Amara Omoregie Breaks Down Some Great Stuff on How to Build and Manage a Team

Atiba de Souza: Hey, welcome to Build Your Team. Today, my guest is my personal coach, Amara Omoregie, and she is the founder and president of amaraREPS. And believe me, when I tell you, this woman is sharp. She is, she impresses me. She blows me away. Literally every time I shot with our and today on today's show is no different.

Amara's going to break down some really, really great stuff for us in terms of building our team and managing our team. Now, as always, we are brought to you by Client Attraction Pros. If you're ready to become a thought leader in your industry, if you're tired of people saying, "I don't know who you are."

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Amara, welcome to Build Your Team. 

Amara Omoregie: I'm super stoked to be here. This is such a cool topic. I'm glad you are tackling this. 

Atiba de Souza: Oh, well, well. Thank you. Now, before we jump in, why don't you tell us— give us a little bit of a background as to who you are and, heck, even how you became my coach? 

Amara Omoregie: Oh, okay. My name is Amara Omoregie. I run a, you know, decent sized agency here in Long Beach, California. 

Atiba de Souza: You're being modest.

Amara Omoregie: It's, you know, it depends on who you are. So would say it's big. Some would say it's small. I'd say it's pretty small, but that's, I guess, it's relative. And my role, we've pivoted and or grown into becoming a— we would call "growth agency. However, we're focused on marketing and sales ops, first and foremost. Right. I've been in marketing— I've been in sales since I was 19 at Toyota on the line selling cars. But I'm so glad I got a sales foundation before I got a marketing foundation because it makes marketing that much easier. And then I went into marketing shortly after I've worked for several agencies managing tens 50, 50 clients at a time.

You know, back when social media was just MySpace. Facebook before they had business pages and doing media buying for major major brands and things like that. At the time, doing social media, you know, enterprise social media analytics for companies like Too Faced Cosmetics that you see at Sephora and things like that.

So, I've worked on teams, I've managed teams. I've been a project manager, program manager and now agency owner for 14, 15 years now. Which has been really, really awesome. And I have definitely had my fair share of challenges, managing teams. Um. 

Atiba de Souza: Sure.

Amara Omoregie: I'm a digital marketer certified partner. Been for a really long time. And so I became a coach for digital marketer through being a partner for a long time. And I always wanted to support my partner community and the engaged community, the market— and business owners. So that's how I became a coach. They had an opening and they reached out. So I'm honored. For the opportunity. 

Atiba de Souza: Yeah, and I get the benefits of that. So that's absolutely awesome. Now, she is being modest when she says that, you know, she has this little agency in Long Beach, California, guys. Let me tell you, so my introduction to Amara and I don't even think she knows this, but it was in Austin, Texas, and we were at a conference together and there were probably what, two, 300 people in that room.

But something about the way this woman just kept walking back and forth. I was like, this woman must be super powerful. And then what was it on day two? Because I didn't know who she was. And then on day two, she hit the stage and she just laid out some stuff, some of which we will talk about today, but she just laid out some stuff about team, about building, and operations inside the sales and marketing that just was like woah, just amazing.

 And so I was in awe since then, and then was fortunate for her to become my coach as well as part of the digital marketer community. So, Amara, now, you know, we know we have a friend in common, Jeff Hunter. And Jeff is a regular here and Jeff and I talk a lot about, you know, the process of hiring staff. Whether that's virtual staff or in person staff, whatever it is. We talked a lot about that process. And a lot of our listeners have that kind of question because they're new and they're really trying to get off the ground with hiring. But we both know that that's like planning a wedding. 

Amara Omoregie: Yeah.

Atiba de Souza: You can plan it all you want for the wedding day, but the marriage starts the very next day and that's the rest of your life.

And there's a whole lot more work on the back end than there is on the absolute front end of just, you know, hiring someone. So, one of the kinds of start there and my big question to you, and I'm going to kind of just launch it out there to you and you can take it wherever you want to go. Okay. So you hired someone. Now, what? What do you do next?

Amara Omoregie: It's a great question. So, I think there's a lot of different things that happen when you hire somebody, right? Is this person an independent contractor? Is this person part time? Are they hourly? Are they an employee that's being paid benefits? And, there's something transformational about hiring your first person.

