Gabe (2:55)

Okay, sure. Anyway, so we spent a lot of time together. We've traveled all over the place together. But you and I met in person for the very first time on Monday.

Saka (3:07)

Yeah.

Gabe (3:09)

It didn't even feel like we didn't know each other. It felt like we've always known each other and everything was so comfortable. Other than the fact, like, Sock is huge. He makes himself look small. I don't know how he does it. We can't figure it out. He's almost as big as Richard. So it's other than that one factor. Like, I felt like I've known you for years, because I have. And because we've been able to. Even though we're working internationally and we're working online, we've been able to create real rapport with one another. And so I want to just talk to that really quickly, and I'd like to hear both of your perspectives on why you think that is.

Saka (3:44)

Yep. I'll go first. So for me, I'll say, like, the amount of face to face, I know, like, when I joined Shockwave, I used to have meetings on the other companies I've been on, and there was never the need to put on our cameras. And so I've seen a profile picture, and that's about it. That's the only thing I've seen. It might be a picture from seven years ago. I wouldn't know. And when I joined Shockwave, the first thing that I noticed was everyone had a camera on. And you mentioned this a lot. Like, you're unable to see people's reactions to or emotions behind every statement that they make. And at first, I never understood it. I always felt like I could tell how someone sounds by just how they speak. I can tell if you're pissed off. I can tell if you're happy. But now I see what you mean. Seeing someone's reaction, seeing you they're paying attention, or if they're just being like, okay, I don't care what you're saying. It's played a very big part. I think that's the reason why we see each other every day.

Gabe (4:39)

Literally every day, except for Monday. Multiple times. Multiple times. Monday through Friday.

Saka (4:44)

Yeah, we see each other every day. We're on calls every day. If you see me wearing the same shirt three days in a row, you're gonna be like, you okay? Saga.

Gabe (4:51)

I think that happens the other way around, actually.

Saka (4:53)

But this happens because we are getting on the calls every day and we're speaking to each other a quick 30 minutes every day in the morning, having that conversation.

Gabe (4:59)

How many times have you shown up sick and tried to play it off and I knew immediately and sent you.

Saka (5:03)

To bed so many times and yeah.

Gabe (5:05)

Every time you've been sick in two years.

Saka (5:06)

Exactly. So for me, that's the key reason why that bond we've created over being able to get on a video call every day, it's been the major part for me.

Gabe (5:15)

That, yeah, I love that feels really good. Thank you for sharing that for you. What do you think?

Richard (5:19)

Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said from that. There's a lot of companies where we bought it in person, but we don't have anywhere near the kind of report or understanding really. I think the core difference here in Shockwave is that everyone knows, at very least a lot about what everyone else is meant to be working on, partially. This is why we structured the face to Face meeting to talk about what we do in a day. It's a lot of.

Gabe (5:42)

That's one of the first things we did. Just to. For those of you that haven't heard me talk about that on the podcast, we do what's called a morning face to face. And I intentionally called it face to face. Instead of a lot of people call it a stand up meeting or coffee break or something like that. I intentionally called it a face to face because I wanted everybody to know that my face was going to see your face every single day. I'm going to get to see you. So we do. It's scheduled for 30 minutes. It usually only takes 15. We have the 30 just in case someone is having an issue or they need help getting through something so we can keep things moving. But that's what Richard's talking about when he says the morning face to face.

Richard (6:16)

Yeah, I think the fact that we always have that discussion, have that understanding of what people are working on, it builds a understanding of what everyone does, what everyone is responsible for. In a way that is not the case for a lot of in person businesses and definitely not a lot of international businesses because so many times there's going to be in different companies, there's going to be, oh, what does that guy do? What's his responsibility? What does Andy do? What does a person X do? What are they here for? What can I go to them for? What can I help them with? Whereas in Shockwave, I think it's so much more of a central part of that connection. As Saka said, we have that face to face, not physical, but virtual face to face connection. And we have a little bit of a connection to what we actually do. I think those two combine to be very unique. I think in any kind of business, whether it's in person, virtual, whatever the case may be.

