Author: Brittany Crockett

Now, the next question then is, what prevents you from doing the thing that you’re most valuable at? So what can we do to overcome those things? Well, the first thing is… The next topic is Delegation. That’s not a surprise to anybody here, right? But I want to give you some thoughts about Delegation. This quote, Andy Stanley I wouldn’t necessarily go to him for theology or anything, but he was at a leadership conference a long time ago, and he said a quote, and this is more than a decade ago, I heard this quote, and it stuck with me ever since. He said “Leaders should focus on doing what only they can do and delegate the rest.” This idea of what’s the most valuable thing that you can do was planted in my brain a long time ago, and I don’t always follow through with it as much as I could. So going back to our Chief Everything Officer worksheet, what can you take off your plate? What are the things that are low value for you that you can hand off to someone else and delegate it so that you have more time to do the things that you’re best at that provide the most value?

Delegation is not a dirty word. Because sometimes I have conversations where I’m like, people are just like, I just don’t want to do that thing. Well, there’s a reason you don’t want to do that thing. You may not be skilled in it. It may not be the right thing for the business. It’s not just you’re like, I want to get rid of this piddly task and give them to someone else. No. Delegation allows you to free up your time to do the things that you need to do. We’ve covered that a bunch. It allows the things to be done with more attention and focus than you’re going to give to it anyway. The things that I need to get rid of are things that I’m going to do as quickly as possible to get rid of them. But if I give them to someone, they can give them true attention and focus and do a better job at that than I will. Also, you can get someone who can do it better than you. There are people who are skilled at things. I hate accounting, but man, I’m glad accountants like it, right? Because you’re Giving someone an opportunity to grow and find work that they love.

Just because you don’t like to do it and you think it’s a piddly task that needs to get off your schedule, doesn’t mean that someone else won’t find it fulfilling. You’re not delegating it because it’s trash. You’re delegating because you need to do something different. Delegation can be really good for you, and it can be good for someone else because it gives someone an opportunity to contribute to your organization. Now, there’s a couple of levels of delegation. Do as I say. This is where interns start. I don’t care what you think. I just want you to do this thing. If you do that well, we can move you up the spectrum of authority. Research and report. So learn about it, tell me about it, and I will I will make a decision. Research and recommend. Learn about it. Come to me with a recommendation. You’ve earned some trust. I’ve seen that you’ve made wise choices. Come to me and recommend, and then I will confirm or tell you to go back to the drawing board. Decide and inform. This is a big jump between these two. But hey, make a decision. Let me know so that when I talk to the customer, I know why you’ve made that decision.

And then act independently like, Hey, you’re going to handle this. I’m trusting you. And this is a funnel. Everybody know business is a funnel. Most things in life are a funnel on some level. You start at the beginning and you work your way down until you build trust and you know someone’s competent enough to do that. Delegation is important, but what do we need to delegate? We’ve talked about tasks. Let’s think about it from a different perspective. I don’t like organizational charts, but I think they can be a very useful tool in this aspect. I started my company from nothing about 10 years ago. And a couple of years in, I learned about an activity. I can’t remember which book it was in, but it was like, make an organizational chart for your business. And I’m like, that seems dumb. It’s just me. And they’re like, the idea is like, No, You do more than one job, make a chart of all the jobs that have to happen, and then figure out who’s filling those jobs right now. So I got to do a new one of these in a couple of weeks. I want to do my end of the year planning

But a couple of years years ago, this was as best as I could get to as an organizational chart for my business. The visionary and integrator words sound a little arrogant, and it has to do with a book that I’ll talk about in a minute. But notice, very heavy on this side are a lot of things that you’d recognize that go with marketing. We got a videographer, we got a copywriter, web design, all those things. If I was to ask you what a marketing company does, you’d get a lot of those. Well, but we also have to worry about business development and account management. Oh, by the way, we have a van. You may have seen it outside. We love our van. Hey, it’s got to get its oil changed. It’s got to get washed. I need to wash it. It’s like growing mold. So IT, HR, all things that have to happen in my company. But I don’t have a dude who takes care of the van. So when you draw the organizational chart for your business, go detail. All the things that have to happen need a spot on the organizational chart

