Marketers Unleashed

Stop Managing, Start Leading: The Keys to Scalable Leadership from Mads Singers

• Kathryn • Season 1 • Episode 20

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What separates a good manager from a great leader?

In this episode of Marketers Unleashed, host Kathryn Strachan sits down with Mads Singers, a veteran business consultant and leadership coach, to explore what truly makes teams thrive. With years of experience managing global, remote, and in-person teams, Mads shares his hard-won insights on how to lead with clarity, trust, and strategy.

You’ll hear his journey from the corporate world to entrepreneurship, and the leadership mindsets that helped him grow multiple successful businesses. Whether you’re scaling your team or just starting to manage people, this episode is packed with practical wisdom you can apply immediately.

What You’ll Learn:

  • Why delegation is the most underused leadership superpower
  • How to build real trust and ownership across your team
  • What most managers get wrong about responsibility
  • Mads’ framework for recruiting and developing high-performing teams
  • How to lead remote teams without micromanaging
  • The mindsets and habits that define strong leadership

Who It’s For:
Business owners, team leads, and entrepreneurs ready to build empowered teams and lead confidently, whether remotely or in person.

Resources & Mentions:

Guest: Mads Singers


 Host: Kathryn Strachan







Tags:
#LeadershipDevelopment #TeamManagement #Delegation #RemoteTeams #Entrepreneurship #BusinessLeadership #MadsSingers #MarketingPodcast #PeopleFirst #ScalingTeams

Kathryn:

Welcome to Marketers Unleashed, the podcast where marketers break free from the noise and dive deep into the raw truths of the marketing world. We're here to go beyond best practices and uncover the bold ideas, untold stories, and hard lessons that shape real marketing success. From dissecting daring campaigns, to confronting the challenges keeping us awake at night. We're unleashing honest, unfiltered conversations to inspire, educate, and challenge you to think differently. Get ready to conquer the untamed side of marketing. I'm your host, Kathryn Strachan, and this is Marketers Unleashed. Where we're not just talking marketing, we're redefining it. For anyone who doesn't know me yet. I'm Kathryn Strachan, author of Scaling Success: Building Brands that Break Barriers, international Keynote speaker, and fractional CMO for cutting edge brands. I have spent years navigating the ever-changing world of marketing and have seen it all. As your podcast host, I bring my expertise and curiosity to the table. Diving deep into honest conversations with industry leaders to uncover the insights, challenges, and bold ideas shaping our industry. Let's get started. Hello and welcome to Marketers Unleashed. Today I'm here with my good friend Mads, and we're gonna be talking about effective management, how you can be a good leader, and some of the things you might wanna be thinking about if you are managing a team. Mads, thank you so much for joining me on the show today.

Mads:

Thank you very much for having me. I'm super excited for this.

Kathryn:

I am excited to have you here. So for anybody who doesn't know you, do you wanna kick us off by telling us a little bit about you and who you are and what you do?

Mads:

Sure. I own a whole pile of businesses, but my core passion is management and people management in general. I used to work in the corporate world for 10 plus years, and eventually migrated to the smaller business world. Started out first my consultancy and still I've started a whole bunch of businesses after that. But really my passion day to day is working with people, building great teams, and so on. So that's where my time and focus general lies.

Kathryn:

What is it about people management that you really love? Tell me a little bit more about that.

Mads:

It sounds probably a bit weird, but it's people happiness. You know, the world is full of people who work eight hours a day in jobs they absolutely hate. When I was a kid, I didn't like school a lot, to put it politely. My parents were telling me how much I'm gonna hate real life, because work was way worse than school would ever be. And my realization when I got a real job was that a job could be really good if you had a really good manager. So I got into management and, I love what I do and, really helping other people manage staff better so that those people will also grow, develop, and enjoy what they're doing.

Kathryn:

We do spend more time at work and with our work colleagues than we do with our friends and family. It's important to be part of a good work environment and to have a good boss. I've had quite a lot of good bosses in my career, which have definitely helped me to grow and accelerate, and I hope that I've been a good boss to the people that I've employed. But, can you tell me a little bit about what good management looks like? How do we even begin to define what we should be aiming for?

