John Corcoran 16:06
I mean, that’s a perfect example, because you’re someone who knows more in your little pinky finger than most people that I know about health, about what’s good for you. And yet, when you got serious about getting fit, you hired a personal trainer, you hired a personal trainer to hold you accountable to actually do the things that you knew you wanted to do. And it’s been really transformative.
Jeremy Weisz 16:32
They have specialized knowledge, like, could I go on YouTube and watch a bunch of videos, and I studied stuff for like, 15 years, but they have specialized knowledge in this realm that is not my specialty.
John Corcoran 16:47
Yeah? It could be something like, Oh, you’re lifting that weight in the wrong way, and you’re going to injure yourself, and you’ll be out of commission for two months, you know. And then boom, there goes the entire routine, yeah. That’s a great.
Jeremy Weisz 16:59
So point level of control. So the seventh one, so after what’s the impact of internal resources, the seventh one is, what’s the level of control and customization required? Talk about that with control.
John Corcoran 17:17
Yeah, I think with that, it really has to do with, how are you at delegating to a specialist? Is this something that you need to have control over? Are you like that throughout the business, where you need to have your fingerprints on every different thing that’s going on, or are you able to delegate? Are you able to let someone, you provide the guideline, and of course, your vision is throughout, but you know that it’s going to get across the finish line, even if you’re not watching every different piece of it. So those are some considerations, like, How much control do you need to assert upon it? Or can you trust? Can you delegate?
Jeremy Weisz 18:04
Yeah, and that’s, I find it like a muscle that I have to use and or people have to use to get okay with it. Yeah, eight. What are the risks associated with each option? Right? So we’re talking, versus in house or outsourcing reliability, which kind of goes back into the, you know, some of these kind of overlap, right? Because if you your team is overworked or they get busy, it’s not that the team members not reliable. It’s just like they have other priorities that take precedence over this, right?
John Corcoran 18:42
Or even different skill sets, right? They might like editing video and do it in their spare time, but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to produce show notes that are up to a caliber that you’re going to be proud of representing your company.
Jeremy Weisz 18:57
Yeah. So what’s the quality and reliability risks as an option, right? I mean, I was talking to a really high level executive at a publicly traded company, okay? And they’re doing consulting, and we get on the call, and they were interested in doing a podcast, but that’s not what you’re referring to. He’s like, look, I created this website for my consulting business. And I’m thinking, why would you, can you create a website for yes, you can. You can go on like Wix and like, do it, but like, is this representing you from a quality standpoint? And I was nice about it, but I was just like, listen, there’s professionals that this is, they could just craft you like an amazing website. It doesn’t have to be crazy expensive either, but so it’s a risk. People check out what you just DIYed, and be like, oh, this is not for me.
John Corcoran 20:02
They have a bunch of flash and Blinky icons and a little counter at the bottom and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah. That don’t really helps with the reputation.
Jeremy Weisz 20:11
There’s risk involved. Number nine, what’s the strategic importance of the task? So, number nine, what’s the strategic importance of the task? Yeah, that’s a great question. So, is this task really that important, right? I mean, maybe you just don’t do it at all, like, in our case, obviously, you know, like you said, there’s so many benefits from like, a podcast perspective, like, there’s a lot of strategy that goes in. Is it going to require a hands on approach to execute all these things?
John Corcoran 20:45
Or which parts of the approach require the hands on component to it? In the podcast context, a lot of our discussions that we have with clients are, what should you be spending time on, and what should you not be spending time on. And I’ve seen people, they start doing podcasts, and they spend all this time on things that don’t matter, like they’re spending the time adjusting the font size on the website. Like you are far too important to be spending time on that. Or maybe they enjoy creating little video snippets, and so they do that in their free time. But a client is worth 2 million bucks. Should you be spending an hour, two hours on the weekend, doing that? If you enjoy it, it’s a hobby.
That’s fine, but should you be spending your time on that when having another conversation could lead to another $2 million client? That’s a much better use of your time, you know. And that’s really gets to kind of that strategic importance of what you should be spending your time on, the most strategically important uses of your time.
Jeremy Weisz 21:54
Number 10 is what is the potential for long term relationships. So, could outsourcing this help build relationships with external partners, and they have a bunch of relationships in that industry that might be really valuable in the long run.