Then what you do is then you start putting names by stuff. And this is where it gets a little sad because you’re like, Oh, my name’s on a lot of spots on this chart. And now, a couple of years ago, my name was even more spots on this chart. Eventually, I want my name to just be up here, but it’s not going to be that way for a while. But vehicle maintenance, that falls in my camp, right? HR, it’s me, my project manager, and my wife. I hope that my project manager doesn’t have an HR issue. I help with IT, and then we got a guy on our team, Ricky, he can fix anything. It’s really remarkable. Eric’s in the back recording. He’s on the videography team. You can see how… You see my initials a bunch, right? You should do this. You should make this list. And then what you do is ask the question, what do we do to start removing you from things? Because you only have so many hours in the week. One of the hardest lessons that I’m still continuing to learn running a business is that I can only work so hard for so long, and then I’m going to fall apart.

And I’ve gotten close to that a few times in the business. And so the old phrase, faster alone, further together is very true. And so what can you do to start removing yourself from this list? So can you promote someone internally? Can you hire someone to help you with those things? There’s things called virtual assistance. I was talking to a guy who owns an HVAC company yesterday, and I was like, he still takes all the phone calls for the new business. I was like, what if you hired a virtual assistant to take all the calls and give you a schedule? And he’s like, wow. He’s like, I could get another job done every day. I was like, yeah, that would pay for it very quickly, right? Fractional leadership. CMO, CFO, COO. Have you guys heard of the term fractional leadership? A couple of you. It’s where you can’t afford a chief operating officer, but you need someone to help you with that type of area. You go on LinkedIn and you type COO and you’re like, Oh, there’s a bunch of people doing this, and they work for you a couple of hours a week, and they give you guidance in that area.

And I’ve gotten close to that a few times in the business. And so the old phrase, faster alone, further together is very true. And so what can you do to start removing yourself from this list? So can you promote someone internally? Can you hire someone to help you with those things? There’s things called virtual assistance. I was talking to a guy who owns an HVAC company yesterday, and I was like, he still takes all the phone calls for the new business. I was like, what if you hired a virtual assistant to take all the calls and give you a schedule? And he’s like, wow. He’s like, I could get another job done every day. I was like, yeah, that would pay for it very quickly, right? Fractional leadership. CMO, CFO, COO. Have you guys heard of the term fractional leadership? A couple of you. It’s where you can’t afford a chief operating officer, but you need someone to help you with that type of area. You go on LinkedIn and you type COO and you’re like, Oh, there’s a bunch of people doing this, and they work for you a couple of hours a week, and they give you guidance in that area.

It’s a little bit more woowoo I guess would be the word than I normally read books at, but this is an enjoyable book that helps you think about how to expand – have you read Is it? No. No. Okay. Oh, well, and if you scan that code, I’ll get money. So it’s great. All right.

So the second component, and we’re doing good on time, is Traction. A lot of the next part comes from a book called Traction by Gina Wickham. Who’s read or seen that book? A couple of you. Great. Perfect. Traction is like, how do we make progress in the whirlwind of business? I’m sure I’ll have a semi-acrimonious meeting with a client this afternoon. How do I still make progress on my business, even though I’m dealing with that and dealing with all the details? How do we grow our capacity and operations for the business? Well, first we need to have a vision. So what is your ideal future? So this is another… If you clip through the book, there’s sheets, the organizational chart in there. There’s a thing called 10-year goals. So what is your ideal future for you and your business?

What is your income in 10 years because of the business? What is your company revenue? What is your percentage of profit coming in? How many staff do you have? Here’s things that I care about. How does your staff describe you? What is the culture that you’re building? How are you treating your people? How does the community describe you? If you asked a random person on the street that knew about your business, would they say that you are someone they wouldn’t want to do business with or someone that they would want to do business with? What does it look like for us? One thing in our 10-year vision is to have a big studio space. That may look different. Obviously, most of you probably don’t need a big studio space, but you may have something specific that you want to have. Jamie might have a fleet of vehicles, and you’d like to be completely get free on those vehicles in 10 years. Is there a specific thing that you can hit on that goal? And then what do your responsibilities look like in 10 years? If 10 years from now, if you’re successful, what does your job look like and how will it be different because you’ve grown the organization underneath you?

