BUSINESS LEADERSHIP LESSONS WITH MADS SINGERS

Delegation Strategies for Effective Team Management and Continuous Learning

When it comes to leadership, delegation in business isn’t just assigning tasks—it’s about empowering people to own outcomes and drive results. Mads emphasizes understanding personalities through tools like DISC assessments to assign roles that play to strengths, such as detail-oriented folks handling technical audits or extroverts excelling in outreach.

For scaling teams, start by identifying one core process, like link building or content optimization, and break it down into repeatable steps. This allows quick training—often in just a week or two—so new hires add value fast without you micromanaging.

Avoid common pitfalls by hiring for a single high-impact skill first, then expanding responsibilities based on performance. If things aren’t clicking, reassess fit before letting go, but always prioritize trust and accountability.

Mads also advises business owners to delegate even unfamiliar areas, like email marketing, by defining clear communication goals (e.g., ROI exceeding costs) and letting team members innovate. This approach not only frees your mental space from nagging tasks but also fosters innovation, turning potential roadblocks into pathways for growth.

As a leadership lesson for entrepreneurs and executives, incorporating continuous learning through programs like executive education or MBA insights can enhance your business strategy, helping leaders develop skills in calculated risks and conflict management.

EPISODE NOTES & RESOURCES:

• Free SEO Audit Tool: Evaluate your website’s SEO performance with our free tool
• Mads Singers Website: https://madssingers.com
• HeyRamp (Personality Tests and Management Tools): https://heyramp.com
• SEO Mastery Summit: https://seomasterysummit.com
• Book: Scaling Your Digital Marketing Team – Business Is a Team Sport

Episode Transcript – Business Leadership Lessons With Mads Singers

Jesse Dolan (00:19)
Everybody welcome back to the podcast on this episode here. I’m your host Jesse Dolan with Luminate Local. And as always, we are here to help you grow your business and get some visibility now.

Today’s we’re going to take a slightly different direction in today’s topic. We’ve got Mads Singers on here and we’re not going to talk about maybe tips or tricks for SEO or finding your business. but more so how to make sure you’re growing, sustaining, running a good team. Hopefully if you’re doing SEO, digital marketing, getting found, you’re growing, there’s going be some growing pains, and at a certain point, it’s not just about the leads.

It’s about the leadership.

See what I did there? Kind of kitschy, right? and it’s about managing the people. And I had the opportunity to see Mads at a couple of different conferences, speak, listen to a bunch of his different episodes. He’s been on, you were just saying Mads before we recorded like 600 podcasts, I believe. And out there he’s got, he’s got his message out there and it’s really about how to help organize a team, lead a team, delegate, hold people accountable. And I’ve.

Mads Singers (01:16)
something like that.

Jesse Dolan (01:29)
personally got some great tips and expertise from him that I’ve implemented in my agencies and businesses I’ve ran and pass some of that down to clients and customers, you know, secondhand as well. so I’m excited to bring Mads on to talk to everybody listening and watching as a managers, business owners, you’re going through the struggle and if you’re not, you’re going to be pretty soon. So Mads is on here to help us break this down and, learn how to really run your team effectively. think if anybody’s especially starting from the ground up, you’ve been the Superman or superwoman done everything. It’s a little bit different to start to delegate, not just assigned tasks to people, right? Like to delegate and run a team here. So, Mads is an expert. he’s an expert team management coach among other things, Mads. I don’t know if you want a better title, but that’s kind of how I surmised it. creator of SEO mastery summit, founder madssingers.com willing to all this in the show notes as well.

And worth mentioning too, we’ll put a link to this brand new book out, coauthored with James Dooley scaling your digital marketing team. Business is a team sport. worked with hundreds of thousands of leaders, right? Like been around the block knows what he’s talking about. Mads. Thanks for coming on today.

Mads Singers (02:48)
Thank you very much. Yeah, it sounds like I’m really bored.

Jesse Dolan (02:52)
No, that’ll be discovered here. So let’s start big picture. why do you think, teams have these issues, management, delegation structure? why are they having these issues in general? And, why is it a road? Not a roadblock. I’m sorry. A bottleneck. once businesses start scaling, I know that’s kind of a big one to start with, but let’s riff on that.

Mads Singers (03:19)
Now, that’s a great place to start. I think as human beings, we get taught in school that everything is about you and what you do and how you do it. school and life are very different. Reality is what you do doesn’t matter. What you make sure happens is what matters. And I think that’s the starting point when you’re looking at delegation, right? So most business owners…

Jesse Dolan (03:38)
Mm.

Mads Singers (03:48)
particularly in small and mid-sized businesses, tend to be the bottleneck. And the core reason for that is very simple. They want to do everything perfect. Now, reality is that the issue is not about doing things perfect. The issue is what you’re not doing when you’re doing things perfect. So the problem is when you’re typically growing a business, right?

And most business owners have that. One of the challenges I often ask people to do is say, if you could do one thing in the next week that would really, really move your business forward. Often it’s around sales and marketing. Sometimes it’s operations or finance. But what is one thing you could do that would really put you in a different place from a business standpoint? For example, what would it take to double your revenue?

