, you've just got to stay elite, right? And you've got to keep hacking at it. And you've got to create accountability around that. And the way I see it is like, you know how personal trainers get good results with people because they just stick to the process? Because once you're financially committed to something, you're just going to do it. It's the same with working in like a top 1 % company. It's like you have to hold high levels of accountability for getting things done.
And that's what I'm trying to build every single day, which by default, that means that I have to be accountable. So my personal trainer for personal development in life is just having a business because like everybody around me holds me accountable to the standards that I set for myself. Yeah. At least that's, that's how I feel about it.
Jack (16:38)
Right. I like the,
yeah, I like the, some of the things that you're doing with your team as well in terms of tapping into that psychology, right? If you have somebody who is, ⁓ has a natural inclination towards obsession around getting better, and then you can tap into that psychology, the same psychology that might be, ⁓ working in video games, right? That short feedback loop, those regular dopamine hits.
Shahbaz (16:56)
Hmm.
Jack (17:07)
and bring it into the day-to-day role, ⁓ yeah, then you're not fighting human nature, you're working with it.
Shahbaz (17:14)
Yeah, you're nurturing people as like, in a power, right? Sounds a bit wishy washy, but like you're actually channeling people into being the best version of themselves. And that's like when you build the best company, because like people get addicted to being good at something.
I have one guy on our team who works with us remotely now, but he's super into all the AI generation stuff. And so I work very closely with him to test out the different tools, see what's working, build custom flows in Comfy UI. And I could tell he just genuinely ⁓ is impassioned by the process of creating with AI. ⁓ And so for me, I'd be silly to give him other types of work now. So I just tried to just remove all of the responsibilities and get him to just
Jack (17:29)
awesome.
Shahbaz (17:57)
double down on that. I know that he's like feeling good about that. So it's also about finding what resonates with people and putting them in the right role. That's also important because different people will value different things. And like you come to realize that later on in life when I sound like an old person now, but you come to realize that when you can't motivate everybody in the exact same way. And so like you've got to use different messaging and different tactics with different people.
Jack (18:23)
Yeah, there's a through line there with marketing somewhere.
Shahbaz (18:24)
Yeah.
100 % recruitment is a marketing funnel and I'm to talk about that in a second. I'll come to it. Um, so how we used to do things. So typical indeed LinkedIn job posts, online interview, a test, a final interview, hide and train, but like, just wasn't quite working. This is quite a typical process that most people, most people follow. Um, I'd say like, I mean, job ads are expensive and the quality of the leads you get through them are pretty shit to be honest with you. Um, agencies are absolute fucking waste of time. Don't ever use them. I've like.
sorry, all agency owners who are my friends, recruitment agencies, sorry. I've tried seven, eight, nine of them and they've all been absolutely useless. They don't take any accountability for the result. So I think that because your people are the most important thing in a company, you need to internalize that. You need to be absolutely excellent at doing that. I can understand the use case for a recruitment agency as you scale when you've got 100, 200 people. need to widen the pool of people who have a network who can contact other people. get that.
But when you're kind of sub 100 people, do not think you should be using a recruitment agency. It's a bad idea. And then, yeah, so we, why doesn't work? Filtering CVs takes ages. That's like such a cumbersome process. There's no really good way of finding an actual culture fit. And like often you end up in a situation where you hire the wrong person, you've got to turn through them, right? And whatever got here. So.
Yeah, I guess what our constraints were for recruitment. So I set this challenge. This was something we overhauled. Recruitment process is something we overhauled over the last six months. And I sat down with two of my team in operations and I said, look, the goal is this. This is the ultimate constraint. I want the top 1 % of people. I do not want anything else. Like I'm not going to accept anything that is like 2%, 3%, 4%. I want the top 1%. If you bring me somebody who's not top 1%, they should just not even come in for an interview. And the other constraint was like, I wanted to have a physical office because I feel like the...
level of human connection and interaction you have in a physical office makes such a difference to like problem solving that you just cannot get working remotely. And I've done both. I've worked remotely. I've worked in-house in real life. And like, I know that there's certain things that can be done remotely, repeatable tasks, maybe a task where there's like very defined start and end point. But in terms of like the, in terms of the getting people to actually problem solve, I think you need them physically in person.
