TTA03-Mads Singers

Michael J. Mahony 0:01
Good management skills are essential for survival in today's business world. Listen in as we hear how one man helps people

learn to be better managers.

Welcome to the technology Alchemist. Our sponsor is your virtual CTO. The virtual CTO is a technology services company specializing in increasing your revenue and profit. Through a close examination of your technology engine. Your virtual CTO offers exclusive coaching for business leaders. That is the only business coaching program that includes technology as part of the program. If you want to learn how you can make more money by tuning up your technology engine, you can learn more at get your virtual CTO calm. Today I'm joined by Mads singer Matt has more than 10 years of experience in fortune 500 companies such as Xerox, and IBM, and more than seven years experience, coaching and consulting online entrepreneurs. He has spoken at many large events such as cm SEO, Thai con, DC BKK and dm SS Bali, SEO spring training, and survive and thrive e commerce summit. Mads currently owns and runs three companies managing more than 100 people. He doesn't just talk the talk, he also walks the walk. Mads shares his management philosophy knowledge through the effective management master course and community. Welcome to the show, Matt.

Mads Singers 1:43
Thank you very much. My pleasure to be here.

Michael J. Mahony 1:45
I'm really glad to have you here. So tell me a little bit about your background. Let's get into your background for so what what got you started as sort of a business management expert?

Mads Singers 1:57
Yeah, I mean, I actually started

already when when I was younger I wanted to be a tech guy. So I wanted to be a developer or something like that. But what happened was when I was 18, I got a job corporately with with Xerox first and I bumped into this manager and I literally I was blown away by how she managed people and the difference she did. And basically, like, in a couple months, I went from being I want to be the tech dude to, I want to do what she does, which was management. I was sick and tired of school at the time. And everyone told me to go get a five year management degree or some stupid stuff. And I was like, no chance on Earth. If it was five days, I could maybe do it five years now. So basically, I ended up doing rigorous rigorous self study for many years. Until even after I got into management, I probably read about a book a week for 12 plus years. So I've been through a lot of books up into a lot of content, I was paying email and I was working. I was paying out of my own pocket to go to all these management seminars. And so on. So I really invested a lot in it. And also passionate about it. Even working with a company like IBM. There's lots of great people, but I found few that had the passion I had around it right. And eventually, I started coaching people beside doing my work at IBM. And, you know, one day I was kind of like, Well, I have my 6070 week, IBM weeks, and then I do my five weeks, five hours a week coaching and, you know, at some point when the coaching starts paying more than 70 hour job, then you're kind of like, something doesn't make sense here. And yeah, that was basically that was effectively how I took the jump. So ever since then. And that's about also 2013 or so. And pretty much Ever since then, I've, I've started a couple of more businesses, but I've lived primarily in Asia since So, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand. That's kind of the key place I've been. And what's really beneficial out here is there's there's a huge group of Sort of startups, there's a huge group of entrepreneurs living out here. And basically people who are starting businesses, they, you know, they can start out here at a much lower cost because both because cost of labor is is significantly cheaper, but also cost of living, right? In the beginning, when you're trying to get a business off the ground, very often, you know, caches, caches important. So great entrepreneur environment out here. And I basically went from initially I was coaching all corporate people. And, you know, most people, I mean, if people pay for themselves, yeah, they're interested but, you know, sometimes you'll walk into a session, five people's like, Yeah, great. We've got falls asleep now and, you know, so but the benefit of working with small businesses and even managers within small businesses, like they're just so much more passionate and driven and in love, right.

Michael J. Mahony 4:51
So what if you had to sum up your, your management philosophy in one sentence, what would it be?

Mads Singers 4:58
One sentence that's very

I'll basically sum up that, for me management is about treating everyone as the individuals they are. And you need to learn to put the right people into the right boxes.

Michael J. Mahony 5:13
Yeah, I agree with you on that. I used to hear the saying of having the right people on the bus. But I always felt like having the right people on the bus was a, you know, it's a valiant idea. But the reality is, you also need the people in the right seats on the bus. You know, if you have somebody driving the bus who doesn't know how to drive, you're going to crash. So I've always that that's a really good point. You know, treating people the right way and how I'm putting them in the right place is really important. So you mentioned books, and I just wonder what you think about a leader? How much reading should a typical leader do?

