31:8 Productivity with purpose

Lee Matthew Jackson: Welcome to The Agency Trailblazer Podcast. This is your host Lee, and on today’s show for a third time we have the one, the only Mr. James Rose. How are you sir?

James Rose: I am good. Given it’s 7:00 PM I’m normally crashing by this point, but Lee, so thank you very much for having me.

Lee Matthew Jackson: It’s great to have you back. Folks, if you don’t know who James is, check out episode number 64 bear in mind we’re on episode 240 something. I think we’re nearly at 250 now. James rocked the podcast donkey’s years ago now, episode 64 and 71 that was way, way back when you had an agency. I think you, we’re launching Content Snare back then, weren’t you as well?

James Rose: Yeah, it’s early days. I think the dates like March 5th is when we spoke about Content Snare for the first time so March 5th 2017.

Lee Matthew Jackson: 2017.

James Rose: Yeah, that was early days. I think we took our first payment in June.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Holy moly. We’re in the 20s now. Man, that was so long ago. That was last decade. Oh, I’ve totally been running that joke for ages by the way.

James Rose: Congrats on 250 episodes or whatever man, that’s insane.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah, I don’t know. Actually, let me just double check. This is going to be episode number. Wait for it. This will be episode number 248 wow. 250 so close 248. Folks, be sure to check out the show notes you will get access to those podcasts so you can check those out as well as James’ websites and courses as well. Today I want to talk with James all about productivity. So before we do that, for the people who don’t know who you are, mate, can you just give us a little bit of a quick bio? You know, maybe a 62 second Hey, I’m James. I like whatever this colour and all that sort of stuff.

James Rose: I don’t even know what colour I like, probably black because it matches my heart.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Your soul.

James Rose: Pretty much something like red, orange and yellow for fire as well. No. Oh man. Well, I mean this has been a long journey but now, I mean we used to have an agency, hence the first chat we ever had was when we ran an agency and our tagline was called websites that don’t suck the name of that episode, but man we’ve shut that down in the last sort of couple of months. So we got rid of our last client and now I am all in on two things. Content Snare, which is a software platform that makes it easier for web designers and digital agencies to get content and information from their clients. Wraps it up into one spot with automatic reminders in that. And number two, I have a Zapier coolest just because I love saving me a crap load of time and Zapier was a good way to do that and a lot of people asked me to teach them essentially. So I made a course. That’s where I’m at.

Lee Matthew Jackson: So me and you, we’ve known each other for a long time. Obviously when you’re running an agency the day to day is pretty stressful. You’ve got a lot of work on be doing 8 to 15 hour days. That’s kind of the average life of an agency owner and that’s many years ago now with your software business and with your course, et cetera I have noticed that you do find time to do awesome things. Like you shared an amazing drone video you did the other day, which I commented on. It looked phenomenal and you’ll be out with the skateboard or whatever that thing’s called, cause it doesn’t actually look like a skateboard or you’ll go and spend some time with some other entrepreneurs in the Philippines or some random place in the world and chill out, etc. You’re even coming over to our event in the UK as well. So you’ve been able to create a lifestyle for yourself where you are able to be productive. You are able to create amazing software, great valuable courses, provide tonnes of value online, but also kind of balance that with doing an awful lot of other stuff that many of us would kind of dream of doing cause we’re just kind of chained to our desk. So, am I right or are you just lying on social?

James Rose: It’s all, yeah, it’s absolute farce on social media. Mate, I am super excited to come over to your event by the way. Thank you for reminding me about that. I have not been so excited for an event in a long time.

Lee Matthew Jackson: That’s because you sponsored the booze mate.

James Rose: Well that’s also been on my bucket list to sponsor booze and like, yeah, it absolutely made sense. So that’s ticked off my bucket list. No, but just one thing on that, like I’m not sure how that sounded to other people but it almost sounded like the only reason I get to do fun stuff is because I don’t have an agency anymore. But that is not the case. Like it’s still very, very possible to have an agency and still do a lot of fun stuff. Just, you know, if it’s structured the right way, you’ve got the right team around you and all that and I know you have this.