I don't think there's any compensation for that. By the way, might, could you say something? think my earphones might have just died.
Jack (20:57)
I can still hear you, buddy.
Shahbaz (20:58)
Oh, OK, one of my headphones is still working. That's fine. So I wanted a physical presence in the office. And so I literally set up an office like 20 seconds walk from my home, which is super useful for me. And we have around about 2 thirds or half to 2 thirds of our team here, and the rest remote doing more functional roles. And yeah, kind of key constraints. So get me the top 1 % of people. We've got to have a core team of strategists in the office. And we've got to make sure that every single person who comes on board is
Jack (21:02)
Awesome.
Shahbaz (21:28)
quick learner and easy to train. That's the ultimate remit, right? So I don't care about skill. So I got this from Ray Dalio, right? It's like you're hiring for aptitude, attitude and skill. Like I genuinely don't care about skill. What I care about is the attitude and aptitude. So attitude is, is somebody willing to learn? And aptitude is, can somebody learn? So if you've got a willingness and an ability to learn, like you're going to figure things out very quickly. In fact, I think like having too many skills is a deficit. If I take on somebody who's got 15 years experience doing something.
They're gonna do it in a random way that is just like not how we do things. I'm not saying that experienced people can't bring value to the table, but I find them just so much harder to train and more difficult to kind of mold into what you want. So we have like two different methods to recruit credit strategists at the moment. So we have junior hires and senior hires, right? So senior hires are through headhunting or through networking. Networking is usually when you're gonna find your best people, because you get to know them, they hear what you're talking about, they outreach to you, et cetera.
⁓ But more specifically recently we've been focused on junior high. So this is where we have an internship, which we called a Quest Ship, which I'm going to explain in a second, and also through networking as well, mainly through universities. So how does the Quest Ship work? So we put up a job out as usual, but we actually position it as an internship and it's an unpaid one week internship. We do cover some travel expenses if people are coming from afar. All we have is a screening call. So we usually go through a few hundred candidates.
on CVs and then we'll get down to maybe 50 screening calls. And then we'll have around about 15 people turning up for this one week quest ship. And by the way, it's like, you have to be careful because unpaid trials are like not legal. But what we're doing is we're giving them like basically free education, free training for a week. And at the end of it, they get a reference as well. So they can go and use that training and do whatever they want. But the whole idea for us is it's like a soft recruitment exercise. And.
When we have a cohort of 15 people, we're aiming to recruit one or two. We only want the top one or two. We do not want all of them. We don't want five. We just want one or two. That's it. And they usually emerge, right, cream rises. They usually emerge from the process. ⁓ And the good thing is they are already pre-trained through this process. So imagine it's like, we're going to take on a new creep strategist. We're going to have to train them up anyway. So why not just train them up during the recruitment process? So that is basically what we do. So we apply a week of training. There's a challenge at the end.
which helps to assess them. And at the end of it, they're ready to go, to jump straight into the process of work. So what does this look like? And I did make a LinkedIn post about this. If anyone wants to have a look, there's a more detailed agenda of what's included within the five days. So day one is very much so getting stuck into the tools of what we use. So we use so many different tools, like Ads Manager, 4Play.
Motion, GA4, ArcAd, VO3, Runway, Mid Journey, 11 Labs, File.ai, NA10. There's so many different tools that we use. So we try and showcase all the different tools on day one. And usually, if people stare blankly at the screen and are clicking around and don't understand what's going on, it means they're not tech savvy enough to actually be a CS in this company. If they're like, oh, how does this work? How does that work? Oh, I've tried this thing. Oh, can you explain how that setting works? You immediately get the sign that they're going to be able to pick up software very quickly. Within our industry, we know that...
Being able to use new software and new tools is like a key component of being a really good CS. So we give them a crash course on that on day one. We see how they kind of interact with the software. We also cover the general principles of how we work and what we do, et cetera. Day two, we really focus on direct response copywriting. So we teach them all the basic frameworks of copywriting. We go through breakthrough advertising principles. We explain how that all works.