Gabe (7:08)

For me, a little bit of all that. But one of the things and we as we were going through and I was writing the book Scope and Richard was a big contributor to that book, we were trying to figure out there was a component during another weekly meeting that we have called a breaker, where we take a break from working on our business to enter business. And I was trying to add an element of us understanding what each other is going through. And so we changed the meeting to start off with this week and weeks for us mean breaker to breaker. So Thursday to Thursday is a week for us this week. What are you grateful for? What are you excited about? What's the other one? Professional win. And at the beginning, when we first did it, everything surrounds the business and the company because I think that's where people get comfortable. And I very intentionally kept putting personal stuff in. I am grateful for my son Magi being home. I am excited about this weekend. Gabe and I are going to this thing. My personal or professional win is that. And I did this very intentfully. And I know you two don't know this, but a light bulb might go off. Everybody was working so hard all the time and we were all doing so much overtime. I think all three of us were about 55, 60 hours. And so I started saying that my personal and professional win was that I took all weekend off and spent time with my family because I really wanted to instill in everybody that should be a win for us. My intent was to manipulate everyone and do what I wanted. But what ended up happening is I started learning about Thiago being excited about his daughter sitting up or Sokka being excited about going to see his girlfriend in London. I would have never known. Cause we would have never discussed it. So there's just so much that I've learned about our different team members during that time on what motivates them, what drives them, what excites them, what gets them fueled. And yeah, I love all of our answers. It's great. I want to switch gears a little bit. To you, Sokka. I know when you came into Shockwave, one of the beautiful gifts that you gave me was peace. I don't do stupid well. And If I have to tell somebody the same thing twice, I feel like it's stupid and I lose my mind. But when you're dealing with so many people and so many projects, you have to repeat yourself over and over and over again. And we're going to talk about that a little bit on my episode with you. But I. I just so appreciated the way you came in and took so much off of my plate. That made me angry every day. And there's been a huge shift at Shockwave. We've eliminated the past about eight months, everything that pissed me off. And I hope you guys can see, like, the change that I feel, because I feel so calm, I feel so much at peace, and I feel, like, super happy to work with everybody because you've taken all the crap that you actually love to do. And so I'd like you just to talk for a minute about how you came to the realization that you should take over some of those things because you came to me. I didn't come to you.

Saka (10:30)

Yeah.

Gabe (10:32)

And the trust that you have to say, hey, this is making everybody miserable. Can I take it? So I want to walk through that with you.

Saka (10:38)

Yeah. So again, comes back to what we initially talked about and how we have this open calls where it would spend 30 minutes together in the morning. And just from seeing the kind of questions. Because it's very hard for you to hide your emotions.

Gabe (10:52)

Hide my emotions at all. I don't even try to.

Saka (10:54)

Yes. So that's what I mean.

Gabe (10:56)

No, I can't, by the way.

Saka (10:56)

Yeah.

Gabe (10:57)

Even if I try and pretend like I'm not mad, my face is gonna show it. So I just may as well go full on.

Saka (11:01)

Like, for me, that was it. I mostly pay attention. Like, I can tell we're all on the call, and when someone asks a question, I can see your reaction. And in my own head, I'm like, okay, that's something. Because when I joined Shockwave, one of the first things that I was telling my girlfriend, I was like, I'd really like for this morning face to face to be a smooth call. So I just took it on time.

Gabe (11:21)

It never was.

Saka (11:22)

It never was. We used to have a lot of issues back then. When I first joined, a lot of problems in the morning, I was like, it's never a great way to start the day. So in my head, I just took it as, I'll do whatever I can to help people. There's a lot of things that. And again, the system we had in place was people were going directly to you without having a Bit of a stopgap for everything. We were not taking enough away from you. You had to look at things. But being able to put a break in between you and someone that is doing the actual. Because people were doing the first draft and sending the first draft to you.

Gabe (11:55)

Thing that you say all the time is, why did you send that to her before you send it to me?

Saka (11:59)

So this is the first thing I noticed. And first drafts are never perfect. And then the second problem is when people were communicating to you, people were not communicating to you that this is not the finished product. They just send you a link and say, hey, have a look at this. Without saying, hey, have a look at the first draft. Please know that this is not the final product.

Gabe (12:17)

Saka definitely knows how to talk to me. I don't even think that I've ever one time raised my voice at you.

Saka (12:23)

So that is the missing.

Gabe (12:26)

I don't think so have I.

Saka (12:30)

In the past. So, like, you know which one's made.

Gabe (12:32)

Me get seething angry.

Saka (12:35)

So it's the lack of just understanding how to communicate with you. This was the thing that I noticed early on and I just took it on top myself. If it becomes a thing where the morning face to face is very smooth sailing. We're just actually talking about what we're gonna do for the day. And so that's what I did when I joined Shockwave because it's pretty smooth.

