Building Your Dream Team: Megan Dougherty’s Proven Strategies at One Stone Creative

Atiba de Souza: Hey, everybody! Welcome to another episode of the Build Your Team show. Listen, I know you are working on building your team, or maybe you're pulling your hair out like I am today, managing the team. Yes, we all have those days and those times. My guest today, Megan Dougherty, she is no stranger to those. She is running an agency, but we're gonna talk about her team, how she's built it, and what she has done in the past.

And as always, Build Your Team is brought to you by Client Attraction Pros. Hey, it's time that you become the thought leader of your industry, and we're gonna help you do that and make it fast, easy, and fun. 

Atiba de Souza: Megan, welcome.

Megan Dougherty: Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be here and to be with everyone who is here listening.

Atiba de Souza: Well, one, I'm glad that we're getting to do this. You and I are new fast friends, right?

Megan Dougherty: Very much.

Atiba de Souza: We met — we were on your show. So by the way, if you haven't yet, go check out Megan's show. You can start by listening to my episode if you'd like, but —

Megan Dougherty: You should. It's a good one.

Atiba de Souza: Definitely go start watching or listening to her show as well. So Megan, I wanna take you all the way back to the absolute beginning when you started your agency and you were at that place where you realized, I can't do this alone, I need help. One, what was going through your mind and two, how did you hire your first person?

Megan Dougherty: Oh, that's great. And it's kind of fun to go back there. So, to set the stage, it's 2017. And I've just started this business. Now, I wasn't completely alone. I have a co-founder, One Stone Creative. So her name is Audra Casino. She is an audio production expert engineer. And she's the one who approached me and she's like, "Hey, do you wanna start a business together?"

And I said, "Yes." And so we're like, "Okay, what can we do together?" My background's in digital marketing, hers is in broadcast audio. So we thought, "Okay, we can produce podcasts for business owners." So initially for the first six months or so, we were okay alone with the amount of business that we had.

She was handling the audio. I was doing the other things that we offer as an agency, like show notes and social media and consulting, all that stuff. But then, you know, we started to get a little more clients. We got a little too busy and like, it was way too busy for two people to have an enjoyable life and also be making money.

But we weren't yet making enough money to make hiring a really easy choice, which as I'm sure a situation, no one listening has ever found themselves in. That's completely unique to our situation.

Atiba de Souza: Completely.

Megan Dougherty: But we decided, we really did need someone to handle, the first thing we wanted was admin support.

So when we looked at the tasks that we had, the audio was specialized. We didn't wanna hire for that yet, cuz Audra had plenty of bandwidth. What I was doing was not at all specialized for the most part. Some of like the strategic consulting, kind of show design, like these things, I had to do them at least for now, scheduling blog posts, uploading podcast episodes. These are not things that I needed to be doing. So we need admin support. And that was kind of how we decided that was the first hire that we needed to make, was someone who could do more general admin tasks within the business. And hopefully we'd go from there.

Atiba de Souza: And so makes a ton of sense, right? Makes an absolute ton of sense. And we talk about that a lot too here on this channel. Just that you're bringing in somebody, but your first hire especially needs to be somebody who is taking over a job that you were doing. So it's not like, "Oh my gosh, we're not doing the books."

No one's paying attention to the accounting, which is bad, by the way. You just say, "You go, run and take care of our accounting." It's not that, right?

Megan Dougherty: That's what I do now. It's not what I did then.

Atiba de Souza: Right. And so, how did you go about like — okay, what was the anxiety? Let's start there. What was the anxiety and then how did you overcome that anxiety and actually make that first hire?

Megan Dougherty: So the anxiety was for me in our business, a lot of tiny details for every client have to be done correctly every week. That's the linchpin on which we built our reputation. We keep our relationships for each individual show that we produce. And at the time we were producing maybe five, there were about 20 things that had to be done correctly every single week.

That's a lot of things to get right. And that means we needed to hire for something that's really, really hard to hire for — reliability. We did not do that correctly the first couple of times. I don't mind saying. It took a few tries to find someone who could really fill that role well.

But the anxiety was that we wouldn't be able to, and that anxiety proved to be quite well founded in the early days.

Atiba de Souza: So you went through a couple hires before you got it right. Why didn't you quit?

