Hey Everyone!

I want to first start off by saying, thank you. The first edition was a success, and are now at 219 subscribers! I am excited to keep sharing, so more to come!

As of writing this issue its Monday, everyone’s favorite day of the week hahah. I personally find that it is the one day that seems to be the hardest to get started. No matter how early I start my day or how planned out it is, I have to dust the weekend cob webs off.

💼 Hot Job: In Charlotte, NC, Scout Motors is looking for a Web Strategist ($130 - $160K) at their fancy new HQ in Plaza Midwood. Fun fact, their office is around the corner from my house, and we are excited to see the growth in the area.

📣 Shout-out: To Leah R., our Director of Culture and Talent, she has been working tirelessly to help fill the 3 new positions at PMG.

— August Shah

You have projects in flight, a dispersed team of developers and designers, all tracking time against project codes, but no real visibility into who's stretched, who has capacity, and what that's actually costing you.

I know we've all been there. You think the team has bandwidth, you take on the work, and then BAM, reality hits. Turns out "we're good" and "we're actually good" are two very different statements, who knew.

I put together this Team & Bandwidth Utilization Tracker to give you a starting point. You input your team’s data into the sheet so you can answer two questions: who's overloaded, and what's it costing? It's definitely not exhaustive, but it gets the job done. Bonus feature, we built in email notifications so that you stay up to date without having to check the sheet every day.

We are in the age of AI and every tool on the market now has some variation of AI built in. I'm personally bearish based on what we've seen so far, but I'm not here to tell you AI is useless. It has its place. But the reality is, purchasing another tool or “handing the keys to the kingdom” to AI is not going to save you from bad processes. Hot take? Possibly. I recently made a video about it.

AI is a multiplier, not a fixer. Hand a broken process to an AI tool, and you don't get a fixed process, you get a faster, more expensive broken process. Garbage in, garbage out. The organizations succeeding with AI right now did the boring work first. They documented workflows, defined ownership, and built systems that didn't depend on one person holding everything in their head.

This is all to say, before you subscribe to the next tool or AI platform promising to transform your operations, ask yourself if your current process is even worth automating. If the answer is no, start there.

Answer:

You have a rockstar on your team who outperforms everyone else, but they treat your SOPs like optional reading material. And look, I understand the instinct is to let it slide. The problem with that is: what you permit, you promote. The moment your team notices that results buy an exemption from process, you don't have a process anymore. You have a suggestion.

Getting someone with this mentality to follow SOPs is a two pronged approach: education on why the SOPs exist and matter, followed by a structured scale-up plan to get them there. And please skip the PIP, they don't work and usually just accelerate an exit.

Step 1: Have the real conversation. Sit down and genuinely try to understand their motivations. Why aren't they following the process? Is it ego? Is the process broken, and they've found a workaround? This is the time to listen and learn. From that conversation, build a scale-up plan together, specific, clear, and time-bound.

And yes, I can see how this sounds like a PIP. It's not. A PIP is a paper trail that everyone recognizes as they enter the door. A scale-up plan is a leadership conversation involving getting honest and building a path forward. One is about documentation, the other is about development.

Step 2: Hold the line. The scale-up plan might not work, and that's okay. Stay human, stay empathetic, and be direct about the boundaries and the outcomes if things don't change. Treating someone like an adult means showing them respect and being honest about where things stand.

Strong performers set the standard whether they mean to or not. Your job is to make sure the standard they're setting is one you actually want the rest of your team to follow.

#SkipThePIP

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Let's talk about your website. Again. Specifically, the part where a potential client lands on your homepage, reads your hero text, and has absolutely the foggiest idea what you actually do. You most likely have spent tens of thousands, and yet the headline reads something like:

"We empower organizations to unlock their full potential through innovative, synergistic solutions."

Nobody has a fucking clue what that means. Including you, probably…maybe.

Here is what is happening right now on a lot of agency and service based websites. People are stuffing pages with AI-generated copy and SEO keywords, hitting publish, and wondering why the leads aren't converting. The answer is not more (cowbell, hopefully that refereance lands) keywords. The answer is that nobody feels spoken to because nobody actually wrote it for them!

The fix is not complicated, but it does require you to stop writing for search engines and start writing for humans. Be specific. Be direct. Say exactly what you do, who you help, and what changes for them when they work with you. If you cannot explain it clearly in two sentences, that is the problem to solve first.

Clarity is a thinking problem. And it is absolutely 100% costing you business.

If you asked me a little over a year ago if I thought we needed a tool that looked like Excel with a pretty UI, I would have said you were crazy. And yet, here we are. Airtable is now fully integrated into our operations and plays a pivotal role in not just tracking data, but visualizing it.

Airtable itself is very easy to use and surprisingly simple to get started with, but the real power comes from the automations and integrations. A great example of how we use it: Airtable powers our entire operational data infrastructure, and we leverage Lovable to build an internal web app that connects to it and visualizes that data in real time.

Here are 2 tips I have on how to get the most out of the tool:

Stop treating it like a spreadsheet. The instinct is to replicate your Excel setup inside Airtable and call it a day. This is a hard no. The magic is in linked records and relational data. Once you start connecting tables to each other, the way you think about your data changes.

Build your automations early. Airtable's native automations are underrated, and most people ignore them until it’s too late. Even simple automations like status change notifications or record creation alerts will save you more time than you might expect. Just start small and build it one step at a time.

Happy Monday to you all, my goal for the week is to try and not drown in meetings ahah.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to [email protected].