Lee Matthew Jackson: I would caveat that then with, you’ve been doing this for an awfully long time, so even when you had your agency, you were hanging out in countries with other people and me and you hung out like three years ago in London and took a crappy selfie. So that’s something that you have consistently been doing in your life.

James Rose: Yes. Yeah, that’s it. You’re dead right. I don’t, I just kind of wanted to make sure that agency owners aren’t hearing that and being like, Oh, I got to do something else. That’s not an agency because yeah, I mean it’s all about getting the most done in the time that you have not working yourself to death and putting in processes and systems that can handle most of the work for you when you’re not there.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Amen. So describe some of those processes and systems. If we rewind to episode 64/71 at one time when you did have the agency and yet you were still able to travel, what were you doing? You came over to London and we hung out at Youpreneur, I think it was well that Youpreneur like three years ago.

James Rose: Yes it was. That was the first time.

Lee Matthew Jackson: How were you able to do that and you had an agency back then as well as launching Content Snare so you had a lot on your plate.

James Rose: So yeah, definitely. I guess that was a really silly period of my life where I was taking on way too much, way, way, way too much and I’ve dialled back under the guidance of, you know, business coaches and self telling me to stop being such an idiot. But yeah, no, I think as much as I bang on about productivity and automation to save myself time, which it does, right? Like I save a lot of time personally and with our business using Zapier and various productivity techniques. But the bulk of the time saved that allows you to go away and do stuff and have a life is having a team and you know like, it wasn’t too long before that way we hired a first developer. I mean this was the order we went in. I had a WordPress developer to take some of the WordPress work off me, then another one and then it became too annoying to deal with like the communication with those two end clients. So we hired a project manager slash QA manager to test the development that those guys did. And those three guys handled so much work and you know the fact that was once clients were trained to email the help system instead of me. I’ve got some funny stories about, I actually just wrote a blog post about that like training your clients like a dog by like by rewarding good behaviour and and sort of punishing bad behaviour. Like when they email, they continue to email me for a long time and I just kind of sit on the email for like a week and and then reply be like, Oh sorry I’ve been away. If you just emails this address like we talked about previously, this would have got done in a day.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Like we talked about previously #passiveaggressive.

James Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Well a little bit like that and very quickly they learned to email the support desk where our manager would handle it and then the developers would get it done and I didn’t have to touch anything right. That was the biggest part of getting out of the super grindy crap of the one person agency life.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yes and that is a massive struggle just being able to shift from doing the work. I think it was the E myth revisited and they talk about how very often, so for example, a developer loves to develop and build websites and they’re working for another company and they just feel like they’re not appreciated and all that sort of stuff. So they end up launching a business and then you become essentially the entrepreneur, the manager and the day to day grinder. You’ve got to do the work as well. So you’re now doing all of them. The problem is is all you really want to do is just develop all the time and not grow a business. Or your other skill might be, you’re more entrepreneurial and you come up with the ideas and actually you are now, you know that entrepreneur and you is now fighting the worker inside of you who wants to do the code, et cetera and it just becomes this constant nightmare. Then building up that team has is absolutely, I think, essential for growth. If you’re going to scale and produce code for money. There’s only one way I know of doing that, which is by getting other people involved or freelancers who you can trust contractors or an actual team. Did you start with freelancers or you were just, you just went straight for the team?

James Rose: So I went for, you know, we’ve been through phases. I had freelances a long while ago. The very start of our agency but, we very quickly went to full time in the Philippines, right? Because it’s a lot more affordable obviously and that you can get them to do certain kinds of work. Generally, you know, it depends how much you’re paying, right? You can find really, really good people in the Philippines that can handle all kinds of dev work, but like any country you get, there’s a lot of bad and there’s a lot of good. But yeah, that was the first thing and I mean you can get a decent Filipino for $1,000 a month, so work on WordPress stuff and I truly believe that hiring full time where possible is the best idea because with the freelances you’ve got a lot of opportunity for them to just disappear. Like there’s so many horror stories of freelancers just vaporising, you know, like in the middle of a project. But as soon as you get lock someone in for full time, like they know they’ve got an income coming from you and they show up and they’re in your Slack every day or your whatever your live chat, then you’ve just got access to them. You can get things done. If there’s an emergency, it’s like, Oh no, this thing happened, fix it please and it’ll get done now instead of like four days when they get back from the mountain that they happen to be on when you needed them.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. I mean, what we did here in the UK was we first did a apprentice scheme, so we brought a school leaver in who didn’t want to carry on with university and wanted to learn on the job. So we did that. That was kind of subsidised by the government, which was really helpful. So that helps us get started. But then it was always apparent that I was going to have to hire abroad. I mean we did the exact same with our old agency many years ago. We ended up getting, we had staff from Indonesia and from India as well and we grew a whole team of people that way. Frankly, because it was just so expensive to do it here in the UK, I could have a team of five people for the same price as one developer here in the UK. So how did you get over the communication struggles though? Did you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you found the team?