Mads Singers 5:52
I mean, I for me, you

personally, I would always aim for at least five hours a week. Right. And I'd say that's a minimum. Now how you do that development is up to you. I definitely think books for me have been huge. But there's many I mean, nowadays, amazing podcasts and things like that, that are very valuable as well. Right. But I think, I think one of the good things about books, particularly if you're reading the right ones is that and you can get a ton of recommendation from friends and stuff, but but I think some of the best books are, by far the best time investment you can ever do. Right? Like there's some. There's some powerful stuff out there and like that life changing stuff. I mean, one of the ones that really, really changed my life was called first break all the rules by a guy called Marcus Buckingham. And the essence of the book is really the fact that a manager or a leader is not someone that have a certain characteristic. anyone anywhere can learn to become a good leader and manager, what they have to figure out What they're really good at and how they excel as a manager and push that strength, because what happens in the world today is that a lot of people look up to sort of Elon Musk's, and they look at their idols. But the thing is, if personality wise to totally different from those people, then that's a very, very bad idea. Because if you're trying to be someone that you're absolutely not, like someone like musk will call up people at 2am in the morning, right? Now, if you're not that guy, like if you're not the guy that can schedule 35 minutes a day for your kit, right? Like you won't be Elon Musk and you won't succeed trying what every individual has to figure out as a business owner or as a manager in a business, but they have to figure out is what is their key strength and how they utilize that to get the best result as a manager. Right. And as an example, like some people are great at you know, verbally talking like drawing great visions for the team and so on. Some people have just, you know, bang on like that. Good. pushing people. Some people, a lot of tech people, they're great with numbers decorated with data, they make amazing decisions. And some people are just very sort of, you know, personal decorator, bring people together, making sure caring about everyone, so on. So there's different kinds of personalities, right? But you need to figure out what you assess. And you need to figure out what you excel at. Because again, most business owners fall into the trap of doing majority of stuff that they suck at, because they suck at it. Right? So everyone, everyone have this idea that, oh, someone said, I'm bad at this thing. I need to learn how to do it. Like, no, if you're really bad at it, and it doesn't come natural to you. You want to learn how not to do it.

Michael J. Mahony 8:44
Yeah, you want to learn to delegate that to somebody else. So how important to you you feel work life balances.

Mads Singers 8:52
I think it's a very modern term. Again, what I would say is when you love what you do, becomes a lot less relevant. I'm Personally, I have I've been fairly location independent, like I travel around and, you know, I don't need to be in a certain spot and in a certain office. So for me, it's much more about, you know, having the right flexibility in life and just making sure that, you know, if I want to go to the gym every day at 12, I can do that. If I want to eat lunch at three o'clock, I can do that. So for me, it's much more the flexibility, both myself and the family, like, the fact that you can, you know, pick up a random week and take the family somewhere. And for me, that's more important than the actual balance, like most people just look at it as an hour's game. And effectively, most people, and this is a lot of what I go through in my management training, but, like, the challenges a lot of people, they make it analysis game. And the problem is it becomes this like, Oh, yeah, I want to tell my friends that I work 12 hours a day. So I'm gonna sit here in the office until 10pm. And you know, I want to I'm hustling and doing good cheer. Reality is like for majority of people, 98% of people who spend more than eight hours a day in the office, you're being very ineffective, right? Because the problem is when you work a 12 hour day, you use your ability to deliver the next morning, not not an afternoon, but the next morning, decreases significantly. And the biggest challenge for entrepreneurs and business owners, it's not the hours, it's making the right choices, its focus. And it's, I mean, it's getting the right shift. Right. And the problem is, when you're tired from the day before, and so on, you're much more likely to just grab what's in front of you to feel productive, instead of actually doing the things that matters, right. I mean, talking about books, I mean, a book like the one thing is, is a great book in terms of that kind of

Michael J. Mahony 10:54
thinking, do you you know you mentioned focus and getting the right thing. Done. Do you have a recommendation for how to determine what the right things to get done are?