I really want to have my first person, that's like, now what do I do, right? Nine out of 10 times, and it's okay if this is you, I'm giving you permission to be this person, you have no processes in place. You haven't written down the things that you want them to do, they're pretty much just sitting next to you and shadowing you and trying to absorb and trying to just be helpful, which is really a travesty for them because they want to be useful.

And, you know, we make the mistake as newbie, inexperienced employers of not setting them up for success. So what you do and what you should actually do are two very different things. Before you hire somebody, I don't care if they're just working for two, or a two hour project, be very clear on what you need them to do.

Have their training outlined before they come in on their first day, so that they're set up for success and you can hit the ground running. Whether it's watching videos, reading material, making sure that they, you know, understand the background of the project that they're going to be working on. Even if they're still trying to gather things and get things ready, have that ready so that they can start working. Carve out enough time so they're not just waiting for you in between meetings and sitting there looking crazy, trying to figure out what they have to be doing. 

Yeah, that's what you should do beforehand. Be very clear on the role. And this would be your first person, so they're doing everything which also isn't fair. Know what their limitations are and make sure you hired them for the right thing and make sure you show them what success looks like.

Because a lot of times, especially when you're hiring for something that you're not good at yourself, I find that a lot of business owners will say, "Oh, I hired this person to help be my director of marketing, but they've never actually directed a marketing campaign." Like yikes.

Atiba de Souza: Exactly. It's a yikes for sure. 

Amara Omoregie: Yes, you're definitely setting themselves up for failure and you know, what's unfortunate is some people will rise to the challenge, the occasion, and then they'll go find a new job, love marketing director on their resume because that's the title you gave them because you're underpaying them and over, you know, overworking them or over putting them in a position that they're not prepared for in some way, shape or form.

And then, you know, I get that all the time. I see creative director on an email and I'm like, are on our resume. And I'm like, there's no way you're a creative director just by looking at like the stuff you're doing. Just, it's just unfortunate. It happens way too often. So just make sure you're hiring people, forget the titles.

You're hiring them for what the job is supposed to be doing at the competency, if they're supposed to be doing it. And that you're clear on what they need to be doing and what success looks like. 

Atiba de Souza: Yeah. So you said two things that I wanna kinda jump back into, and dive into a little bit deeper. You talked about training and success, right?

You said, decide how to train them before you hire them. So my question there then is, how as a business owner, do we decide to train someone when we don't know what we're actually doing sometimes? And then how do we, which getting back to that marketing director position, we were just talking about, how do you show them success?

How do you define success for them? 

Amara Omoregie: So, you know, in that conversation, I think they were talking about where I spoke from the state. I talked about different levels of marketers. And I think this is where after the misalignment happens on both sides, which is why this industry is becoming more and more untenable when it goes to hiring. You have people who know how to implement really, really well.

And that's because they're taking something that's already working and just keeping it going. They're just doing the thing that you told them to do. They're not going to necessarily know how to make it better. They're not going to necessarily know how to find the problems.

They know it's wrong and that's okay. Sometimes power implementers are power implementers for a reason until they've been given the right training on strategy. So it isn't something that just comes with the territory. You have to be trained. You have to be groomed. You have to understand so many different things.

So knowing that, you probably need to hire somebody, even if it's not a full-time person, a consultant, a coach, somebody that can come in and tell you where your areas of opportunities are, how to execute those and help train that person. Get things back up and running so that you can use that person's implementation skills to implement at the level that you need them to.

Atiba de Souza: Gotcha. Gotcha. So that's a really great point and I hope you guys caught that. So what Amara just kind of gave us there was that sometimes, you know, you may define a position and say, "This is the position I want. I want to bring this person in. I'm going to go write the job description, do all the different things that we talk about that you should do in the hiring process." Right. But in order to really set yourself up for success after they show up, you actually may need a third party's opinion on what you're doing to show you where some of your holes are, what some of your opportunities are, and as you said, as well, some of that training that you— or how you should even train this person and what you should expect from this person as they come in.

So that's, that's a really, really a great point. I think so many of us need to hear because so many of us don't want to spend that money on that person because we feel like, well, we'll just figure it out. 

Amara Omoregie: Well, that leads to broken technology, leads to misuse the technology, having the wrong technology, having the wrong strategy, and it'll hit a plateau at some point.