James Rose: Yeah, I mean the half of the thing is, I mean most of it is trying to find the right people. And so having a decent and what the word is like a filtering process to find the right people. Then if it’s becomes apparent that you find the hire the wrong person, then moving on quickly, you know, like a, what do you call it, a probation period where it’s like if they aren’t working in the first couple of months, then get rid of them and find someone else. You know, like we had, with a good hiring process. Generally it’ll pop out at least a two or three decent candidates. So you can sometimes, if they haven’t already got another job, move on to that next one pretty quickly. Some people actually hire two people with the intention of working with one of them only for a month and picking the best one or like three or four people even I haven’t done that.

Lee Matthew Jackson: That kind of feels bad.

James Rose: Yeah. But I mean they don’t lie to them. They say, you know, we are going to hire, put you on for a month at minimum and then then we’ll see what happens off to that, you know.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah, that totally makes sense.

James Rose: Don’t be an asshole.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah, yeah. No don’t be an ass. So if we fast forward to now mate, I mean you’ve got Content Snare, this requires developers, et cetera. Did you move from the agency, take the same team and is it the same team that are now behind contents now? How’s all that working? Cause obviously you’ve got clients all around the world who are using your software as a service. You’ve got to support that. You get to keep the development of that. You’ve got to keep cutting edge, you’re always launching new products and services. How are you managing all of that, you know, with your day to day life, et cetera?

James Rose: So there is one thing that helps me a lot here and that I have a business partner so he handles a lot of the tech stuff now. So a big part of our agency was actually custom development and it was almost like two separate businesses. The WordPress stuff was always me and I would handle the WordPress team and he was handling the Ruby on rails.net development with the tech team. Still overseas but not the same. We had them mostly in Russia and Ukraine. And that’s still where most of them are actually all of them. Yeah so we’ve sort of wound back the team a little bit as our projects trail off, you know, as we shut down the agency. But yeah. Well that guy’s now there and it is definitely harder in some ways an easier in some ways like Russia and guys tend to be a lot more advanced. They can handle some seriously advanced development compared to my experience with the Philippines so far. Their English is usually pretty good, but the time zone becomes an issue, right. So I’m in Australia and all the Russian guys come online at 5:00 PM when I’m trying to like shut down for the day, which is kind of annoying.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah that’s tough.

James Rose: But you know, we’ve got really good guys at a good price and that’s kind of what you pay, you’re paying your time. I guess.

Lee Matthew Jackson: I just have Russian stereotype accents in my head right now and I’m really holding back from doing it. When you joined the call before we started recording, I just totally ripped off the Australian accent for about 10 minutes. Got it out my system before we started recording.

James Rose: Well you are doing an alright job. It’s apparently it’s a hard accent to impersonate. I wouldn’t know.

Lee Matthew Jackson: What the Russian accent or the Australian?

James Rose: No the Australian.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah, I always just sounded like Troy Dean when I do it. Well I think I do anyways cause I watch all his content and listen to his stuff. I just sounded like the dude.

James Rose: Love it and the Russian accent is awesome man like our team calls are great, I love listening to all of them.

Lee Matthew Jackson: You’ve got a business partner, right? So I want to understand this relationship and the dynamic. So a lot of people don’t know that you have a business partner. People think it’s you because you are the more public facing side of the business. So what is the balance of duties and responsibilities, et cetera. Are you simply just the marketing person? Is that your role and your business partner is doing everything else with regards to admin and everything and development? What’s the setup?