Megan Dougherty: Oh gosh. Well, that would've mean having to get a job for somebody else and that was a far worse prospect for me than you know — in a pinch I could always go in and do the work myself if needed. So there wasn't like a catastrophic, if it all goes wrong, this is like there's no recovery from option.

And I knew the good hire was possible. I'm not a particular genius in any of these tasks. I was trying to hire for if I could do it, someone else could do it. It was a matter of finding someone whose kind of interests and aptitude and kind of professional values matched the role. Cuz of course, as you know, you can't hire someone who's gonna care about your business as much as you do.

So it was finding someone who cares about kind of the diligence. In the course of it, we found out one of our major company values, which is we do what we say we're gonna do and that underlies everything else that we do. And so if I can talk to someone during an interview process and they're like, "Oh man, I love that."

I'm so into doing what we say we're gonna do. That's a person who I think I know we're gonna be able to work with really, really well.

Atiba de Souza: Yeah. That's awesome. I sarcastically asked you the question, why didn't you quit? Because so many of us feel that way though, we feel like, I hired one person, they didn't work out and I hired another person, they didn't work out. So either I can't hire and so I just gotta do this job, or this business doesn't work, right? 

Megan Dougherty: It's true. There's so many things that go into it too. It's like, are we charging enough to justify the kind of hire that we can pay enough then to be doing that really high quality or we have to fix our pricing.

We have to fix what we're paying people. We have to fix flexibility and work hours. And I had a lot of beautiful theories. I had managed a large team at another company that I'd worked at previously, and it's like, "Oh, I know everything." I've got all these theories and these philosophies that I'm going to polish off and we're going to live by them.

They're going to be fantastic. And then you put them into practice. And when you're the actual owner, it's really different and it really does feel a lot more tense than managing someone else's team is very different than managing your own.

Atiba de Souza: Yeah, absolutely. And you said something that I don't wanna gloss over, and it tied into the joke we started with here, which was, can I afford to hire this person? Do I have the money to be able to hire this person? Not even do I have enough work. I'm overwhelmed, I'm drowning. I got the work. Can I afford it?

Megan Dougherty: The money.

Atiba de Souza: And one of the things, especially for early stage is, we often undervalue our time and don't charge enough. Did you run into that in this process early in the hiring of — and cuz you kind of touched on it, on having update your pricing.

Megan Dougherty: Oh, I'm still not completely through that process to be completely frank. We look at pricing regularly. We look at our offering and our service mixes regulated. We make changes, especially to what we're offering quite frequently. Sometimes we raise prices because costs go up.

And I know that just looking at competitors, I'm still probably undercharging by about 30 to 40% based on what kind of our nearest equivalents are. But I'm kind of okay with that just because of I love the type of people that we're working with as clients right now, and it is a really good match for a particular kind of part of the market.

And I want the business to be sustainable and to be profitable, but I'm not looking to be the next mogul of any kind. So there's some comfortable flexibility there in terms of what we can do, but my main impetus for raising prices when we have to is, it is more about being able to make sure my team is compensated well than myself personally.

Atiba de Souza: Yeah, no, that's a really great point. I was with a friend of mine, Scott Cunningham who's from the other side of Canada over in Vancouver last week. And he was talking about this exact thing. He said that the thing that he had to do early and realize early in his agency was he had to figure out, "If I had a rockstar, how much would I pay them? Where can this role go to? And then set my pricing so that I could pay people at rockstar level."

Megan Dougherty: Smart.

Atiba de Souza: He said that changed his hiring paradigm because now he had the clients that were paying for rockstars and he felt more comfortable to go out and get a rockstar.

Megan Dougherty: Yeah. No, that makes sense. And I think that makes sense, especially if you need rockstars. I would say not every business needs a lot of rockstars. In many cases what you need to know as someone who's — again, my big thing is just really dedicated to doing a good job consistently.

There's so many different personality types, right? That you've gotta take into account when you're building a team and figuring out what you want the culture of your team to be.

Atiba de Souza: Yes, absolutely. And then we're gonna come back to figuring out the culture in just a moment. But before we go too far cuz we just touched on the rockstars and I was gonna go back to another term that you used earlier, particular genius. And you mentioned your co-founder here, that she has the particular genius in audio engineering, right? And so in that case, if you're hiring someone to work for her or to replace her, you are looking for a rockstar who has particular genius, right? Have —

Megan Dougherty: Or passion and trainability.