And so, even if you can't afford to bring on a CMO or a director of marketing or marketing manager, full time, have someone that you can consult with, you know, once a quarter. To 5, 10 hours at a time. And there were out there that can look, things over, build your plan for you. And you guys just execute.

I do that for clients all the time, where they have marketing teams and it's just like, we'll help them— maybe do some things that they can't do internally, but the rest they have their teams and they execute and that's totally okay. But not having a good strategy is worse than having a great person executing the same thing over and over again.

 I'd rather have a good strategy and then figure out how I'm gonna execute it versus just having someone pushing buttons, like leads to nowhere.

Atiba de Souza: Exactly. I learned this from Jack Welch who learned it from the franchising industry that, 95% of workplace failure is due to poor systems, which lead right back to your strategy.

Right. So, yeah, completely agree there. So now, okay. So we've got somebody in, let's say we're in that place now we've hired someone. Let's talk about communicating with them, communicating what you want done. So we've done the training. Okay. They've been trained, but now it's actually time to start assigning tasks and duties and communicating what you want done and then how you actually track that they're doing it and getting the results. What have you learned in your time? And I know that's a loaded question, cause I know the answer because we talk about it all the time, but what have you learned in your last 15 years?

Amara Omoregie: Document everything, even if it's the wrong thing, because at least you can fix it. Start somewhere.

Everybody does things a different way. And even you will do things differently. The next time you go to do the same thing that you've seemingly done, quote, unquote the same way over and over and over again. So, document it. Cause even you will screw it up or miss one tiny little step along the way and things that seem super easy but have a lot of steps are the things that are most likely to fail or one tiny detail goes missing and it ruins the whole campaign or something like that. Document it, just document it. Like we do webinars all the time for clients and there's like 150 steps. My team has it so dialed in that they feel like it's the easiest task on earth.

And it's just second nature. I'm like, that's because the system is there, you guys. I remember when we first started doing webinars, we've missed one tiny detail. It's like, "Oh my God, people can't register. Oh my goodness, we missed this, you know, this isn't syncing with that. So the leads aren't getting notifications" or whatever the case may be, right?

Atiba de Souza: Right. 

Amara Omoregie: And so, it's like, we don't miss those steps anymore because it's so documented and every single tiny details there. So even if somebody knew how to come on board and do it, it would be done the same exact way each time. So don't underestimate how complicated or uncomplicated simple things are even difficult things are. Document everything. Every single thing. When you get your second person onboard or third person, or even if it's just you and one other person doing things. Have check-ins. Don't just assume someone's doing something right. Have clear milestones on completion because no matter how big or small the project is because people have typos, people have little small errors, and even have that person check you and make sure that you didn't make errors and make sure you completed all the steps.

Having an extra person check things is super important. We don't let anything go out in the company. I don't let things go out. Nobody. Without somebody at least just double checking to make sure that we didn't accidentally miss something. 

Atiba de Souza: That last part is so super important too, because we can so easily miss things. Right. And you know, if in the world that we live in, we call them playbooks and they're in their audit playbooks and that type of thing. And yes, we audit everything before it leaves. It needs to get audited to make sure that it was correct. No matter how simple it is, because at the end of the day, what leaves us represents us.

Now, how do you communicate tasks by how do you tell someone what to do and when it's due?

Amara Omoregie: So we use ClickUp, our project management system. And I don't want to say it doesn't matter what project management system you use, but I guess it kind of doesn't depending on how many people you have. You know, give people a place where their task lives so that they know where to find things.

Be very clear on how to communicate the status of those tasks. Like, should he work on them now? Should you work on them later? What day should you start them? What day is it due? What's the priority and so on and so forth. So you kind of have to have that figured out. If you're not a project manager, you might need to hire one.

Specially if we're giving somebody, you know, bulk dump of tasks all the time. You gotta be able to set them up for success. You got to know how to prioritize and make sure. And here's the thing when everything's a priority, nothing's a priority. And so everything's a priority. Nothing's a priority. So, you got to check yourself and make sure that you're not overprioritizing everything with people so that they can get things done in a timely fashion.

