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Transcript80 lines
- [00:00]
Emma Rainville
People think marketing are just ideas and content, but execution, this is where you thrive.
- [00:06]
Arafat Saka
At the end of the day, it comes down to project management.
- [00:09]
Emma Rainville
Even though they've done it a hundred.
- [00:11]
Arafat Saka
Times before, you need to say it.
- [00:13]
Emma Rainville
Again, man, that's so annoying to me.
- [00:15]
Arafat Saka
And that's a key way there. Again, patience. Some people, they don't need to see this information because they could get overwhelmed or just that.
- [00:21]
Emma Rainville
Is that what you do to me? You just hide stuff so I don't freak out? I just said yes.
- [00:27]
Arafat Saka
There's a difference between what you want and what needs to happen. The owners don't think about what needs to happen. That's my job, to be able to take what you want into what needs to happen.
- [00:36]
Emma Rainville
How are you making it so balls don't get dropped? What are you doing? Welcome to another episode of Special Ops Podcast. I'm your host, Emma Rainville and today I got something really special going on. As you guys know from last week's episode, I am in London with our team doing some team building and some much needed time together. And so we decided to hop on into a podcast room. We rented the studio for the day and today I am bringing you someone who I talk about all the time on Special Ops. My very own director of marketing operations, Saka. Saka's real name is Arafat Saka. He is from Mauritius, Africa. He is visiting us in London. So we've all come here together and I am so excited that you get to hear from Sokka himself. I talk about all of his brilliance quite often on the show and now you're going to get to hear from him directly. On today's episode, we're gonna be talking about how most people see marketing as strategy and creativity. But behind every smooth campaign, every email that hits on time, every funnel that doesn't crash on launch day, there's someone making sure that the engine stays on. In our company, that's Saka. As director of marketing operations, Saka is the one quietly orchestrating the chaos that I create, ensuring nothing gets dropped. Well, everything moves forward. In this episode, we're pulling back the curtain on what it really takes to run streamlined, systematized marketing at scale. From internal workflows to cross channel execution. You'll hear exactly how soccer turns strategy into action and why businesses that overlook ops end up stuck, stalled and in spinning circles. Saka, I'm stoked, bro. I'm so excited to be here with you.
- [02:32]
Arafat Saka
I'm happy to be on finally.
- [02:34]
Emma Rainville
I know Saka's first ever podcast, by the way. Very excited that I get to pop that cherry for you.
- [02:40]
Arafat Saka
Yeah.
- [02:41]
Emma Rainville
Amazing. So people think marketing are just ideas and content, but execution, execution is where businesses die quite often in our space. And this is where you thrive. So I am so ready to dig in, pull back the curtain on how you do what you do. And what's really cool is you're going to, at the end of all of this, share some things so that other people who are listening can find their own soccer. You can't have mine. I'm crazy. But it help you find your own Saka. So I want to kind of explain what you do for viewership. And so for those of you who aren't regular listeners, I talk about soccer all the time. But for. For those of you who aren't regular listeners, what Saka does in our company is he's the orchestrator behind all of the components and elements that need to actually happen to get things out the door. So whether it's a client's newsletter team who's writing newsletters, a graphic design team, a podcast team, a social media team, an email team, like no matter what component is Saka's hands and all of that, and what he's able to do, which is amazing, is I can go to Saka and I can say, hey, we need to increase subscriptions on the podcast this month by 350. You got it. And he's got it. It's all I have to say. And then Saka goes and creates the roadmap on how they get it done. And then it just magically appears to me in the timeline that we agreed upon. Mo most of the time. He does a really great job with that. Sokka, I'd love for you to kind of start by walking through how I get to have a 30 second conversation with you and you take a team of people and I don't want to say lower level people, but they're entry level positions and you're able to orchestrate big initiatives and projects with them. So talk to me about how you are able to do that.
- [04:42]
Arafat Saka
Yeah, so for me, I would say the secret to that essentially is my experience. And this is something that we're going to touch on as we go further into this episode. I've been there, I've done that. I've worked on different project over the years of working with Shockwave and even before Shockwave and I've worked in different capacity that has helped me become who I am today.
- [05:03]
Emma Rainville
Right.
- [05:03]
Arafat Saka
And so when a two line brief comes over to me, I can immediately see again Being in the higher level now, I understand what a business owner wants, but at the same time understand what a graphic designer needs to hear. There's a difference between what you want and what needs to happen. The owners don't think about what needs to happen. Again, that's my job, to be able to take what you want into what needs to happen. And so one of the major things I'm able to do is be able to speak the language of everyone on my team. And when I say language, I don't mean actual language, the technical language. So graphic designer needs to hear certain keywords for him to understand what you're looking for. A copywriter needs to hear certain things for him to understand what needs to be written. Podcasting needs to hear a whole different type of language for them to understand what needs to happen.