Mads Singers 11:07
Yeah, a few. I mean, the fundamentals always asking and, like understanding from yourself. And this is actually something I have from Drucker. But basically, if you say right now the next quarter priorities management,

sorry, that's a bad one, priorities sales,

right? If you go back and look at your schedule, and then of the month, and you say that, like you actually look at your schedule and what you've been doing, and if 70% of your time have been not sales, then your priority was not safe. Right? So again, like I always start out, and I do it generally on a quarterly basis, but I then look at, you know, what are my top level priorities this quarter? What is top things I can move forward in this business? And then I look at like, what are the initiatives that I need to put in place? What are the actions that need to be taken, but that comes secondary, right, so a lot of people tend to scramble They do a bit of operation to do a bit of sales is a bit of marketing, and there's no coordination. And the problem is when you do a little bit of things all over the place it you don't get that huge benefit, right? Whereas if you consistently just focus on sales for three months, like you're gonna make a much bigger impact than if it's kind of like, something you do occasionally, right. So my recommendation, particularly, I mean, if you're the only person in the business, you need to do different things. But if you have a team with you, like, left the team now and say, you know, this quarter I focus on operations, right, we're going to streamline operations, we're going to make things smooth, we're going to do whatever, but but if you have a focus area where you sit down and you focus for a period of time on that area, and get it, quote, fixed for the time being, then you can move on to something else, right. And it's much better rather than trying to do everything all the time. It's much better to focus in and say, This is what I'm doing right now. And then basically what I do I plan my week. plan every Sunday night. And what I do is, I basically take these big chunks, so I usually do three work segments a day, either one hour, one hour and a half per chunk. And depends on how much it's in my calendar and stuff. But I basically schedule in three chunks a day. And I basically have a very specific purpose for those three times. And you know, most people try and schedule eight, nine hours in the calendar. And the thing is that always fails, right? Because there's always stuff come up. So what I've always found is if you schedule three to four hours a day of plan specific time where you don't check email, and you don't answer your phone, you just in that one hour slot, you just do that one thing, right, then you move shift forward. Right? And that's how I do it. So basically, under Sunday night for the whole week. I said I'd say okay, sales is priority, you know, what are the projects I need to move forward? What am I going to do Monday, what are the three work slots, what are the three works for Tuesday, and that way, I

make a lot of stuff out

Michael J. Mahony 14:00
It makes sense because what I tell my clients is to be intentional about what they're focusing on. So if you decide that first quarter, you know, you're going to grow your social media presence, then the majority of what you do should be focused on growing your social media presence, or I get clients come to me about a project and they'll give me a list of things they want to accomplish. And I'll ask them, you know, give me your top three priorities. And they'll tell me what those are. And then they'll say, but we don't want to work on that yet. We don't want to spend the money on that yet. We want to work on this and I question i, okay, how invested in those top three priorities are you? If you're saying they're your top three priorities, but you're ready to go off and do something different? I think people don't. It's just like content creation. We, we have learned over time from that really good content creators that you need to spend. If you want to put out videos every week. You need to have a day during the month where you spend a few hours Doing nothing but recording videos. If you don't do that, when people say, Oh, it's only a half hour of my time for each video and I want to do four videos, well then block off two hours somewhere because if you try to do it a half hour a week, you will invariably bump one of those and you fall behind and any stress out about that. So that's another question is How should an entrepreneur deal with the stress that goes along with having to run a business?