John Corcoran 22:10
Yeah, we’ve done that before, where we’ve hired people, hired vendors, we’ve hired companies. We paid them because we want to develop a relationship with them and their network beyond the service that they provide.
Jeremy Weisz 22:24
100% and Number 11 is, what’s your client lifetime value, right? Because if you know, maybe it’s not that big and there needs to be something in there for it to make sense for a company to hire partners for it. Yeah, so these are some of the questions I like to talk and we’ll talk about, you know, some of the reasons we found why companies DIY it or handle it in house. But I do one of the biggest I remember, one of that podcast episodes I did that was the most resounding example of this in-house versus outsource was Mobileye. Right. Mobileye I had the founding engineer on and Mobileye is a chip company that helps fuel an autonomous vehicle, self-driving car, essentially. And Intel, what they realized was they had all of the chips in some of these self-driving cars.
And Mobileye had one chip in the car. And Intel was like, wait, why do we not have all the chips? Like, literally, why? What’s this one chip? Like, why don’t we just figure out how to create this one chip so we have all of the chips in the car that run the car? And so they evaluated and talked to Mobileye, so they had to make a decision. Do we create a whole team around in this expertise of creating this one chip, or do we outsource and buy Mobileye as a company? Okay, I’ll have to fact check this, but I believe Intel bought Mobileye for $15.2 billion maybe it was 15.3 Listen, a point one decimal place. John is 100 million, so I don’t want to get that wrong, but let’s just pretend, for argument’s sake, it’s $15.2 billion that means Intel thought it was cheaper, more effective to buy the company for 15.2 billion, then to create a separate division and team and everything like, let’s say they go, oh, we’re going to invest 10 billion. That still be 5 billion last in paying for Mobileye. But they found it you mentioned this before we hit record about they had a head start.
John Corcoran 25:02
Yeah, and they probably time some of the other factors we just talked about, the questions we just talked about, were probably weighed into that. Yeah, Mobileye had been doing it for 10 years, longer than Intel had. So it probably would have taken Intel 5, 6, 7 years.
Jeremy Weisz 25:15
They’re going to make all the mistakes that Mobileye had figured out in those 10 years and they shortcutted it, they fast tracked it, yeah, and bought them.
John Corcoran 25:25
It was strategically important, right? This wasn’t like a side mirror in the car. This was a key component of the car, and will be a key component of the cars going forward in the future. So it’s strategically important to them. So, yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 25:41
So a lot of these questions, like, we take it through this example Mobileye probably had long term relationships that they built with different car manufacturers now that Intel has so, take those questions through any decision as far as that goes. So let’s talk about the reasons we have found why companies, DIY, are handling a house, one of the main ones is cost, right? Talk about that, and on the surface, how are people evaluating cost?
John Corcoran 26:14
I mean, on the surface, oftentimes they think that it may be saving you money to take it in house, especially if you’re using, as we mentioned earlier, a fixed resource, someone who’s already being paid. But the truth is, if they’re working on this project, they can’t work on this other project. They’re torn between different projects. There’s hard costs involved in that person’s time. If they take longer to complete that project, then it’s going to, it actually ends up costing, can cost you more, right? So that’s definitely a consideration. An analogy would be like, coast to coast travel.
Like, if I want to go, I live in San Francisco, if I want to go to New York City, you know, I could drive myself across country and that would probably be less expensive. Or I can hop on a plane. The tickets going to cost me something more, you know, I’ll still get from A to B, I’ll get from coast to coast. There’s two different ways of achieving that, but the cost will be significant. I’ll be stuck in driving myself cross country for a week. That’s a significant cost to me, and I got to pay for gas, and there’s wear and tear in the car and all kind of stuff. So there’s other considerations that go into cost.
Jeremy Weisz 27:22
The next one is a team member. We hear this a lot. Hey, I have a team member. They have a lot of free time. They’ve also maybe expressed interest in doing some of these tasks. How do we think about that?
