Hey Everyone!

Its pretty crazy that we are already on our third issue! As of writing this issue we are currently sitting at a 50% open rate! While this is a great start, someone once said “Gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers in this racket.”

We are now fully in Spring and with that comes Spring cleaning, but not in the traditional sense. On the first issue I spoke about days being crunched and in meetings all the time. Right after that issue I set out with the goal of blocking off days for deep work and spending Sundays planning out my week. Since I started doing that a couple of months ago, it has been an overall game changer for myself. Finally got some breathing room back in my days.

💼 Hot Job: Search Optimization Manager (Hybrid) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for lightburn. Within this role you will be driving research, strategy, and execution of SEO and search optimization across client accounts.

📣 Shout-out: To Jeff, he is a PMG day #1 team member, and closest friend. He makes sure the train keeps moving day in and out and also has to deal with my crazy ideas haha.

— August Shah

We have all been there (we just did this for 4 separate roles). You open a role, get flooded with applicants, spend weeks doing interview rounds, get everyone in a room to share their thoughts, and walk away exhausted. Hiring is one of the most time and resource intensive things we do as a business owner and it requires a structured approach.

That is why I put together the Hiring Scorecard. It is a simple, flexible template that gives you defined categories to score each candidate, weighted by what matters for the role you are filling. No more walking out of an interview with three bullet points and more questions than answers. And yes, you can thank me later haha.

Pro tip: We built a custom ClickUp board that we use to track every candidate, log notes, and score against our hiring categories all in one place. If you are running any sort of volume on hiring at all, it is absolutely worth the setup time and will pay dividends.

Let me tell you something every founder has a hard time acknowledging.

You are holding your business hostage.

You built it from the ground up, you know it better than anyone, and you are the one who fixes things when they go sideways. And somewhere along the way, that stopped being a strength and started being a problem.

Now Founder syndrome does not happen all at once. It shows up as "let me just handle this one" and "it's faster if I do it myself." Before you know it, your business has one single point of failure and that point of failure is you.

I say this all from personal experience. This was one of the hardest things I have had to learn and it happened in phases, most of them uncomfortable. But we kept building systems, documenting processes, and putting the right people in the right seats. We are now at a point where if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, PMG would keep running. That did not happen overnight.

The best advice I ever received was "“nobody is going to care about your business as much as you do, and nobody is going to run it exactly the way you would”. And that is okay. The goal is not to clone yourself, it is to build something strong enough that it does not need you to survive. Now I pose this question to you, If you disappeared tomorrow, what would break first? Start there.

Answer:

In fast paced, growing environments project management mistakes tend to sneak in easily and there are two that I see come up more than others.

The first is hiring too junior. The instinct is to hire a coordinator to "keep things organized." But project management at a growing organization is not an administrative function, it is an operational one. You need someone who can anticipate problems, push back on unrealistic timelines, and keep things movin along when everything is on fire. If you hire too junior you are not delegating PM work, you are just adding a step before it lands back on your desk.

The second is keeping your PM in the dark. Withholding budget, margin targets, and operational context because they "just need to manage delivery" is like hiring a chef and not telling them what ingredients they have. A senior PM is not just an executor, they are an operator. Give them the full picture and they make better decisions, flag the right risks, and have harder client conversations from a place of context rather than assumption.

You hired them to own it. Let them own it.

Have a question you want answered?

Submit a Question

One of my goals this year has been figuring out how to use AI in a functional way, not just for the sake of it. That is where AI super agents have come in. Tools that work proactively and operate more like a team member than something you prompt when you need something. I tested all of the major ones and the only one worth its weight is Viktor.

Two things set it apart. It lives natively in Slack, so it fits into how your team already works instead of becoming another tab nobody opens after week two. And it actually works proactively. I use Viktor as my personal EA and operations support. It handles email replies, monitors budget spend, creates reports, and posts content. And It even talks directly to my ClickUp Super Agent and the two work together to keep projects moving. Overall it has just been a mind boggling experience in its capabilities.

Pro Tip: To save on credits, group scheduled tasks into a single schedule rather than running them separately. Use threads when chatting with Viktor to keep conversations tied to specific tasks. And adjust the model settings because not every task needs a premium model.

TLDR: Viktor is an insane AI tool, and I would highly recommend giving it a try. And if you do, use my link, I am out here scraping for free credits and I have zero shame about it.

Now that's a wrap! I am off to burn through some more Viktor credits and build the next billion dollar agency!

If you have any questions or just want to chat, drop me a line [email protected].