Mads Singers 15:28
So a lot of it comes down to good management, right? So I got like, one of my business outsourcing company, we have about 130 staff, right. And I spend about two hours a week on that business. Again, because I have the right people in place. I do 212 ones, which is 30 minutes each. I do a team meeting that's half an hour with those two people as well. And then I spend about half an hour on, you know, random stuff that comes up. But again, I've put the right team in place, right and it's not like I don't have to go spend a week just focusing on it. I don't. Right. So I think majority of the time the problem people have with stress, it's not that there's a lot to do. But again, it comes back to this thing, like no one ever walked home and everything they could possibly do is done. It doesn't have, right. So you might as well we're assigned to that thought right away. And so that will never happen. That's always stuff you can do. But the thing is, if you if you go for your priorities, if you go for your focus, that is generally the thing that most of all the most forward, then generally, you know, a lot of distress disappears, right? Because if you're if you're fixing some of the problems, if you see that you're fixing some of the long term things and you're making a big difference, I think for most of my clients, at least, that's where I mean that's where the benefit big time right because fundamentally, it's it's really, really that important to make sure that you have like that focus and you know what you're doing like because probably If you're just what most people are doing is just like, Oh, I have to do this thing over here, I have to do this thing over here, then it's easy to get stressed because you're like, oh, all these important things have to happen. And I somehow have one of these cool squares where you have like a, you know, what, whatever is urgent and important, you need to work on whatever's not important but urgent, you know, you need to hand out to someone else. And whatever is important, or whatever is urgent, not important, or whatever, that you have to delegate to someone else, right. So, basically look at and this is, again, from a business owner perspective, many business owners go down the business and do the stuff down here. And everyone always say, Oh, you should work on your business. Now in your business. Everyone say that, a lot of that, but they don't actually get what it means and working on your business means doing big thinking stuff, right? It's, it's more strategy. It's more

like that kind of stuff.

Again, don't go down and start answering customers. Service meals because the customer service person isn't there. Like you need to do that within. If you have an organization of more than five people, you need to get that stuff done in the organization, it should never come back to you. Right? So you need to build out those systems, you need to make sure that I mean, the biggest the biggest management challenge and tank. The two biggest is number one is delegation. Just because most people are super perfectionist or super detail oriented, they suck at delegation. Again, that's what most of my clients on and help them fix that and, like, so many of my clients, right? They go from having this hundred hours a week till, you know having a 30 hour week and actually one of my really good clients he literally just took he just got a baby took three months off, where he's literally spending less than an hour a week on the business. And he can do that right and it doesn't take that much like if you have a decent sized organization. It doesn't take that much but it's really All in mindset, it's really understanding and burning, what are the right things to do, right. And then the second thing that a lot of tech people struggle with is communication. Right? And natural tech people's communication. It's, first of all, it's long, long emails. So, you know, if you ever get an email, that's a Saiga a4 page, it's a tech detail oriented person. And even I mean, you can even learn to make those kind of mails somewhat effective. But most most techies like that really struggle to be effective communicators. They struggle to condense down what they're talking about in an effective way, and really get it across the right way.

Michael J. Mahony 19:43
Yeah, I think this pandemic has shown us that a lot of businesses don't really have a strategy. They're more into the daily tactics than the long term strategy. And one of the things I've been preaching for a long time and especially during this time is that having a strategy for the long term is key, because it's kind of like going on a trip with a where you don't know where you're actually, you know, you've never been there before you don't bring a map. So you know, any literally any road will eventually get you there. But what's the most efficient way you gotta have a roadmap to get there and just make sense. So the strategy part is really something I hundred percent agree with you and it's something I teach my clients, it's one of the reasons they hired me is to build them a strategy. And another thing they'll do is they'll have a technology strategy, if they have a strategy. They have a technology strategy that doesn't match their business strategy. And that, of course, is you know, that's not going to work. So one of my jobs is to align that. So I think it's very interesting. You talk about strategy versus tactics, because so many people are bad at that.

Mads Singers 20:48
And basically, like I work with a lot of clients on that exact thing, right? So the thing is, goal should always go from the top down. Right and what happens in many companies is each departments set their own goal.

And the problem is they don't match up.

Right? So you'll have sales saying, Oh, we want to double sales, then you have operations saying, Oh, we want to save a bit on operations. You're like, wait a minute, if you're going to double sales,

but cut costs on operations, how's that gonna work? how's

Michael J. Mahony 21:16
that gonna work that plan

Mads Singers 21:17
that work across the business and then only work from the top? So your top goal, your like, your top focus in terms of, you know, what is the company going to achieve? That needs to be broken down in each department saying how are we going to achieve that?