Mads:

I think the starting point for me is really, is the people around you growing, developing, and delivering results. I think that's the sentence that I can put together that probably sums it up best. So if you can enable people to deliver results while they grow and develop, and over time takes on more responsibility. Then you are both helping fulfill the human need in people, which is, we all want to grow, we all wanna be better, we all wanna feel valuable and important. On top of that, obviously from a business standpoint, you're looking for the same. Why a business want their employees to grow and develop so that they can be more valuable. What it means in reality is, it's building good relationships with the people who work with you and report to you. It's really learning to delegate, very effectively and really learning to grow other people. One of the key things I tell most people that I work with is that, the reason why everyone is where they are right now, like the reason you have the level of success you have today is because at some point somewhere someone trusted you. They gave you ownership, they gave you responsibility, and that is what enabled you to be where you are now. As humans, we grow when we are being given responsibility. That's the fundamental starting point. And this is what most people often forget. I say frequently that no one wakes up in the morning and say, yeah, I'm gonna do a shit job today. So if people are not doing a great job, it's typically either it's the wrong person for the job, it's they haven't had the training development they need, or their personality might not fit into the role as such. But fundamentally, people wanna do a great job, and in most cases it is poor management that hold them back more than anything.

Kathryn:

What do you think is the biggest challenge for making that possible and making that really good thriving work environment where people can learn and grow and can do a good job? What stops that from actually happening?

Mads:

I think the biggest point definitely is around delegation. Most business owners are not very comfortable delegating, and they haven't spent much time learning how to. Typically when I train people or when they're going through my training course or something. The starting point for everybody is around the mindset of management. The big thing for many people is that we've ended up where we are because we were great at our previous job. So that means if you're a business owner today, you are likely a business owner because you're good at doing something, right? A lot of us take that into our next job. So if I was a great salesperson, if I'm now the sales manager, I was great at sales, so I'll keep selling. So a lot of the time it can be hard for people to learn to let go because they don't necessarily understand the management mindset. They keep going on in an individual contributor mindset. Instead of understanding that the second you manage other people, it stops being about you. I tend to say what you do doesn't matter. What matters fundamentally is what your team is delivering. And as a manager, your core time and your core focus should be on how can you get your team to deliver more? And that is often spending more time with them and giving them ownership and responsibility. So the key thing for every business owner is really sitting down looking at their company or companies and really prioritizing and saying, what's the one thing that's really gonna move the needle here? What's that one thing? And sometimes that might be one thing in sales and one thing in operations or whatever, but you really wanna learn to prioritize. And when you look at that, you look at what are the resources we can put on it. Who are the best people to solve this particular challenge? And in most cases, most business owners always pick themself. The thing is, you can only do one thing at a time. So if I have a company where the struggle is marketing. And what most people do is they find something and then they start digging at it themselves. But the challenge with that is, one, when you're doing that, you're not doing other things. Number two is, you are only one person. And in a place like marketing, if there's 10 different things you could go and do, if you have other people in your team, or even if you don't have any resources, you can hire other people to do it. That way you can really scale things because you can grow by the success of other people. So instead of thinking as a business owner, I need to figure out everything, and then I hand it down to people below me. You really want to go the other way around thinking, what is ownership and responsibility I can give to people that are currently in my business that can help the company move forward? So when you identify key challenges, find people within your organization that is not you, that is best suited to help solve those challenges.

Kathryn:

Yeah, I think it's really true. Because if you are doing all the doing, then you don't have time for the strategy and the vision. And as a company leader, your ultimate responsibility is to lead the company forward. So to have that vision, to know where you're going. And you won't have that head space if you're doing all of the doing. But you're totally right. A lot of business owners try to do all the doing themselves, and a lot of the time they're not even the right person to do it. But it is really difficult to delegate because it requires trust, and it also requires a little bit of saying, this person knows it better than I do, so I'm gonna trust them. Or, they may not know it as well as I do, but they're gonna do a good job, i'm gonna trust 'em to do that. If you're a little bit of a fearful manager or fearful business owner, how do you get that trust?

