I’m now saving 5-10 hours a week because of our systems.

We click one button in Asana…

Then projects are created, tasks are generated, descriptions are filled, roles are assigned, due dates are set, and notifications are sent to each team member…

The best part?

I don’t need to manage any of it.

There’s a special freedom to this…

Especially for a creative Founder like myself.

It’s time I can use to create content, think about strategies, or even do nothing at all, which makes me more productive.

This is a big step forward compared to the last time I tried to run an agency…

Back in 2021, I was at the height of my career.

Demand for my services was at the peak. I was earning $27,000/mo in profit on just six clients. And I was living on the 8th floor of a beachside hotel in Cancún.

I could go from my desk to plopping my ass on the beach in under two minutes.

My girlfriend and I would go out to eat at a different restaurant every night, and I could still put $10,000 or more into savings every month.

On paper, everything was perfect. But there was one little hidden problem…

I dreaded waking up each day.

Half of my day was filled with client calls. The other half was filled with putting out fires. That’s already a full work day, and I didn’t even get around to doing the actual strategies or work I was hired to do.

I worked for 12 hours a day minimum. So I tried hiring two full-time copywriters for $5,000/mo and $3,500/mo. But that still didn’t help because I needed to work even more to get each copywriter up to speed. I frankly didn’t have the time for it.

My girlfriend would often go to the beach without me because I had to take yet another call. I felt terrible about this.

One day as I was looking over the balcony into the vast, blue ocean, I realized I built my own prison. I spent years working hard and sacrificing my life so I could earn more than the average American. But when I finally achieved it, I didn’t even have the time or energy to enjoy it.

I quickly burnt out, and I shut down my agency in a matter of months. This experience gave me battle scars, but it also gave me three important lessons:

1. If you don’t have a system, you don’t have a business. I can call it an agency all I want. But until I can remove myself from the delivery and still deliver great results, we’re just glorified contractors.
2. Build your agency around a single offer. I was offering far too many services to different clients, which makes it harder to actually build systems properly for everything.
3. Provide a service that’s easy to delegate. Marketing is complex, which makes it difficult to delegate. Even if you pay a lot of money to a more experienced person.

These lessons are etched into my brain. That’s why we’re building our agency like we are now. My partner’s job is to build systems, we’re only offering YouTube services, and we’re doing YouTube in the first place because it’s easier.

I’m proud to say, it’s all finally working.

Now, I’m still handling the strategy and creative for ourselves and our partners, and my partner is building systems and managing all the moving pieces.

But this is only step one.

The next and hardest step is to remove me from the actual work. This includes three main things:

1. Scriptwriting.
2. Thumbnail reviews.
3. YouTube strategy.

This phase will be hard because I need to turn my brain into a digital product that my team members can study.

After working with 24 brands generating 7 figures or more, I know this point is a major company bottleneck.

There’s valuable information stuck in the Founder’s or CMO’s head, and they don’t know how to transfer it to the people around them. The solution is actually simple: they just need to sit down, write it all out, then organize it properly.

The problem is this takes a LOT of time.

That’s why for one hour a day, I spend time writing everything I know into a training document. These are concepts I’ll teach our marketing team, like market awareness, market sophistication, universal appeal, positioning, deeper core messaging, symptomatic messaging, archetypes, psychological biases, symbols, optics, unique mechanism, creating contrast, energy transfer, and so much more.

I’ll share what these are another day. What’s important to know is I use all of this every day. Once I can train someone on these, and they can execute it at the same level or better than I can, we have a real business.

At the end of the day, I see myself doing this for a long time.

I love YouTube, marketing, and video. In fact, I love being a creator more than an entrepreneur. I always tell my partner that he’s going to be the CEO and run this business for us one day. Because I frankly don’t want to be the person ‘running’ anything.

All I want to do is write about cool ideas and share inspiring stories online. The more I do this, the happier I’ll be and the more successful this business will become.

In self-help, common wisdom says you don’t rise to the level of your potential, you fall to the level of your habits. Business is no different. You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.

So although systems aren’t exciting, they’re the one thing that will bring me closer to the things that truly matter in life.

Which is having the time, space, and money to do the things I actually want to do.

As I like to say…

Systems aren’t sexy… until they are.

This is Week 11 of building my business in public.