And asking those kind of questions and taking those actions that you know you should be taking, but are not. Those are the things you don’t have to do when you’re doing all the stuff. So the problem with not delegating, like so many people are like, yeah, I have high standards, therefore I can’t find anyone that can do it. Like that’s okay. If you want to run a small business, if you don’t want to make so much money.

Keep doing that. Right. But if you want to make a successful business, if your goal is to make a lot of money, this is the only way to hinder yourself in doing it. Right. So reality is everyone starts a business at some point. And again, I don’t know a ton about your background, Jesse, but every single one of your listeners are where they are today because at some point someone trusts them.

Jesse Dolan (05:15)
sure.

Mads Singers (05:43)
Maybe they were in a job where a boss said, hey, we need some SEO traffic. Can you figure this out? Or, hey, we don’t have a website. Can you build one? Whatever. Or sometimes if people start out as entrepreneurs straight from school, someone trusts them by giving them a handful of money and say, hey, get me some results with this thing. All right. So every one of us is where we are today because someone somewhere trusts us.

Now, reality is as a business owner, if you don’t do that, you’re not trusting your people, if you’re not growing your staff, then your business isn’t growing because your business is fundamentally your staff. Right. And I know nowadays with AI and so on, the people think they can automate the world and you can automate quite a lot of stuff. But reality is you still want some smart people to run this thing because what happens if you go to the hospital? What happens? Like every year I typically go traveling three, four months.

And you know what happens like and today I can tell you what happens when I come back. Every one of my companies is bigger than when I left. There’s nothing better than taking a four month vacation and coming back to bigger and better companies. right. And that’s what you want to build and you build that through empowering people, giving people real ownership. And yeah, that’s key. So what is it that

Jesse Dolan (07:15)
That’s what is it that screws us up as business owners, right? If I’m scaling and maybe I’ve got somebody that I think I’m gonna trust and they’re good, but I’m hesitant or I don’t fully delegate to them.

Mads Singers (07:17)
Who is less left as business owners, right? If I’m scaling and maybe I’ve got somebody that I I’m not trust, and they’re good, I’ll have someone. I’m hesitant, or I don’t totally delegate to them. What are some of the barriers that you’ve experienced? Why am I doing this? Why am I not doing this? Not just one extra person, but one person trying to me train. How am I screwing that up?

Jesse Dolan (07:30)
What are some of the barriers that you’ve experienced? Why, why am I doing that? Right? Why am I not doing a good job? Just if I just have one extra person, right? Let’s not make it complicated. Just one person. I’m trying to, mentor, to train, to take over, to do stuff for me. How am I screwing that up?

Mads Singers (07:47)
in every way. So first starting point is really about understanding people. So I spent quite a bit of years, quite a few years learning to understand humans. And one of the things is we’re all naturally good at something. Right. So we have natural behaviors genetically that from a child’s state, we have certain things that we just succeed at.

Some people succeed at math. Some people are extremely extroverted. Some people are exceptionally caring. Some people are really good at getting shit done. Right? So we all have natural tendencies and understanding these and looking a little bit at these when you’re both when you’re actually hiring, but also when you’re giving tasks to people is very important. So for example, someone like yourself, I would be very comfortable giving you task, I’ll be very comfortable giving you projects because by nature you’re a very logical person. So when you’re dealing with people, understanding a little bit about their personality really helps you understand what is the type of task or what is the type of responsibility that this individual would be well suited to. So that’s for me often the starting point. And if you don’t know anything about this, i you don’t know much about people and so on, you can actually at our website, heyramp.com, you can sign up and you can do a free test both for yourself and your entire team, no matter how big it is. And you can actually get a personality test done. We’re using a framework called Disk. And that will help you understand way more who is the individual you’re working with and then looking at, okay, what are the things that make sense?

So fr example, if you have someone super detail oriented, they’re probably going to be good at lot of the of grindy SEO stuff. So internal links, doing unpaid stuff, and so on and so forth. If you have someone who’s good at getting shit done, well, they might be great at link building. They might be great at a whole host of things. But typically, people getting shit done don’t like doing the same thing over and over and over over again.

And you might have more creative extroverted people. So people that loves talking to other humans and so on, they might be good at things like outreach or they might be good at stuff like sales and so on. Right. So finding the right type of work to the right people is often where people don’t succeed in the beginning. They hire someone for whatever reason. Sometimes it’s a friend. Sometimes it’s someone they met in a coffee shop that sounded cool. Sometimes it’s a remote worker.

But in either way, a key thing is understanding. And you can ask people as well, what are the things you like doing? What are you good at? And you can also test out different things, right? So try and get people to do a few different things in the beginning and see where you feel they excel. And then try and give them more things in that direction. So I would say that’s sort of the key with starting out with an individual, at least.

Jesse Dolan (11:06)
Yeah.

It makes total sense. Let’s say, you know, if I’m in a scenario or anybody listening where you’ve already hired a person and someone to ask you about hiring with what you just said to you as a second one here. But say you’ve already got somebody and it’s just not working out. If I’m hearing what you’re saying, maybe it’s like instead of getting rid of that person saying this isn’t working, they’re not doing what I want before you do that.

Maybe make sure you understand what kind of personality this person has. Maybe you need to change the way that you’re delegating, assigning and interacting with them. Maybe the, maybe the tasks aren’t a good fit too, right? For your personality profile example, that could be a reality, but before you just fire them and move on, maybe you need to interact with them differently and they can execute the thing still. that, is that accurate or plausible?