- [05:51]
Emma Rainville
Development is a big. Development's a big one.
- [05:54]
Arafat Saka
Developers need to get a whole different thing when, you know, they need. And my original background is development. I. I studied. I was supposed to be a computer scientist. And somehow, thank God. Thank God, somehow you had a course. Correct. In marketing. So, like, that experience over the years has been able to help me to break down things granularly for the members of the team. And I will give you a quick story. We have a client, and just last week he said to us that this version of the website that we have right now doesn't look like we know what we're doing. That's exactly what he said. We need a website that makes us look like, you know, what the fuck we're doing. That is all we got as a brief.
- [06:34]
Emma Rainville
But what was funny about that was, is you were given a website to mimic, and it looked exactly like the website you were told to mimic.
- [06:42]
Arafat Saka
Exactly.
- [06:43]
Emma Rainville
And then he got on and said a week ago, this to you. And so then what?
- [06:47]
Arafat Saka
All I took was, you know, I understand where it's coming from, is we had a different version of the content written, which is more of a sales letter, which goes deep into what exactly we're selling. And then the design was the most important part in this particular thing because it was about, we look like we know what we're selling. That keyword look is I automatically knew that it wasn't about the content because the content was strong, but the layout and how we had it on the website just looked like it's just all put together in a very weird way.
- [07:15]
Emma Rainville
Two sentences, this isn't right. And it looks like we don't know what the fuck we're doing.
- [07:18]
Arafat Saka
And I'm able to Tell that. Okay. The graphic needs to be so much better. And with a graphic designer, we're going each section by each section. A lot of graphic designer, they have the skills to design very pretty, but they don't understand the conversion behind the conversion mechanism behind designing. So they're able to put up a pretty design. But I asked you a question. Is this design gonna make. Gonna trigger any kind of psychological response from someone wanting to buy a lot of graphic design? This is a very big problem with graphic designers. They design for look and feel, rather for designing for conversion. And designing for conversion is a whole different thing that we can speak about on a whole different day. So these are the things that I apply across the board. And just being able to speak the language. And again, I'll just bring it back to saying, I've been there. I've done that. I have years of experience in being able to understand what needs to happen in each category for each person. Regardless of the skill you have, regardless of where you come from, just understanding what you do and being able to explain to you the way you need to hear it. That would be my. That's the secret behind how I do what I do.
- [08:27]
Emma Rainville
That's fantastic. That's not the whole secret, though.
- [08:30]
Arafat Saka
So that's.
- [08:31]
Emma Rainville
That's number one. So, number one, you're able to take initiatives from me, from our clients, and quite a few at any given time, and in two to three sentences. And that's usually all I give as well. Most of us, right, we feel like we've painted this, like, roadmap that's perfect in our two sentences. But really, it's like the average person couldn't possibly take that and create an entire project out of it. Whereas you've played so many roles, from tech to graphic design to marketing, that you understand how it all comes together, and you're able to actually paint the true roadmap instead of the destination, which is what I give you or what our clients give you. The second part of that is. And this has been a real superpower of yours, I think. Richard and I, who. We get to see Richard on another episode. But Richard and I, I think, have struggled before you came. You're in your second year with Shockwave, but, you know, we're almost six, and so we struggled for a while managing all these different teams all over the place. And you've come in and done it what looks like effortlessly. I know it's not effortlessly, but you make it look really easy. So I kind of want to talk through. You have teams that you're dealing with that are shockwaves, teams that are clients, teams that are vendors of clients. And you're having to not only manage the projects, but you're also managing the people and the outcomes. And that's a really difficult thing to do. And so I'd love for you to walk me through how you're able to really dive in and do that.
- [10:11]
Arafat Saka
Right. So I'm going to talk about the system is behind the whole everything that I've said so far. At the end of the day, it comes down to project management. And this is something that you preach. We preach it internally and externally. We're going to preach that to you every time.
- [10:26]
Emma Rainville
We do preach that a lot.
- [10:27]
Arafat Saka
And Internally we use ClickUp, which is our project management tool. And everything needs to be centralized within ClickUp and breaking down projects, as I said, across different teams. It's one thing for me to be able to mentally break it down, it's a whole different thing for me to put it down on a system where it's actually broken down to what each person needs to see. In some cases we want to protect some people. They don't need to see this information because they could get overwhelmed or just that.
- [10:58]
Emma Rainville
Is that what you do to me? You just hide stuff so I don't freak out? You said yes.