Atiba de Souza: Say again?

Megan Dougherty: Or passion and trainability.

Atiba de Souza: And so, yeah. So let's talk about that. Because a lot of business owners feel that, and I've heard this from a ton of business owners over the years that it's so hard to find somebody who does what I do. Only I can do this and so I'm glad that you could see yourself not there at all, right? Personally. That's awesome. But for all these other business owners who find themselves, like my business is me.

Megan Dougherty: No, it's not. Sorry. Look, I'm not gonna say this is an easy thing to do. I spent a long time being a company girl. Other places I worked with, I got really invested out. My identity was super wrapped up in my job and it made me completely miserable and burnt out. And I was basically without creative or any other capacity at the age of 27. I started this new business and I absolutely made the distinction. This is going to be a business. I'm going to enjoy it. It's gonna be creatively and intellectually stimulating. I'm gonna do a good job. We're gonna provide value, and at the end of the day, I'm going to close my computer and I'm not gonna think about it till the next day. I love what I do, but it is definitely not my identity anymore. And I try to maintain that for my team too. I don't want them working nights, weekends, I mean, flex schedules. People work whenever they want, but we're produce podcasts for a living. We do a good job, but no one's gonna lose a leg if we screw up. It's important that we keep our commitments, but it's not brain surgery.

Atiba de Souza: Yes. Yes. That's so important. And so now, let's start talking about culture and let's look —

Megan Dougherty: Yeah, let's talk about culture.

Atiba de Souza: — at culture. So now we've hired some people, right? And, did you think about culture before you hired them or did you end up with a group of people and start to say, "What kinda sleep we're making here, guys?"

Megan Dougherty: I guess our situation would be a little bit different than many. There's not a whole lot of collaborative work that happens within my team. The different roles are fairly autonomous. And so we've got kind of our audio camp. On one side and they work together really well.

They're brothers, actually. The first person we hired, I said, "Erwin, you're a fantastic. Do you know anyone who is just like you?" And he is like, "Well, I've got a little brother. I'll take responsibility for training him if you'll hire him. And I said, "Okay, that sounds great."

And now they're both wonderful. And then our writing department is kind of another area, and that's a wonderful woman who has her own business. She's based out of Trinidad and works with teachers who Moonlighters podcast show notes writers.

And so she handles all of that. And then we've got Audra, myself and our account manager, Darla, who kind of just handles the day-to-day and everyone gets along, but we don't do team building exercises. It's not that kind of place. Everyone's friendly, professional, polite, but I wouldn't say, we wouldn't all go camping together, probably.

Atiba de Souza: Yeah. Okay. Understood that. Little known fact, I'm actually from Trinidad too.

Megan Dougherty: I've been informed on very good authority that so is God.

Atiba de Souza: Those words came from the mouth of a Trinidadian for sure. 

Megan Dougherty: Yes. 

Atiba de Souza: There's no doubt about that. I could probably trace the source of that statement. We really needed to as well, and how it propagated throughout the millennia.

Megan Dougherty: I would love to hear that story.

Atiba de Souza: It has to do with the Holy Trinity which is where Trinidad got its name, right?

Megan Dougherty: Oh, that makes sense.

Atiba de Souza: And the piece that Columbus saw when he came, which is why it was called Trinidad because of the three piece and the Trinity. So, yeah. 

Megan Dougherty: Oh, marvelous. I'm going talk to Hazel and she'll be impressed with my new knowledge.

Atiba de Souza: Yeah. That's little bit of the history there.

Megan Dougherty: No, very cool. Thank you so much for that.

Atiba de Souza: Yes. So in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and found God in Trinidad. Anyway, we digress. But that's the fun here of being friends and being able to just talk and that type of thing, right? And so —

Megan Dougherty: And that's one of the fun things I find too about getting to have a team that's distributed around the world is I get to learn so many things about other places that I wouldn't know otherwise. It's marvelous.