Richard (12:51)

A lot. A lot smoother.

Gabe (12:52)

It's pretty smooth. I can't remember the last time we had like a big issue on the call that couldn't be resolved in 13 seconds.

Saka (13:00)

So, yeah, just taking you out of the equator, only seeing the final product again. Of course you give feedback, but I.

Gabe (13:07)

Think there's a lot of higher level stuff I'm seeing progression on and giving feedback. But the lower level stuff that they were just drowning me in when I have to, it's like Gabe and I talk about this all the time. He'll say, what do you want for dinner? I made fifteen two to ten million dollar decisions today. I don't fucking care. And you want to show me colors, different colors of carousels for social media posts. I want to slap my head up against the wall and. And then you want to talk it out. I don't have five minutes to talk. Do you see my calendars? And that was. We'll talk about that in a minute. But there was another thing. Like I'm getting on calls from 9am to 7pm, sometimes 8am to 8pm all day, every day, nonstop, with no not even 15 minutes to use the bathroom or get something to eat. I'm eating on calls. Like, my whole life's surrounding this thing. And I really loved that you saw what was happening. And instead of just being like, ugh, you know, her problem, you. You were like, oh, no, she's miserable. So it's my problem. And that's one of. There's been several things that have happened that make me super happy to come to work again, because that's how it was when we started. I was super happy. It was just me, him, and Julie, and I was just super happy every day to get up and go to work. And I hated Fridays and I loved Mondays. And then I got to a place where I hated every day because it was just so much, and I felt so alone in it. So thank you for that. It's amazing that you had the ability and the foresight to see what was going wrong and then take it on you. Yo. We interrupt this pod to tell you, like, and subscribe. What are you doing? Why haven't you liked? Why haven't you subscribed? Just subscribe. What's the problem? In all seriousness, subscribe so that you get notifications every time we drop new content. Additionally, if you have not signed up for our visionary vault, what the hell? Www.specialops podcast.com Go sign up. It's free. We never try and sell you, and we're putting all kinds of stuff in there to help you with the operations of your business because we're passionate about it and we want to share operational excellence with our direct response, e commerce and online selling family. And so one of the things I'd love to chat with you about a little bit. You've been really amazing at taking huge amounts of workload, dealing with Saka manages more the people, you're more the projects. Tiago's the projects, too. It's a little all over the place, but we understand our buckets. You've been able to take these international teams and the differences and nuances of how people talk to each other and communicate and silo it. So I need direct bullet points. I absolutely love Tiago. Sometimes when Tiago talks, I just shut off because I know that I don't even need to listen. I can wait till the end and be like, what's my action item? And I only needed to hear a sentence. You've been really good at understanding that one person needs a ton of context. Another person needs two sentences. The next person needs a bullet point. This person needs it written. This person needs it verbal. And I'm not saying that you do, but you've been really good about that. Talk to me about how you have learned over the years to work with different personalities who learn differently because you're a teacher amongst most of us, you're teaching us about marketing, about copywriting, about split testing. So how do you overcome that challenge of different people learning different ways?

Saka (16:21)

Sure.

Richard (16:21)

I think it's. It's very much an individual thing. I think ultimately I think it comes down to making a mistake in the first place. That's gonna sound. No, it's gonna sound a little silly, businessy, but like, when we bring on a new person, I communicate with them as I like to be communicated with.

Gabe (16:36)

And no one on our team likes to be communicated like you do.

Richard (16:39)

No, absolutely not. And that's always gonna be a mistake in that sense. But generally that will give me some idea of, okay, where did this go wrong and how do we take it from there? Why did it go wrong in this specific case? What do I need to adjust when I talk to them in the future when I'm telling them whatever the case may be? A lot of people need a lot more looms, for instance, a couple people. It's more of a text based thing, but generally it's gonna be a case of it didn't work the first time. There's some reason for that and there's an individual reason for that. So let's figure out what that was. I don't want to say this is a me thing. Usually the way to figure out what mistake that they made is that the next time they'll ask you, hey, can you give me a loom? That's very nice to hear that extra help on that side.

Gabe (17:19)

But you are a pattern person, right? So you definitely see patterns.

Richard (17:22)

Oh, sure.

Gabe (17:22)

One of the things that I've noticed I need to be communicated differently depending on what's going on.

Saka (17:26)

Yeah.