Mads Singers (11:44)
Definitely different interaction can help, but reality is sometimes you have ended up hiring someone who’s just not a good fit for what you’re needing. And reality is when you’re running a small business, when you’re hiring your first person, there’s often a bunch of stuff that’s important for them to do. And if you haven’t hired the right type of person for that job, you often don’t have the finances to necessarily just going higher and multiple people.

So sometimes you might need to let them go if they don’t have a personality that’s a good fit for the things that you need them to do. So that’s typically how I’d look at it. So even when I go in and work with clients, even larger clients, one of the key things we do is we typically assess the management team, making sure we have the right people in the right places. And similarly, often with the staff looking at, you

Do we have the right people? Someone can be great, that doesn’t mean they’re great at everything. Again, as people, we have different things. I know I could be good at a bunch of things. If you make me into a sales guy, I’ll be horrendous. I’m not a sales guy. I’m not naturally a sales guy. I’m not good at this. Fundamentally, it’s really…

Jesse Dolan (13:02)
Sure.

Mads Singers (13:24)
critical to understand what are the things that each individual are actually good at and what are the things that are naturally inclined to succeed at.

Jesse Dolan (13:34)
Okay. So I’m picking up then that making that higher is definitely important. The understanding the personalities and a lot of that work ahead of time, not just grabbing onto the friend that you’ve known or that the person that is available and has the hours, the capacity you need, slowing down to do it the right way. The first time it is going to, is going to teach you all right.

Mads Singers (13:57)
Yeah, I would say two key things around it. Like a good example, graphic designers and developers are not the same people. And what I mean with that is if you ever find someone who is decent at graphic design and development, they’re half decent at one of them and they can be great at the other one. But the two skills are so polar opposite that there’s very, very, very few, if any, really good developers who are also very good designers, right? Because just naturally, personality-wise, it’s just not the same skill, right? And this is for our outsourcing companies. So we have a Risto sourcing, which is a large outsourcing company. And very often when our sales team talk with clients, the first thing they’re trying to do is say, what are the things that really matter?

So when I look to hire a person, you know, I might sometimes have multiple things I would like them to do. there’s one thing is understanding, okay, is this one person who can do this? But the second aspect that I try and isolate is say, if there’s just one thing this person could do, and they’ll be very good at it, what would that be? And that is typically what we try and hire for. So rather than trying to hire someone who can do five things, I try and always look at what is one thing that will make this hire successful. So for example, if you’re hiring someone to do SEO operations, right? Like if they could do just link building, or if they could just do unpatriot successfully, or if they could just do internal links or technical audit, what’s one thing that would make it worthwhile having them? Because this is also the starting point. Because I know that if I need one person and I just need, let’s say link building. Like, if I can get someone in who just ace link building, you know, I probably have a few things I want them to do, but if they can ace link building, that’s going to make it worth the salary. Well, then I’m going to focus on someone who is more likely to succeed on link building. And that is going to be the main priority. And then when I get them in, when they ace link building, then I then look at, based on who they are, what else can they do?

But having a solid starting point of how you ensure people are successful and valuable to the company is often very beneficial in my experience.

Jesse Dolan (16:32)
I like that just kind of going off of the title or the second part of title of your book that it’s a team sport, right? Running a business. I’m drawing an analogy of, you’re going to hire this person. They have to be really, really good at that one thing. Or in my mind, play that one position and they’re the A1 option for that position. But hearing you talk.

It doesn’t mean you’re not going to ask them to do other things maybe that they’re not as good at, but you really want to make sure that this relationship, this hire, this whole collaboration is going to work with them on their primary position, their primary thing. And you’re setting them up for success and putting them in an environment where they can thrive with you and then grow and expand, right? Instead of trying to do seven things from the get-go that they may be generally good at, but never overwhelmed or fairly underwhelming maybe, right? So interesting.

So now on the other side of it, because we’re talking, effectively personality for the team. what about me as the owner or me as the manager, if I’m either the position of hiring somebody, or if I’m having a challenge and I’m trying to figure out if there’s personalities and trainings and interactions the right way, how important is it for me to understand my own? If it’s the DISC.

Or something else. Am I part of the problem? Do I have to change how I am or just recognize? Can you speak to that a little bit for us?

Mads Singers (17:55)
Yeah, one of the key things is as a human being, we always have this tendency to try and fix our mistakes. If there’s something we’re not good at, we try and become good at it. And again, going back to school, if you suck at math, you’re going to do everything you can to try and get better at math. You’re going to get a tutor. You’re going to do this and this and this. Reality is if you’re not a logical human being by nature, you will only ever get so good at math. So the whole point here is really learning whatever personality you are. It’s about learning to get to know yourself better because we succeed as people when we focus the most on our strength. I’m not saying you should never ever try and become a little bit better at something you suck at, but the core thing is that our strength as an individual. We want to harness those. want to spend the most of our time in our zone of genius. And getting to know yourself and getting to really understand yourself and what you’re good at helps you also focus on what are the things you want to delegate first. So with me, when I started the outsourcing company, one of the first hires I made was the salesperson, because again, I suck at sales.