James Rose: That’s kind of where it’s going towards. You know that at one point we were both developers but like I said, I was WordPress, he was the Ruby on rails in the bigger stuff. We’re actually getting more and more towards that, which I think is idealistic. You know, that’s exactly where I’d love it to be is me marketing and him on the dev and the tech tech lead right now we crossover in the middle in a few ways, like in product development. So generally I would do the client facing stuff. Like I will talk to clients and ask what they want in the product. You know, I actually handle support still, which most SaaS people would slap me for saying. But I think it’s really important to be across support. Cause now I have my finger on the pulse of everything people like don’t like what problems are happening and it’s not too intensive for me yet. So I stay on that, he’s on the tech lead and in the middle, yeah, we talk about like feature development, discuss UI, UX and we’ve actually just brought on a freelance product manager and UX guy that I met called Adrian, I met him in Thailand randomly at a bar drunk and now he works with us.

Lee Matthew Jackson: That’s the best way.

James Rose: Man, absolutely. You know, this is why you travel to places like Thailand to find people in dingy backpacker bars and hire them.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Amen. In Event Engine then, so I think we’re kind of in a similar vein. So I used to handle a lot of the development. Now what I do is I’m a lot more customer facing with our clients in the events industry. I’m understanding what they want and need and then I am then communicating that back to the development team. So Karthik is actually handling now a lot of the development. Then me and Tim kind of share the role of marketing and working out how are we going to attract people to our business? How are we going to get our message, what’s our platform, all that sort of stuff. So we’re evolving that together. But then a lot of the admin, all the stuff that I’m actually pretty good at, but I’m already doing in my other company, Tim is then handling that and Gretta and they’re doing all of the administration, making sure all of our books are updated, all the finances are done. So I just don’t have to think about anything to do with that side of the business. So, you know, as long as I can check the bank account now and again and see that we’re doing good and I’m happy, that’s fine. They do everything else, which is really helpful for me and that just frees me up to focus my energy on, you know, marketing Event Engine and also listening. I think you were talking about having those conversations with the clients, understanding what it is that they want from your product or service. You’ve got Content Snare, I’ve got event engine, people want new features, I want to be able to listen to that and then to be able to communicate that well to the team that we’ve established as well over the years, which is phenomenal.

James Rose: Can I ask you a question?

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah do it.

James Rose: So I imagine when you’re talking to a lot of clients they might report like issues or bugs or feature improvements, which you have to relay that to the tech team yeah?

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yup.

James Rose: Do you also relay positive things that people say?

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yes.

James Rose: Ah, see I had to learn that for a long time. I’ve just realised that like the only time I talked to the tech guys is like there’s an issue, here’s this thing we should fix, here’s an issue, here’s the thing we should fix. Then I was like, wait, people like raving about this tool and I’m not forwarding any of that to them. So they’re just seeing this like negative. My business partner was like, he only got the worst feedback.

Lee Matthew Jackson: So he thinks that people hate it.

James Rose: Yeah. Well, like I went through a survey and I was like, here’s all the things we need to fix in the product, but I’ve removed all the positive stuff. Yeah. So yeah, I just, that was the thing I kind of learned along the way is making sure you’re even feeding through the positive to the dev team cause they might not always hear it.

Lee Matthew Jackson: That’s something we’ve done for a little while now, probably for the last few years because maybe 8 to 10 years ago things were really rough. Was it 8-10 years ago? Whenever the financial crash was. So everything was kind of negative. So we were trying to find positives in all of that. So we really started to celebrate people and we use the word kudos. I don’t actually know what kudos means to be honest, but I just know, I think it means something positive. So we would always give kudos to different team members. So if somebody said, Hey, I love that feature, or we really love how fast such and such responded or whatever, then we always make sure, and we’ve done it for years now that we will celebrate that as a team. So that’ll go out to everybody and it’s something that I learned in my old corporate job that I hated. I hated the corporate job, but what I did like about it was that people were being recognised. Yes, complaints would come in about the support or the service and you know, things would have to get fixed, but very often as well, the positive things were celebrated as well. And people would get, Oh it sounds a bit childish, but the people would actually get a certificate.

James Rose: Whoa. That’s what I was going to ask is how you manage this. Like how did you give the kudos physical certificates.