Gabe (17:27)

If I'm an event running the event, it's different than when I'm attending an event. It's different when I'm traveling for a client and I'm in a room with them all day, or I'm traveling with Gabe and we're just enjoying ourselves. It's. There's just. You're dealing with eight different people. Sometimes when you're dealing with me and you automatically have Learned over been 6 years almost, but you've learned how to just know that based upon what's going on in my schedule. Yes, it is a trial and error thing, but you'd be surprised how Many people will just continue to do the same thing over and over again and won't see the pattern. Right. So I think there's something to be said about that. I want to move on because one of the things that happens, I think with international teams, very often that we see with our clients. So we work with a lot of different clients. We have worked with a lot of different clients over the years with a lot of different styles, and just about all of them had people internationally. I don't even think. I don't think there's been one client that didn't have at least a few international team members. Man, they micromanage. I hate micromanagement. I absolutely hate micromanagement. And generally when people are micromanaging, it's because of a lack of ability to lose control, an ability to lead or teach, or an ability to create SOPs and SOPs as, you know, serve freedom. I like to start with you, Saka, and then move on to Richard. What are some of the things that you do to make sure that you're not micromanaging our international teams? Because we have people in the Philippines, Africa, uk, us, Jamaica, and the Pasha. Jamaica, Bahamas. Oh, Argentina. Oh, sorry, Tiago. We didn't mean every continent. I know just about every Antarctica, we're just gonna have plant someone out there. So how do you keep from the need to micromanage when you've got people all over the place? And ultimately, and if you haven't gotten the feel from Sokka, like, I can be a battle axe to work with. I can be amazing to work with when things are going well and everybody's doing their job. But I can also be really difficult to work with when people aren't doing their jobs. And Sokka came to me. I want everybody to just understand the massiveness of this, the ginormously of this. He came to me and said, let me be responsible for all the things that you're always mad about. And you can just get mad at me now, literally what he did. And then they'll watch me go, sokka, why have I said four times that these photos cannot end up on social media? And Sokka says, knowing that he didn't do it, sorry about that, Emma. I'm gonna get that corrected. That, by the way, will always calm me down. Responsibility and I'm gonna fix it. Will always calm me down immediately. Arguing with me that, oh, it was in a slack thread with 500 people while you were away, so what's the problem? Always makes me go absolutely ballistic. But that was a Very long winded. I just. Perry belchered the question. Sorry. So talk to me about how you do that.

Saka (20:26)

Yeah, so I think you've answered part of the question already. When we get on a team or we just join a company and the first couple of talks that we work on together, you have to pay attention to not just the actual work, but actually understand personality and how people do things. Like I said this and you did that, and compare the expectations and the results or the brief and the results and understand the pattern. You're never going to get it right in the first couple of conversations. It might take you a month, two months, depending on the size of the team or the amount, like where they are. But after a while, as someone that is leading a team, you need to pay close attention to people's personalities and how they process information. Because you can't know right away what you can do on your own end to start with is go over the top in terms of brief. And I will give an example because we have Paolo from one of our clients and he works on Philippine time and so we only have a couple of hours a day where we crossover. And so when I'm sending in my briefs, I'm sending giving him as much information as possible because when he's.

Gabe (21:32)

He doesn't have the ability to ask you a question.

Saka (21:35)

This is one of the biggest problem. If you're working with an international theme and you're not working on the same time zone, you need to when you're sending out your brief because you're not there to answer questions in real time, they're gonna have to sit around and wait for you.

Gabe (21:48)

You have to think about all the questions that they're going to have and eliminate those. By over communicating.

Saka (21:53)

Yeah, over communication. Whenever. Especially when you're working different time zones and they're not working on the American time zone or whatever time zone you're on, you need to over communicate and then look at the pattern. See if after a couple of projects they're able to understand the very basics. And even after understanding the basics, you still need to always communicate that. Not as in depthly as you've done the first two, three times, but you like, hey, now those long conversations are now becoming bullet points. And then the more advanced things that you want them to improve on are now the ones you're starting to over communicate. And I'm going to go back to Paolo as a very great example, because six months ago he was unable to, for example, create mockup for a whole website. He could create assets. But he couldn't piece it all together. And now he's doing some amazing work in terms of creating actual full page mock up. And that's because we went from working on, hey, okay, this is the reason why. And another thing is giving reasons behind why you're doing what you're doing or.