Now, again, most people would try and get someone in to do the things they’re good at and then try and learn sales. But my experience is that you get way further if you actually focus on the things that you’re good at and doing more of those and then letting go of the things that you suck at or you don’t like doing. Right. And a good example, a lot of time, it’s not the time it takes. If you think about doing your yearly taxes, right, everyone hates it.

Now, every year I tell myself, okay, next year I’m going to do it sooner, right? Next year, I’m not going to do it last minute. So I put a reminder on my calendar. It gets to that time and I keep just moving the thing. I’ll do it next week. I’ll do it next week. I’ll do it next week. Right. When I actually do it, it takes me a couple of hours, right? It doesn’t take forever. But here’s the thing, the amount of time it sits in the back of your head and it’s like, yeah, you have to do this thing. That’s the problem.

And it is exactly the same in your business. There’s things you hate doing that you’re constantly postponing because you hate doing it. Those are the first things I find someone else to do. Because it’s not about the time it takes. It is about the fact that it’s constantly sitting, nudging you, right? And it’s coming up and it’s like, yeah, I have to do it. I have to do it. I have to do it at some point, right? That’s the problem.

Jesse Dolan (20:32)
Interesting. That makes sense.

I really like that. You know, there’s the, part of the results, which is I think very tangible to everybody, but you just, you just mentioned it where the mind space, like the taxes, if it’s getting closer to tax time and I’m like you, I just, I always want to get it done at ASAP, but it never works because of the same reasons. But let’s say the couple of weeks leading up to tax time, just occupies more and more of your mind space. And I’m not saying like I shut down and just hibernate. That’s very dramatic, of course, but it’s back there, whether you realize it or not, it’s eroding your energy or your focus from other things that you should be doing. And that’s just one example. And as a business owner marketer, especially if you’re scaling, you have a lot of those things, man. And if they’re bouncing around, like you’re saying, if you hate doing it, if you suck at doing it, that’s just going to eat, that’s just going to eat at you. And, if you are motivated being a manager or an owner, like you can do great things. And I think to your point, right? Like just as much as possible, try to free you up to do those. You have to do the pushups and the sit ups some days. Like you got to do some of the work, right? But, in general, if we can head that direction, I can see where that, they really should align with everybody.

It’s one of the things that’s interesting because most people I work with, right? Most people I consult and coach, they all come to me saying the same thing. They’re like, yeah, I don’t really like managing people. And I’m like, that’s okay. Number one, the reason why you don’t like it is because you don’t know what you’re doing. Right? None of us are born natural leaders. So you don’t know what you’re doing yet. Now, reality is…

As soon as people learn the skills, most people enjoy it. Because here’s the thing, the 17th time you’re sitting going through a site and writing meta descriptions, it ain’t that fun. You might love SEO very much, but when you’re going through a site with hundreds of pages and writing out meta descriptions, I promise you it isn’t that fun. Right? When you can instead, you can ask someone to do it or you can make sure there’s a system that it gets done without you having to do it. Trust me, that is way more fun. Now, I’m not saying that there’s no parts of SEO, for example, that’s fun to do, but all of the people I work with, someone, take some examples, like someone like Matt Dickens, for example. mean, he’s very nerdy, like most people, and he loves SEO. And when we first started, working together, he was like, yeah, I just want to do SEO. Can I just do hire someone to manage people? Right now, probably seven, eight months later, his approach was, yeah, 180. Right. And if you ask him today, if he want to go to SEO, I can tell you he doesn’t do much SEO today. Right. He managed people because when you can get the results without having to do the work.

Jesse Dolan (26:12)
100%. I don’t think anybody would find an argument against that, right? Well, let’s talk a little bit about, again, like that evolution of somebody going from being a Superman, Superwoman to, like you’re saying right here, just delegating, managing people, leading a team for the first time. Not something.

You have a lot of experience in something that you’re evolving into. What are some of the key? I think I’ll get mentioned earlier, like there’s assigning a task to somebody and then there’s like delegating the task to somebody, right? Um, is that a key or are there any other keys to help us perspective change how we would have operated ourselves? You’re not just cloning yourself, right? You’re delegating. What’s, does that mean?

Mads Singers (27:00)
Yeah. Yeah.

So let’s take a step back. So first of all, organizations exist for the specialization of labor, which means instead of cloning yourself, you’re looking to break down process. So most successful companies are successful because they build a process and they learn how to execute that very, very well, which is one of the reasons why most SEO agencies in particular, many SEO companies fail, is because they say, do everything for everyone. One day we’ll work with an E-com guy, the next day we’ll work with a local SEO guy, and the following day we’ll work with some international site. And the owner is the only one who can make the strategy because there’s obviously no processes. What does that mean? It means you will have a company that won’t make a lot of money and it will grow really slowly.

How do you make a company that grow fast? Well, you find one process that you’re good at executing and you execute that repeatedly. that could be if you say, it’s done, niching down is not necessarily about the niche. It is about the process. Right? So just saying, we only work with e-commerce store, but these e-commerce store could be wildly different beasts. Right? They could have wildly different requirements, et cetera.