Lee Matthew Jackson: We don’t do certificates in our business in the corporate they did. What we do is we’ll send a group email out and everyone celebrates it, et cetera. You’ll get a few replies, great job and all that sort of stuff and we know people love our products. So we feel very proud of our product. I think as well. We love our product so much. Like I am so freaking proud of Event Engine cause he just worked so well and it does so much more than any of our competitors. Obviously I’m also extremely biassed, but position that we’re in, we get to look at all of our competitors products all the time because our clients are using a mixture and they’re awful. So I’m like, yeah man and our clients tell us that as well, which is wonderful.

James Rose: That’s so good to hear. I mean that kind of happened with our new version two release of content, snare, you know like we’ve been dealing with a lot of issues for about 12 months and we released it and just to finally get like this, just onslaught of positive feedback. It was just awesome. Yeah, I know that feeling. It’s nice.

Lee Matthew Jackson: So if we can kind of go back into your life and be dead nosy then mate, you’re getting married. I think it’s coming up soon. Or are you already married?

James Rose: Couple of months.

Lee Matthew Jackson: You’re getting married, you’ve got the Zapier course, you’ve got your Content Snare, et cetera. But you are also balancing that life of you know, investing in playing with your drone and creating awesome photography. And again, going on that skateboard thing, what’s it called?

James Rose: First, I love that you use photography and me in a sentence like at this point I’m literally just flying the thing around and hitting record.

Lee Matthew Jackson: All good.

James Rose: But thank you. It is a skateboard. It’s a longboard. That’s why it doesn’t look like you would traditionally know as a skateboard probably, but it’s got a couple of motors on it as well. That’s the kicker.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Can you try and describe your week, you know, your average week and how you do it all. Not in massive detail but just kind of give us a high level cause it would be great for people to get an understanding of how they could create a bit more balance in their life. What is it that you’re doing that means you will put aside that time to go and play with a drone. Because half, I know a lot of listeners, sorry, maybe not half, but I know a lot of the listeners here will be perhaps listening to this as they’re going to their office or they’re listening to this during lunch or they’re probably half listening to this because they’re coding and by tonight they’re probably going to be hitting the bed as soon as they can. They’ve got no time for anything else. So I would love to learn a little bit from you, from the lifestyle that you’re creating for yourself that how other people could apply that to their lives. And I’m talking more personal rather than, you know, we don’t necessarily, we understand that you have to document processes and all of the boring stuff, but what decisions are you making in your life that are enabling you to do some of these cool things?

James Rose: Well, I love that we finally got back to productivity.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah, I know we digress all the time mate.

James Rose: No mate it’s great. Like you said, these are the best kinds of podcasts. I love just chats between friends. So there’s a few things I think like it’s important to note too that like a lot of the drone stuff and skateboard stuff like that’s happening like a quote on quote outside of work hours, you know, like it’ll be at night. You know, after five o’clock I take my dog across to the park, I live opposite a park and I might run around with her and fly the drone, you know, so I’m still doing a lot of work. It’s not like I’m just mocking around all the time.

Lee Matthew Jackson: I think that was the energy isn’t it? Cause like I can work from 8 till 4, which is our office hours and be so freaking tired that by the time I get home I do nothing. The difference is you are now going out, you know, how will you getting that energy, you know, that sort of thing.

