Hello, hello, hello, friend!

And welcome back to First Class Operations!

This is your Captain Kuba speaking.

How am I doing? Pretty okay, thanks for asking.

There’s a feeling that things are picking up speed recently.

Maybe we should be in the ‘summer lull’ right now. But it’s not feeling like it as of yet.

Let’s keep the party going with some fresh insights to boost your agency operations! 

I’m particularly excited to share some of our latest podcasts with you. More on that in a minute.

The soundtrack for this edition of First Class Operations is Four Out Of Five by Arctic Monkeys. A very chill song to swing to as you go about your working day. Perfectly loopable, if you ask me. Got some great memories associated with it too; I’ve had the luck to see this performed live at a Polish open air festival a few years ago. Anyway, enjoy!

Captain's Address

🗣️ Talk yourself through it.

I’m home alone this week, and as a result…

…I end up talking to myself a lot.

Turns out, that’s actually very smart of me to do, from a productivity and focus standpoint.

There’s research showing that talking yourself through a process can actually boost your performance and reduce errors.

For instance, research by psychologist Ethan Kross (author of the book Chatter) found that using your own name when talking to yourself can increase your chances of success in challenging situations. It’s like you become your own coach in those moments. And actually, specifically talking to yourself in the second person (using “you” or your name) makes you more empathetic and helps you see more potential solutions for your problems.

Another study published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology showed that people who verbalized their search while looking for objects found them faster than those who stayed silent. So for example, saying “chair” out loud makes it easier for you to find a chair with your eyes, etc.

Obviously, tricks like this can be useful for all us wonderful agency professionals as well.

We’re juggling multiple projects, deadlines, and client demands all at once, daily. And for the managers and executives among us there are hairy leadership issues on top of that, too.

By talking ourselves through our daily work, we can better keep ourselves on track.

The tone of your self-talk is up to you, of course. Some days, it will be nice and gentle and encouraging. Other days… Well, there’s nothing quite like a swift kick in the pants from Me to Myself, isn’t there?

Try this out next time you're drafting that crucial pitch, getting your ClickUp tasks back in order, or helping address client issues.

On the other hand, if you’d rather have a real conversation partner to talk about your operations / project management / team productivity issues, you can always book an ops therapy call with our team at ZenPilot. We’ll help you see and address the gunk in your workflows that’s keeping your team from doing their best work.

In-Flight Magazine

🛫 New from ZenPilot

Here’s our latest content for you to enjoy. If you like podcasts, you’re in for a treat.

Podcasts:

• [Agency Journey] The Daily Stand-Ups Anti-Pattern (+ Alternative Async Methods for Planning, Trust, and Momentum) with Gray MacKenzie. My interviews with Gray are ramping up! In this one, we take a deep dive into the practice of daily stand-ups with your team. We break down why they seem effective at first glance, how they may turn into an inefficient crutch, and what to implement instead for async productivity.
• [Agency Journey] The 40-Hour Conundrum: Rethinking Time Tracking for Modern Agencies with Gray MacKenzie. We get questions about time tracking quite often—working with ZenPilot is a popular first step towards properly implementing it—so I sat down with Gray to properly document our recommendations for best practices in this area. How to talk about time tracking with your team? How to shape expectations around the number of hours worked? How to use the insights from time tracking data? It’s all in there, and more.
• [Agency Journey] Motorcycling In Vietnam, Scaling to 150+ Remotely, and Choosing Team Over Clients with Zach Boyette. This was such a blast of a conversation. Zach’s agency, Galactic Fed, has had undeniable success—and in our conversation, Zach breaks down how they approach documenting process, building a remote team culture, hiring self-starters, managing leaders, and much more.
• [Podcast feature – Schmidt List] Boosting Team Productivity and Profitability with Gray MacKenzie. Kurt Schmidt had Gray on his podcast, where Gray shared his thoughts on how to structure client engagements; the cultural change needed for a full ops makeover; pricing strategy; and more.

Videos from our YouTube channel:

• [Webinar replay] Account Management Mastery: 5 Easy Steps to Happy Long-Term Profitable Clients (with Taylor McMaster, DOT & Company). Our well-received webinar with Taylor from DOT & Co. is finally public for everyone to enjoy. I particularly enjoyed the segment about gifting strategy. Taylor really knows how to make clients “weak in the knees”, as she says it. If you want delighted clients too, you should listen to this.

On The Radar

🧠 Content from the ZenPilot network

Here’s some inspiration from our Pilots and other places on the web.

🌐 From outside of ZenPilot:

• Hannah Cohen from Tango featured yours truly in an article on the Tango blog. I once made the connection on a call that Tango turns running processes into something like an interactive tutorial in a video game… But the article goes so much deeper into this, with a lot of fun detail. Check it out here.
• A cool story from Daniel Priestley about winning an influencer with 15M followers as a client. It involves an assessment. 
• Erica Schneider never gets tired of posting on LinkedIn because she follows one simple rule. Check it out.
• Carrie Rose traces 5 years of growing her business, and names the one thing that made the most difference for each year. 
• Some of you are not following Jay Acunzo yet. Big mistake. Here's just one of his banger posts: how he plans his content using just 4 simple words as a guide. 
• Have you been on multiple podcasts as a guest? Then you should steal this Spotify tip from Eric Doty. 
• Just today I recorded an upcoming Agency Journey episode with Ben Catley-Richardson, the Accountability Viking for agencies. Extremely excited for you to see it. Here’s a taste of his approach… I guarantee the last 15 secs will get you going.
• I love a good villain origin story. And a good villain laugh. And a slow descent into madness. This newest, excellent clip by Todd Clouser has got it all.

🧑‍🏫 Jeff posted a couple:

• “This is one of the simplest solutions we've built at ZenPilot, but it's made the largest impact.”
• “How do you stay on top of all your client issues?”

And I keep posting clips from Agency Journey on my profile. Like this one from Gray about 2 different types of EOS Integrators.

And that's it for this edition of First Class Operations!

One question for you before you go though…

Any feedback for this newsletter? What would you like to see more/less of?

And how have you been? Let me know in an email reply. Or add me on LinkedIn and let’s chat.