- [11:04]
Arafat Saka
So using our systems internally, ClickUp is where I go in and create that project map. In a way, everything is also created in a system that is automated. When one task is done, the next task triggers when there's a dependency on another task. It's all a backend system of using ClickUp. And we also have additional tools where, you know, communications, communication is very important. We mostly use Slack, I mean different Slack channels, different Slack groups. But being able to decide what goes in a group channel and what goes to like individual conversations, those are the things that goes on behind the back that you don't get to see. A lot of mistakes happen that before it comes to the group chat, we're able to come individually, just have a conversation, we're able to get things fixed. But just to summarize on everything that we do, it's everything that I do is when the project comes to me, I understand the big picture from that one conversation. I take down my notes personally. That is just for me to be able to plug that two line brief and the final product. I already have a mental picture of that and have that written down for myself personally. The next step for me is usually creating those into detailed small level tasks like breaking it down Individually. And not assuming that my team knows what to do.
- [12:30]
Emma Rainville
Right, because assuming that your team knows what to do even though they've done it a hundred times before, you need to say it again, man, that's so annoying to me. But you do it so well, and you're very patient, so you need to.
- [12:41]
Arafat Saka
And that's a keyword. Again, patience. Like, you need. Do not assume that. Because the last project we did is pretty similar to this project, so you.
- [12:51]
Emma Rainville
Should know we've done the same exact project. Just swapped out the titles for workshops, and it blows my mind. You still got to tell them every time.
- [13:01]
Arafat Saka
Every single project, you need to make it your. It needs to be standard. Every project is broken down into bits and pieces.
- [13:09]
Emma Rainville
And so you're templatizing everything. You're standardizing it, and then you're breaking it down.
- [13:14]
Arafat Saka
Correct.
- [13:15]
Emma Rainville
And if I heard you correctly, you're only assigning the components that need to be assigned to certain people so that they have a small piece and aren't overwhelmed. Makes sense.
- [13:24]
Arafat Saka
And once I'm done creating that, assigning that, discussing timelines. Of course, everything has a timeline. Due dates. That's all important, no matter how little it looks like, or setting deadlines, setting expectations, deadlines. And having a conversation we've assigned to that. Hey, is this timeline that I've set for you accurate? Because they're a team, the people, they have things going on as well. We need to have a conversation. Hey, your deadline is Friday. If if, for any reason you're not able to complete this before Friday, please let me know. There's nothing stopping you from having that single line of text in every product, every task description saying, hey, if for any reason you're unable to finish this task, please let me know as soon as possible or before your deadline hits. They look very little. They look very. They look like tiny things that are not necessary. But they are.
- [14:17]
Emma Rainville
I know that's necessary. The worst thing in the world is something was due on Friday. I. I'm looking for it on Monday, and I reach out to the person that it was assigned to, and they didn't get it done, and they didn't tell me, and they waited for me to ask. Those people don't generally work with us long.
- [14:33]
Arafat Saka
Yeah.
- [14:33]
Emma Rainville
Or at least not with me long. But, yeah, it's such a good tool and great advice. Yo. We're interrupting this podcast to remind you to like and subscribe. And if you haven't gone over and signed up for. For a free membership to the Visionary Vault. We never try and Sell you anything. All it is is good content that we feel will help you in the ops in your business. Www.specialopspodcast.com Sign up for our visionary vault and go in there, grab courses, we have checklists, we have all kinds of resources to help you in your operations. We just wanna help. So go run over there and don't forget to like and subscribe so that when we drop new content you are the first to know.
- [15:17]
Arafat Saka
And then the final part of that is when we read the final destination, when we have the final product. What I do on my end as being the owner of that project is looking at the initial conversation that we had or the initial two line brief and looking at the final result. Does it actually achieve what we set out to do? There's a lot of times during the project where things go off track which is completely normal. However, I need to like go back and look to all the notes and every step and ensure like everything was properly done, everything was properly documented. Every close task has its own deliverable within the tasks so that in the future when I need to go back in and pull a resource and know, hey, this project was this project. I need to find the asset organization. That is where the organization comes in. When every member of the team has done their own part, I need to go in as the leader of the entire team to just double check that final double check of making sure everything is put into place. This is the operational part the client doesn't get to see even after delivering an amazing project with all the resources and all the assets that we created behind the scenes. So keeping everything where they're meant to be structured, very, very important. And that's what I do on getting projects moving and everything streamlined.
