Search Interviews:

Jeremy Weisz 15:26

Um, you were talking before we hit record, and you said one of the things that you learned was learning to pitch.

Alex Chan 15:37

Yeah, that is an ongoing, that doesn’t change, you are always learning pitch really, from the start from day one, when you launch your business all the way until you maybe sell it or you decide to retire. And you’re probably still pitching it when you’re retiring. Because you’re telling people about it. Pitching at all different levels is completely different . It requires different levels of investment, whether it’s like the expertise, the team members that you need to hire in order to fill the gaps, or you launching new services or products that you’ve never done before to fill gaps in order to make it work.

Or even just investing heavily in putting together presentations decks as you move up the ladder. Fortunately, in the very beginning, when you’re a junior agency, you just have to tell people about yourself, show a few examples of work and you’re good to go. As you grow, you start to have to build case studies. Now you need to start talking about why you’re special and what you’ve done, what you’ve accomplished, as you start to move up that corporate ladder. From then on, you move into a smaller pool, as you get higher and higher the number of clients reduces, the budgets increase, but the number of clients shrink.

And that is actually a big challenge, because now you’re up against agencies that have been around for maybe 30, even 50 years. A lot of companies came from print radio, television, and they have been around for decades, with tons of experience, tons of expertise under their belt and lots of connections. Now as a new company enters that space, now you have to prove yourself, you have to decide how you are going to get in. And sometimes that means taking on projects from agencies to fill gaps for them to get you started, you know, now, all of a sudden, you decide you don’t want to share the pie, you don’t want to move up even further, you start to want to take on the the actual contract and be the one that divides the pie, which is the best place to be.

Now you’re in the same room as these agencies as these top dogs. And they know the language, they know how to talk to these people. And they also really know how to pitch in that situation. So you’re always constantly learning. And hopefully, if you’ve hired correctly, you’ve got some good talent that’s able to fill those gaps.

Jeremy Weisz 17:47

What are some examples of mistakes, maybe you’ve never made mistakes and you’re relaxed, but some mistakes that you remember, when you were pitching?

Alex Chan 18:02

Oh, not listening. That’s probably the one, you know, the most important part. And that’s the one thing everyone forgets. Yeah, just like not taking the time to really hear what the client has to say. Even if they don’t know what they want. They still have a general idea of what they need. And if you don’t understand that aspect, you won’t win.

Jeremy Weisz 18:25

How did that play out? Do you remember a time? 

Alex Chan 18:30

Well, you walk away feeling great, because you talk for 20-60 minutes? Yeah, but getting a callback is the next step. And usually they will.

Jeremy Weisz 18:39

Did someone actually say to you, I mean, you know, because if you go like you said, walk away, you’re like, that was amazing. And you talk for 30 minutes, did a company actually come back? And like Alex, you know, you just talk too much. You didn’t listen to what we had to say. I don’t know. Did you get that feedback?

Alex Chan 18:55

I wish someone had said that to us, because it probably made or would have made our learning experience a lot better. You probably made that mistake a dozen times before we finally learned how to ask for help. I think the big thing with that is you know you get those you get those? Oh, I’m sorry, you but we’ve gone with someone else’s emails, you get a few of those. And you start to have to realize, hey, like what are we doing? That’s not right, or what do we have to change?

Jeremy Weisz 19:24

So not listening? What else?

Alex Chan 19:25

Not coding and prepare, you know, knowing your client is big. Learning who they are, what they do, or regions that are in learning the people that you’re going to be talking to what level of people you’re going to be talking to, as you start to work with larger and larger clients, you’re not going to be talking to the CEO and the chief operator and the CFO anymore. You know, in the very beginning it was all partners, but now you’re dealing with a marketing manager and now the question becomes are you empowering the marketing manager with enough experience and knowledge to then pass that information? up to their superiors, to where they’re interested enough to have another conversation with you. That is, that’s a challenge and other learning lesson that took some practice.

Jeremy Weisz 20:11

Talk about that a little bit, because that comes up often in interviews where they’re talking to someone who’s in charge, but maybe they’re not the end decision maker. How do you navigate that, too? Because ultimately, you’re thinking, what you just said is you need to talk to the, you know, the board or the partners or whoever’s in charge, how do you navigate that with that person? 