And we get them to do 10 or 15 mini quests throughout the day where they've got to do a bit of copy and submit it. We actually use a WhatsApp group and they submit their bit of copy in the WhatsApp group. And at the end of the day, we assess it and have a look at like how they've done, right? We teach them the basic principles of marketing. You've got to remember people come in at different levels of experience. Some people with literally zero experience in marketing whatsoever. And we take them on even if they don't. Some people have been doing marketing for a year or so. ⁓ And then we take them through our research process. We explain exactly how we do research, like what we do on.
in Reddit, what we do with ChaiGBT, what prompts we use, how we do review mining, how we look at ad comments, how do we bucket people into different avatars. ⁓ We go through all that stuff during day two. And then we focus towards the afternoon, we focus more so on ad creation. So we tell them about the different Gen.AI tools, we get them to actually make some stuff as well. And we explain the principle of what is a hook, what is pacing, ⁓ what makes good visual, what's a headline, what's a sub-headline, and what's visual hierarchy.
We explain all these core principles to them. And the whole idea is in day one and day two, we're absolutely overloading them with information. It's so dense information that some people just can't keep up and they just fall off the process and people do actually leave the process. That's fine. Then day three and day four, they get split into groups and they do a quest and the quest directly mimics the work they do day to day as a credit strategist. So they've got to build an ad plan, which is basically a plan for the week. What ads are gonna make.
They propose a bunch of new concepts and bunch of iterations based on some previous ads in a brand's ad library. And they each get a product and they have to make an ad plan and then add some ads off the back of it. So they go and shoot the ads as content creators. They go and edit them and they go and get them ready for us and they put it into a presentation. So it's very time intense and the best groups, they often like work late hours and they kind of have to do the extra pick or the extra mile. And we observe that. We see how they're doing in that process.
And then day five, do presentations. it's a good kind of test of communication skills, presentation skills, if they're working with clients, although we're doing less of that now, we're working more as affiliates. So there's less client management. But it also just kind of shows how they will internally communicate. And how can they manage and convince stakeholders? Because we have a panel, we usually have four or five panelists, and we're drilling them with questions throughout the presentations. And at the end of it, we have a winner. And then, yeah, so usually the winning group
often has like the top one or two candidates where we're looking to take them on. And that's basically how the quest ship works. here's some like pictures behind the scenes of her, that's a couple of the groups. So I do some of the teaching on day one and day two, but now I've like shifted some of the teaching to the team and I do a little bit and I've kind of narrowed that down over time. So I'm only doing some small parts. Yeah, these are some of the guys that we hired through the quest ship.
And yeah, how do you get the best people in there in the first place? You mentioned about it being a marketing funnel, So recruitment is absolutely a marketing funnel. And I don't know if you've ever read this quote before. Have you read this quote before?
It's like a fake.
Jack (28:08)
Men Wanted,
A Hazardous Journey, Small Wages, Bitter Cold, Long Months of Complete Darkness, Constant Danger, Safe Return, Doubtful, no I've never read this but this is good.
Shahbaz (28:11)
Thank
Yeah.
If I saw this job ad when it came out in like 19, whatever, I'd be fucking applying for it straight away. And I'm like, this is awesome. How do I sign up? It's the best bit of copy that I've read. Honestly, I really, really enjoy reading it. And it's a famous ⁓ excerpt from a newspaper. It was like an advert basically. And I just thought it really resonates with me as a person. And therefore I wanted to make sure I put that into all of the messaging I put out there for potential recruitment, potential candidates. ⁓
Jack (28:26)
Thank
Shahbaz (28:48)
Because we want people who are like, want to push themselves, want to be growth minded. And we just don't want candidates who just want to coast and do nothing, right? And make nothing of themselves in the life. They want to be somebody who's got a chip on their shoulder, wants to make something of themselves, wants to attack, right? So like literally this headline that I wrote for the careers page, no corporate nonsense, no old fashioned hierarchy, no micromanagement. It's basically people are willing to take self accountability and don't want to be working in a stiff corporate where they just can't make any changes to anything, right?