Michael J. Mahony 21:34
Well, in our business, we, we look at what we call vital factors. And it's more than just revenue or profit, but we look at vital factors, and then all of our goals are geared towards keeping those vital factors as healthy as possible. So you, it's sort of a, you can't manage what you don't measure. And that's where the strategies come in, because and when we talk about someone will come to the table at a meeting with I want to do this. And we'll say, Well, how does that align with our vital factors? What's it gonna do to this? What's it gonna do to that? And unless the plan can enhance those things, then it's not something we should be working on. So I definitely agree with you there. So tell me about this course of yours. The effective management Master, tell me about that.

Mads Singers 22:19
Yeah, I mean, basically

what it does. And so the first part is probably, I mean, it's great for everyone, but particularly tech people, right. So the first part is going to the disc personality framework. And that's basically learning to understand different types of personalities, how to communicate with them, how they're motivated, how you know how to be most effective with different types of people,

right? And that's really the essence.

And that, I mean, for technology people this lesson is probably the most important then it goes through the standard meetings. So how to do effective one to ones and by the way, you should have that weekly with everyone. I'll propose to you how to do effective team meetings. By the way team meetings is for the team. It's not for the manager to sit and talk for 45 minutes. And then it goes through goal setting delegation, and how to give feedback. Again, tech companies and their inability to give feedback is

Yeah, let's just leave it at that.

Michael J. Mahony 23:27
goes back to that communication issue.

Mads Singers 23:29
But the thing is,

I talked with so many staff members that are like,

how often do you talk with my boss? Oh, every time you tell me I made a mistake. My only time your boss talk with us when you make a mistake? Yeah, I'm doing a crap job because he have talked to me 10 times as much. And I'm like,

right. So again,

positive feedback is more important than the constructive stuff.

And the thing is with feedback, right?

A lot of reverse psychology. If you tell them Someone Hey dude, you're late every day like what's up? You know, people get defensive. If you do the opposite, if you'd say, Hey, man, you're on time today. Great. Do you know how much it helps

a team? Try it.

Try it and see what happens. Because the positive feedback generally have a much bigger range of improvements. The same if you if you have a staff member that makes one mistake pretty frequently find examples where they don't give them positive feedback on those examples and see what happens.

Michael J. Mahony 24:31
See, I agree with you there. I think my personal philosophy is lead by example. So if you want, you know, I'll use a personal issue if you want your your home to be kept neat and clean. Then you can't ignore the spill on the counter the thing that's laying on the ground, you have to show other people in your family that you dig in and you clean those things up, and they generally will follow your lead. The other thing though, is like you say it works really well with teenagers. If you want the teenagers Like not leave plates on the, you know, living room table or whatever, you when they put it away, you praise them for putting it away. And you explain to them how much it helps that they did that. And they respond to that by doing more of it because they want more of that praise. Rather than saying, hey, you didn't put your plate away, please go put your plate away. I'm not saying you should never do that. But if that's all you do, like you gave the example of, you know, my boss, talk to me 10 times I must be doing a terrible job. That's a morale killer. And I found in this last year, I've really changed my mind set a lot about who I work with. And both client and employee and I have found there's a certain type of people that fit well with me and everyone always talks about find your avatar and then you know, that's who you want to work with. And that's that's all well and good and I know it's effective. But the problem is that even within the avatar, there's going to be a lot of people But you still don't connect with and don't fit. And you have to find a way to find the people you do connect with both who work for you and who you work with. The last

Mads Singers 26:13
two modules of the course is around recruitment and how to fire people, and exactly what you say. So one of the big problem in tech companies is the tech people like hiring all the tech people. So even when they have to do marketing, they hire tech guy to do marketing. Right. And coming back to what you're saying. One of the big, big, big benefits of going through this this training I have is the fact that you learn to understand people who are not like you, much, much better. And it helps you it helps you become a better communicator with like, if you're tech guy, it helps you communicate better with sales people, marketing people and so on. And it's so critical for success as a business owner, right. And basically, in my recruitment module, I go through a lot of this stuff. Like, you know, recruitment to sales. So most people look at recruitment as fulfillment, like I have to open things, I need to put stuff in there. That's not the right way. Recruitment is sales, you need to build a sales funnel. You literally need to do this and say, here's the requirement. We want a lot of people.