Alex Chan 20:37

Well, a lot of tricks, you know, you learn to learn a lot of stuff along the way, as you’re, as you’re researching the company, go through their LinkedIn, figure out who’s in charge, so that when their name or email is in the thread, you can acknowledge them if they’re actually in communicating with you, or you know that they’re there. So they’re at least going to read your emails or receive the deck that you’re about to send forward. 

That’s, it’s definitely like step one, that’s even before you walked in the room. Now, the next thing we always told our staff was, you know, if you’re working with someone, you ask yourself how you can get the other person or raise, right? It’s a good way to look at it, because then you can go, what can I do to help this person so that they understand what’s going on here?

And what can I do to make their lives easier, so that they will want to work with me, they’ll become champions of my company, in their company, because we do so much to help them that when they move up, and as they, as you build a long term relationship with them, and this person continues to move through one manager role to another, you’re building people within that company and building a stronger relationship between your two.

Jeremy Weisz 21:51

Yeah, I love it. Because of what you just said there, I wrote it down. It’s a great phrase that the six out, which is what can I do to make your life easier, because it’s really ultimately helping them in the company, but like, helping them individually to make their life easier is, you know, a personal instead of I imagine —

Alex Chan 22:13

Yeah, that’s ultimately why they reached out. Typically, a company will try to manage all their marketing in the very beginning and house until they realize they can’t, or until they realize there’s a certain level of expertise that they need to hire for. Now, whether they choose to hire in house or whether they choose to go with an agency. So obviously, pros and cons to both going with the more expensive option and agency, then you’re always faced with the challenge of if they’re going to be spending, let’s say $60,000. With you, why don’t they hire someone for $60,000? So then what are you doing more than what are you doing to help the person that you’re working with? 

Jeremy Weisz 22:48

You know, you talked a lot about hiring, having team members talk about the evolution of the team a little bit when you first started AntiSocial, and some of the key hires along the way.

Alex Chan 23:02

You know, it’s pretty funny. Yeah, hiring is one of those things that never changes, it’s always challenging. Finding people within the talent pools of you really the world, you start to realize how small those talent pools become as you get higher and higher, how much more expensive those polls become as you tap larger and larger groups.

So in the very beginning, like all small businesses, you hire, who you can afford to hire who’s around you hire who has a little bit of experience in your sector, as you grow, and you start to seek people who maybe have more pitch experience, you maybe have more understanding in that sector, or maybe even if you’re growing agency, and you don’t actually have real agency experience, because you have a team of juniors or and it’s just you leading the pack, you then need might need someone who could be an operator, someone who comes from an agency background, with more agency experience, all those people are more expensive.

They came from roles that they have a lot more experience in and your hope is that your investment in them pays off. Because at the end of the day, if a person costs you $125,000, you’re not going to know whether or not they’re the perfect fit for a few months. So that’s your investment. So when you’re hiring, you need to really take that into consideration how long of a runway can I give the person I’m hiring, and you know, during that process you just hoping for the best

Jeremy Weisz 24:24

When you first started, obviously it’s you who had a partner.

Alex Chan 24:28

Yeah, yeah, I worked with one partner, Daryl Louie, here in Vancouver.

Jeremy Weisz 24:33

And then when you decided to grow, at what point did you hire your first staff? 

Alex Chan 24:40

Ah, we kind of hard right out the gate. We needed community managers back then. Social media was a lot less content and a lot more community management. And as we all know, community management is the most difficult thing to deal with. For especially as a company we have product services and lots of clients. By the way, we actually hired a number of people right out of college right out of the service industry right out of restaurants. 

The reality was, was that nobody above the age of 20-25 really knew how to work with social media at the time, it was so new and so fresh, anyone who was in their mid 20s, were already too busy with their lives to spend all day on social, you actually needed someone that was were between the age of like 18 and 25, who had that time in their life, to play with social media, to then become the people who can champion and say, this is what needs to be posted, this is what needs to be created, it’s still very valid to this day, because I wouldn’t trust someone that was 50 or 60, to create my TikTok videos for me.