And it's funny because when interviews happen and I ask people, why did they apply for us? Often they literally just quote this headline. They literally quote it verbatim. I'm like, actually, this had such a big impact compared to how I imagined it. I wrote it just off the cuff, right? Because it was what I was feeling. I used to work in a big corporate at Deloitte. And I just didn't enjoy the environment. The culture just wasn't me. I wasn't aligned. Me and Deloitte weren't aligned. And so I wrote it off the cuff very quickly. And what's funny is like,
I can't count how many times people have quoted this in interviews to me. They're like, they read this and they're like, well, that's the thing. So I guess the key principle is here. You need to think about what you're building. Think about what you're building with intent and put all that stuff, all that messaging of like what you're trying to build into every part of the recruitment process. If you do that, you're to get the right people on the team. know, I'm I'm definitely of this mindset here. Like it's a dangerous journey. We don't know if it's going to work. AI is taking over.
I'm going to be part of the race. Like, are you coming with me? If you don't, that's fine. ⁓ So I'm not apologetic about it anymore. And we have this WhatsApp group with a local university where there's like hundreds of people in there for a local society. And I always send like very outrageous stuff in there to recruit people. I'm like, if you want an easy life, don't apply for this job. And I always lead with that. And it's always like inspired by this one particular thing.
And you'd be surprised at how many people I get off from the back of that particular society at university of a similar mindset. you know, like, I feel like people are too apologetic to like, you know, you've to be nice and like, you know, we've to like a friendly, warm environment and like, you know, we all cuddle every day and eat pizzas and like, or sing kombayah every single day. you don't build a fucking awesome company that way. You need to just be like, say what you mean. Like I'm trying to build top 1%. That's what I'm doing. So I'm not going to apologize about it, you know? And so if it's going to turn off 99.
of people or like, I don't care. That's not my feedback loop. I'm not looking for those people, you know? And so exactly for me, it's a good thing because like, I don't want to build an average company. I'm building an elite company. So I've got to naturally just piss most people off. It's just the way that it is, you know?
Jack (31:16)
might be a good thing.
You know what, I'm sure you've probably seen this, you know, previously in your career, maybe working at Deloitte, when you don't have that filter, you get a lot of nonsense. You get a lot of nonsense, right? And ⁓ unfortunately, you don't get that mindset that you talking about, the ability to grit your teeth and do something that's difficult, right?
Shahbaz (31:39)
You do. You do. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah,
do you know what it is, right? Early days, I'm just going to kind of talk about this off the cuff, but early days when you grow in a business, you really have to try hard to convince people to come and work for you because you feel like there's nothing there, right? You're starting from nothing. You have like literally like no employees, right? So you're trying to recruit people and build something, right? So you have to be very convincing and you feel like you have to be like nice to everyone, give them good environment, et cetera, et cetera, right? But what I've learned throughout the years is you just need to have, you don't build a great company that way. You need to...
have a lot of conviction about what you're building and be like strong in that mind. And if you can skip past, so I probably like spend a lot of time like time wasted, you know, trying to just convince people I'm like, no, you build through attraction. It's the law of attraction, right? It's like, if you build something awesome, people are going to come to you. The right people are going to come to you. So that's a core thing for me, right? It's like, just don't worry about the masses, just ignore them. And which means by default, like said, you're going to piss people off. And that means that, you know, it's going to be harder for you to recruit at the beginning, but be very selective is really important.
Yeah, and then just going back to some of the practicals here. So yeah, we do use ads to do some recruitment as well. So that's something we've been trying out recently. And then we use job ads on LinkedIn and Indeed. And again, the copy on the job ads is very like polarizing. You we're not apologetic in the job ads as well. And it always starts to hook and a problem agitates solution, you know, typical copyright framework.
Do you hate your life because your job sucks and you've never been inspired in your whole entire life? Something along those lines. We tested so many different things. I can't even remember what the current version is. But then we provide a solution. like, hey, come and work here. You're going have an awesome time, but it's not going to be easy. And then we go into the job description of what's involved, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm continuously testing the job ads. It's not something I just make and forget. It's not something that I just depended on AI to write for me or somebody in the team. I'm personally signing off on all the job ads myself. And I think that's super important.