Atiba de Souza: And that's exactly where I was going to go. So the next side of this is, you have a team that's distributed around the world. I remember in my 20's when I had a different company in my 20's, I was doing consulting. And I worked within a company that I was doing consulting for within a particular department, and the head of that department was so bullish that he had to see everybody every day that he got me an office to show up to. Even though I was only there like a few days a week. Dedicated a whole office space. He's like, "I want you here." But the world has changed.

Megan Dougherty: Oh, yeah.

Atiba de Souza: Right?

Megan Dougherty: Oh, it has.

Atiba de Souza: But so has management. Now, you said you were a corporate girl for a while, and you did that whole thing.

Megan Dougherty: It was in startup world, but still.

Atiba de Souza: Ooh, that's even tougher. And so that's a great comparison because so many of our listeners are in the startup world in some way, shape, or form as well. So tell me, how has management changed from in-person to virtual?

Megan Dougherty: Well, I can't speak very much to in-person management. The company as I've worked at before was kind of hybrid initially. And when hybrid, there was never an office. It was sitting around the boss's dining room table to work a couple times a week instead of at home, right? That's internet marketing startup world. The team was always fairly distributed.

So when I learned management, I really learned about it kind of from the virtual distributed way. I mean, I've certainly had like managerial style talks with people face to face when that was come up especially in earlier days. But for the most part, I've been working remotely since 2012, 2013 and building teams that way. So that's kinda where my expertise more is on the virtual rather than the in-person management.

Atiba de Souza: Well then, give us that then. Tell us what have you learned about virtual. If you were to distill it down into a few tips, what would you tell someone who's saying, "Hey man, I'm struggling with virtual management." 

Megan Dougherty: Gosh. The first thing I'd probably say is, look at your hiring and look at your team. Did the people match the roles that you need done? And then ask yourself a couple of questions is, what do you need to be confident that something is going? Like what signs, what cues, what information do you need to know to be comfortable that things are getting done as they need to be?

So I've got a bit of a story about this. Despite all of my grand theories and great experience management when I first hired our account manager, I micromanaged her and I was getting involved in the process and I was kind of gumming up the works in different places. And I am forever grateful that she virtually sat me down in a Slack channel one day and she said, "Megan, please back the "F" off and let me do my job."

Atiba de Souza: Well then.

Megan Dougherty: She said very politely, more politely than that. That was the gist of it, was that I was in the way and she was completely right and she's like, "I'm gonna send you an email every morning with anything you need to be aware of on like the ongoing day-to-day basis. Other than that, please don't answer any emails, don't post anything."

I said, "Okay." And now I get my update email every morning. She's working great for the last two years, ever since we had this conversation. But that was what I needed, was just to know if there was an issue. I didn't need to go look and try to find issues. I needed to trust that I'd be told and have someone that I could trust to tell me when something was coming up.

And so being able to have people on your team who feel comfortable one telling you that is without price in terms of the value and then also being self-aware enough if you can manage it to be able to take that kind of feedback or even preempt it if you can.

Atiba de Souza: Yes. Yeah. That's a really great point there. And it's about the system that you set up. And the thing that I love there, because we talk about this a lot here too is, understanding that everything has to kind of fit together. And in order for it to fit together, you have to know who you are and what it is that you want and are expecting, right? So for you, you want that daily email. I've got a friend, Lauren, she's the same way. She actually has a very similar story to you, right? And —

Megan Dougherty: I'm glad to not be alone. That's great.

Atiba de Souza: Whereas, if you send me an email every day, you guarantee I will ignore it because I saw this yesterday, why am I seeing it again today?

I don't wanna see your name again today. Talk to me once a week, once every two weeks, right? But that then informs the type of people that we hire, right? And so recently, I did hire somebody and he loves to send daily emails and I'm just like, "Yeah, somebody else has to manage him cause I can't."

Megan Dougherty: That's what's so great to be able to figure out and learn. You have to kind of experiment I think, especially if you're new at it. You've gotta try out the daily updates and if the daily updates drive you mad, you've gotta try out maybe weekly or I know we've got one client who has our team really well trained and organized on using different channels for different types of communication.

 If text comes through, that's an SOS, that's an emergency. If it's an email, that means, this is not urgent, it needs your attention, but, sometime within the next couple of weeks and getting that understanding of the patterns of communication are really, really good.