John Corcoran 27:37
Yeah, and that has happened more frequently as our world, podcasting has become more popular, and people are interested in listening podcasts and stuff like that. Oh, I like listening to podcasts. I’d like to be involved in this project. A couple of considerations that you should think about is, even if a team member says they want to stop and they want to manual that manage that process, you’re going to have to manage that person, and probably other people too that don’t have that expertise. This is what happened to me my first four or five years doing the podcast. I didn’t even realize it, if you’d asked me at the time, but I was basically project managing it, and I was doing a crappy job of that. And then it was when I came Jeremy and I had started a business together, and I was like, Jeremy, I see you putting out two episodes per week of your podcast.
You’ve been doing this for years and years. I’m totally inconsistent with mine. What am I doing wrong? And he pointed all that out to me, that I was needed to manage people. I had no real good, defined process for it, and we totally revamped it, and it became far more effective for me. Another person, another consideration is that person, that team member, could leave. They probably will at some point leave. And if all that knowledge is baked in that one person, we’ve seen this happen over and over again, podcast just grinds to a halt. We talk to people all the time that, you know, we look at like, oh, they come to us and they’re like, oh, I had a podcast. It’s, you know, and we look at it. And last one they, published was two years ago, and it’s like, well, what happened? They’re like, oh, well, I have this team member who was working on it, and they left and nothing was documented.
There was no SOPs and boom leads drive to a halt. Boom business development grinds to a halt. These things end when that one team member leaves. And then I think I touched on a second ago, but that person may not have all the expertise that you need. Even if they’re interested in it, that doesn’t mean they have all the expertise.
Jeremy Weisz 29:30
Yep. Another reason we have found companies do it is they’re a micro they like to they don’t want to delegate. They need to control different pieces of the process, all the pieces of the process, and they really kind of micromanage the process, and they want control again, if it’s someone’s core competency, I totally get it right. That’s like, that’s what they do. But outside of the core competency. See, you know, it’s, it needs to be delegated, right, to get done, right? And so that is a key factor, something like, you know, I need it a specific way every time, which, again, like for any agency you’re working with, they can follow your guidelines and take what you need and execute on it. But let them do what they do best, because that’s they’re the expert. Right?
When I go into the coach for health, I’m like, hey, just tell me what to do. Like, I’ll just listen, you’re the expert. Tell me what I need to do, and I try and be as coachable as Pro as possible with the process. Yeah, so, and the fourth one is, we’ve had people come to us and they’ve done the podcast before in the past, or they’re doing currently, and they said, oh, I’m not getting ROI. I tried it already, and it doesn’t really work. And that could be for Facebook ads agency, that could be for email I tried doing this, it didn’t work. And what do we talk about with those cases.
John Corcoran 31:01
I mean, in many cases there could be a lot of different failure points. And we oftentimes think that we’re the best at diagnosing where we went wrong or we went awry, but oftentimes we need the perspective and an outside expert to come in and see what we did wrong. In terms of the podcast, we’ve done other episodes where we talked about the million different things that people could be doing. Doing wrong could be a lack of consistency on reaching out, following up with prospective guests. It could be not having a structure for doing the actual interview. It could be the questions that you ask. It could be the strategy of the types of guests you have on. We’ve seen lots of people that interview B level celebrities, rather than interviewing their you know, best client, who they’ve had for 10 years and who has referred tons of clients to them, you should interview that person. So a lot of times we see people making those sorts of mistakes or not reading a sponsor message describing what they do. I’ve been a guest…
Jeremy Weisz 32:02
Like, there’s so many strategies that they’re not employing, that there’s so many failure points, right? And so that goes into having someone who’s an expert team, that’s an expert to help the best example I love with this is we did an event, and someone in the room, someone suggests, oh, you should try Facebook ads, right? And that person said, yeah, we tried that. Didn’t work. And then someone else in the room was a Facebook ad agency that drives, drove 10s of millions of dollars to their clients every month, and it’s just sort of funny. And they were speaking up and like, Hey, I think you should try this. And we kind of interrupted and said, hey, just so, you know, like you say, doesn’t work. She drives 10s of millions of dollars every month. So maybe it’s your process that doesn’t work. It’s not Facebook ads that doesn’t work. So is an example. So yeah, go ahead.