⁓ Let's see, we've got two here. Yeah, we've gone through all this. ⁓ Yeah, so I think another key point is you're doing this quest ship. So they're doing this one week intense training and recruitment. Generally speaking, people value the position more because they understand that they had to go through a hard recruitment process. And so the commitment is higher as all. And second thing is that I think I mentioned this already like
They're already immediately able to contribute good quality work from week two because I've had a lot of intense mentorship and training in that process. You also get to see who's receptive to mentorship, who took the advice, who took the feedback and actually implemented it, you know, because not everybody does. that's, that's something we're always observing. And somebody wrote this slide deck for me. This point three here is Gen Z aligned learning, gamified tasks, team quest and collaborative growth focus culture. You've got to like...
In the end, you're doing a quest ship, it's your first interaction with people. potential people will come on board. So you do need to gamify a little bit and make people realize that we are just playing like a glorified version of Age of Empires or League of Legends or whatever it is, right? I think if you can do that, that's always a nice touch. Yeah, I've mentioned all this stuff already. Yeah, repeatable and scalable. So we've built a process around this now that just works. I can get my team to handle the majority of it.
and I just kind of come in and do my couple of hours in the morning on the Monday and then help to assess the candidates as well. ⁓ What else? Yeah, networking. So we attend a lot of ⁓ university events. So for people who've got universities near to you, know, go and like go to the networking events at the societies, try and get on the speaking panel of the societies, try and speak at events. And you'd be surprised how easy it is. It's like pushing an open door.
You walk into the university, you go and find a society, you say, okay, who's organizing this? And you're like, okay, what events have you got coming up that relate to recruitment or can I just speak in front of the lecture hall? So I've done this continuously over the last three years. And I'd say like on average, every time I go and do an event at university, I end up recruiting one person. And I try and do this like at least like four, five, six times a year. ⁓ and generally creative strategists we get from a film and media background. ⁓ although we've had some good ones from classics, English literature as well.
And then growth strategists we get from STEM degrees. All of our growth strategists have come from a STEM background. So it's usually like ⁓ engineering. I think most of our current media buyers are engineers by background. And some of them didn't even intend to go into marketing. You know, I just showed them, showed them the light, showed them that this is an interesting way of applying their skills in a way that they didn't anticipate. ⁓ I'd say like it's half off. Half of them have a marketing background. Half of them had a zero marketing background were just engineers.
So I'd that's a key kind of like key component of good growth strategies. They've got to be like very analytical, numbers driven, hypothesis focused, a bit cold blooded, right? It's like, did the numbers work or did it not work? Right. I don't care about your crazy idea. Like show me the money. Is it printing? Is it like making contribution margin? Right. Show me the actual tangible numbers. Can you track it? Don't go based purely on sentiment, you know, go based on facts.
Yeah, so I think also the point made here is like, it's good to have a diverse range of recruitment activities going on. So we have some from universities, some more experienced and then some people who are like completely junior. And we're currently experimenting with apprentices as well. So just seeing if that's like another route to go down. But by doing that, you get like a wide range of experiences and a wide range of people. And then going on to retention. So
Retention and motivation. So how do you motivate a team? Right. You've got to make sure their incentives are aligned with yours in a way. And because we're very performance focused, because we've always been on a performance based fee when we've been an agency and because we've always, well, as an affiliate, we basically only get paid if we get the sale. So for people who don't know how an affiliate works, basically we get paid a fixed amount per sale. So a brand might pay us, I don't know, $300 per sale that we make. And we go and spend our own money on ads every single week, every single day.