And then like, a lot of time people have like 10 applicants,

and then make a choice, right? Like I'm, if we ever have any job, but we have less than 100 applicants, like it's not gonna go well, right? Do you want a lot of applicants, and you then want to make like test you want to do different things in between?

One of the hardest jobs

to get right now is a job at Google, because you need to go to seven different interviews. That's one of the biggest successes one of the reasons why they've got the best people. Two reasons around it. One is the harder it is to get a job, the more people appreciate. And what that means is very often, a tech guy comes in and you know, it's like oh, well okay, you sound great. Yeah, let's stop. But if people feel it's too easy, it's a lot easier for them to leave. If they feel they struggle than they fought to get this job, there are a lot less likely to leave it.

And the second thing

is that when you're when you're actually doing so when you're when you're doing the funnel and giving people things to challenges and stuff, you'll see who's really interested. I mean, so often you sit in an interview and you're like, Well, why do you want this job and it's like, I need money. Right? If that's the response, just let them walk back out the door. Right? They have to want to work with you because you're you like that when when you asked a question they need to fire in the eyes and they were like, I want to work with you because you have an amazing company culture. I love your

product. I you know they have to, they have to one that job.

And if people don't want that job, that's one of two things either you haven't sold it good enough and selling A job good enough is not making it sound easy. selling a job good enough is targeting the right people. I mean if your environment and I don't think it's the right thing to do but if your environment is you know, we work 16 hours a day we have a installed better no office and all that stuff. If that is your environment, you need to sell it so that you get people who is comfortable with that people who think like, wow, that's fucking amazing. I want I want to be part of that culture. Right? So you need to sell your business you need to sell your values you need to sell you like the business strength, right? And, and if you do that, well then people will like the people who don't come to the interview wanting that job, just kick them out, but the people who want that job, that is the kind of people that you want in your business.

Michael J. Mahony 29:47
I think that desire aspect is the most underrated thing. I see. I've I feel like the best contracts I've ever landed. Were because I saw a project that I really wanted to do. I knew I could really help this client, and you reach out to them and you have an initial conversation and you don't hear back from them. And in my system, I have a way I follow up with them on a regular basis. It starts out at shorter intervals, and then it spreads out to longer intervals. But I've actually spent six months following up with somebody, only two then end up landing the project, and then it ends up turning into five or six more projects, because they know how much you want to work with them. Because you took the time to follow up. And I think it's the same. You're right about, like a Google, you say the other seven interviews? Well, if you think about it, anyone who's willing to sit through seven grueling interviews wants that job. And so you sort of you remove that element, like you say, one of the one of the biggest expenses for a business is hiring and training and employee who then leaves because then you got to do it all over again. And nobody, like people say, oh, I'll just go back to the pool. I think that's the worst thing you can do because it's kind of like you Break up with a with a person who you're in a relationship with. They're an ex for a reason you don't go back to that. So there's a reason you eliminated a candidate. You shouldn't be going back to that candidate go well, the other guy left. So here, let me pull you in, you know

Mads Singers 31:12
what I'm saying? So one of the key things for me is

that was two key things around recruitment, one, recruitment is about elimination, not selection. Every time you talk with a candidate, every time you communicate them anything, you have to keep looking for reasons not to hire them. Most people do the opposite. They look for reasons why this guy would go would be a great hire, do the opposite. Why would this person potentially fail?

Michael J. Mahony 31:44
Yeah, I take that. And I apply that to my projects, too. I try to disqualify I actually learned to this through NetSuite, you know, NetSuite does this thing called Sweet success, and they're literally their initial contacts are to actually disqualify you From the need to use their product, because if they if they just look for reasons to, you know that you'd want to use their product, lots of you can find lots of those. But you have to find like, maybe there's a process that they do that you're that that software can't handle, well, then it's not the right fit. And I think it's the same for your projects, you know, you know, take it to, you're talking about hiring employees, I actually call it hiring my client. And when I'm hiring a client, I look for reasons not to work with that client. Because if I find them and they're not resolvable, then that's not a client I want to work with. And too many too many people these days are so hungry, so to say that they take every project that comes their way. And what ends up happening is that just stagnates their growth because they end up spending so much time putting out fires and having client meetings with an upset client that they never, you know, it kind of goes back to the discussion we just had about giving positive feedback. If you pick a client Who isn't the right fit for you? Chances are you're going to get be rated a lot like there's going to be issues. And that's just demotivating. So no one wants that.