John Corcoran 33:01
Yeah. And we carry these biases throughout our lives. You know, when you talk about getting fit, getting healthy, losing weight, people try different diets. They don’t work. It doesn’t work, right? And then, and then some new health regime comes along with it might work for them, but they don’t want to try it, because we have this baggage in our head about the time that it didn’t work, or the multiple times that it didn’t work for us previously. So, yeah, those are all…
Jeremy Weisz 33:25
The last was really, someone who comes to us in their, you know, or your agency, and they basically express that they’ve got it all figured out, so they don’t see the value in the expertise and strategy, and they feel like, okay, I can, I can figure I can figure this out myself, and I don’t need you, right? So it’s more of like a mentality perspective. Um, the last thing we’ll talk about is like, so when you’re thinking of evaluating an agency, an external partner agency, what are the things you should look for in evaluating that that company?
John Corcoran 34:05
Yeah, and one is, how much expertise, experience do they have in this specific field? Not every different thing under the sun, but this specific, field for us, in the B2B podcasting context, combined 30 plus years of experience working in this area. The next one is strategic advice should really underlie everything that you do, and it should really come first, especially in the B2B podcasting world, you need to have the right strategy, or you can do everything else flawlessly. If the strategy is wrong, you will not be doing it for very long. You will end up very frustrated.
Jeremy Weisz 34:51
That goes with any agency like we focus on making sure it makes sense for the business and the strategy and the same thing goes, say, oh, I just want a website. Well, you want to actually driving leads to your business. I just want a podcast. Well, you want it driving partnerships and revenue for your business, right? So focusing on the strategy first is an agency that thinks of your goals is really important. Number three, external accountability.
John Corcoran 35:22
So important, and I think we don’t even realize how important it is. Again, going back to your fitness journey, having a health coach to help hold you accountable, in spite of everything that you already knew about healthy habits, it’s really critical. Because in the B2B podcasting world, it’s not like you build a website and you’re done. Podcast is a journey. It it’s something that you need to do over time. It’s not something that you do once and you’re done. And so you really need to have someone who’s going to have the outside stature to hold you accountable. And it can’t be a internal team member that works for you that reports to you, because they’re just not going to hold you accountable in the way that someone outside of your organization will.
Jeremy Weisz 36:07
And that’s why we’re so part of what we talk about and do with clients is people get assigned that personal trainer for their business development, which is their outreach strategist. The fourth is provide the execution to ease the burden of your team, so an agency that’s actually going to save you and your company tons of time by executing on these things you don’t have to. And then the fifth one provides you with a streamlined, deliberate process.
John Corcoran 36:40
Yeah, and here’s where you can see whether someone’s thought through these pieces or not. And Jeremy, we and our team have collectively put in our 10 proverbial 10,000 hours into this process, and we have very defined thoughts and ideas about how these things should be done, because we know what works and we know what doesn’t. And so we even built software. We built a tool to go with at our podcast copilot that puts all of that into play and into practice.
Jeremy Weisz 37:11
This is one of my favorite ones. It’s the last one. What you should look for, an external partner agency is actually practicing the craft, right? So in our world, let’s say you hire a company to help you their podcast, and they don’t have a podcast, or they don’t release a regular podcast, yeah, it’s like me hiring a super overweight trainer, okay? Which I’m sure there’s good trainers, but like, if they practice what they preach, then I want someone who has a proper diet. They’re working out a lot, and I want to strive to be like them, right? And so, same thing with if you hire a website design company, and you look at their website, and it’s horrendous, yeah, then I get it, it’s like, what’s the saying with the cobblers kids, or whatever, don’t have shoes, but still, like, yeah, it’s, it’s kind of funny. Like, okay, you do this, but you’re not practicing it. Like, obviously doing two episodes a week for like 15 years, right? And so we eat our own dog food, yeah, so to speak.
John Corcoran 38:29
So just kind of to wrap up this episode, I think that obviously, having done the work that we do for so long, we have strong thoughts on how to see success and what leads to disappointing results. But that’s that comes with time. Comes with expertise. It comes with having done it for as long as we have, any final thoughts on that, Jeremy?
Jeremy Weisz 39:00
No, I think we kind of laid out the questions, and we use these questions internally when we make decisions in general and we don’t want to overburden our team, the same way, we advise people not overburdening their team. So hopefully there’s a lot that someone can glean from these particular questions and answer them for themselves.
John Corcoran 39:21
All right, thanks, everyone.