- [16:38]
Emma Rainville
Amazing. Now the last thing I want to talk about before, before we close out because I think it's important. There's so many moving parts in your day to day and there's a lot that goes on that's like we'll be in the middle of something and then there's one piece that we have to go back to. And again, I've struggled with this for a really long time. Oh crap, we didn't get X done or oh no, we forgot about this and you do that but it's so rare. And so you've done a lot in the background where you're managing all these people and all these things. I'm thinking about how to ask you the question, how are you making it so balls don't get dropped? What are you doing? Are you going and stocking everyone's ClickUp every day. Is it automations? What are you doing?
- [17:27]
Arafat Saka
Yeah. So a mix of everything. So on the automation side, part of its personality. Right. Personally, me as a person, whenever a task or a project comes in, regardless of how the priority of that project is set, if it's a low priority project for me doesn't mean low priority in my head because I know the decisions we make for setting out to achieve a project is part of a bigger picture. Even if you tell me that this is low priority, I know that not completing this task could essentially lose us like we miss out on certain opportunities, we lose out on leads, we lose out on customers. It might affect our customer retention. Something as simple as setting up an.
- [18:15]
Emma Rainville
Automation, it could also lose some trust with clients.
- [18:18]
Arafat Saka
Exactly.
- [18:19]
Emma Rainville
Even small things.
- [18:20]
Arafat Saka
Small things. It's something as little as it usually.
- [18:22]
Emma Rainville
Is a small thing.
- [18:23]
Arafat Saka
These are small things. Sending out a automation for, you know, birthday reminders or in the grand scheme of making money as marketers, that might just look like it's not high priority. But for me, I see it as, I'm thinking two steps ahead that sending a personal message to a client that hey, happy birthday from Shockwave team or from a client would make them become loyal to you.
- [18:48]
Emma Rainville
Right.
- [18:49]
Arafat Saka
And so for me, what I do as a person or personally, why everything, everything matters to me. Regardless of how little the priorities or because when you say high priority, everyone is going to listen and be like, hey, okay, I've got to get it done, I've got to get it done. But where people go wrong or where the balls get dropped a lot is when you send those medium to low priority tasks. Because in people's head, okay, it's low priority. I can probably.
- [19:14]
Emma Rainville
We've struggled with that at Shockwave, not making everything high priority for that reason. For that reason, high priority means it needs to get done when really it cut in the project management tool. So it needs to get done.
- [19:25]
Arafat Saka
It needs to get done. The medium to low priority. That's where people drop the balls a lot. Because, you know, and at the same time, I'm not saying you tell your team every single task is high priority, it's going to lead to burnout.
- [19:35]
Emma Rainville
Right. You've absolutely been able to change that for us because for a while everything was high or urgent all the time, which made nothing higher urgent and everyone was burned out. So you've done a really good job at that for sure.
- [19:50]
Arafat Saka
So that's on the, on the personality side. And back to the systems.
- [19:54]
Emma Rainville
Yeah.
- [19:55]
Arafat Saka
Having systems in place when it's a low priority task, you make sure you set a deadline, a reasonable deadline that is not putting a big stress on the team. But at the same time, you know, we're able to satisfy clients and able to get the product moving and being accountable, having someone accountable for each task. And so that's why we have our morning face to face. We're able to ask you, hey, what are the top three things you're working on today? And me as a manager of this project, I know, like, mentally I can tell that we have a deadline coming on Friday, Monday, Tuesday, you're not working on that by Wednesday. If I notice, like, okay, I'm just double checking with you. I know we have this on Friday, but we've had our morning face to face. You haven't mentioned working on this. Just checking in to make sure, you know, this is moving.
- [20:45]
Emma Rainville
I'm morning face to face really quick. For those of you who haven't heard me talk about it before, our morning face to face is where our team, our entire team gets together. It's really quick. We schedule 30 minutes in case there's issues or problems that we need to talk through, but generally it takes 15 minutes. Everybody just goes, what's your three top priorities for the day? And we can, it's an opportunity for us to course correct before a whole day goes by.
- [21:09]
Arafat Saka
Perfect. And so, you know, I hold the responsibility of knowing what is happening at every point in time. Again, I also drop the ball. So what I do generally is in the morning, just before the face to face, I go in, I look at the overdue task, the upcoming task, what has been completed, and I keep a mental note of that. So when I have that call, I'm able to ask you, hey, just checking on this project. We have a deadline on Friday. It's Tuesday today. Absolutely fine if you haven't started. But just keep in mind by Friday, we're going to need this. And of course, this doesn't always work. Things happen, people get personal things come.
- [21:43]
Emma Rainville
Up or I mean, sure, it's. No one's going to be at 100%, but out of everyone I've worked with, I would say that you have the highest accuracy rating and meeting deadline.