Traction is the idea of this vision meets reality and it turns into action. And that’s when you have traction and you start moving forward. This is from a book called Traction by Gino Wickman. So I would encourage you to read this. It’s like an operating system for small businesses. And so it’ll help you give a framework to achieving the goals that you want to achieve and give you a set of methodologies to get there. So we’re going to talk about a few of those really quick. It starts with having you set a 10-year vision, and I’ve done that. And then if you’re going to get there in 10 years, well, where do you have to be in five years to get to the 10 years? I know that sounds really simple, but having to put it down on paper is a little bit of a challenge. For me, five-year goal, and for Mark, too, is we’re going to take a month off, not together, Just to be very clear. I mean, we could if you wanted to go somewhere, but my goal is to take a month off of my business and not touch anything in the business for a month.

Because in a month, all the cycles of normal business will have happened, and if they can do that without me, that means that I have a real, true business, not something that I have to run and maintain, something that can run itself. That doesn’t mean that I am no longer involved in the business or anything. It just means that I can work on those things I’m the most valuable at, thought leadership, big customer development, strategy, stuff like that. One year. So if you want to get there in five years, what’s the one year goal? How do we make one year’s progress? And then for one year, what’s the next 90 days look like? How do break that goal into 90 day increments to get to where we’re going. What does that process look like? So it’s a system called Rocks. There is an example Rocks sheet in your agenda, which it looks like that. But this is an actual screenshot of our Rocks. I gave you a piece of paper you can do it on. You can do it in a spreadsheet. They sell a lot of different softwares for this, but I’m cheap. So we do it in a Google spreadsheet.

And important thing is we talk about it every week, every week in our team meeting, our staff meeting, because our company is small enough that we don’t have a leadership team that just runs this. As your company grows, usually a leadership team runs these meetings. Every week, I would ask Brittany, which is initials BC, where she’s updating our case study content. Brittany, give me an update on the case study content. Hero video. Alex, Ricky, give me an update on the Hero video. Kevin, me, so I’m accountable to the team, too. Release the CMO service, plan in place. So you can see, look, I had to tell the team multiple weeks that I was behind on this. It’s not fun, but the accountability is super important. Even for you as an owner, I almost feel like it’s more important for you as the owner because nobody’s going to stop paying your paycheck. Nobody’s going to fire you. You’re not going to get a deduction on your whatever. You’re not going to get a point on your record or whatever. My accountability to the team is just as important as their accountability to me. This is a screenshot of our actual rocks, and I think we actually completed all those rocks.

Now, also, truth telling here, our third quarter rocks, my summer got so crazy that I jettisoned all the third quarter rocks. I said, Guys, we can’t do that right now. We’ve got to focus on what we’re doing. Which is a whole another situation. And so fourth quarter, the rocks are back. I started a week early. We’re moving forward again and growing progress for the company. So I’m not a perfect example of this, but this accountability is super important. And then you’ve got this worksheet. Well, And so start something easy like read EOS and what does success look like? I read the whole book. And then who’s responsible? It’s probably you. And then what day does it due? And then each week in your leadership meetings or your staff meetings, you give an update and you ask whoever’s in charge of that thing to give you a report. Because it’s like doing a group project at school. When they are like, Hey, did you do your part? You don’t want to be like, I didn’t do my part. At least I hope you’re not one of those people. Statistically, there’s probably a few of you in here, but accountability is key.

So the traction book is really helpful for that. Okay. Yeah. We got time for questions. I’m going to do the real quick pitch. If you are needing someone who’s a strategic marketing partner, we would love to help you. We work on websites, digital advertising, videography, and then we also have a CMO service where we work with this framework with your business. And so we help you think strategically about marketing. On top of that, this QR code, you can sign up to get the workbook emailed to you. So if you wanted to share it with people in your office. And if you want to get a recording of this session later, scan that code, put your email in there, and I’ll email you about when that’s finished being edited. I’ve got a couple of comments or time for comments or questions. So the floor is open. And if not, I will turn it back to Kyle. Thank you all for your time and your attention. I hope it was valuable. If you have any questions later, feel free to shoot me an email. I’d love to talk about this stuff. So thank you all for your time today.

Kevin
Welcome to the Content Machine podcast. This week, I’m joined by my friend William Donnell. William is going to be talking to us about his interesting career and how he’s grown and changed his business over the years. William, thanks for joining us today.

William
Yeah. Thanks, Kevin. I guess you’ll have to stay tuned to see if it’s actually interesting or not.