Jeremy Weisz 25:46

So if you look at the trajectory of, you know, AntiSocial Solutions, what was the next kind of key position? So the first you hired community managers, what was the next kind of batch of key positions you had to put in place.

Alex Chan 26:02

And then we had some social media managers, their social media managers at that time, were also our project managers. So I mean, more traditional, you could say that you had us, the founders, and you were the leadership group, followed by our project managers, which are basically our first highest, but we call them the social managers at the time. Then following that, we moved into the community managers, and that became kind of our initial structure for quite some time, of course, photographers, videographers as well, so that they were on the side as well, too. And they’ve kind of supported the whole hierarchy in that.

Jeremy Weisz 26:39

You mentioned the hiring process, and how important it is because you’re investing a lot of time and money. What did you or some learnings from the hiring process and maybe some of the mistakes? In the beginning, maybe you left out of the hiring process, then that you included? Because you’ve, you know, you’ve learned,

Alex Chan 26:59

I think I’d say the biggest mistake in the beginning was hiring our friends. As much as that’s, it’s, that’s a lot more common than we actually think when you’re starting a new business and just getting your business up and running. You kind of just look around within your circles and go, Hey, who can I hire, who can fill this super easy role? Because the demand isn’t that high, just to that point yet. The thing is, is that as you —

Jeremy Weisz 27:23

It seems like you have smart friends when you were in engineering. So I don’t know, for today —

Alex Chan 27:28

Unfortunately, engineers are some of the hardest people to work with. So, you know, for good or bad, they’re definitely very clever. The challenge of hiring friends is, you know, you have an authority, little bit of an authority issue there, you know, you’re trying to hang out with them on one side while you’re trying to tell them what to do on the other. And sometimes it just doesn’t get taken that well. Or, you know, worse because of your friends. 

They just might choose to not do what you ask them to do and do what they want to do. You hopefully those expectations can kind of set in the very beginning, but back to just see whether you have the experience to set those expectations or not like it’s it’s not something that we’re taught, it’s not something that you initially start with, unless maybe you had an HR background, and even then I wonder, you know, if that’s something that you have to learn?

Jeremy Weisz 28:16

What are some of those essential, important steps that you put in place in the hiring process? 

Alex Chan 28:23

Boundaries are a beautiful thing, right? Good fences make great neighbors, you need to really define what you expect out of someone in terms of whether it’s like work life culture, whether it’s the whether it’s the expectation of, you know, how you want work to be delivered, or even just showing up on time, believe it or not, in today’s age, that’s actually something harder and harder to accomplish than ever before. 

The big thing for us was really defining what the rules met. In the very beginning, especially with a small company or small agency, everyone is wearing a lot of hats, keeping someone within their kind of playpen is almost impossible. Someone who is a manager is going to become the manager of multiple things just because they’re already a manager with experience managing, you’re going to lean on them more.

Now, don’t come in and just go we’re just instantly going to pay you more because we’re giving you more work it’s up to the leadership to balance that work schedule with them to kind of come up with something that works and continue to build a proper structure and properly scale your business including raises bonuses, whatever you’ve lined up and make sure that’s adequate for them as well as sustainable for the business during that growth.

Jeremy Weisz 29:44

Anything in the interview process itself to weed people out or to get to “this person looks really good?”

Alex Chan 29:53

You know so many candidates come through and so many are great. It is actually very difficult to tell the difference between all of them, especially when you just look at a resume. I can only imagine what an Amazon would have to deal with when they deal with like 1,000 resumes. Now, one HR person that I talked to once told me that they hired based on whether they were kind and I kind of thought about that as like, What do you mean, if they’re just nice? Like, are they just nice? And they come in? And they’re friendly to everyone? No, no? Like, are they kind, are they willing to go out of their way to help people, are they willing to volunteer themselves to help out with other things that they maybe don’t even know about?

Or just spend a little extra time to learn something that they don’t know, in order to be better at what they do, because they know it’ll help their teammates. When we started to hire based on that, that helped a watt, whether someone was the right fit or not, they were the right character. And that character really allowed that person to grow within our organization. Because when we hired the best of the best, they were sometimes really hard to work with, and ultimately didn’t grow and actually made things more challenging.