Atiba de Souza: Yeah. No, absolutely. That's really, really great suggestion because that is one of the things, and maybe you've experienced this too, that I've seen a lot of people struggle with in the virtual environment is, there are now so many different ways to communicate. So many different. I met a new friend last week who runs an agency out in California.

I met him after I was on stage doing a presentation and he said, "Dude, I took some screenshots of your slides and sent it to my team, and they've already implemented it," right? And I was super excited. Super grateful. But then it took five minutes for him to find where they sent it because he had to check seven different channels to figure out where they sent it to 'em, right?

Megan Dougherty: Oh, that would be maddening. I would find that very challenging.

Atiba de Souza: But that's all of us and we run into to that a lot. And so part of the system is also figuring out, 'Okay, we communicate this way," right? For us, we have Slack and ClickUp.

Megan Dougherty: Ours is similar. We've got Slack. We've got Notion, is what we use for ongoing project management. And then we do email because there's a lot of client conversation that happens as well. So we've got a couple of inboxes that we're all in.

Atiba de Souza: Yeah. Email drives me nuts.

Megan Dougherty: I think I might be the last person in the world who doesn't hate email. I love email.

Atiba de Souza: Let me rephrase. Email among multiple people drive me nuts, right? And so, we saw that by, there is someone who manages the mailboxes, and if information comes in, if it's stated information, in other words, information that we need to keep around for a long time, right? So for example, a client decides that they're gonna change their ideal customer profile, that's a big deal.

Megan Dougherty: You need to know that. That needs to be distributed information.

Atiba de Souza: We actually have a company wiki for every single client.

Megan Dougherty: That's great. Oh, we've got something similar in Notion.

Atiba de Souza: That's where that goes, right? Somebody writes in and, "Oh, I don't like this thumbnail," that goes to ClickUp.

Megan Dougherty: Oh, that's good. It's always interesting to hear how other people are managing that. Cause I think I've been starting to feel in the last little while, just like, "We're due for an upgrade." Some of these systems are — I feel like we've carrying excess communication baggage at the moment, but I haven't identified exactly where it is yet. But definitely, we're probably sharing a little too much in too many places.

Atiba de Souza: I get that. And that's why we streamlined.

Megan Dougherty: You have to do an audit on how things are working at annual might be a little much, but annually or every 18 months. And just be like, "Okay, do we actually need all of the softwares that we have? Do we actually need all of the channels that we're using?" Just a little trimming the fat time is very valuable.

Atiba de Souza: So we do that quarterly.

Megan Dougherty: You do that quarterly. Oh, wow.

Atiba de Souza: Hold on. Not on the communication side, but on the tools.

Megan Dougherty: Okay.

Atiba de Souza: So once a quarter, I get a report on all the tools that we are paying for. So it gets a little bit tricky there because there are some tools, as you know, that based on usage, you don't pay for 'em and people are using.

And so that kind of flies under the radar. But we get a once a quarter report on all the tools that we pay for, and then those tools get categorized by the departments that use them, and each department head has to proof, I'm still using this and there isn't something better.

Megan Dougherty: Wow. 

Atiba de Souza: Because at this point we're using like 40 different tools.

Megan Dougherty: Yeah.

Atiba de Souza: Right? And yeah, the $10 here, the $15, the there.

Megan Dougherty: It does really sneak up on you. It really does.

Atiba de Souza: I'm not even lying to you — the first time we did this, we saved $800 a month.

Megan Dougherty: All right. I'm adding a little notion to my to-do list for the week to maybe do a good tech audit.

Atiba de Souza: And that's why we've gone to once a quarter.

Megan Dougherty: Yeah. No, that's really sensible.

Atiba de Souza: So yeah. But anyway, again, the point here guys, and you're hearing us talking through some of this — it's about systems, right? And it's about figuring out the systems that you are going to work in and making sure that those are communicated and that everybody's on the same page.

So you heard Megan say that a few times, like, we know that this is how we do it, right? And everybody knows this is how we do it. It doesn't mean it's perfect, but it means that's what you do.

Megan Dougherty: Yeah.

Atiba de Souza: If you're in that place right now where you've got a team and there's communication or anything all over the place and you don't know which way stuff is coming from, you have a problem with systems.

