https://youtu.be/0ZVG6G9tQZM
Andrew Miller is the co-founder and VP of strategy at Workshop Digital, a search engine marketing agency that helps sales teams generate and convert sales qualified leads. We talk about the cost of customer acquisition, task-relevant maturity, and understanding the ROI of your marketing efforts.
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Task Relevant Maturity with Andrew Miller
Our guest is Andrew Miller, the co-founder and VP of strategy at Workshop Digital, a search engine marketing agency that helps sales teams generate qualified leads and convert them to customers. Andrew, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Steve. Good morning. Pleasure to be here. Appreciate you having me on.
It's great to have you. So, Andrew, let's start with the usual question that I'm always curious about. How did you become an entrepreneur and a co-founder of Workshop Digital, a digital marketing agency? Tell us a little bit about your journey.
Yeah, it was very unintentional. This is a chapter of the Workshop Digital story that most people don't know that I'm a reluctant entrepreneur, or I was in the early days. I was happily full-time employed here in Richmond, first at the Martin Agency, and then at CarMax, two both great companies to work for. Loved every minute of it, great people, connections I still have to this day. But I was pushed out of the nest a little bit when my wife decided to attend grad school.
We had to move out of state for a few years, so I wasn't able to keep my full-time job. Parmax offered me the option to stay on as a contractor, which I initially declined. I didn't think that consulting or contracting was the role for me. I wasn't sure about the autonomy, the uncertainty. But at the time, we were moving to Michigan, a state which didn't have many great job prospects, so I reconsidered the offer and actually accepted it thinking worst case scenario is I can honor the contract and work through the first six months, get settled in Michigan and figure out what comes next.
And I will say that was 2007 and I've been self-employed ever since, haven't looked back. I have been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and I love it. And I know it's not for everybody, but the lifestyle, the autonomy, the sense of purpose has given me a lot of enthusiasm, and that hasn't changed for almost 15 years.
That's awesome to hear. So that's just proof that it's not necessarily an innate, inborn thing to be an entrepreneur. It may be something that evolves over time, and as you say, the entrepreneurial bargain beat you and now you're infused with it. So that's pretty cool, so along the way, as you built your business, what kind of business frameworks or concepts did you embrace? So, give me something that, whether it's a fully fledge management blueprint or whether it's a concept that really inspired you and which you decided to take on board and implement in your business?
The entrepreneurial spirit evolves over time, as the entrepreneurial journey beats you and infuses you with it.Share on X
Sure, so there are two, two that have been instrumental in our growth. And so, you know, that initial chapter got us up through 2007 to 2009, around the end of 2009, early 2010, as luck would have it, very fortunate to have grown the solo consulting business to the point where I had to start hiring employees. And that became a different challenge. It almost became a separate career. And I like to think about it as a separate career than my technical days of actually doing the work for clients.
So, around 2010, I started hiring employees. I realized I didn't know jack about managing people. I had never done it, never been exposed to it. I had great managers in my prior careers, but I had never had to do it myself. And I didn't realize how hard it was. So fast forward to 2015, my current business partner, Brian Forrester, and I merged our two companies together to form Workshop Digital. So, at that point, we were immediately a 20 plus person company. We had to step up and start to build out these frameworks. So, the first two that we adopted and adapted at Workshop Digital are the EOS, or Entrepreneurial Operating System model.
Most people know it by this book, Traction. It's been our main framework for the last six years, but we also layered in the soft skills part of management that a lot of people don't talk about, and certainly EOS doesn't spend as much time on with Andy Grove's book, which we love called High Output Management. And it provides this framework for managers and employees to communicate on different levels based on their skill sets, their level of maturity at any given tasks. It's called PRM or task relevant maturity.
So, between the two, the business framework from Traction, which gives us the big picture, how to set our long-term goals, how to work backwards to achieve the vision and all the good stuff that helps drive us forward as a company to the day-to-day soft skills that we train our managers with from high output management. I think we've been able to leverage both, but our philosophy has been not to be too rigid with any one particular framework. I think they exist and they serve a purpose, especially for a young company like ours.
There's a need for that kind of knowledge and experience and common vocabulary that you can't get if you're just making it up as you go along. Or if you have managers that come in from different organizations with some experience, but they're speaking slightly different versions of the same language, so we found that we had to adapt these because neither of them suits our needs perfectly. So, we've benefited greatly from having them as resources, but we've had to change and modify how we use them and how we mesh things together internally.
I feel strongly that any business that starts to feel like they're outgrowing perhaps a particular framework, maybe needs to reconsider, is it time to just mix it up and inject your own secret sauce? Because I think there's some adaptation and improvisation you can do. You don't strictly have to follow the book letter for letter, and that's served us well so far.
Any business that starts to feel like they're outgrowing a particular framework may need to reconsider and inject their own secret sauce.Share on X
No, I love that concept, and I totally agree with you. I mean, you have to make this framework your own, something that works for your particular business and which you really feel ownership of. Then you can do that, then you made your business more valuable because now you have your own operating system. You're not running on the US, you're not running on scaling up, you are running on the virtual digital operating system, and that's part of the value proposition that you have and that can be extremely powerful. I'd like to ask you a little bit deeper about the Andy Grove, High-Import Management, which one of my favorite books as well. And you mentioned the task relevant maturity. So tell me a little bit about what that means and why is this important?
TRM, it's a task relevant maturity is a mouthful. So we just, yeah, we call it TRM as he does in the book. It's the concept of adjusting your management style based on your employees' level of understanding and accomplishment in a particular task. So think about it as I'm a parent, but it applies in a work setting, it applies in a family setting, it applies in a leadership in a community setting. You have team members or employees or children that have different levels of autonomy and understanding of a particular task. So if I told my kid to go outside and just clean all of the leaves off the yard, they may not know exactly how to do that.
Task Relevant Maturity (TRM) is the concept of adjusting your management style based on your employees' level of understanding and accomplishment in a particular task.Share on X
They know what the end goal looks like, leaves got to be off the yard, but they may not have done it before. And they may need a little bit of instruction on how to use the rake, how to get the blower out, how to fill it up with gas. So the TRM concept means that I, as their supervisor, their manager, I have to go out there and show them, sometimes hold their hands, sometimes give them some encouragement at the very basic fundamental building blocks of that task before I can expect them to handle it autonomously.
Then as they get more comfortable with it, they're out there maybe raking half the yard or they get to a section of the yard they haven't encountered before. That's when I can step back until they've got a problem. And once they get more mature in that discipline, then they can come back to me for specific help and guidance, but I'm really there to keep them within the guardrails, provide encouragement, motivation, incentive, and help them continue to grow.
Your job as a manager is to stand back and provide encouragement, motivation, incentive, and help them continue to grow.Share on X
So maybe someday that becomes, you know, they learn on their own, they learn here, and then maybe they turn that into a, you know, a business of some sort, or they take ownership of it and they go around and start finding other ways to use those same skills around the house. Same thing in business. You have employees that are new to the organization, new to the industry, new to a particular process or task, and they have to be shown how to do it first. So the TRM concept means for those lower maturity tasks, people themselves aren't low maturity. They have low maturity within that particular task.
They need a little bit more handholding and guidance. And then as their experience and comfort level grows, your job as a manager, as they get medium to high levels of maturity, is to stand back and provide that encouragement. And that is kind of the overarching theme. There's a lot of conversations that have to happen in there.