Kevin
That’s true, but I think it will be. Okay. William, you have a really interesting career path that really starts, in my knowledge with you being an Ag major at UT Martin.

William
True story.

Kevin
Why don’t you give us a little bit of background on that?

William
Yeah. I grew up on a farm. If anybody has been to Donald Century Farm, then that’s the farm I grew up on. I was always the geek sheep of the family. But my dad and my brother ran the farm after I graduated college. And then my dad still… My dad has passed away, but my brother still runs the farm, and then my mom also helps there, too. So growing up as being on the farm for generations and stuff, agriculture was just always a big part of my life. I thought that I wanted to do architecture landscaping. So went to UT Martin and got a degree and about that same time, though, my wife and I were dating at the time and started doing music. I do have a degree in agriculture, and I’ve never used it. As soon as we graduated from college, we just continued doing music full-time, which naturally led to doing website design and creative, and then from there. It’s a pretty natural progression. Most people start in a Ag, then they go to music, and then into a tech field. Same old story.

Kevin
The music to website stuff, What was that transition? I know you guys had some success in the music space. You were traveling around, making albums.

William
We made a living.

Kevin
We made a living.

Kevin
Yeah, absolutely. No, seriously. But then how did that transition into websites?

William
Sure. Maybe this is an advertisement for anyone to take electives in college that you’re interested in that are not part of your major. Getting my degree, I had to have a communications class. I could either take speech or I could take visual design, or I think it was desktop publishing. We were using Aldus PageMaker. I’m really dating myself there. You’ve probably never even heard of PageMaker. I’ve not heard of that. This is before Adobe, or maybe at the same time as Adobe, but before Adobe just dominated the landscape. I took a desktop publishing class. I’d always paid way too much attention to advertising and billboards and ads and stuff like that. Just always fascinated by really more that than maybe the fine art side of things. But I was just never a very talented, traditional writing, drawing artist. In that class, though, you could use computers. You could use the Command Z button to undo. If I could play around with something and then undo, let me try to make something different, undo, let me try it again, then I just really got an opportunity. I was like, Hey, this is a tool I can actually use, and I can find a way to be visually creative. My professor, who’s now the dean of the department, says that I am the best Ag student he’s ever had in his program. But I did get a taste of that. Then doing music full-time, the internet started to become a thing. This is around ’97, ’98, maybe something like that. And I realized, hey, we probably need some type of a website. So I didn’t know anyone local that did websites. I knew one person. There was only one person. That’s not true. Beth Rowe, locally, I knew her, and she was doing website stuff. And so I just thought, well, I don’t have any money to pay somebody to do a website. And so I’m just going to get some software and see if I can figure it out on my own. Got some software, used the tutorials that come with the macromedia stuff that was back then, and played around with flash, and played around with Photoshop and a bunch of stuff. And so built a website for our music ministry, and a local business said, Hey, I saw the website you did. That looks really good. Can you make one for my business? And I said, Absolutely, I can. And I knew that I really only had about half the knowledge which I needed to be able to complete that project. But I thought, Well, I didn’t know anything when I started my first project, so I’ll just just figure it out. And so did that project, learned a lot from it, obviously, and continued to do, I think, two more projects with her over the next five or seven or eight years or so. So that’s how I got into it, though.

Kevin
But your business didn’t stop at websites. You did websites mostly for the first how many years?

William
Yeah, websites have almost always I’ve been a part of the portfolio, I guess would be the fancy word, right? But one of the services we provided. But other types of marketing and stuff. So we’ve tried a lot of different things. I remember to begin with, any project that was remotely interesting and would help pay the bills, I would take it. And very early on, I got reconnected with a friend of mine from high school, Shane Aday, who was working for DeVilbiss, I think, locally, and was doing some freelance graphic design stuff. And so he and I got connected, and he was like, Man, I don’t mind doing the work, but I hate talking with customers. I was like, Hey, I could talk to customers! I could do that part! We started collaborating together. Then we did more print stuff because of Shane’s experience with that. That’s how that got started. But yeah, through the years, and I think we’re in our 22nd, 23rd year, I’ve tried lots of different things, and some of them worked, and some of them didn’t work as well because they weren’t profitable or because I didn’t feel like it was not an area that we wanted to continue to dig into, or I didn’t feel like we were really going to be good at this.

