Jeremy Weisz 16:17
What made you Justin first decide to start an agency?
Justin Cook 16:25
I was working for a tech company. I was very frustrated because I was still very kind of Junior. And you know, when I was also newly married, and I was very frustrated that I understand the power of the capabilities of technology and what I can do, I felt very limited in my like, salaried role where you have to wait and have to ask for vacation three months in advance, and you get a 3% raise each year. And you can only work on this one project at a time. And at the same time the company I was working for had hired an agency to do SEO consultant consultation. And I was aware of how much they spent on the consultation, and I was sitting in the boardroom going, this is like, this is like rudimentary, I’ve been doing this stuff for years, I just didn’t consider selling it as SEO.
So I excitedly read home to my wife, and was like, I think I can start a business and put together some basic sort of two year projections and started trying to get some clients on the side and ended up actually getting a full page article in Canada’s National Post about this whole battle to be on Google’s first page. And then just like, I always just thought, I’m going to be a consultant, and then it just ballooned too quickly and became an agency.
Jeremy Weisz 17:50
And so you started off doing consulting, but then people wanted you to do the work too.
Justin Cook 17:57
Exactly. But I was always constrained. But like, I want to take on as many clients as the hours of the day that I have, right, and so then it’s like, okay, if we’re gonna bring this on, and we’re going to design a campaign, now, I got to figure out how I can hire really smart people to do the work, but also how I can create structure and processes and accountability and financial controls. And that’s where, where one of my early partners early on, really came in, and just basically structured the entire company around what we do.
Jeremy Weisz 18:29
Talk about hiring for a second, some of the key positions you put in place from the beginning, until now.
Justin Cook 18:35
So key positions, unintentionally, one, I was always looking for that sort of right hand person to basically, you know, when we land a client land a project, that we create the strategy and, you know, client signs the contract, we can say go and I can have the confidence that like my shoulders can go down that this person is now going to completely oversee end to end execution. And so we hired a junior project manager who was actually a new immigrant to Canada, and within a couple of months, I was like, there’s some serious talent here like this, this person can get it. He learns quickly. Very good communicator, very emotionally intelligent. I think there’s more here and while we were grooming the role, he was also on his own accord, slowly taking over more and more work, like, you know, just I’d like to do this. I’d like to make this process better, and eventually grew his role to where he’s basically. Second, I don’t want to say a second command. That sounds awful. But basically, he’s like that.
Jeremy Weisz 19:52
People with a CEO type of role. I mean, I’ve had Cameron Harold on the podcast several times, and that’s what he called it. I think this book is actually called Second in Command. So.
Justin Cook 20:02
Yeah, I mean he basically oversees all of the team and makes sure everything gets done and everyone’s happy and people look up to him and, and also contributes to an enjoyable workplace like we believe we’ve created, what’s the non toxic work environment. And he’s in no small way. Due to that, and I say my other major, incredibly important hire was our lead developer, again, hired as sort of just an intermediate developer, but very quickly, I could see that there was so much more than just a producer. And at this point, he’s essentially steering the technology that we’re adopting within the company.
Jeremy Weisz 20:49
So yes, I’m looking it up by the way, Justin. Cameron Herold, his book is called The Second in Command: Unleash the Power of Your COO, is the book. So from a culture perspective, what are some things that you can talk about that has helped maintain culture in the company?
Justin Cook 21:12
So as much as remaining in business, obviously, the number one thing is cash and revenue. Clearly, those are the most important, therefore, you must keep clients happy, and you must do great work. Those are not our culture, our culture is we treat our people like people. I should say we treat people like human beings. We give them a lot of autonomy. A lot of credit, where credit is due we we never talked down to any like, there’s no politics permitted. As my partner calls it no kingdom building. Everyone has a voice. I mean, pretty much on a daily basis, someone within the company is telling me I’m wrong about something. And we encourage it, our prospective is if you have a better way, tell me. Prove it. Show me your better way and show us why we should change or adopt what you think is better.
And then this part, I’ll say, is very tricky. Pre pandemic, we had a beautiful office, full bar, you know, we can celebrate all the time. In a hybrid environment, that becomes more challenging, a lot of our staff have actually distributed so we’re kind of across Canada now. So we celebrate whenever we can quarterly. We’ll bring everyone together for a sort of team building day, we would a client will take out the key staff that were on the sales pitch, we’ll go for a fancy dinner, we just tried to, you know, someone needs the morning off for a doctor’s appointment. And it’s not like, Oh, you make sure you block that time. And like, Okay, we trust people to do their work. And as a result, they live up to that trust. We launched a really big platform a couple of weeks ago. And I didn’t even ask any of the staff to put in time over the weekend to make sure it went well. And I’m seeing chats going over it like Friday at 11:30pm, Sunday at 7pm. And like they took it upon themselves to do that because they had so much ownership of the project.
Jeremy Weisz 23:19
What has worked in the hiring process? And if you’re watching the video, you’ll see we’re at the 9thCO.com company page. I do have to ask, I don’t know if there’s a story behind any of these pictures. Justin, I think you guys are standing by some planes, maybe. I don’t quite know what that is. And there’s another one where, I don’t know, there’s a statue behind you, but any significance behind any of these pictures?
Justin Cook 23:47
Yeah, so this one here, the plane, we actually got invited to our clients annual big party, appreciation party for their clients, and it was on the SS something like a big old battleship in Manhattan’s waterfront. So we were just up on the deck after walking around and just one of the security guards like hey, do you mind if I take your picture? So we’re like, wow, that was a really good picture. So that’s kind of iconic to our history. This one was at the AGO, that’s the Art Gallery of Ontario. And every year we would do a full team photo so this was like a, I wasn’t behind the creative on this one. But there’s something to do with the monochrome.