Mads:

I understand what you're saying with trust, but I look at it the other way. My starting point is that if I don't delegate, I am holding back the growth of my business. You can build yourself a nice full-time job with a good pay. But if you actually wanna run a business, you build a business on top of people, right? So the value of a company is generally the people within it. So if you are not giving people around your ownership and responsibility. You are simply just holding back the growth of your business. And, if that is your mindset, you're gonna have a very hard time. So you need to get yourself to a point where you understand that if you want business growth, if you wanna make more money, then you need to find people who are capable of taking ownership. And this is the key thing. Most people really don't get the part between tasks and ownership. And what I mean with that is that most people unfortunately ever heard that you sit down, figure out how to do something, put it in a process, and then you hand the process to someone else. The challenge with that approach is that you are not really given ownership. You are handing over tasks. One, it's hard for people to take ownership when you do that. Two, you are gonna keep being the expert because, every single time people have a problem, they're gonna come back to you. Now I can promise you the CEO of IBM does not know what 200,000 people around the world is doing every day, and doesn't want to and shouldn't. Particularly in the early days of your business, your goal is to find someone. Let's say customer service as an example. Instead of saying, here's how I answer customer service mail, go do this thing. Hire a smart human being or find someone who's already in your company and say, hey, it is not the right thing for me to spend my time on answering customer service emails. I really want to give you the responsibility because, let's say you have great communication skills and you know our product really well or whatever. So explain to a person why you give up them ownership, and then explain to them the goals. So instead of necessary sitting saying, yeah, you have to click this, you have to do this, you have to do this. Explain to them the goal and say, our goal with customer service is to answer every customer within 24 hours. Number two is when we send out a customer happiness survey, we need to have 95% plus happiness. You still want to give them the process. You still wanna show 'em, hey, here's what we used to do, here's how we've been doing it. But you really want to give people ownership by really making sure that they're clear. My goal is not to answer 100 emails a day, the goal is to make sure that we handle the customer in queries and make sure that they're done in a satisfactory manner.

Kathryn:

A lot of that requires hiring the right people. And hiring can be really difficult, it's hard to get right with a short interview process. It's hard to find the right people who are gonna take responsibility, who are gonna do what they say they're gonna do, and who will always excel. There's also a lot of people out there who may not be right for the role or it may not be a good fit for the organization or, a thousand other reasons why they may not work. And if you're a founder and you haven't maybe hired for, say, a marketing or customer service role before, you maybe also don't know what good looks like or what the right skills might be. How do you find these right people to begin with?

Mads:

From my point of view, one of the number one skill sets to invest in as a business owner is recruitment. If you learn to hire better people, you are gonna be significantly more likely to succeed. So that's a key thing. One other thing is, yes, many business owners have not hired much, and are not very good at it. But also they don't invest any time and effort into learning how to get better at it. I definitely, advise people to go and either find some people they can learn from, read some great books about the topic or some things like that. But the starting point is simple. You gotta start somewhere and you've gotta take the risk. Just like when you start a business and try and offer a service the first time. You can sit and say, oh, the service might not be perfect. But if you never try to sell it to anyone, if you never try to deliver it, you don't have anything. And recruitment is a very similar mindset for me. Core things when it comes to recruitment for me is definitely learning to understand people. Because again, there's some people that just naturally have certain strengths and certain weaknesses. So that's one aspect. But how I've often done it is simply just looking at, have they done a similar job before with success? Can the person explain to me what they've done or why they've done it and what they would do in a situation with our company? Is it gonna succeed a hundred percent of the time? Nope. But there's no guaranteed success, right? And obviously some things it's way easier to test than others. Like if someone can answer a customer service email in a nice polite manner, and learn to understand the product, you can figure that out in a week or two. If you don't know SEO and you're trying to figure out if someone is a SEO shop, that could take a while to learn because the impact of SEO is not necessarily super quick and so on, right? So obviously certain roles are way easier to test for than others. But in my experience is always testing for the attitude and the individual, like their mindset and everything more than the skillset. Like we hired so many people that started with us at the 1819, had a great attitude, very good at figuring stuff out. But they didn't necessarily have the degree, have the experience, but they really had the right mindset. And, that's really the core things for me. The problem is when you hire people and give them tasks, you don't see their growth. You don't see their development. So by giving them clear ownership and, some of the responsibility in the early days, you will see if they can do it. Let's say I wanted to do TikTok videos for a brand. I go out and I hire someone who I can see have done some sort of TikTok before, and I sit down with them and I say, okay, our goal is X. What do we want to achieve? So that could be we want in the next three months to drive at least three leads from TikTok to our website or to our brand somehow. My goal is never to tell them what to do. I'm simply trying to give them ownership and responsibility for a process or for a part of the business that I want them to learn and figure out. And my experience is most people over time will learn how to figure things out.