- [21:55]
Arafat Saka
So, yeah, and so this again brings back to that what I said before. Having someone in my position means you need to have someone that has been there and done that, someone that actually understands the little things that happens behind every task. That's how you're able to estimate how long it's going to take. It might look very simple to everyone else but me knowing that it's going to take a graphic designer a little bit longer than we think it will helps a lot. So those are the things that I apply in creating systems.
- [22:24]
Emma Rainville
Talk to me about the automations though real quick. I don't want to leave that out because you have automations within ClickUp that really help you stay on track. Talk to me about that.
- [22:30]
Arafat Saka
So we have automation. Yeah. So setting up automations Automations into our Slack channels, for example of due dates people tend to not go back into ClickUp or their emails to check on deadlines because it's just a whole different system compared to where we have our regular day to day conversation putting that deadlines and notifications and reminders in front of them. That is just. I'm just.
- [22:56]
Emma Rainville
Without relying on them going and checking.
- [22:57]
Arafat Saka
Exactly. So I'm just putting the reason behind why you're creating automations. Just you don't want to create automations for the sake of creating automations. You need to think to while you're automating this. The reason why we do that is we're able to see where most people spend their time on during the day and is most likely going to be on Slack. For your team it might be a different tool.
- [23:17]
Emma Rainville
So we use time doctor at our company and a lot of people think that it's like you're time tracking. It's not at all. We want to understand where our team is spending time and how we can help them be more effective, more efficient. And so we know that our team spends a significant amount of time in Slack because we can actually see like where is your team spending their time and so yeah, setting up automations for where they already are.
- [23:42]
Arafat Saka
Yeah. Yep. So we have those automations set up to remind us in ClickUp and in Slack when your task is set. When is your task due upcoming. We also have automations that you know when we finish up meetings, for example, the meeting notes, we have this automated going into our Slack channel. Just a quick recap of what was discussing today because a lot of times, a lot of times we have calls, a lot of things get dropped in the calls. We have your. What tool do we have for you for recording your. The meeting notes that goes otter. Yep. You use otter for everyone else to keep using something differently. You can connect Otter into Slack every.
- [24:20]
Emma Rainville
Call I have but now that Richard got me squared away, every call I have Otter automatically puts in for the team to ClickUp.
- [24:28]
Arafat Saka
You can automate that back into your Slack channel to automatically create tasks. And so these are the automations that we use on the backend. And of course we create dependencies within each project. When one task is completed, then it triggers the next task as start this because we have dependencies. You don't want to set a deadline when the task is not completed. So we have dependencies and just setting up entire projects in ClickUp. You don't want to create random tasks all over the place. You want to create a very streamlined process overall project and create subtasks and have dependencies, actions, notifications out of ClickUp notification back into ClickUp. And using the ClickUp dashboards, we were able to create reports. We have Tiago and our team that's really great at creating dashboards in ClickUp. And so these are all like different things that we do. Just automated the dashboard, once you set it up, the data is automatically pulled into the dashboard. That's an automation on its own. So these are the things that we do on the back end that our clients are not privy to. But all they need to see is the end results. But internally, these are the things that goes on and that I do.
- [25:35]
Emma Rainville
Fantastic. So as with all of our episodes, we give a freebie in the Visionary vault. And so Saka has offered today to create Dun Dun Dun.
- [25:48]
Arafat Saka
So I'm going to be creating a hiring guide on how to how to.
- [25:51]
Emma Rainville
Get your own soccer. Don't message mine. I know how to build pipe bombs.
- [25:55]
Arafat Saka
So I'm going to create a guide for you on how to hire someone like me. Some of the questions that you need to ask in this interview, some of the things that you need to be looking out for to have someone on your team that has some of the.
- [26:05]
Emma Rainville
Skin set, some of the personality traits, and then some questions to ask them during the interview process.
- [26:10]
Arafat Saka
Exactly. Yes.
- [26:11]
Emma Rainville
Having a socko will change your life. I can absolutely. I'm going to call it having a soccer. Having a soccer will absolutely change your life. I know it did for me and I know if Richard was, he's in the next room, but I'm sure he's shaking his head back there like it changed his life as well. Having you join our team has been just amazing and I am so stoked that we got to do this today. So thank you for being a guest. Even though you basically manage this whole thing special. He manages the whole thing. So thank you so much for coming on. If you enjoyed today's episode, please and subscribe. Do all the things. Head over to our visionary bill@www.specialopspodcast.com where you can get Saka's hiring guide, as well as many other courses, lessons, checklists, essays, reports that our team has written over over the years. So thank you so much for joining us today. And Saka, thank you again. This has been amazing.
- [27:11]
Arafat Saka
You're welcome, Emma.