Jeremy Weisz 31:04

What were some of the things you do to determine that kindness in the interview process?

Alex Chan 31:12

Oh, well, you know, you have to really trust your gut. Which is tough, because yeah, how do you put that into a scalable process? We would ask people some odd questions as well, too. I think one of the questions I remember asking all the time was, you know, give me a moment where you’ve been uncomfortable at work and how you managed to get through that. The reality is that you’re going to be very uncomfortable when you’re learning something new, you’re going to be very uncomfortable when you’re taking on a new role. 

And if someone does not like being uncomfortable, that’s perfectly fine. But then you have to decide whether or not that role that you’re about to put them into is right for them. A community manager will be very comfortable, it’s a very easy role in terms of just following up with people and knowing how to respond to people. But being a chief operating officer is a challenging role that is going to put you in some very difficult shoes.

Jeremy Weisz 32:06

You mentioned, you know, as far as people are, you know, staff can get busy. How do you manage that balance of staff keeping busy without sustaining burnout?

Alex Chan 32:25

Symptoms. You know, there’s no perfect formula for that, it’s going to come and go, I think this is back to having kind staff or having people in the company that are kind, you know, they need to also understand that you know, you were we as management or leadership, or partners, or founders, whatever you want to call us are doing the best they can to balance with what resources are available. And sometimes the scales tip and become more challenging for the people within the company. Sometimes they’re more challenging for the founders within the company. When it becomes more challenging for the staff, it is very important for the leadership to acknowledge that understand that that’s happening, and put steps in to either mitigate and avoid it from happening at all in the future, but also take care of the immediate problem and give that person that time off necessary so they don’t burn out.

Jeremy Weisz 33:19

You know, you ended up selling to Thinkingbox, just talk about your decision to decide to sell the company in the first place.

Alex Chan 33:29

Yeah, we were, we were in what we call a hyper growth phase, we were doubling our revenues and doubling our staff. Basically year over year for about three, four or five years straight. It was an exhausting and expensive process. The nice part was that we were generating enough revenue to cover our costs. But we were also spending all of our profit reinvesting it every step of the way. So the founders are us, we weren’t getting any more comfortable. We thought life wasn’t just getting better. We weren’t buying homes or jumping on boats, we’re actually busier than ever before. 

And we were actually reinvesting the money in creating more work for the general team than ever before. We started to really see gaps in our experience as well, too. As much as I would love to say at no everything I really have older I get them more realized and less I know, as we started to grow towards the corporate space, and as we started to realize how much more competitive it became, we realized that we actually needed to hire some very specific talent, people that were going to cost us quite a bit.

We’re starting salaries at 125 141 65 250 depending on what city we’re trying to move into or expand into how many flights we had to take around that. We started to realize that the next step of growth, well, that would have actually cost us millions dollars. So now, do we slow the business down and decide to just say play within our circle and continue to grow? No, we’re young and hungry, that might have actually been the smarter move, I can’t go back in time to to see whether or not that would have been the right move, we decided to try to find some key partners, whether they would invest in our business and become partners with us, or in the other option acquire us. Ultimately, the company that came across which was Thinkingbox decided to acquire us.

Jeremy Weisz 35:27

So talk about the conversations, and initially whether you know, you obviously, both decided it was a good fit. Talking about those initial conversations and what you were discussing, to get to the point of, yes, let’s do this. 

Alex Chan 35:45

Yeah, a lot of research. In the agency world, your culture is so important, right? Like, it’s your Kool Aid. It’s, it’s what everyone drinks is, having a cool fun company is what keeps your talent around. It’s what keeps it’s what makes people want to join your business as well, too. And when you’re getting acquired into a new company, the first thing you’re really looking at is why, like, do they have the money to pay? You know, what, what we want? Do they have the existing culture where our team is going to merge into because if our we do the acquisition and our team leaves, then what did they acquire, we’re back at square one, the clientele that they work with, whether or not they’re a good fit for our business, whether or not that’s someone that we can merge in as part of the growth.

And then the leadership of the other team, whether we’re aligned, there’s a lot of meetings, a lot of dinners, a lot of conversations about whether or not we align about the same thing. The only tip that I would ever give someone during an emergency mergers and acquisitions process is that if your gut tells you that the culture and that the fit in the new group isn’t right, and that’s not where you want to be, you should listen to that.