But if you say, for example, okay, we specialize in working with Shopify stores and here’s our process. you know, we have a process. First, we do an audit where you can teach someone how to do that. Then we have a certain way of doing everything else and we can break that down into pieces. What that does instead of spending three years training someone how to do SEO, you can train someone how to write product pages or someone how to write category pages in a relatively short span of time. And that means you can hire people with, let’s call it limited initial skill set, who can bring value in a very short time. So you might only need to, in most cases, spend a week or two, train them up and how to do the specific skill. And then they can actually do it. And they can bring a lot of value, straight away. So that’s a very good way of really ensuring success. So again, don’t do this, do this. Focus on what is one thing that can be done repeatedly over and over and over again. In the of SEO, you’ll see a lot of successful link building companies, for example. And the reason why they’re super successful is because they’re doing one thing over and over again. It’s not about links per se, but it’s because they have a simple process that they’re scaling. And this is really what you want to do. And this enables you to not be the main person. Because here’s the thing, if you’re doing the same process over and over over again, your expertise is not needed. You can teach other people how to do it. You can teach other people. Let’s say you’re specialized in local sites or some kind of local process that you’re very good at.

Teach someone how to run an audit on the site. Do it 10 times, write down what are all the steps, what are all the things you’re looking at. When you’ve done that 10 times and you’ve written down all the steps, then someone else can learn how to do it.

Jesse Dolan (30:40)
Right. Simple as that task by task item item, right?

Mads Singers (30:47)
Yeah, and you don’t necessarily need to write down the process, right? So the key thing, again, I simplify this a lot, but most of the time what I do is I’ll do a loom. If it’s something I know, I would do a loom. But actually the time when you become really successful and when you really learn to manage people is when you start delegating things that are not yet being done. There is this unfortunately bad advice in business saying that.

Okay, as a business owner, you have to figure out how to do something and then hand it over to someone else. Well, if that’s the case, you are always and will always be the bottleneck. Right. My favorite is not learning how to do things, but handing over the responsibility to someone else from day one. So let’s say I have a company and we are not doing email marketing. Well, they have to want to start doing email marketing, I could sit down. I could figure out how to do it. I could sort it all out. But if I hand that responsibility to someone else, if I say, Jesse, I love the way you write emails, or I love the way you write, you’re a good writer, I would love you to be responsible for email marketing process. Here’s what I want to happen. We need to find some kind of email tool so we can send out email messages on a regular basis.

But fundamentally, what I want to achieve is that I want to make sure that we convert a certain percentage of our customers into paying clients. And probably a percentage of makes it worthwhile for us to run this process. doing that, like delegating things that are not yet getting done, that enables you to scale. Because that means that people can be doing things around you. They can take ownership of areas in the business that you know nothing about. And yeah, that’s key. That’s the part I wanted to not push back on, but it’s more insights for everybody. How, if you don’t know the thing and you say you’re responsible now for the thing, don’t get me wrong, you have some insight and some general talent, right? But how do you fully trust that or delegate that or let them be responsible if you, again, as…

Traditional advice you’re the business owner. Make sure you know the thing that you’re delegating so you can just innately understand if they’re doing a good job or not If you’re not gonna do that if you’re gonna empower them and trust them and have them own that You as the manager or business owner How do you know that they’re actually ineffective and doing a good job there outside of just the eye test right of looking at it Can you speak to that a little bit?

Yeah, understand what is the output that you need. So for example, in many of our companies, we do things like cold outreach, right? Now I could probably figure out how to set it up or how to do it. But a very simple example is if I hire someone to do cold outreach and they make more money than they cost, it’s probably good business. But if I’ll go hire you and I’ll say, I’ll pay you three grand a month.

Your goal is to send out a whole bunch of emails, try and land clients. And if you make more than 3K a month in sales or lifetime value in sales, then we are in a good place. Now that’s a simplistic approach, but fundamentally I do a ton with marketing. I mean, I’m no marketing genius by any stretch of imagination. I’m pretty good at SEO game, but the rest of it, not so much. Right. So here’s the thing.

If I go and do it, I can only do one thing at a time and my time is very expensive. If I hire people to do it, I can do 10 projects at a time. So let’s say, for example, I want to do social media. I could go out and hire five different people, one on Facebook, one on LinkedIn, one on X, one on Instagram, one on TikTok. I could go and hire five different people.

who have some kind of level of skill around that channel. And I could say, hey, I want to hire you just to do this thing. What is the goal? The goal is to generate X amount of leads or to get X amount of output or whatever is a good outcome that I would be happy with, that I’m comfortable. It’s probably worth more than what we pay the individual. Right?

Now, if I hire five different people to do that, instead of doing one of those at a time by myself, then all of those five can be executed. Let’s say just two of those five people succeed. That still means we have two successful acquisition channels. Yes, we wasted a bit of money on three of them that didn’t really work out, but we have two successful acquisition channels. If I had tested it myself, I might have made one work.

the same amount of time. But I’ve just doubled the output. Yes, we have taken more risk, but this is what’s key. Business is all about asymmetrical returns. Business is about taking bets that can get you significantly higher outcome. What is asymmetrical returns? Well, what it means is it’s like SEO. If you’re spending some money on SEO, in the beginning, you get no output.

But then eventually, hopefully, the output becomes significantly higher than your investment. And this is fundamentally how I look at business. So for me, business is a question of where can I take a bet that have the potential to have a significantly higher outcome than the cost. So for example, if I have an opportunity to try out something that will cost $5,000, there’s a 10 % chance of success. And there’s a 10 % chance that it can make, let’s say, a million dollars.