Gabe (22:53)

Reasons behind so that they can learn.

Saka (22:55)

So they can learn. So one thing I always do is the reason why. I'm not gonna say to you, hey, we need to put this video or we need to take this out without giving a reason. Giving people that context helps a lot. It also helps build them in their own career and their own journey, and also helps them see the whole picture. And I think that model works regardless of who you're working with. I think everyone at the very least would like to have information presented to them in that way. Doesn't matter if you're high level, low level. If you're doing that, you show that you care. And if you don't need that extra context, fine, it's there. Do whatever you want to do with it. But I've given that to you along with the final result. So if I give you the result that you want and I give you a whole bunch of context and you're like, I don't need that, but I've satisfied what you wanted and you've taken what you wanted out of what I've provided to you. So that's how I think of it and that's how I do things with the team over communicate so that you're also giving them the opportunity to over deliver. If you under communicate, you're never gonna get over delivery. Like, it's just gonna be just about right at the very best.

Gabe (24:01)

Amazing. Thank you so much, Richard. For you, we're very intentional about being proactive versus reactive and not micromanaging our people. Talk to me about how you and I think you and I probably struggle with the micromanaging part more than he does. Cause we want things to be right because we have to face the clients when it's not. Yeah, it's us who have to do that. Talk to me about how you've progressed over your six years working with international teams and how you've managed without micromanaging.

Richard (24:33)

I think it's really a question of understanding where the boundary for micromanagement is drawn for that individual person. It really is an individual thing. To me, micromanagement is going to be a lot more broader question that it might be for someone who's coming into their job for the first Time, who doesn't have the background information to know this is what we want the thing to look like. So, for instance, earlier today, I was adjusting a brief. The prompting on that. When I'd originally sent this brief, we'd sent it to someone who has been with one of our clients for a very long time. So I gave them the basic outline, the basic details of what we would want, a couple of ideas for things to try. We needed to push this off to someone else, so took a bit of time to give them that extra detail to get a little bit more in depth about the assumptions, the understanding of how the flow should work. So I want to detail that out. I want to be explicit there, which to the first person would definitely have been a question of micromanagement, because it's. So you're telling me how to do the job that I have invented in this particular case. So really, it's understanding where people are and what their specific takeaway is going to be from how something is presented to them. Because the problem with micromanagement isn't necessarily just being super honed in. It's probably more that it's a way of condescension. It's a kind of you're not smart enough to think of the answer. Trust you, cannot trust you. So really, it's a question of understanding where those boundaries are drawn. And those change over time, of course. Really, I think, as with a lot of management questions, it comes down to getting to know people as they are.

Gabe (25:59)

Yeah, we've talked a lot about this when I was working with Dr. Laurie Emery, phenomenal human being, by the way. But I was working with her. One of the things that she really taught me and I brought into our business was you do not meet people in the middle and you don't expect people to show up where you're at. You need to walk over to where they are, grab their hand, and if they're for you, slowly walk them over to where you are so that they can comfortably, comfortably serve what needs you have, whether it be an employee or a spouse or a friend. Because when you're meeting people in the middle all the time that compromise, how does that serve them and how does that serve you? So anyway, guys, this has been great. Oh, my gosh. I still can't believe that we're here. I'm super excited. Special thank you to Vox Pod London. We are, like super stoked to be here. We'll probably be doing this again. I don't know if they want to do this again, but I want to do this again. I want to come all the time and do this because this has just been a phenomenal week and we've only been, this is only on day three. It's just been so phenomenal to be in the room together and to share time together and then to have them on the podcast. I've been talking about them for so long and now we finally get to have them on the podcast. So thank you so much, guys.

Richard (27:16)

Thank you.

Gabe (27:17)

We're going to create an SOP on how to create rapport with international staff for you and that's going to go in our Visionary Vault. As always at Special Ops, we like to give something that helps you and your direct response e commerce or online selling business move forward. And a lot of us are using international teams. So we're going to give you, I said sop, but it's actually going to be like an article on some tips and tricks on what you need to do. Very bulleted. Www.specialopspodcast.com Join our visionary vault. You'll find all kinds of courses and all kinds of stuff that the guys and myself and guests on the show have made for you to uplevel your ops and create operational excellence within your business. Thank you so much. And until next time, make sure you like and subscribe so you can get notifications on all of our podcasts. Make sure you like and subscribe so you can get notifications whenever we drop new content. Thank you so much and see you next time.