Jeremy Weisz 36:59

So when you’re having those discussions, were you talking about what your role would be? Because you’re obviously merging different kinds of leadership groups. I know every company probably handles it differently. Maybe you operate as a separate entity, maybe you get absorbed under a thinking box. What does that conversation look like? 

Alex Chan 37:17

Yeah, there are so many ways to kind of, to kind of like, handle the leadership of a company you’re acquiring? Yeah, exactly. Exactly what you touch on you acquire them, all you want are their assets, you actually just want the team, the assets, the process, you don’t want their existing leadership, and you send them on their merry way. And you do your best to merge everything in your company that’s in the agency world, that happens a lot less. Because the reality is that agencies don’t have a ton of assets. We’re not sitting on mountains of real estate, we have a lot of processes, which can be replicated. And we have talented team members that know those processes that you want to stay, and founders that know how everything works.

So typically, in an agency setting, you are trying to merge the founders or the people of the leadership into your business, at least for window that can come in the form of just employment contracts with nice bonuses that can be a you can tie it into the mergers and acquisition where the person might need to stay on for a period of time in order for them to get the remainder of their sale. Yeah, for us, they wanted us to stick around, we got along well with the leadership, they wanted us to stay so we were given employment contracts. As a founder role we continue to stay in to oversee the overall operation and helped with the merger. The reason why we just kept getting the founder role is because ultimately there was no real role that fit or like a title that fit. And at the end of the day, a title and and in an agency setting is pretty meaningless. We were basically the people who wear every hat and support it in every aspect of merger. 

Jeremy Weisz 39:02

Oh, is what you do changed since the merger.

Alex Chan 39:07

I was having a lot of the finance in the very beginning. And that was actually one of the reasons why we wanted to move over as well. You know, when you’re managing finances for a $100,000 business, it’s actually not a million dollar business, no problem 10s of millions dollars. Now you have a problem. You are now faced with a lot of hard costs added into your business because you now need a finance team, whether it’s someone who just handles invoicing or accounts receivables, or you decide to get out and hire another company to come and do it. Ultimately, if you’re crossing that $10 million threshold, you’re probably going to need your own internal team. That’s part of the added cost that we wanted to avoid ourselves and why we wanted a investor partner, but also more importantly, you know, someone who can actually just take all the finance, build you your projections, and ultimately you’re creating a role, CFO-type role whether you call it that or not.

Jeremy Weisz 40:02

How did you communicate with the team? Throughout the process? Because I know people have various thoughts on this, like sometimes they include people along the journey. Sometimes they tell people when it’s done because they don’t want to scare people. What? How did you end up handling that?

Alex Chan 40:21

Well, because of NDAs, we didn’t really tell anyone until we were basically sure that we were going to do the acquisition. So in the very beginning, while we’re doing all the research, the meetings, the conversations, we didn’t really tell the team a lot, they might have known one or two things happening. But yeah, we never really like to take the time to do a full brief. Once we decided that this was the move we wanted to make. Once we decided that, once we started out to the point where we’re ready to start making offers, then we started to do introductions, we started to allow our team to meet the leadership of the other team and vice versa. We started spending time at each other’s offices in the very beginning as we’re going through our due diligence.

And then while we had to do a lot of one on ones in that process to really reassure the team, that, you know, our objective was to not turn the table and flip the whole business all over again. But rather, they’re acquiring us because they like what we do and how we do it. The objective of the merger was to grow with them to take on more resources. So we could do more potentially growing our teams careers as well in that process, too. So a lot of that led to coaching everything from coaching to one on ones to just talking about the future.

Jeremy Weisz 41:38

How do you reassure the team in that situation? And because I know you were talking before we hit record, and some people’s positions will change based on it. And some may be just worried, like, they look across the table and go someone over there kind of does what I do. So how do you reassure the team throughout the process?