Mads Singers 33:08
Yeah, no. Let me come back to that in a second. Right. So the second point about the recruitment processes, people.

People have,

like, let's say you have 10 people left in the process,

and people end up hiring the best one.

If the best one is not good enough, don't freaking hire them. So people always just look who's the

best. Don't do that.

You have to look at Do you really believe this person will be a success, a smashing success in your company in this specific role? And if not, don't hire them just because they're the best one left. And I see it all the time. You like oh, yeah, but you know, we were desperate to hire. He was the best one. We hired him. Like if you believe he would go in and smash this job. Now I was a bit in secure, and I didn't know, whatever, right? And they're like, the most expensive thing for businesses is hiring the wrong people, which is exactly the reason why the recruitment process is for elimination, the cost of hiring the wrong people in your business. It's the most expensive mistake you'll ever make. Right? Back to your other point. I love that. Right? One of the key things I work with all clients on again, like focus this way, everyone particularly early on, it's like, oh, business, any business. Anyone that do anyone technology come my way, come my way. The problem is when you do that, you don't framework, you know, doing things consistently. You don't particularly know your clients or the market.

When you do this.

Like, instead of take like, I mean, take the website example. So let's say you build websites. Now if you build websites for anyone, you're gonna building websites, right? But the first question for every web developer is what do you want? What color should it be? Right? It's like going like if you go to an architect and need a house strong and they say, you know, what, what materials? And what should the house look like and stuff and you're like, well, I go to an architect to help me do that. The same thing as a web dev, as an example,

you to add value.

And the problem is, if you don't know the niche, you don't know the market, you don't know what works that market,

you're not adding enough value.

Right? So the way you get to know the market is instead of saying we do all sorts of things, we do like we built websites for carpenters. If we do just that, what happens is one, you can build a process. You can have actual framework that's easy to replicate again and again, to you get to know and understand the market. You get to know the lingo, the jargons, etc. and tree, you can add value because you get to know what works. If you build a website for one person in that in that niche, you can easily start learning from those lessons, you can start doing conversion rate optimization, you can start testing things to make it work better. And if you if you're consistently working with clients and one segment of a market, like even your content brief, right, if you work with a carbonyl in Kansas and a cabin zone, Illinois, whatever,

you know, it's the same keywords.

Like it's the same, like probably you shouldn't copy the content, but you can literally use the same content brief to get an our content writer to write it. And, yeah, you're off to go. So basically, the process is like you basically build a streamlined process that's easy to execute again and again. And that takes the most important thing away from business owner, because often the business owner is like, oh, no one can do what I can do. That's why I have to be here. And the reason for that is you haven't focused, you haven't niche down because one day you build an e commerce website The next day, Saturday. to a website and the third day at dentist website, like,

it's all custom processes.

Michael J. Mahony 37:05
Yeah, and there's things and there's things you miss in that process. Well, you've shared a lot of great gems. How can my listeners find you if they want to work with you?

Mads Singers 37:12
So Mets singers, ma DS, si n g rs.com. Actually our free webinars while on the top of my website, people can go through and learn a bit more management. But that's usually the best way to get me I'm also on Facebook and LinkedIn and all those fancy things

might not be me replying, but I

have a profile at least. So I get messages everywhere. I think I'm the only person in the world with that name so

Michael J. Mahony 37:43
Well, great. Well, I appreciate you being on and tell the listeners thanks for listening to the technology Alchemist. You can find mad singers, as he says on the on the internet. Mads singers comm he has a webinar there that you can look at a nice website. He also has a podcast that you can find just search his name. And he's right. He's the only person that I found with that name. So shouldn't have any problem but thanks again, Mads and look forward to talking to you again.

Mads Singers 38:10
My pleasure, Mike, thank you very much for having