Kathryn:

I mean, it sounds like a lot of, this framework requires giving them, smart goals and KPIs that they can aim for. So they can figure out like the middle stuff. I mean, what about for people who don't own the business but have been made a manager? What sort of skills, do they need to maybe learn or what do they maybe need to unlearn?

Mads:

So, two key lessons, the first one is you will not be promoted until someone knows how to do your job. And that's a critical mindset piece for managers to understand. When I worked in the corporate world, most people were so afraid of other people knowing everything they did. Because they're like, they can just fire me and give them the job. But reality is if you can teach someone else how to do your job well, that means you become incredibly valuable and you can do higher level stuff. Because there is no manager, there's no business owner around who have a to-do list that's empty. If you had a manager who come to you and said, Hey, I've managed to train someone to do my job, so now I have a bunch of extra time, do you have anything I could do? Your answer in every single case would be a big fat yes. There's always more stuff to do. So the way to get promoted, not just in the corporate world, but in any business, is really teaching someone how to do your job so you can do more important stuff. So that's the first step for me in terms of being very successful in management. So your mindset have to be not, I am the manager, I have to do these things. Your mindset as a manager have to be, I am the manager of this right now, my goal is to grow and develop my staff members so that one day they can do all of the whatever without my presence. That is the starting sentence. So the second thing when it comes to sort of new managerial role is again, learning to get out of this individual contributor mindset. So if you see a sales guy who even after becoming a manager, still keeps selling. And he's like, yeah, I'm the best sales guy in the team. I do the most sales, even though I'm the manager and I also do other stuff. My only reaction to that is you suck, because you're spending your time selling instead of teaching your team and helping your team become better salespeople. That is your goal. And obviously that situation, if you are becoming a customer service manager and you only have one customer service person and you're still doing a little bit of it, maybe slightly different scenario. But your mindset have to be constant growth, constantly developing the people that your managing. Most people get promoted because they're really good at that job. That means when you get promoted, your job is to get the rest of the team to the level you were at. That's literally why you get promoted. You get promoted because you are really good at something and whoever promoted you, want you to teach the rest of the team, want you to develop and coach the rest of the team how to get to that point. So that's the two key mindset things that I think is most important for managers within businesses.

Kathryn:

There's a lot of debate going on at the moment that you know, you collaborate better if you're in person versus online. What's your take on it? Does this matter if you're remote or in person?

Mads:

Bad managers become significantly worse remotely. Great managers typically can get similar results out of remote staff than they can from in-office staff. Now, one of the reasons is often that when you do remote, you can often find people who have a higher skillset that are willing to work remote, at maybe a lower cost. So because of that, often great managers can often get more out of their budget, if you will, if they're dealing with a remote team. Now if you're not great at managing. I'll point out the particular area. So management is all about building relationships and if you think we're managing people remotely, is just talking to them on Slack every day, that's not managing. I had a client at one point who had an employee that had been with 'em for eight years, and they had only talked on Skype. They never had a voice conversation, they'ed never had anything. The way you get the most out of your people is to build relationship and communicate with them. My framework is very focused on one-to-one as a, as a core ingredients of successfully getting the most out of your staff, right?'Cause having weekly one-to-one sessions with people who report directly to you, enable you to talk about what they're doing on a regular basis. Enable you to build relationship and enable you to help their development and their growth, which is the critical aspects. In a remote world, if you do that well, you can usually get very similar results. Now, if you're doing physical product development. Let's say I'm developing a new microphone. Now if I have a product team that are all sitting together and staring at the physical object, that might be easier than if they're sitting looking at it remote, right? Absolutely, no doubt. So there's obviously certain situations, certain scenarios where physical work environment have significant benefit. That's definitely also in terms of team building and so on. There's things you have to do that, sort of comes natural, when you are physically in person, right? So there's all the water cooler conversations and all that kind of stuff. And You can definitely learn to grow and develop those as well through remote work. So you can set up systems and you can make sure there's good communication between team, but it definitely takes effort.

Kathryn:

You said that one of your techniques for managing remote workforce is weekly one-on-ones. How do you keep them productive? Because I often find that like weekly meetings or weekly one-on-ones start to become not so productive after a while. So how do you make sure that these meetings always, hit the desired outcome? Or is it not about that?