Kevin
Well, and I would say, based on just my recollection, because we’ve known each other for probably about 12 years now. Yeah, sounds right. Because I was actually a customer on a very small project at a nonprofit I worked at. And then we ended up working side by side at theCo for several years. So probably about eight years ago, I feel like the change started to accelerate greatly in what you guys were doing. You started moving more into user experience design and research. What is that? What is that? Yeah.

William
Yeah, sure. So first, I’ll explain what it is. So user experience is really thinking about any time a customer interacts with your product or organization. So if you think about if you’re going to go and get a box of Kleenex at Target, then the user experience is not just seeing the box on the shelf, pulling it off, putting in your cart and checking out. That’s not the whole user experience. It’s the whole thing of when you’re pulling to the parking lot, is it easy to find a spot? Is it clear how you get into the building, the signage, the landscaping when you walk inside and you smell the coffee over to the left at the Starbucks? That whole thing from when you first get out of your car, or maybe even before, all the way through when you check out and leave and then later see their ads or any other part. All of that is the experience the user has with your brand and with your organization. So the way I really became exposed… Well, I’ll say that when I first learned that there was a term for this thing was when we first started working with our first startup organization. And so this is really when we got into digital product design from website stuff. But I’ll get into that in a second. But that’s what user experience is.

Kevin
Okay. So how did you make that transition from doing websites to user experience design? And then it seems like over the last eight or so years, that has become an increasingly large part of your business.

William
The short answer is the providence of God. The longer answer is that a great friend of mine since eighth grade is Marcy Harris, who grew up in Lexington, so she’s a local girl. After college, she founded a startup that had one foot in the San Francisco Bay Area and one in the DC area. I was the creative person she knew. She knew that they needed to design a product for pop box, is the name of the product that they were working on. And so got an opportunity to work with her. And then it was really amazing because she got connected with someone who I now consider my friendtor, which is a word I made up, but feel free to use it if you want to. I’m trying to make it a thing. Janice Fraser. Janice is one of the OGs of user experience. The very first user experience design firm is the the one that she was the founding CEO of. So I just happened to, I say happened to, but I think I mentioned the short story, the short version of this. It’s not just happened to, right? But got a chance to be introduced to Janice, and Marcy and all of pop box went through an eight-week boot camp of user experience and really a lean startup methodology for startups. Janice led that workshop, and my eyes became open to all of these things. I was like, Oh, so that’s what that’s called. And that makes so much sense. It was very much this thing of… Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s tons of new stuff that I had never heard of before, but there was a lot of stuff, too, that it was just connecting the dots to things that I just- Or putting a name to something.

Kevin
I’m already doing this, but I didn’t know it was a thing.

William
Right. If somebody said, Oh, that’s called gravity. You’ve experienced gravity all of your life, but you didn’t know. And there’s a principle behind it, and there’s rules, and there’s math behind it. You don’t have to know all the math to understand.

Kevin
To know that you’re going to fall off a chair. That’s right. Yeah.

William
That’s right. Yeah. So getting exposed to all of that was just an amazing milestone in my life, personally, and just changed the trajectory of Sodium Halogen.

Kevin
It’s interesting how people popping into your life can change entire directions of things, right? That started to become a thing. You found more and more of it to or you liked doing it more, you guys really started to pursue that. Why did you chase after that so much?

William
Sure. I think it’s a couple of reasons. One is it’s just way more challenging, way more exciting to create a digital product that, in that case, for that product, there were tens, if not 100,000 people that were using this product. I’d never worked on something that had that scale and reach. Also, because pop box was all about connecting what’s happening in Congress and the laws of Congress with the actual people that are being represented by those Congress people, That was really exciting, too. I feel like we were really good at it. Here’s a thing that is exciting to me. It is maybe, potentially, of more consequence to touch more people than the stuff I’ve worked on before. It is something that I think can be profitable and something that I just really enjoy doing. So working with startups, that was our first introduction of working with startups on digital products. The reaction we got from working on that from the venture capitalist, who are the people who invest in the startups, was very positive, too. There was obviously a need. I think startups were realizing, Hey, figuring Coming out this user experience thing is really important, and there aren’t a whole lot of people at that time that were doing it. So it felt like there was a void in the market, and it was something that we thought was exciting, something we could be good at, and something that would be profitable, too. So you want all parts of that

Kevin
Thank you for joining us for this first half of the episode with William Donnell. Stay tuned. In a couple of weeks, we’ll release part two, where we hear more about William’s business journey.