And we try and acquire it 250, 260, 270, and we try and make a margin in between, and then we get paid weekly by clients. So because the whole ethos of the company is around performance, we have to somehow make sure the team is aligned with that. So what we do is we create monthly targets, and the monthly targets are split into four tiers. Tier one, tier two, tier three, tier four. If the growth team hits tier one, they get a 10 % bonus. If they hit tier two,
they get a 25 % bonus. If they hit tier three, they get a 50 % bonus. If hit tier four, it's a 75 % bonus. But we're making it conditional on people being out of probation, generally speaking, and if they're performing well. If they're on a performance improvement plan, they're not legible. And the whole idea here is we're trying to we're just trying to build that same performance mindset as we have as founders of the business into the actual team, right? And give them some upside as well as like...
If you're going to ask people to work hard, you've got to give them some upside with it as well, right? So there's got to be some natural incentive. And yeah, because we're very contribution margin focused, we would make sure the team is also aligned with that. So you'll often hear people talking towards the end of the month, like, oh, what is our projected spend? Like, are we going to hit 3 million? Are we going to hit 4 million? What's our actual spend? Like, how far are we away? Can we scale the campaigns? Can we cut some loss, losing ads? Like, people are scrambling last few days of the month to try and like make sure they hit a certain tier so they can know the bonus.
And the reason why we put this into place was I saw how recruitment companies were working. They're very cutthroat. They're very much performance driven. They're very much like, okay, if you're to stick around, if you're not going to get fired, you've got to hit a certain sales target. And so I know what the cutthroat nature of is. The cutthroat nature is inside recruitment agencies. And we didn't want to quite get to the same level, but we thought, okay, there's something to be learned from that. And because we were performance focused, we then...
create some kind of a tier structure similar. It was inspired by how recruitment companies do things as well. ⁓ And then how to improve culture. I mean, this is just general stuff. I think this is nothing new. Like just talk to your team, spend time with them, find out what their problems are, see what's interesting them at work, know, actually give a shit, like spend time walking around, talking to people, go the extra mile and do outside of work as well as inside work, you know.
Some of the best problem solving I've had has been like when I've been up a mountain talking to somebody about some shit we're trying to solve or like, you know, making a fire in the woods. ⁓ and like just talking about, we ended up talking about work randomly because we're all inspired by what we do. like, it just comes up randomly without us even being at work. Right. And I think that's the super powerful. and then, yeah, so I think I mentioned the, I've mainly focused on the recruitment strategy around CREP strategists. We have.
different strategies for growth strategists and creative production. Creative production is our content creator, studio team, post-production, basically making of the ads. The creative strategists are the ones who think about what ads to make and the growth strategists are the ones who run them and make sure they're working. ⁓ And yeah, if anybody has any specific, that's the end of my presentation. If anyone has any specific like team related problems, I thought what would be quite cool is if you send me a loom video of what your problem is, because I get asked all the time, like, hey, can I pick your brains, blah, blah.
And I get super busy with like requests coming in. So what I've kind of said as a blanket thing now is like, if you have a specific team related problem, send me a loom video, there's no more than five minutes, or send me a very specific detailed problem that you're having. And what I can do is I can use it as an excuse for me to make some video content on LinkedIn or Twitter. So like it just kills two birds with one stone, right? So I'm trying to like double up. I can't do things for free anymore, right? My time is too valuable. I've just got too much stuff to do. So if somebody's got a detailed problem, I'd...
Always happy to solve problems. Um, but I'll just do it publicly. I won't talk about your company publicly, but I can just anonymize it. So I'm more than happy to do that. Um, if you want to find me LinkedIn, Twitter, just scan the QR codes. Um, and then yeah, I started a podcast recently. So if you've got a brand and you want to share your story and you're doing at least 2 million in revenue, come talk to me. Cause I'd love to have you on the podcast. And that is pretty good. So you're gonna, it is you. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, you made it to the screenshot.
Jack (42:04)
Look, that's me.
I said, like that. We've got a couple of questions,
actually, if you don't mind. We've got one from Josh here that's, ⁓ does location create a restriction on the caliber of talent you can acquire?
Shahbaz (42:11)
Go on then, yeah, hit me. Go for it.