Mads:

It's not necessarily just about that, right? So the number one goal for me in doing a one-to-one is the relationship building. The reason why I'm talking with the people who report to me on a weekly basis is to make sure I'm consistently building a great relationship. The reason why that's critical is you want people to be comfortable telling you things. You want people to be comfortable telling you if they have a problem. You want people to be comfortable telling you if they're about to screw up on a project. You want people to have that trust in you. And a lot of leaders, and a lot of managers don't build that trust because they don't have a relationship. They're so busy doing their stuff that, they simply don't have much of a relationship with their staff members. And that means that's very often staff members don't come with ideas and suggestions on how to do things better. They're often hesitant to sharing when personal stuff is going on in their life. And here's the thing, when personal stuff is happening in their life, if you don't know, you are at a significant disadvantage. Very often if your staff are leaving and they have four week resignation and you know it four week and a day ahead. It typically tells you that you don't have a great relationship with those people. Because a lot of time when you have a great relationship with your staff, you will know far in advance when they start thinking about leaving, in most cases. So relationship is number one. The second thing is talking about performance. So one of the key things is that most managers really struggle to properly give feedback on their staff member's performance. And when you do that on a weekly basis, it helps people understand how they're doing. Most people in most companies, if you ask them, do your boss think you're doing a great job right now? They will look at you and they will give you an answer that is not very convincing. Whereas if you actually talk with people about their performance on a very regular basis, you're setting clear expectations. That is very helpful for people in terms of pushing them when it comes to growth and development. If you talk with people about performance once a month and you're like, oh yeah, last month wasn't super great, let's try and do it a little bit better. You're already a month behind and when people haven't performed for a month, that's a really long time to make up. So yeah, performance is definitely the second aspect. Then, as I said, the development and growth of the individual is also for me, super key.

Kathryn:

Yeah, I mean, and you need to create that psychological safety. And the ability to bring personal issues to you or to tell you about things that are maybe going on outside of work that could be impacting how they show up or their performance. How else might you aim to create that psychological safety?

Mads:

A lot of people that I first talk with about this, they start interrogating their staff. They're like, so tell me how many kids do you have? What are their names? But then it's not a two-way conversation, right? Communication is a two-way street. If you're asking your staff members to tell you about their weekend, they expect to hear about yours, right? I have a lot of managers who says, oh, I don't wanna share my personal stuff. I'm like. If you're not comfortable building relationship with your staff members, you are gonna have a significantly harder time managing them.

Kathryn:

What are some signs that you may not have gotten it right? It's obviously high churn rate, but what about quiet, quitting and, having a disengaged workforce. How do you actually, start to suss this out and see if you might have some problems that need to be solved?

Mads:

I would say the first place to look is are your people performing? If you have a team of people who are reporting to you, if they're all delivering, then you are likely to not have an issue. Because if people are delivering really well consistently over time, that is definitely a good indication that you're doing something right. Second thing is looking at, are people growing? So are the people around you, are they growing? Are they developing? Are they getting more ownership? And are you able to push down more and more of the things that you are doing to the team you have around you? And the more you are capable of doing that, the better a signal that is.

Kathryn:

And what about if you wanna become a better manager? I know that you run courses and workshops and I'm sure you have a book as well, but if you wanna become a better manager, where do you start?

Mads:

I would say the starting point is development, right? So it's easy to sit down and say, I'm not a great manager. Understandable, no one is born a great manager. There's no born leaders, they don't exist. Leadership and management is a learned skill. So if you wanna learn how to be a better manager, the starting point is to invest time and effort into, right? So a good starting point is doing things and putting in effort into learning and growing. Obviously as you mentioned, I have great management course. But there's many resources out there. There's many great books on management and so on. For 10 years or so I read more than 400 books, so I've definitely gone through my fair share of content. But fundamentally the key thing for me is, again, like with everything is the constant development, right? So you're better at creating a system where you're spending half an hour a day on learning and growth. Find people around you, find a mentor, find a leader or a manager, could be in your company or it could be elsewhere that you think is doing a fantastic job. And ask them, say, hey, I'm looking to learn and grow. I'm willing to invest some time and effort and I would love for you to mentor me. I would love for you to help guide me a little bit. There's a lot of people in the world who are very good and who are eager to, to help others. And yeah, the internet is full of resources, right?

Kathryn:

Yeah, almost too much. I sometimes feel overwhelmed when I look at all the books and all the courses that you could take on management. There's also a lot of people out there who are selling a dream of, take my course and get instantly promoted. How do you tell the difference between people who actually have good insights and wisdom to offer and the people who are full of hot air? And the management course that may actually help you move the needle, and just another management course?