Jeremy Weisz 24:35
I assume you guys wear coordinated outfits and it wasn’t random. You’re wearing beige or something. Okay. That’d be really weird. Wow, we’re wearing the same thing. So from the hiring perspective.
Justin Cook 24:52
So what has worked really well? I can tell you first what hasn’t worked really well. What hasn’t worked really well was when we were growing and when some of these tech in what we do was kind of in development, SEO was a new thing. PPC was a new thing. Even web development was fairly nasty. Is hiring scrappy, ambitious or like I can do this kind of like shoot from the hip. But either didn’t want to adhere to process, was more so of entrepreneurial in nature. doesn’t really work well when you have to get client work done by x date, and it has to adhere to this, right. That was one. And also, it’s really hard to know, if someone is really good at the tech, or if they’ve just watched some YouTube videos, and are really good at rhyming off what they saw in the video. Right?
So what we’ve adopted in our interview process is a lot of probing questions. You know, one of my favorite questions is, first of all, tell me what you’re most proud of in your last role. The second, tell me what you’re the least proud of. If you could go back and change one thing, what would that be? And the really good hires, they’re gonna talk about a mistake they made, and how they fixed it, or how they navigated to work with a challenging situation, like, okay, there’s a person who, who owns mistakes and then but I find the number one red flag and I hope no one who’s interviewing for 9thCO watch this, but basically whenever someone says, oh, I had this really great idea, and my managers just wouldn’t let me do it, whatever the problem is out there, you know, that if you put that person with the rest of the team, they’re gonna cause problems with everyone else. And if they mess up some client work, it was a problem with the client. So I really look for people who are humble, and they accept that they’ve made mistakes, and they look for ways to fix those mistakes.
Jeremy Weisz 27:01
I think, Justin, if a candidate goes to the trouble to do research on you, and watch an interviewer, I bet they’re the type of person that would own their mistake. I’m just gonna guess that but who knows. So if you’re listening now, that’s probably you. But you bring up a good point, which is process, right? And it kind of goes into team playing and following. Even if you look at sports, you know, I’m from Chicago. And so, looking at the Bulls, and Phil Jackson, like they had a process, they had a methodology that you know, and even one of the best, arguably best basketball players ever Michael Jordan was in this process. So talk about your tech stack a little bit. How do you manage processes or project management tools? Do you have software for SOPs? What do you what’s the tech stack look like?
Justin Cook 27:55
So we’re very rigid and fluid with our process. We’re rigid in that as it is ironed down, it becomes fully documented, and fully automated. So right now we use the platform called Teamwork. And all of our projects are scaffolded in terms of milestones, past, you know, dependent or codependent task timelines and all that sort of stuff. And so as soon as the moment client signs, like, okay, scaffold the project, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and here’s all the steps and, and we sort of fall within that. That’s the strict nature of our process.
Where it’s fluid is, since the inception of the company, we’ve done this and I’ll keep this for wherever I work. Every single month or sometimes even bi weekly, we have management meetings with each sort of role or department and it’s an ongoing conversation of challenge the process, challenge the process, what you know, what can we be doing better? You know, when we deploy a site, we do these three things, well, maybe we should be introducing an end to end error testing tool, in this process and build out our QA phase by three weeks. Like we’re always looking for ways to better the process. You know, here’s a very simple one. AI tools, everyone’s talking about AI tools. Great. So where do they fit in the process? Can we use them to beat up front end code development? Can we use them for slicing and dicing visuals into components? We’re always looking for stuff like that?
Jeremy Weisz 29:44
Yeah, love it. Justin, I have one last question for you. Before I ask it, I want to point people to check out 9thCO.com That’s the number 9 th co.com to learn more. They have a really cool website, you could check out the services piece, the work piece. The last question is just more of some of your favorite resources. It could be books, business books, leadership books, it could be mentor that you’ve learned a lot from. What’s some of your favorite resources throughout the years that you’ve learned from?
Justin Cook 30:23
I mean, definitely mentor, my original business partner and co-founder and 9thCO, Aaron. Aaron Mogàdam, is an incredible person and has played no small role in my professional and personal development. Digitally, you know, I subscribe to a number of newsletters within the tech space that produce high quality content, you know, skim them kind of weekly to go, Okay, what’s new, what’s worth digging deeper into that? Okay, maybe we should do some r&d around this new piece of tech and should be brought into our stack. Professionally, on the book side, I have a hard time with that I find there’s a lot of gurus. And you know, by the time you finish your book, the whole book, you’re like, it’s been like a five page article somewhere, you somehow managed to turn into a book, but I do love, on the personal development or emotional intelligence, I love digging deeper there. So I just finished a book called The Body Keeps the Score. And that’s around the identification and treatment of PTSD. And a lot of it has to do with how the mind works, I found that fascinating. But some other, anything similar to like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, The Power of Now, Emotional Intelligence. I find the impact that has on understanding myself, managing my own stress and how that translates to productivity, and also helping to buoy and build up the team, and even just navigating the challenges of communicating with clients, particularly over a virtual device. It’s really helpful to have a fundamental understanding of what makes people tick mentally.
Jeremy Weisz 32:14
Love it. Justin, I want to be the first one to thank you. Thanks for sharing your lesson, your journey. I really appreciate it. Everyone, check out 9thCO.com, more episodes of the podcast and Justin, thank you and we’ll see everyone next time.
Justin Cook 32:27
Thanks so much.