I would do that every single day of the week. I would even go borrow money to do it if I needed to. Because $5,000, 10 % chance of making a million. That’s how you have to think about business. And that’s when I’m delegating, when I’m giving responsibility to people, that’s how I think about business. So I think, is there a likelihood that this can succeed and that this can bring in significantly more outcome than the initial investment?

Right. That’s, that’s the objective. So when I’m, when I’m looking at business, when I’m looking at myself in particular, my time, the question is, what are the things only I can do? What are the most important things that I cannot get other people to do that I have to focus on and everything else? My focus is how can I get someone else to do it? And that is the simple approach of how you scale quick. Right. Now I can promise you.

The CEO of IBM is not sitting figuring out what 200,000 people are doing. I promise you. No stretch of imagination. The reason why small business owners do it is often in the beginning and early days, they don’t have a lot of budget, but this is also where the focus should be. So the focus in an early business should generally be what is the one process that you can execute repeatedly? And people are always like, but why one? I can do different things. I can make more money. No.

If you want to succeed, find one process you can do repeatedly. Focus on building it out and making sure that it’s a solid process. Then hire people to do it and focus your time on the high level stuff on how do we bring in more clients? How do we make sure that, you know, marketing wise, we’re successful? The benefit when you reach down to a process is also your whole marketing process becomes way easier.

because if you’re doing one specific thing, repeat the old one over again. One, you get way better at it, which means you deliver more value. Two, you get way faster and more efficient at it, which means you do it cheaper. Now think about that. You can deliver more value, charge more money, and it costs you less to deliver.

Jesse Dolan (39:26)
The win. That’s a big win right there, right? That’s not hard to figure out. Yeah, absolutely. So. If I’m going to turn these tasks over or task or specializer, whatever it is to somebody.

Just kind of re reiterating here, clearly understanding what the goal is, right? Whether I was going to do the thing or if somebody else is like you’re saying, right? I either more output ROI X number of widgets, whatever it is. You have to clearly understand this to hold somebody accountable. what about the pushback you’ll get from an owner, a manager, somebody else? I don’t have the time. I can’t train Jesse. I will just do it myself. It’s going to take me the same amount of time to show Jesse how to do this thing.

So I’ll just do the thing myself, right? I don’t have the time to train. I have the time to manage, to delegate, to follow up, to hold accountable. What’s your, what’s your, pushback on people that have that kind of sentiment? Cause that’s a real thing, right? People feel like that.

Mads Singers (40:30)
It is a little bit, but again, even if you spend minimal amount of time. So let’s take an example again. Let’s jump in a different direction. Let’s say customer service. Let’s say I run my management coaching company. Let’s say for argument’s sake, I’m getting a bunch of customer service inquiries. Now you not knowing much about management consulting, I will bet you if I were to hire you.

Now you don’t necessarily like customer service, but let’s say I was to hire you for customer service. I’ll say, Hey Jesse, here’s the tool. Here’s what we’re doing. You know, here’s our website. I don’t have the time to do customer service. I need you to own this thing. Right. Even if I gave you very little guidance and ask you to be responsible for it out of the gate, you would probably do a 70, 30, 80, 20 decent job, because you’re a normal human being, you have a brain. Would you do everything perfect? Probably not. Would you say some stuff that didn’t make sense? Probably. But here’s the thing, if it went totally off my plate and I could then spend a little bit of time every week talking to you and gradually helping you improve and understand things better, we would get way further. Right? That makes sense.

I got a buddy who’s trying to get his business up to the size where he can take a vacation, not four months off, right? But just a week or two. And he’s always in this quandary of, if I do, you know, I’m going to lose some business. I don’t have that potential there. Not big enough to hire somebody yet, but I know I need to because I can’t do these things. And it’s always strapped for time. And I like what you’re saying because you’re not striving for perfection on that person. You delegate it’s, it’s going to be a process, but, it’s a little bit less investment than it is, for you to do it all yourself. Right. And it just starts to erode. And then not only is your time now freed up, you get to go do those things to your point that only you can do that. You’re not going to hire somebody else to do, and that’s going to drive your business forward. And last but not least on it, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure I’m following you hear that hiring that person.

Understanding the personality, understanding what the job is gonna be ahead of time. And then when you do say, own this process, now do this for me, you’re not guaranteed, but your odds of getting to that 70, 80 % completion rate right off the bat, instead of having to side by side train for a week, whatever, I’m speaking very generally, but if you hire the right person, if you have everything set up ahead of time to know what you’re doing and attacking as you’re teaching here.