Mads:

Yeah, that can always be hard. In the end of the day there's always people looking to make money. When you've read a lot of books, 80% of them might not be valuable, but the whole thing is you just need one golden nugget for the last 20% to be exceptionally valuable. And I see the same thing when you're going through courses and so on. Even less good courses, tend to have things that are valuable. Now saying that I have been through one or two, that was not very useful. But again, starting point is find people who are where you want to be. So if you find people that have already done what you want to do, then that's a great thing to look at, right? Because if they've already done it, if they've been through it, make it more likely that they can at least help guide you. In terms of training, initially when I started I had a sort of really long training that I brought most of my clients to, but everyone is busy, right? So I really got it nailed down to five-six hours worth of video training. And if I do it in post, and it's typically a full day or a bit more than a full day, but, I think you could go through most of the content that you need to understand in about a day to become a very successful manager. And then from that point onwards, it's then about actually implementing and doing. Right? So again, do your one-to-ones, do your delegation, consistently focus and revising what you're doing. This went well, this didn't go so well, how could I do that better in the future? And so on.

Kathryn:

Do you have any stories of clients who were maybe bad managers who came to you and worked with you and then, what was achieved after perhaps doing your training or working with you on a one-to-one basis?

Mads:

People often come for me for two reasons. Either number one, they have a business and they want to get out of it. So they wanna hire someone to replace themselves because they build a big business, they're making a lot of money, but they're working nonstop. Or similar scenario where they wanna stay in the business, but they want to get out of working in the business so they can focus more on the high level strategy and where they wanna put that time. One of the guys, Kurt, I work with him and his team at Convertica for a few days at a retreat. So he started out with a small team of six or seven people, eventually got up to about 30. And I think it took him about nine months to get from working a ton of hours to working less than 10 hours a week. And that was just really going through the one-to-ones. Going through the delegation and really pushing down ownership and responsibility. Worked with another guy called Matt Diggity in the world of SEO. And when I first came in, they had just hired a whole bunch of people and they hadn't really got much structure and things. And he was very good at what he was doing, which was SEO. And like many people, his first thing was, I just wanna do SEO. Can you just do some stuff so I don't have to manage people? Now, if you have the conversation with him today, he will have the total opposite point of view. He doesn't wanna do SEO, he wanna manage people because when you learn to do things through other people instead of having to do it yourself, you become so much more powerful. You can do so many more things in very little time. It's very much about getting into the mindset of becoming a business owner or becoming a manager, rather than being the individual contributor. As humans, we tend to stay in the area that we are comfortable with. So if someone is very good at running Facebook ads, they tend to just run Facebook ads. In my experience, you have to make a choice when you become a business owner, which is, do you wanna be a business owner or do you wanna run Facebook ads? If you do wanna run Facebook ads, that's great, but then you wanna hire a CEO, right? I know a couple of developers who just love developing and they've hired CEOs, they've hired a C-Suite team, and that's totally okay, right? That's not a wrong thing to do you don't have to be the CEO if you don't wanna invest the time and effort into learning how to manage and lead people.

Kathryn:

It sounds like having a bit of a structure within the company, of different levels is definitely something you prescribe to because in the agency world as well, there's a lot of flat structure, advocating for not having this hierarchy, for having everybody equal. But what's your take on it? Do you believe in the hierarchical structure? Do you believe in the flat structure? How should companies structure themselves?

Mads:

99.7% of successful companies are structured in the exact same way. If you look at the US and top 500 companies, there are 499 at least are structured the exact same way. CEO, sales, marketing, operations, finance, maybe tech, right? But those are the people. In the beginning, if you're starting a company as yourself, you are all of those roles. But as soon as I start to make my first hire, even if I hire someone to do customer service, my consistent focus is am I hiring someone who can potentially step up and be an operations person at some point? Like where's the person gonna fit in longer term? Because I know the first five or six hires in, in any business are the most critical ones. And reality is in many companies you don't have huge budgets in the beginning. You can't just go and pay 20 grand a month to someone to bring in the expert of experts, right? So very often you need to be very cost effective with the choices you're making in the early days. And hiring people who have the ability to grow and develop is, it's important. If you have the resources, investing in people who have experience is great. But always just keep making sure that you focus on the personality and the individual sort of mindset and the attitude more than just the skill. Just because someone have three years of five years experience doing something, doesn't necessarily mean they'll be a success. If they don't fit culturally, if they don't have the right mindset, and attitude.