You're giving people enough runway and lead time to get things done. Like, you know, don't plan a webinar the day before you want to have it. Plan it like, two or three weeks out. So you can have time to promote it and you're just being really thoughtful about what you're promoting. Make sure you're using briefs, even with one person, because it's great to have like a single source of truth document that outlines what you're doing, why you're doing it, what your objective is of that campaign or thing that you're doing.

So everybody's aligned. So like, even if you have a graphic designer and a copywriter or, someone pushing the buttons in the system to get it set up. Everybody knows what the purpose is. So when the designer goes to design something, if it's a sale, they know how to make it look. Or if it's an announcement, they know how to make it look.

Or if it's something terrible, like we're closing our doors. I don't know. They have content that it isn't just content, you know, that they have to try to figure out, right? Same with the copywriters, same with the implementers. They have full context of what they're doing so that any decisions that they have to make are in line with the objective of whatever task you're making. It takes extra effort to make briefs.

But once you start making them, you can restart to reuse them because there's some great foundational stuff that happens there when you're communicating about different types of tasks. Like, we do podcasts all the time for one of our clients. And so we reused that structure, the run of show, we reuse, like, our editing notes and, the intros, the outros and all those things.

And we're just changing out the things that make this podcast unique, but we spend a lot of work perfecting our briefs and optimizing them reorganizing them. So our teams can use them most effectively when communicating about projects. 

Atiba de Souza: So let me see if I got that clear and just for everyone else too. So you have guru that has SOPs and processes, right? And then for each project and tasks and stuff, you're creating briefs. So this tells you what to do, and this tells you why you're doing it. 

Amara Omoregie: Well, one tells you— one tells you how to do it, how to execute it. And the other one tells you what we're doing. Process all the background information, copy design direction, the objective to increase sales or whatever the case may be.

You know, the purpose, like the clients requesting this for this very special occasion, it's not a public facing thing, or it is a public facing. Just lay 'em all on the background and know that you get the best outcome. Right.

Atiba de Souza: Right. Cause that's what it's all about is making sure we get the best outcomes for our clients and you're tracking all of that stuff inside of ClickUp.

Right. Okay. So, let's peel the veil back a little bit and let's talk ClickUp for just a moment. Okay. I've had the pleasure of looking at ClickUp and full disclosure. We use ClickUp. Okay. As well. And I'm not even going to lie to you guys. We use ClickUp because of Amara. Okay. Full disclosure, because we've learned so much in the time through our coaching that it was just like, yeah.

Yeah. It can really do what we're looking for, but ClickUp can be intimidating. Let me just say.

Amara Omoregie: A lot of features a lot of features. And I always say, keep it simple. You don't have to use everything to use it properly. Just use it well. Just use the feature. Use the tasks. You know, communicate, learn how to communicate on those tasks.

Use the statuses. You don't have to use every single thing in ClickUp, 'cause that gets overwhelming. And then your teams are focusing on how to use ClickUp versus doing our tasks. So be very direct with how you want them use any project management system. If everybody's using it the same way, the data rolls up properly.

If everybody's using it a million different ways, it becomes this whole mess. Yeah. 

Atiba de Souza: So, if I'm a business owner and I'm at a place where I'm listening to us have this conversation and this banter back and forth here, and I'm realizing that, okay, I'm hiring people and yes, I need to work on my processes and my training and my SOPs.

And, you know, I need to communicate better what they're doing and why they're doing it and how they're doing it and all of the information that needs to be communicated for the project, and for their tasks. And then there's this ClickUp thing that exists and, you know, it can all live inside of here, but good grief!

That's a lot to now think about and think through. Is there a place that they can go to get help?

Amara Omoregie: Yeah. I mean, we have our Mastermind. It's still in beta or about the launch at any day. Now I've said that for two months now. Just ping me and kicked me in the pants and I'll totally get it done sooner rather than later.

But, your girl has a lot of clients take care of. So, yes, we have a lot of employees and a lot of clients. And so, but we're getting it launched. We're getting it launched. If not, we do one-on-one until the beta gets launched, but you can reach out hello@amarareps.com and, just email me and we'll get you in. If the beta isn't launched in time, you really need help.

But yeah, we'd definitely help streamline a lot of that stuff for folks. And it's not just for marketing teams, you can do it for individual stuff as well. Just making sure that. Yeah, making sure that you guys have a paper trail and everything. It's great because you can go back and see what happened or how did we do this project last time we did it.