You’re probably going to have a much easier time and not as much time spent training this person as we may think sitting there being the Superman or superwoman looking at our first big hire, right? It’s going to be much easier. So, yeah, and this is also, mean, again, particularly in the remote world, right? Like you can hire a lot of people at significant better costs, right? So you can hire great people at more effective costs, right? And I think a lot of the time it can be very helpful. Like where I’m from in Denmark, right? Having to hire your first employee, you need to make a lot of money to be able to hire the first person and the ability to hire cost-effective remote staff. Personally, we hire most of our staff in South Africa. That’s one of our favorite spots, right? And that’s also where our social company hires a lot. But that’s a great way to help you be a little bit less dependent initially. Now, very often, people are always like, yeah, but I only want to hire in America. I only want to hire in Denmark or whatever. And the thing is, it’s often…way slower to grow because you hire a person. I actually had a friend whose company literally went bankrupt. So he hired a great girl. She was there for a few months. She got pregnant. the problem was that obviously with pregnancy, you need time off. And the problem was he was struggling so much that when she went on maternity leave, like the business literally collapsed. And obviously that’s not her fault at all. But from a business standpoint, he just wasn’t set up to handle and manage that situation. It’s tough in the beginning and the early days, it’s tough as a business owner. But this is also why, again, if you figure out your process, if you make it faster, better, easier to accomplish and deliver, and you can deliver more value.

And you can charge a higher price because you’re delivering more value and you’re delivering it really fast, then again, your profit margins can be significantly higher, which again makes it significantly easier to go out and hire stuff.

Jesse Dolan (46:23)
Yeah, think everything that we say all the time, if you want to get five star reviews, got to be a five star business, right? And as you gain traction and SEO visibility and you get bigger in your scale.

Maintaining that five star business level, right? Can be a challenge. You don’t want to screw that up. And I think these are some of the things or the things you’re talking about today can really help people to make sure that your quality is not going to suffer a year from now. If you doubled in size, like I said earlier, a year from now, be the same company, deliver value, hopefully making more money, right? Like you said, cost goes down, value goes up and leads are coming in.

You don’t want to screw that up. You don’t want to have that flywheel slow down at all. So adding great people to your team as you grow, instead of just putting bodies in there that can fog a mirror and act like they’re busy is extremely important. especially if you’re growing and scaling, you don’t always have the time to do it over or try again. Right. So little work on the front side to make sure you get it right. Pretty, pretty darn important.

What’s your take on that connection between a internal team structure and then delivering that great client experience to be on the outside world, a thriving business that people are attracted to.

Mads Singers (47:47)
Yeah, think fundamentally for me, the core thing is it’s all about your team. Right. So Richard Branson always says, if you take good care of your team, they’ll take care of your clients. Right. A lot of people are more focused on the clients than the team. But reality is it starts internally first. One of the things I tell business owners is to like hiring people is one of the most critical skills. If you work with great people and you work with people who suck, you know the value of hiring great people. And the thing is, it’s often the ability to sell and the ability to hire people. But reality is if you can spend time, right? Like hiring is one of the most critical aspects. The more time you spend and invest in learning how to hire better people, easier everything else will get.

Jesse Dolan (49:16)
Makes sense, man. Bringing it back to sports, your book, right? It’s a, team sport. Just thinking about a sports team. It’s not just the players magically showing up on the field or in the arena or on the court. They’ve been selected, compiled, put together for the traits, right? To be the best team out there. That’s same thing for business. Actually great segue for the book. Let’s talk about that with this, whether it be a digital marketing team, as in, this is what you do as a business, you’re a SEO company, right? But or a digital marketing team within, you know, a company that sells widgets and digits or services, they’re still gonna have a digital marketing team there, right? So tying this into your book, what would you say is a core message or themes if there’s, I don’t want to be too simplistic, core message in the book for owners and managers, business leaders, for the digital marketing team and how to apply it there.

Mads Singers (50:18)
Honestly, a lot of all we’ve talked about today. One of the things that I’m a firm believer in again, business owners, when they hire people, they often neglect the people. And what I mean with that is you’re better spending more time with your people and getting them to do more stuff than doing it yourself. If you’re quote, too busy to spend time with your team, it’s not that you’re too busy, it’s you’re spending your time in the wrong places, right?

Spend more time with your team, give them more of the stuff you’re busy doing so that they learn and grow. Because back to the point I made in the beginning is you grow when you’ve been given responsibility and ownership. When someone’s like, oh, I’m too busy to give you more stuff. And you’re like, well, if you’re too busy, why don’t you give it to me? Do that. Right. So key thing is effectively managing people.

The number one management tool is doing one-to-ones with everyone that report directly to you every single week. What does that mean? It means sit down with them, have a real conversation and say, hey, Jason, how are you? How’s your life? Build relationship. Get to know the individuals, get to know what are the things that ticks them off? What are the things that matters to them? What is their family? Right?

Here’s the thing, if you don’t have a relationship with your staff, they don’t care about your business. If you want people, and business want to tell me this all the time, but my staff don’t care about the business. Here’s the thing, you don’t care about that.

If you don’t care about them, why would they care? My experience is when you show people you care, they will care back. It’s like if you call up your friend and say, Jesse, can you help me move? I’m moving next weekend. If you’re saying yes or no, probably depend on how good friends we are.

No, 100%, 100%. So how does that, for business, you know, brick and mortar, you know, in the same office, those relationships and the things you’re talking about versus either the business is completely remote or maybe I’m managing people that are remote. Do you have any advice on how to connect? You know, it’s particularly on that remote side, because I think most businesses now are dealing with people in some remote fashion that we weren’t a few years ago even. So it’s not like we’re all super experienced or learned a lot of this. How do you foster that remotely?