Kathryn:

Well, It's a tricky one too because not only do you not have the budget, but you are also new to recruitment. So you don't have the experience of how to hire and find the right people right from the get go. So, I mean, It's really quite difficult to get a company off the ground to make the first five hires all good hires. What's gonna be the chances of that? Probably pretty slim. So how do you make those first hires? How do you decide like what role you need and also who's gonna be the right people? Without, blowing the budget and, way overspending when you are, small and just getting started.

Mads:

One of the things I look at a lot is try and focus on one thing. So a lot of the time when people hire in the beginning, they're like, yeah, I want someone who can do these 28 different things with all these different skills. and I say, if I hire one person who can do one thing exceptionally well, what would that skill be? So by looking at that in, in new companies, it often becomes either delivery of a service. So if you're delivering a service or a product, it's someone who is very good at that or someone who is skilled at that and who can grow and develop over time. It occasionally is maybe a sales salesperson. It is occasionally a marketing person with a particular skill set. So a lot of time when people hire marketing people, they hire people that are like okay at 17 different things. But if I hire a marketing person in a new business, I would typically focus on finding someone who is at least pretty decent at one particular channel that I see to be important for the business. And then over time, that person can grow and develop and potentially over time grow into a marketing manager. But getting a return on investment in the early days often comes from having someone who have at least a focus. So in the same way, I always tell people who are starting a new company and they hear this great thing will be everywhere and you see a founder trying to do social media and email marketing and cold outreach and LinkedIn outreach, and they're trying to do all these 17 different things. In the beginning you pick one thing and you just keep picking at it until you make it work. When that works, you pick one more thing and you just keep picking at it to make it work. And that's very similar with hiring. So when you hire one person, if you hire someone to do your customer service, or if you hire someone to deliver your product, instead of giving them all these 17 different things you have, you really keep pushing until they're either capable of doing that very well, or you realize they're not the right hire.

Kathryn:

What advice would you have for managers who maybe feel stuck in that individual contributor role and feel like they're not fully grasping the mindset yet? What advice would you have for them?

Mads:

So most people in that role, they're sitting around thinking, I'm doing a great job, I'm doing all of this stuff. It happens a lot to very detail oriented managers. Their teams are sometimes doing okay if the teams are not too big. But because they're very detail oriented, they're doing it all. So they're constantly firefighting, they're constantly fixing every problem. Every time someone have a problem, it always goes straight to the manager and they fix it. They don't actually teach the team how to fix things. They don't actually give the team ownership to fix things. And that's probably the biggest thing. If you are in a situation where you feel you're struggling to get promoted, you're struggling to move up, then that is a great place to start.

Kathryn:

Excellent. And before we wrap up, is there any final advice that you'd give to our listeners about how they can ultimately be better managers or excel in their careers?

Mads:

Yeah, I mean, definitely I share a ton of content. Madssingers.com. We have a YouTube channel, post a lot on LinkedIn. We have a lot of great free content. Also, a bunch of fantastic books out there. So my top favorite books first one is First Break All The Rules. I love the title, uh...

Kathryn:

I love the title too.

Mads:

Uh, but it's called First Break, all the Rules, what The World's Best Managers Do Differently, which is a great book. There's another great book called The Pumpkin Plan, which is a bit of an odd name, but also a great book. And particularly for new managers those kind of books are very good to both help on mindset, but also help, in terms of the strategic region and so on. So hopefully that's helpful.

Kathryn:

Well, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been a pleasure to have you. I've learned so much about management and how to lead a better team. I think the next time that I have a team, 'cause I don't currently, but the next time I have a team, I'm gonna be a much better manager myself. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Mads:

Thank very much for having me Kathryn. It was a pleasure.

Kathryn:

That's a wrap for this episode of Marketers Unleashed. Thank you for tuning in and diving deep with us into the unleashed world of marketing. We hope you're leaving with fresh insights, new ideas, and maybe even a few aha moments to fuel your next big move. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a new episode. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Drop us a review or connect with us on LinkedIn to share your thoughts, and join in the conversation. Until next time, keep thinking bold, challenging the norms and unleashing your inner marketer. After all, what's the worst that'll happen? I'm your host, Kathryn Strachan, over 'n out.