Start creating templates, just make sure everything's on the same page and make sure everybody has enough work or making sure they don't have too much, making sure you understand how— when you need to hire somebody because it's getting too much. It really helps you be in control of the flow versus life just happening to you and work just happening to you and try to figure out how to get it all done.

It's a lot of work to maintain. It's a lot of work to manage, but it's really great. Get it sooner rather than later. 

Atiba de Souza: Yeah, and I couldn't agree more. And so I'm just going to jump in and tell a personal little story here on this and why this has worked really well for me and why I wanted to introduce this to you guys.

Okay. And really have Amara start to have this conversation. Okay. Because you know, for everybody, I think it's different. Here's what it was for us internally as we made this transition into ClickUp. It was about time tracking for us. And it was about everyone using ClickUp and having all of their tasks inside of ClickUp so that we had real visibility of how long it took them to do each thing.

Okay. Once we were able to get that information, we could see so many inefficiencies and efficiencies. We were able to see people who were complaining that they felt overworked because there was too much on their plate that there really actually weren't.

Right. And they were just being inefficient and we needed to go back and change some processes, redo some retraining to be able to help them refocus their time and be more productive and feel less stressed, honestly is what it turned out for them. Right. And so that's what it was for us. That's what it was for us.

And I don't know what it will be for you. And Amara, I know you've helped a ton of people because you are ClickUp. I don't want to get it wrong, your actual title with ClickUp but it's— she's a Vetted Consultant with ClickUp. So in other words, she knows her stuff. Right. And so I know you've seen a lot of different agencies, a lot of different companies that have implemented ClickUp and had different results that were really great for them.

And that's one of the beauties areas, it's such a robust tool that it will solve the problem that you're having with managing your team. Would you agree with that, amara? 

Amara Omoregie: Yeah. I mean, if you use it properly, yes. I mean, the thing about SAS is that they make a lot of promises.

And they don't really teach you how to use it properly. So that's where the huge disconnect is. If you don't know anything about project management or how to get to the end result, you can get lost in it. So I don't want you to like, start ClickUp and think, well, it's just solving my problems, what the heck is wrong here?

It's not, it's not even that. It's like, like Atiba said, time-tracking is huge and I've heard people say on stages, "Oh, you don't need a time track. Oh, you don't need to be doing hourly estimates." It's like, what? Like the only thing you can try and track in our world is time. The only way that you can determine efficiency, inefficiencies is time for certified project managers say they don't do time estimates.

And I'm like, how do you establish workload? Number of tasks? That's not irrelative or relevant or anything. Right. And so, he's absolutely right. Time tracking is a great equalizer for everything. You know, once you become more efficient, your estimates don't change. You continue to allow for a certain amount of time for things.

But you know, when you realize you can get more done with less people, that's when you become more profitable. 

Atiba de Souza: Exactly. And ya'll hear that? More profitable. And if you're not in this to become more profitable, well, that's a whole nother issue. Before we go, I want to go back to your Mastermind that you're launching.

And so in this Mastermind, if you could give us a 30 seconds as to who it's for, what they're going to learn and what the result is going to be coming out of it? 

Amara Omoregie: Sure. So, I'd say when I used to work at my old agencies, I worked with several project managers, senior project managers, working on major, major a hundred thousand dollars projects.

And it was weird to me that so many of them, project managed differently within the same company and yet worked with the same teams. Some like spreadsheets, some liked base camps, some like this, and like that, it was just bizarre. And so, I adopted base camp because that's just, I was like technology? Let's use it! You know?

And then when I worked at another agency after that same thing, Just no— they didn't teach me how they managed projects. I was just managing them my way. And then all the creatives had to kind of follow suit. And so when I started my own agency, you know, we use our project management system our way, but forever, I was like, okay, well maybe I'm just not doing project management right. So, I did certifications, got additional training. Come to find out, nobody's really has a standardized way of integrating project management with technology and that's super important because it's one thing to have theory, and how you should do it. And then it's another to actually use some technology and try to implement it with technology and get the reporting that you need and so on and so forth.

So, when we went to go to switch systems, we were using Teamwork at the time. My issue with that was that all this stuff was disconnected. So we would time track, but like you couldn't use tracking information for billing. It was just insane. Right. And so, we went on a quest to find our new project management system, I realized it wasn't the project management system that was the problem. It was that marketing in and of itself didn't have methodology, any kind of solid methodology. And so we ended up coming up with our own methodology that our whole team, would utilize. And so instead of hiring a project manager and having them project manage their way.