I wanted to do a little bit of an introduction about me because I know some of you, and some of you are very good friends, some of you I’ve met today. I am not an expert in running a business or growing a business. Many of you have businesses that are larger than mine. What today is, is my observations from doing this for 10 years. Just a few weeks ago, really, my company turned 10 years old. I started it from nothing. When I say nothing, I have a degree in youth ministry, and I didn’t come from another marketing agency. Most marketing agencies that start, you’ll find out that they started another marketing agency or they have a degree in marketing or something, and they worked in the corporate world. I worked at the nonprofit world, and then I jumped out and did this thing, and hey, it turns out I’m all right at it. And so these are just observations that I’ve made. I’ve got a long way to go in improving my business to where I’m super… I mean, I’m excited about my business, but it can be a lot better. For example, I took a huge L last week. One of my customers who I was a little too generous on payment terms and not following up, decided that they’re potentially filing bankruptcy and has wiped my profit off the table for the year. So anybody dealt with that before? Some of you are small business owners. You can imagine that. And so my fourth quarter started on Monday. And because fourth quarter, my goal is to recoup that and get ahead of that. And so I’ve got a bunch of goals for myself because my job in the company is the business development, mostly. So Monday, a week early, started my fourth quarter so that I could have some goals to set for. I’m in the middle of this, like many of you are, and And so we’re going to go through this, and I’m going to try to say everything clearly, but hopefully we’ll have time for questions at the end. I’m a person who likes to establish what are we doing? What are we saying? What’s the framework work that we’re thinking about here. Let’s start with everybody’s favorite thing, terms and definitions. I define working in your business as anything that is direct sales or service. Now, the reason this will make more sense, hopefully you’re here because you want to improve your business or whatever. But I define working in the business as anything direct sales or service. And really, only the largest businesses have people that dedicated only to leadership. Most of us will have someone working on the… Most of us, regardless of who you are, you’ll have some working in the business to do. And it’s important because working in the business is the reason that you make money and have a business. So it’s not that that’s not valuable, but we need to think about how to do it differently because working on the business is, in my definition, something that improves the business by growing capacity or creating long term value. So that’s the definition I’m working with for the rest of this presentation. Something that increases, grows capacity for your business, so it increases your ability to do more things, make more money, service clients better, which creates money in the long run or create long term value for your organization. And working on your business is important, but it’s very rarely urgent, right? Because there’s fires to put out. I put out fires all the time. But here’s the thing. If you’re in leadership at your company, working on the business is your responsibility. There’s nobody else to hand that off to. You can delegate a lot of other things, but ultimately, casting that vision and pushing the business forward is your responsibility as the leader or the owner or whatever you may be. And so we need to think about how to do that. Here’s a couple of examples of what this might mean, working on, working in, just so we can make sure that we’re on the same page as we dive into the rest of this. If you’re launching a new business, getting your marketing together, I would say, is working on the business. You’re at an early stage, you’re trying to figure out who you are and communicate it to the world. Hiring your first employee, I say, is working on the business because you’ve increased your capacity significantly to do more work. Building a strategic plan, working on the business because you are planning for the future, you’re increasing value, hopefully you’re doing it right and you’re doing that. Building an onboarding process for new team members. I think that’s working on the business because you are setting them up to work faster. You’re helping build the culture that you want to have at your company. Fulfilling the latest order that comes in from a priority client in the business. That’s right. You got it. You’re there. You’re working in the business. Hiring an HR person to take care of future hiring, working on the business. Because then they’ve taken care of that responsibility for you so you can do other stuff. Okay, a couple more. Let’s do a little quiz. This is a public participation component. All right. Implementing an AI tool to improve efficiency. That would be on. All right. We’re doing good. All right. Building a personnel handbook. On. This sounds like torture to me. I don’t know about you guys, but this would be something that would be important for your business as you continue to grow. Fixing your biggest client’s problem. In. You guys are crushing this. Rebranding the company. Chad? On. On? Yes. We recently rebranded Foundation Bank. Yeah, definitely on. Speaking to an event to increase your brand reach. I think at this point, I’m working in the business. This is doing the marketing of the business. This is what I’m doing right now. Selling a giant new project. In. Yeah, I think in. It didn’t like that at all. Going to a conference to learn new leadership skills. On. I’ve never seen it do that before. That’s new. Okay, we’ll try to unhook that