Megan Dougherty: There's an exercise — I do it whenever I feel like I have lost the plot. And I work through it with sometimes team members or clients. It's writing the — I call it the standard operating procedure of reality. We all know how things should work ideally, and we all get these wonderful tools that are supposed to save us a bunch of time.

But then if you actually sit down with the people who are doing an actual task and actually list up every single step in the process as it is currently being done, that gives you a really good idea of where the gaps are, where the friction is. I've definitely fallen into the trap of writing like a standard operating procedure for a new task I wanna hand over for a new person I wanna hire and writing the idealized version without adding all of the things that actually happen that are actually part of the job.

So getting that really cold, hard look at reality is a little humbling, sometimes, but also very, very valuable.

Atiba de Souza: Yes. Yeah. And so, I'm a huge systems guy, in case you couldn't tell. And so we do lots of SOPs. We've got somebody new on our team for YouTube. So he's gonna be seeing this video cuz he's gonna be posting this video. And I just showed him, we have 20 SOPs on YouTube alone.

Megan Dougherty: Wow.

Atiba de Souza: Okay. But our process is this, if you are doing a process and you have to write an SOP, great. And we have a training on how to write an SOP, but you cannot submit the SOP unless it's been verified by another person.

Megan Dougherty: I love that. That's great.

Atiba de Souza: And verification means that they did all the steps themselves.

Megan Dougherty: Oh, that's marvelous.

Atiba de Souza: And that's how we get to the standard operating procedure of reality. Like what's really going on? 

Megan Dougherty: Good stuff.

Atiba de Souza: The point though, guys, is what you're hearing is, here are two different ways of skinning the cat.

Megan Dougherty: Yeah.

Atiba de Souza: The important thing is that we get the job done and you build systems in your business. Now, I know you got a ton of systems because with 20 things to do every week for every single client, times number of clients and times making —

Megan Dougherty: I did the math. I haven't done it in a couple years. The last time I did it, it was something like 300 odd individual moving parts that had to be accomplished every single week at the right time in the right order. But I think about it, it staggers me sometimes that we pull this off, but it's also very satisfying to get that many checks on a to-do list every month.

Atiba de Souza: I can imagine. And so that's great and it's great that you've been able to pull that together. But now I want you to do me a favor though, because we've been talking around what you do for the last 25 minutes or so.

Megan Dougherty: That's true. We actually talk about what it is that I do for a living,

Atiba de Souza: Yes. So before we go, I wanna make sure that everybody knows the particular genius that your company brings to the market and how you can help them.

Megan Dougherty: Oh, thank you. Thank you for that opportunity. So, One Stone Creative, we produce podcasts and specifically we produce podcasts for existing businesses to leverage in what they're working on. So, as much as I love it, we don't produce true crime or much in the way of passion or hobby podcasts, and we don't do too many podcasts that exist as businesses in and of themselves.

If you're a professional service provider, lawyer, speaker, author, consultant, coach, and you think a podcast can help you grow your business, you're probably correct. We can help you do it. And so we go from show design, figuring out the whole thing to creating the assets around it, producing episodes on a weekly basis.

And I have emphasized our dedication to getting things out on time. We do not like to miss release dates and we create social media shares. We do tracking on stats and metrics. We go really deep into how this podcast can be leveraged for your specific business. It's a lot of fun, ironed out on it pretty heavily. And my team is pretty awesome.

Atiba de Souza: Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, y'all heard that. You need to grow your business? Podcasting is a great option. How do I know? You're listening to us right now. How about that?

Megan Dougherty: We would not have met were it not for podcasts.

Atiba de Souza: Yes, so Megan, thank you. Thank you so much for being here. And for everybody who was listening, I really hope that what you take away from today is understanding that you've gotta know who you are before, and if you already have a team, right now, in managing your team, you have to know what it is that you want, what it is that you expect, how you want things to work?

And then start to create systems around that and then find the people who can live within those systems and thrive. You don't want people who just survive in your systems. You want people who thrive in your systems because it's the way they work too. Megan, thank you for being here, my dear.

Megan Dougherty: Oh, Atiba, thank you for having me. This has been an absolute pleasure.

Atiba de Souza: It's all mine. All right, everybody. See you later. Bye-Bye.