James Rose: A lot of it’s breaking the day up. I feel. So like some days I’ll work from like 7:00 AM till 6:00 PM but in there I’ve gone to the gym typically around the time I crash, like two to three o’clock, I try to go to the gym. I don’t really break for lunch, like I go and make something to eat quickly and eat it. But, you know, then there’s other things in there too. Like before I get onto daily theming, which is like a really good productivity technique that I learned from my friend Mike Vardy. But another thing that I do is actually, no, I’ll go to that. I’ll talk about daily theming because that’s been a huge change in my life, right? Like I theme my days, right? Like Monday is content production, Tuesday is content promotion, Wednesday is relationships and these are themes created around particular business goals, right? Like, I want my clients and traffic to come from getting found with content, right? So we have a whole day for content and a whole day for promotional of said content and relationships are a big thing and blah, blah, blah, automation. And research, I think are my main themes. So then I know that on certain day the mornings are pretty much always dedicated to that thing, right? So I’ll time block the entire morning basically for that theme. So yeah, Monday, you know, if I’m up at seven or whatever through to midday is all creating content. And when you time block like that and dedicate to one thing, I feel like you get more stuff done in that block than you would normally in like half a week. So that I think is one of the most important things. Then where I was going before is I actually tried to put my more intense days on. So when I did the Zappy a course, I redid these themes, right? So I basically made Monday, Wednesday, and Friday all about creating content for the course. And I blocked out, but I don’t think I could have done that five days straight. I would melt my brain, absolutely melt doing this five, six, seven hours of video recording and editing a day. So I compressed it into three days and Tuesdays and Thursdays were like my chill days. Right. And then I would break that up by doing something in the morning and then getting on that skateboard you talked about and commuting to coworking. So I mean, this isn’t something that everybody’s going to do. I get that. But like the fact that my commute is now actually fun is such an improvement. I want to sell everyone on bloody electric skateboards or scooters or something and getting out, like if your work at home, getting out into a coworking space is so good for your mental health. It is for me anyway. So I mean that’s kind of a structure to my week. And I think that’s pretty much how I get a lot done.

Lee Matthew Jackson: So essentially for me to recap this cause I like to kind of create a nice, almost tweetable in my head or a set of bullet points that I can understand.

James Rose: I know that’s really just a better way of saying like, I’m going to fix your rambling.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah. Basically. No I’m messing. So first of all, we’re talking about theming. So we’re going to theme either sections of our days, our own entire day. So for example, we have a content Monday, we have a marketing Tuesday, et cetera and so on. So each day has this repeatable theme, this is what’s, and those themes are all aligned to my business goals. So you know, I need people to know about my company, therefore obviously marketing Tuesday. That makes sense. I’ve, I’ve got to focus on that equally when you’re doing your productivity element, i.e your building content, et cetera, rather than making that something that’s just so intensive and repetitive and will bore the crap out of you, you’re breaking that up over several days, et cetera. So that makes sense. Then what you’re doing is interspersing your days with breaks i.e when you’re coming in to crash, that’s going to be when you’re going to go to the gym because that’s going to kind of revitalise you or you’re going to go and go and work at the co-working space. So you’re going to make that travel fun. And if I can try and align that to a few things that I would do, then yes, we will very often I’ll often finish early if I feel like I’m crashing and then I’ll go for a walk, et cetera, that’s going to reset me.

James Rose: Yeah a walk is huge. Yeah. Going for a walk is massive.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Well, my office is in the same village so I can walk from here to home and that’s kind of like a reset for me. And then I can do another hour at home before then clock off for the rest of the day, et cetera. Also being able to work here with Roy, Sarah, and Catholic and everyone, and having that kind of community around us is something that helps me cause just working on my own, working from home and hiding there, I just find quite depressing over time because it’s just me, myself, and I, and the walls and the fridge, which obviously means I put weight on and it’s not the best atmosphere. So, uh, being around other people I think for me is what you’re talking about is absolutely essential. Uh, which is phenomenal. I just need to learn how to skateboard I think. And then I can be as cool as you.

James Rose: Do it. I mean, you can just get one of those electric scooters that everyone’s riding around now.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah.

James Rose: You look kind of funny though.

Lee Matthew Jackson: You say everyone I’ve seen only you.

James Rose: Oh wow. Okay, so they’re huge in Brisbane. Maybe it’s a weather thing, I don’t know. But like for anyone that doesn’t ride a skateboard, they pretty much like not everyone, but like loads and loads of people get the electric scooters now. Do you guys have Lyme screwed is like the ones you rent?

Lee Matthew Jackson: No.

James Rose: Oh wow. So that became a thing and that’s why there’s been such an explosion of it here. It’s like, I think Uber owns them and you literally walk up to these scooters, you scan it and then you ride it and it charges you based on how far you went and then you drop it off where you ever you wanted to go. And that’s it, right. So this is sort of pave the way for an explosion in personal electric vehicles and I think eventually this is going to make its way around the world.

Lee Matthew Jackson: It could be a weather thing as well. I mean, right now I’m looking outside. It was freezing this morning. I feel like freezing cold. I see nobody walking right now. Everyone’s driving everywhere. So we’re on a main road for that and see all the cars going backwards and forwards it rare we’ll see anyone walking right now.