and start it going again. So, yeah, you guys did great on that quiz. Now, you guys know the urgent versus important grid, right? That famous square that Eisenhower came up with where you’ve got urgent. I have a picture of it, which is helpful. But urgent versus important. There we go. We’re back. Now we’re cooking with gas. Okay. All right. So Urgent versus important. Some of you guys have seen this. Raise your hand if you’ve seen this before. Surely no? Okay. Less than I thought. So you have urgent versus important. Really urgent, important, you do it right now. Urgent, not important, you do it later. Almost everything that we deal with that keeps us from working on the business is that urgent, not important. And really working on the business is important, but it’s very rarely urgent. And so we have a conflict here. So how do we make time to do it? It is a little bit of a radical idea, but almost always working on the business is not urgent. So the mindset I want you to think about today is, how can we change this to be something more important and more urgent for us? How can we think about frameworks to try to make this change happen in our business to help us to get to where we want to be? So the next phase, we’ve got definitions and terms. We all talk about the same thing. Let’s talk about diagnosis. This is a question that you should ask yourself as a business owner or a leader. What’s the most valuable things that you can be doing? There could be a lot of different answers to that. Now, I asked my team this, and if you have a team, I would encourage you to ask your team this question. I asked my team that, and they said things like business development, big picture planning, overall strategy for clients, big picture planning for the company, overall strategy for clients, culture building. So some good things to be thinking of and working on. What is it for you? What’s the most valuable things you can be doing leading your company? You should think about asking your team that question this week, if you have a team. Some of of you have a team, some of you are solopreneurs or whatever, think about that. But if you aren’t a solopreneur, think about that as a team. Now, I printed off nice little workbooks that our team designed for this. If you open to the first page, we have something that I call our Chief Everything Officer Worksheet. As an owner of a business, as a leader of a business, you are likely the Chief Everything Officer. I don’t remember which company branded that, but I thought it was pretty brilliant. This is a tool to help you think about the things that you’re actually doing on a weekly basis, and it’s probably a lot more than you think it is. And you might be propping up more processes in your organization than you really think you are. This is an actual list of things that I did. I gave this talk a few months ago. This was a list of things I did on a Monday preparing for that talk, not preparing for that talk, just while I was preparing for that. So I responded to an incoming lead. I wrote blog content. I led staff meeting. I had a project management call with a client, which was the Jackson chamber because it was a Monday. Interview new semester interns, wrote a proposal, I repaired a broken website, I was sending an invoice, and I set up meetings for projects. Seems like a pretty busy day. It was. But when I look at that, the goal of this exercise is there are things that’s high value for me to be doing, or it’s things I should be delegating. So that the two columns next to that is high value or delegating. I would encourage you to seriously do this for a week. Get home at the end of your day or the first thing in the morning, think back on the day before and be like, all the things that I did as my job, are they high value or should I be delegating them? Some of this list I should be delegating, and some of it I have since then. A lot more that I should be delegating. But this is a diagnosis. You need to get a picture of how much you’re doing so that you can think about other ways to handle that. Because with this, the next question is, when you go back to that first question is, what’s the most valuable things that you can be doing? Is it on this list all the time? Does it make up most of this list? And my guess, unless you’re a lot better than me, and some of you are, is probably not. Because we’re busy putting out fires instead of doing important things. Now, the next question then is, what prevents you from doing the thing that you’re most valuable at? You need to ask yourself that question and ask it seriously. And there’s a couple of reasons that that may be the case. It could be pride. I do this better than anybody else can do it, so I’m not delegating it. Or maybe it’s low quality or unequipped staff. You might have a staffing issue that prevents you from taking the things off your plate that you need to have taken off your plate. Maybe it’s budgetary, right? We have a budget problem all of a sudden that we didn’t have a couple of weeks ago. I guess we did have it a couple of weeks ago. I just hadn’t really come to grips with it. But budgetarily, if I could hire someone else, there’s things that I could do to take stuff off my plate. We’ll talk more about that in a second. One of my pitfalls is that I’m doing too much of the marketing work. We’ve got a great team of designers and stuff, but one of our weak areas is there’s some things that I’m hesitant to hand off to team, and I’m preparing for this talk, and I had a pastor growing up who would be like, Every time I’m pointing a finger at you, I’m pointing three back at me. He was not that great of a pastor, but that was a good illustration to remind yourself that, Hey, I’m talking to you guys about this, but, Hey, I’m not perfect at this either. I’ve got shortcomings. Preparing for this talk made me think about that.