And then the team has to deal with this person's way of managing projects. No, our team manages projects the exact way our new project manager is going to come into our system, learn our system, and manage the way our system works, because it all rolls up to how our stakeholders can look at that data.

What do we need to hire people? Who's being most efficient? How do we bonus people based on that efficiency, et cetera, et cetera. Right? And so the Mastermind teaches that methodology, first and foremost. That's what we do in our first day. Is implement a methodology that your leadership teams, your project managers and implementation people can utilize. Next, we go into proper project planning, tableting setting up your systems and stuff like that. Then we get into onboarding your team, how to get your team onboard and using it. And it's very quick. It takes 15 minutes to train them. It's like that by design. So that you're not teaching them technology or teaching them more about how to communicate within their tasks and on projects.

Right next, we get into some automation and reporting. And then the next they do, integrations and stuff like that. Managing your billing cycles, making sure that your billing aligns with your time tracking. If you have billing through not an agency that might not matter, although, you still want to have a budget for your marketing team.

How much we're spending on their efforts, how much time has been in the efforts, what those efforts yield as far as ROI versus how much you're investing in them. It's still important to have that information. So I have heard marketing teams still use that information to analyze, in a more drill downed fashion, what they're doing and how efficient their efforts are.

Atiba de Souza: Fantastic. 

Amara Omoregie: Yes. Oh yeah and then we're doing— go ahead. And then we're doing a biweekly, like additional training. So I'm going to do some more hiring, but not just like how to hire, but like how to organize talent, how to interview based on how you're organizing the talent structures. Having a review system in place, a compensation bonus structure, project planning. I even believe certain project teams managed differently than others. So really drilling down into how to manage web development, how to manage content, how to manage media buying, how to manage sales enablement type projects. So we're going to get into that stuff. And then hopefully in the fall, we'll have a certification for project managers, so they can come in and learn and stay on top of project management best practices. 

Atiba de Souza: So, I hope you guys see why I started this entire conversation with, okay. So I hired someone now, what? Because Amara knows now what, did y'all catch that? Y'all caught all of that. I mean, she went all the way through to bonus structure, guys. Okay. All the way to bonus structure.

So really, I hired someone now, what? Now, what? Do Amara's Mastermind. 

Yeah.

I know it sounds like she's talking a lot about marketing teams, and she is, but the methodologies and stuff that she's teaching can be used in any business, in any situation, might just slight tweak here, slight tweak there, but the foundation of what you're going to learn can be used in your business.

And as we said earlier, sometimes that's what you need first. Sometimes you need that coach first, who can actually point out some things to you and lay a roadmap for you so that when you get those first people in, they actually have a track to run on and in order to be successful. Amara, I can't thank you enough for being here.

You know, we can keep going, but we we've got to stop at some point. I know. Right. So maybe, we'll have you back and do some more and honestly, I'd love to get you even too— I didn't tell her this guys. So I'm putting on camera to get her to say yes to this one, okay, watch this hook, guys. I'd love to even get you on some of my other channels where we actually talk more about marketing and defining your audience.

I think we can have a lot of fun talking there too. So, you have to be here for that too. But, Amara, again, thank you for being here. Before you go, do me a favor, let everybody know how to reach you and how to get more information on your Mastermind that's going to be— and honestly, guys, by the time you're watching this video, the Mastermind will be live. I know, Amara, they will be live. So, how do they get in contact with you?

Amara Omoregie: You can go ahead and reach out at hello "H E L L O" @ amarareps.com (hello@amarareps.com) for now, it will be on the website soon at AmaraReps.com, but yeah, it'll definitely be on the website soon, but for now, you can just shoot me an email and, or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to answer your LinkedIn messages as well. Any questions or anything like that.

Atiba de Souza: Awesome. And guys, as always, we'll put the link to her LinkedIn and that email address in the description down below. So make sure you get that and sign up for her. I'm telling you, this is my coach. So I'm telling you, I know what you're about to get. It's about to be some good stuff. Alright. Alright, everybody. Amara, thank you for being here and we'll see you next time.