James Rose: Better move to Brisbane then.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah, I’m going to move to Brisbane. How are you guys doing over there anyway with all the fires, etc.

James Rose: Brisbane is thankfully a bit clear of all of that. It’s a lot further South and yeah, it’s super sad. It’s more around Sydney and Melbourne I guess. Like there were some fires up here, but it’s not really as big of a deal as it is down there, you know, like they are dealing with a lot of stuff. I think the insurance bills cleared 700 million, two thousand five hundred and sixty million animals. It’s pretty brutal. 20 people.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Well I’m surprised it’s as low as 20, from all the images we’re seeing from the coverage as well cause I presumed you were being affected in some way simply because all the images we’re seeing online shows pretty much a ring of fire all around the edge of of Australia.

James Rose: Yeah, I mean there’s a bit of haze here but like nothing like the other guys. I’ve got it where we’re getting off pretty easy.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Oh man. Sorry to take the tone down. I just thought I’d ask but know we’re all thinking. In fact folks, if you’re listening to this bit please go and check. There is a link in our community. I’ll also make sure I pop that link as well down in the show notes. If you can spare a dollar, $5 whatever you can spare. There is a fundraiser for the fire teams going right now on Facebook. So I’ll link to that and if you can donate anything that will be super helpful to, we’ve have I think 10 to 15% of our audience on this podcast are from Australia. So let’s love on them and honour them.

James Rose: Well thank you for doing that. It’s crazy how much people have come out in this, you know, like the amount of fundraisers going on that are just generating insane amounts of money for the forest service.

Lee Matthew Jackson: No, that’s good and well I did hear as well let’s go politics just very quickly that Australia had been, the Australian government had also been kind of cutting budgets for the fire service, et cetera. So it sounds like the government on in a very good place right now with the citizens of Australia.

James Rose: Yeah a lot of people are mad, you know, I just, I try to stick out of the political part of it.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah, I’m glad I’m not a politician. It’s sound like you can never please anybody. Mind you saying that there is parallels isn’t there for with agency life as well, depending on the client types.

James Rose: Yeah except you can choose your clients a lot easier than you can choose your leaders.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Your citizens. Oh yeah and your leaders. Yeah, that’s true. Mate, it’s been awesome just to shoot the breeze with you, catch up, learn about your lifestyle, how you’re creating a lifestyle for yourself while still getting an awful lot done and there are definitely lessons that we can draw from that. Folks, if you want to check out Content Snare be sure to check out the link in the show notes as well as the Zapier course and all of the other Oh The Agency Highway podcast as well. If you were not aware, James hosts the agency highway podcast, which is phenomenal. So go ahead, check that out. Latest episode was with a guy called Tim, wasn’t it? A long hair guy?

James Rose: Oh yeah. Conley. Yeah. Tim was, it was a fun episode. He’s a, it got some contrarian advice that he, we spoke about on the podcast and it was great.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Was it personal branding?

James Rose: Yes, it was. It was around a lot of things. But yeah, that was the main theme. I believe this a VIP guests coming up by the name of Lee Matthew Jackson as well.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Really? Oh cool. I’ll listen out for that one. Oh wait, no I’ve got to show up for that one, haven’t I? And actually record that.

James Rose: Yeah you probably should.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Yeah, that’s like in two days from now or is it tomorrow? I dunno.

James Rose: It’s literally tomorrow.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Sweet. So I’m going to go read a book so that I can sound clever for your show.

James Rose: Sounds good.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Anyway, thanks for coming up and showing up and hanging out with me for the last kind of half hour or so and letting us learn from your life and hope to have you on soon. I’m looking forward as well to seeing you in London in just a few weeks time mate.

James Rose: Lee thank you very much. Yeah, I’m super excited and hopefully there was some value in that for people.

Lee Matthew Jackson: Sweet. Take care. Bye.

James Rose: Bye.

Lee Matthew Jackson: You whispered goodbye what was that about?

James Rose: I don’t know.

Lee Matthew Jackson: That was weird. I’m leaving the in. Love you. Alright, now I’m going to stop recording.