Welcome to the second of two episodes with Katie Howerton, where we talk about type. And so you’re saying that in a good brand kit, so if someone’s listening to this podcast and they’ve got a brand kit from a professional, there should be a font listing in there.

Yes. And they’re ideally multiple. I think in my mind, an ideal set is three fonts. So one being your main title font, which you could use a variation of later, a subtitle font and then a body copy. And you can use those within the same family. I like a little variation. So say you have sans serif as your main title font, try to use a serif or a slap serif to offset things in the body. So yeah, and then in addition to that, you should be getting with your brand kits if they do require downloaded fonts as font files as well, which is an easy step to miss because there’s no one rule for fonts across on the internet. Maybe one day we will have that, but yeah. Yeah.

And now you are somewhat famous for your handwriting, your handwritten script and stuff. So how can using unique type or handwritten script add meaning to a project?

I think something we talked about a lot in college when we were learning about typography is that every font has a voice, which sounds like no child left behind. What I mean is that when you see letters in a certain way, you imagine them sounding a certain way or feeling a certain way. It’s why most of our clients, male clients, if I present any script, they’re like, it feels a little girly. It’s a little overcompensating, but it’s true. There are different… It’s like if you’re doing an old brand and you’re using all very modern type, it’s going to feel disjointed. So often I will use hand lettering when it comes to any brand that is okay with as far as either something that’s playful, something that is very personal, or if you just hit a wall with something. So I think about even our own brand. We have a strong look with using Gotham and using our body copy type. But I like to do quotes in hand lettering so that they have a more illustrative element. They can be one on their own. They don’t have to match everything. And as long as the color palette carries over, that there’s a consistency with elements like that, you can have a little bit more fun. So that’s why I like to use it specifically with quotes, because those are heard.

Yeah, you’re reading it to hear it like someone said it. Yeah, absolutely. All right. And then the last thing to talk about is, sometimes we have a conflict about software in our office, and usually that’s because you are obsessed about InDesign. I feel like InDesign is the… The… The… The…

The black sheep.

The black sheep of the Adobe world that nobody talks about. But you love it.

I do love it.

So I wanted to give you a chance to pitch Adobe and defend your choice to use it all the time.

So, Adobe has many, many products, the three main which are used by designers are Photoshop, Illustrator, and Indesign. Photoshop for images, Illustrator for logos, is the best way to put it, and then Indesign for print. I ran our Jackson home for five years, and that was what I designed every magazine in. It’s what I’ve designed resumes in. It’s what I’ve designed anything that is going to be printed in because it is made for that. And so if you learn the muscle memory of it, which is like any Adobe product, if you get used to it, you don’t want to-

Yeah, because the key commands don’t transfer between different software.

Exactly. So it’s just very print friendly. But even with that, I’ll sometimes use it for non-print or things that just don’t necessarily need Indesign, per se. There’s a lot more locking features on there. I can envision it better, I think. In Illustrator, it’s a little bit more of the Wild West of you can have things spread out, less organization. I think I’m just mostly an organized person, and I have found a system within Illustrator that benefits that. I can also design two things back to back and pick a favorite, and for me, it’s visually easier. So I would say the Indesign is really helpful for print materials or anything with lots of words. It’s very type-centric. So I would encourage anybody, if you’re creating a business card, if you’re creating print materials, even if you’re laying out for a website, just to play around with the idea of what are the margins? How are we doing this? Indesign is a good place to start.

Well, Katie, thank you so much for joining us today and teaching us a little bit more about type and making a case for InDesign.

Yeah, anytime.

If you have a favorite type project that you’ve seen Katie make, which are all the quotes from this show that you see on social media, please let us know, and I’ll share that with Katie so she can hear nice things about her work. So thank you for listening to the Content Machine podcast. Stay tuned for future episodes about marketing, small business, and leadership in culture. Thank you.