Morning all!
It was a sad moment this morning when I realised I’ve signed up for multiple sessions with some SEO experts but my days as a practitioner are no longer the best way to serve the business.
I was due to talk to Arvind this morning and had missed our last two sessions…and decided there was no way I could rearrange a third.
At this moment I hopped onto a call with him and told him something I knew in my heart to be true.
The last 10 months have presented an interesting journey to me as we’ve grown as a small business.
As we’ve now pushed past 50 people in the team working across 10+ brands – it means that me learning specific SEO tactics doesn’t actually help improve and progress the overall business.
And the way I knew this to be true was the fact that I’ve booked in 4 sessions with Paul Lovell with 0.5 sessions still pending (so 4.5 in total) alongside sessions setup with Arvind….and I feel that doing them isn’t the right thing to be doing now.
Finding the right people and putting them in the right seats is actually the best way to go about growing.
This is the biggest inhibitor of our success.
It’s growing the accounting, web development, SEO, and lead generation teams overall and looking to find glue that can help stick everything together.
What if I learn how to build improve our own SEO that it needs to be within a specific context.
Quick-fire instantly actionable wins that can lead to consistent boosts in progress.
Learning in-depth technical knowledge is of limited value to me because it doesn’t translate into finding the right people across the organization.
And that is where my highest order value is now.
It’s an interesting stage I think many business owners reach in their journey – and it means my learning ultimately stays broad.
So I’m reading up on sales training whilst in parallel, I do listen/watch PR content because they’re the two spaces I’m focussed on at the moment.
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We’re building out our PR team to support the new space that we’re growing into – so to that extent I want my PR knowledge to match my SEO knowledge. It’s a similar principle with the sales side of things so this is where I’m leaning towards.
I’m glad I was able to recognize this and make that call this morning when I realized that I always get a sense of anxiety when I get on these phone calls because the gap between my learning and implementation is too great.
So the type of learning I am doing is learning at my own speed (which is what I’ve always loved anyway).
That’s dipping in and out of courses and figuring out the quick wins that can be applied to the businesses to leverage the greatest effects.
Actionable items we can take away from this:
- Trust your gut – if something feels like it’s the wrong thing more than once – it probably is.
- Figure out how you can best serve your business – as your business grows the value you add will change over time
- As you grow the focus will move from sales>operations>team development>overall company growth
e.g Now Vasco is the first man in when it comes to generating new business – I need to give him 6-months to pave the way for success and then others can follow him.
It’s interesting to see how ‘people led’ my business is – and it’s to be expected when you’re running an agency – but I’m also trying to make a drive to build proper systems as well around my people.
Regardless – it was a strange and slightly sad (but definitely the right) feeling to say ‘no to sit down 1-to-1 training’ for SEO.
That time has passed.
Now I must train and develop the team – for they will provide 🙂