Alex Chan 42:03

If someone is genuinely worried, there’s not much you’re going to do about it. Yeah, you can do the best you can to really help them out in that process, so that they’re not so worried. And hopefully, and ultimately, we did go in with good intentions. And hopefully they felt that as well, too. So it’s really just about listening to them, finding out what their concerns are, and then talking to them about what the next steps will be. You know, fortunately, during the actual due diligence process, while you’re learning about each other and each other’s company’s roles, you do find a lot of things that their team member, even though they’re in the same role doesn’t do.

And you find out things that your team members do that will complement the overall operation. It’s very rare for a company to come in and immediately remove all the duplicate roles. You know, there is a long merger process in that and so there’s always a good runway that allows people to transition from one role to another. And that runway also gives people the choice of whether or not they want to stick around.

Jeremy Weisz 43:16

I’m talking about handling the transition period. And when you merge.

Alex Chan 43:22

The timing was pretty monumental. We actually completed the deal three days before Canada locked down for COVID. That created so much panic, it was unreal, especially in the marketing world where companies were cut back and began to think about whether or not they would actually make $1 in the coming months because during the initial lockdowns, we were actually told to not do business and not show up to work anymore. Where most of our work was being handled. Of course, like all teleconferences, it was not a standard yet. calling each other obviously an option, but not being in the same room together, was going to create some big challenges.

Companies started to drop marketing agencies left and right during that process, too, because, you know, how can we afford a $20,000 or $30,000 a month agency when all of a sudden their sales declined by 50% to 75%, depending on what they sold, or what they did? So the first three months were quite scary in the sense of “Oh, no, what’s going to happen?” The fortunate part was that the acquisition was not based on whether or not we would be successful within the first three or six months or one year. This was a five year objective. So when you talk about investing, and you’re investing over the course of a long term, these blips and these hiccups hopefully are just that and that’s how we lean into in the very beginning.

While we slowed down for work from our client side, we were able to actually double down on taking on new processes, and taking the time to train the team on those new processes as well with the spare time that they had. So when the clients came back later that year towards fall and Christmas, we were actually able to have the team somewhat trained in some of the new stuff that we needed them to learn. 

Jeremy Weisz 45:20

Yeah, that’s a tough time to be doing any transition because the world got thrown upside down. Um, Alex, first of all I want to thank you. I have one last question. Before I ask, I want to point people to check out Antisocialsolutions.com. And, you know, just poke around our website and more episodes of the podcast. My last question, Alex is just, um, some of your favorite resources. That resource could be some of your favorite business or leadership books, it could be some of your favorite software, it could be a mentor, whether it’s distant or, you know, an actual mentor of yours. What are some of your favorite resources we can point people towards?

Alex Chan 46:03

Oh, I don’t remember the author at this point. But there was a book called Drive.

Jeremy Weisz 46:10

Dr. Daniel Pink.

Alex Chan 46:11

Yeah, yeah, that’s the one. Yeah, he’s I. When I read that, I learned a lot about ops, ops and sales in that one. So I do actually recommend people read that one if they have an opportunity. Outside of that, you know, I don’t. I, unfortunately, haven’t taken on any mentors myself, which I, in hindsight, should have. Now I would recommend people go and seek mentors, if, as they learn and grow, I spend a lot of time skiing. And that was kind of my form of meditation. So you know, if it’s not, if it’s not going out, researching, finding people to help you out, it’s just take a sport, find a hobby that’s going to challenge you outside of work, because that is going to be what allows you to really excel when you go back to work.

Jeremy Weisz 47:02

No, I love that any you know, from a software perspective, or tech stack? What things do you like to use? Daily, weekly basis?

Alex Chan 47:10

Oh man, I’ve used every single one. Each one completely depends on what you need. I believe the agency right now is leaning pretty heavily on Monday. It’s a supercharged spreadsheet tool. So which works well for that agency, but also works with Asana and Bootcamp. For other companies, Slack is always really helpful. You know that, I guess the biggest, the biggest thing I’d recommend is just be really organized with all of your documents and your finance. As you grow as an agency that is going to be what allows you to be acquired, and that’s actually going to be what saves you time when someone comes around asking for more information. That means creating good processes on things like Google Drive, and actually creating processes across those tools I just mentioned.

Jeremy Weisz 48:02

Alex, thank you so much, everyone, check out more episodes of the podcast and we’ll see everyone next time. Thanks very much.