Same thing, one-to-ones and if you have a team, team meetings. The big issue many entrepreneurs have is they have very flat organizations, which means a lot of people reporting to them. If you’re a business owner and you have more than five or six people reporting to you, it’s too many. Make layers. If you have two people doing customer service, make one of them the customer service team leader or manager or whatever. If you have two people doing something, make one of them the boss.

decrease the number of people reporting directly to you. And yes, you will get further away from the execution and two, that is the goal. So again, we especially build a heyramp.com. We build that up specifically to excel in management and particularly from the people aspect side. So we have…very unique system for how to do one-to-ones and how to do performance reviews and so on. yeah, making sure it happens throughout the organization. when you get a little bit bigger, make sure that any team leader, any manager you have, are having these regular conversations with the staff that report directly to them. Because that relationship, particularly in remote teams, is critical.

So when people ask me about remote teams, what I always tell them is that if you have a bad manager, they’re probably less bad if it’s an in-office environment, because there’s just natural communication. There’s naturally things that happen when you walk into an office every morning. But good managers often get more out of remote staff. Why? Because often when you’re dealing with remote staff, you can often get more quality at the same or lower price. When you’re bound to one physical location, you are somewhat limited at the talent you have, right? Whatever that is. But you’re limited to the talent who live in your nearby surroundings. Whereas when you go remote, like you have a significantly more opportunity, even if you just look in the US, right? Like if you’re just in Silicon Valley, you’re 100 % dependent on people living around you and paying wages that match that, right?

If you go out and spend similar money hiring someone in Kansas City or whatever, you can get a significantly higher level of skill for the same or even a lower cost. So great managers who good at communication, who are good at building a relationship with a team, who’s good at holding people accountable, these people will often get a similar or even better result out of remote staff, in my experience.

Jesse Dolan (55:52)
think that’s fantastic. think everybody’s dealing with remote nowadays and there’s challenges there that maybe new or unique to all of us. yeah, I think hopefully everybody listening and watching got a lot of value out of MADS, so I shared earlier madssingers.com and I’ll link to all this stuff in the show notes. We didn’t talk at all about SEO Mastery Summit. I don’t know if you want to mention that or we just drop a link to that in the show notes for people to explore.

Mads Singers (56:22)
is the best SEO conference in world?

Jesse Dolan (56:25)
Yeah. And what was, so you guys just wrapped it up in March, mid-March here, not too long ago from when we recording right now. What were some of the big themes from this last year? I imagine AI, you know, as a topic, without diving too deep, what were some of the big themes this year, maybe that weren’t around last year or?

Mads Singers (56:57)
Yeah, definitely. I think again, for me, I like to look at business holistically. A lot of SEOs believe SEO is a business. I believe SEO is a traffic channel. So some of the key things that I always focus on with my speakers is more around like funnels or the workflows. A lot of SEOs are like, I’ll never do PPC because that’s not free traffic. I’m like, well, SEO ain’t free, mate.

But if you have a business that’s successful on SEO, if you can add PPC to it and scale it and grow it even more, that’s probably a good thing. So yeah, I look at business very holistically. I just like making money, to be honest with you. So helping more SEOs get better at, I say all the channels in general. So dominating YouTube, dominating other traffic channels, stuff like Pinterest and so on that can…that can generate traffic, right? I think the days of pure SEO, pure content, pure content sites, at least, are disappearing. Obviously, still a lot of SEO. And even with the LLMs, right? Like, how are you impacting the LLMs? Well, by ranking well, because they take the results from search engines. So I don’t see SEO going anywhere in the near future. But I definitely see the focus on the…effort. What I would say is to a large degree, SEO has probably become more important because when you ask LLMs, what’s the best company to do X? Well, now it’s probably number one and two that matters. It’s not number top 10, right? So SEO might even become more important to a large extent to make sure that the LLMs are talking about you and mentioning your brand and so on.

Jesse Dolan (58:49)
Yeah. Yeah. Things are a lot more fragmented now than they were two years ago from an inbound perspective. You got to be in any channel that your prospects may be in, right? And it’s not easy. That’s not easy. Well, Mads, should we wrap it up or do you have anything else that you want to bring up?

Mads Singers (59:05)
Yeah, I know. think it was a good conversation. Again, I really, really encourage people, heyramp.com. You can sign up for a free trial right now. Again, test your team on disk, test yourself on disk, get to know yourself better. Try it out. Use it to do one-to-ones. Use it to do performance with you and really put more effort into managing your staff better and your future will be bright.

Jesse Dolan (59:38)
I’ve done some of that in the past and I can tell everybody listening and watching if you haven’t done this yet, take Mads up, do this. And you may be surprised if you got whatever, three people underneath you or on your team really understanding their personality profiles. You’re going to learn some things and go, holy crap. Okay. This makes sense. Now I get it. That that’s why this reaction was happening. And then inversely, I think you’re going to learn how to maybe approach whatever let’s say a negative situation comes up.

You may not treat everybody the same going forward. It’s very valuable. if nothing else, right. A lot of gold here, Mads in this episode, in this interview, but that’s it. That’s a huge one. If, if nothing else, right. Like learn the people, learn your team and take action accordingly. So. All right. well, let’s wrap it up there. Appreciate you being on and everybody again, check the show notes for this. We’ll have all the links down on the bottom for all this gold, that Mads has shared today. So thanks for coming on.

Mads Singers (1:00:33)
Thank you very much, Jesse. It was awesome chat.

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