That's a fucking awesome question. Cause I get, I got asked that question by several people. Even my business partners asked me that. Right. I would say that there's amazing talent. If you go to any big city where there's enough population. So like we live in a city where there's like 1.5 million people. By default, you're going to have amazing people in that city. And like I said, like we don't take on people who just have come from a marketing background. We just look for attitude and aptitude. Everything else could be trade. So in answer to that question.
like yes and no. If you want somebody who's like just executing on a roll. So for example, we have video editors, but we're more than happy to hire the remote because they can come in, follow a brief, execute it, send it back to our team. But in terms of like people who run things, how we want them to be run and in a way that we know that works, you know, we basically just like train them up from scratch.
Jack (43:16)
Yeah, yeah, I like that. We've got another one from Peter here. This is great. So you see if they actually do the job if they were. No, okay. I don't know what that's in reference to, but it's not a question. We've got another one from Sarah here. What if you have someone on your team who is always busy coming up with strategy, but never executing?
Shahbaz (43:37)
Sounds like me. ⁓
Jack (43:38)
Hahaha.
Shahbaz (43:44)
You need a balance inside a team, right? You do need some people who come up with the crazy ideas. And usually speaking, like you want a balance. If everybody's coming up with ideas all the time and nobody's executing, nothing happens. If nobody's coming up with ideas and you have just a team of executors, you're just going to race to the bottom, right? So you need an inventor inside the company, need inventors inside the company, you need people who are innovative, right? But the ratio is like...
I don't know what the exact ratio is, but you could say like 5 % or 10 % of people come up with the most innovative stuff. And then you have like a layer of execution underneath that or with that. But it's also about seeing innovation happening within the team and then pulling that upwards, figuring out if it works and then distributing it back downwards. That's how I like to look at things.
Jack (44:31)
I like that. Yeah. Do you have in your team, a venture beyond people who both work on strategy? And I think this is tricky when we talk about what is like strategy, because it's like, what does it mean? Maybe it means something different to different people. In my mind, strategy is the map, drawing the map for of like, actions that are going to happen to get you from A to B is the plan, right?
Shahbaz (44:54)
Yeah.
Jack (44:56)
Do you have people who are planning and also acting, also executing?
Shahbaz (45:03)
I mean, you raised a good point. Strategy in itself is an abstract term, right? And it means different things to different people, just like how I think about the word manager actually is an abstract term. So I always try and define it more specifically, right? Like, what are you actually doing, right? Day to day, what do you do? What do you check?
⁓ I'd say like the people within the growth team are responsible for the strategy, right? But they also have responsibility for the overall execution. So it doesn't mean they have to execute everything, but sometimes they do their own briefs where they edit things or shoot content, whatever. ⁓
So I'd say like the main strategic role is the ones like within the growth strategies is at the highest level of strategy. And then I'd say like subset to that is like the credit strategy because the growth strategy sees everything right? Credit strategy sees their part of it. So the growth strategy really sets the direction for things. And I think that's what honestly makes a really successful e-com company. Let the media buyer, let the growth strategist dictate the strategy. Just let them do it. Yeah.
Jack (46:04)
I like that. I like
that. I think this is important, and this is probably why ⁓ you and I are capable of just bashing on managers for a very long time. If you have growth strategists in your organization, their job is to draw the map that is likely to produce the outcomes for the brands that you're working with. And part of drawing that map is, I don't know, multiple people doing multiple things. Let's say making static ads, making image ads for a brand that you're working with.
Shahbaz (46:12)
Thank
Jack (46:34)
They ask for one ad from your designer, one of the designers, a designer on the team, and they get it back and it doesn't meet their expectations. And then they have to go back to that designer and ask for it again and say, hey, could you make these changes? And before you know it, they spent a week going back and forth with this one designer on one ad. That strategy is bad. It's not successful. It's made everything very long and expensive. And that's actually kind of the job that a manager would come in to fix. Because your strategist hasn't created a strategy.
Shahbaz (46:52)
Yeah.
Jack (47:03)
that actually produces the outcomes, the required fuel, the gas in the tank to achieve those outcomes for the brands that you work with. So it's the strategist's job to find a better way than asking for ads one at a time from the creative team. Maybe that's asking for multiple. Maybe that's engineering a system of procuring ads that isn't quite as laborious and drawn out as back and forth in project management tools or with managers not getting the product that you need.
Shahbaz (47:17)
Thanks
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah
How can I put this? It's like, there's so many people doing like cookie cutter creatives, right? Where they're just briefing a content creator with a generic brief, getting it back, going to post-production, pushing it out on ads and setting a cost gap and launching it, right? I'm like, okay, that's cool. But like, have you really thought about like contribution margin? What is actually moving the needle? Like you're just doing this thing again and again, right? And I think that this is like often where there's a disconnect.
When you have brands who've got a creative team and then like a media buying team and they're separate and not connected, it also even happens with agencies where like you hire an agency and got two separate teams that do different things, right? If those two things are not deeply embedded and they're not talking every single day, every single week, you're gonna run into problems because you're just making stuff for the sake of making it right. And even with AI now, it still costs money to produce and run creative, right? Every test is gonna cost you add dollars.
and the physical production of an ad, somebody's still got to press the buttons if it's AI. And if it's not AI, somebody's got to sit there and shoot it and edit it, right? So there's this kind of like unseen cost or unknown, not unseen, let's say unmeasured cost of like each creative to be produced, right? And some people do kind of work this out and like come up with a figure for what it is, right? ⁓ But I think in the end, like you've got to make sure that you're, ⁓ somebody's accountable for contribution margin. For me, that's the growth strategist.
Somebody's then accountable for making sure that the creative is working. That's the creative strategist and that's what it comes down to.
Jack (49:05)
Right. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I couldn't agree more on compatibility. I think you see this in multiple different facets, right? In a team, working with external teams, people need to work together in order for things to work. Let's say you have ads that have one offer, right? Combination of product promotion. And then you have emails with a different offer that might work, that might not work, and might lead to confusion and actually break things. If those teams aren't compatible with each other and working with each other, what you end up having is the retention marketing team
pointing fingers saying, it's not us, it's acquisition. Acquisition saying, it's not us, it's, I don't know, web. It's the website or it's retention. And no one's taking any accountability. I think this maps onto software as well. One of the incredible benefits and the reasons why Shopify works and something like WooCommerce, WordPress doesn't, is because things are compatible on Shopify. You don't install two apps and everything breaks and you're like, man, what do I do now? Things just work. In the ecosystem, you can have different
Shahbaz (49:59)
you
Jack (50:04)
specialist tools, different apps that are playing nice with each other, right, and allow to do their own job without interfering with something else, right? So, yeah, I think that compatibility piece and that ownership, the agency, right, of the outcomes is extremely important. Otherwise, you just have, like, people siloed in different, you know, tunnels working on what they think they need to do without communication with the rest of the team.
Shahbaz (50:12)
Mm.
Mm.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Jack (50:31)
One way
I saw this break down at an agency that I was really interesting was ads team doing very well with ads, email team doing very well with email. Objectively, by all ⁓ measurements, they're doing very, well. No one owned the pop-up. So the pop-up conversion rate was very low. No one's signing up. And this is obviously having an effect. They're not retaining quite as much of the traffic, turning those people into new customers, those new customers into returning customers. Everything's bottlenecked by the fact that...
there isn't a good baton pass there between those two teams.
Shahbaz (51:03)
Yeah. Somebody needs to take responsibility for the whole funnel from top to bottom and understand all the metrics and where it's breaking. Right. So like, it's just a simple marketing funnel. There's like percentages of drop off at every single step. If somebody's not looking at that every single day, your brand is not going to work. Simple.
Jack (51:19)
All right, all right. Awesome. Well, this was a great conversation, Shabazz. I love our firesides. I get a lot of information out of them. I learn a lot personally. ⁓ You sometimes I hop on with people and I hear things that I've heard before and it just tickles my confirmation bias. like, yes, I agree with you so much. But we go in and out of, yes, I agree with that. And huh, I hadn't thought about that before. So yeah, I really appreciate your time,
Shahbaz (51:26)
Yeah.
I appreciate you, man. Thank you.
Jack (51:47)
Awesome. Thanks so much, everyone. Talk soon. Bye, guys.
Shahbaz (51:49)
Take it easy.
