Marketing Project Management is Broken with Amara Omoregie

Michael Hartmann: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast, brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by the MO Pros. Did I get it right, Mike?

Mike Rizzo: Uh, You did.

I love it. I love the pivot.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah, so I like I, for our audience listening, like I actually have notes and I’m like, I forgot to change it, but I did it on the fly. That’s how a professional podcaster works.

Mike Rizzo: podcasting goes. I love it.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah. We’ll,

Mike Rizzo: is why I can’t ever lose you as the, as the professional podcast host

Michael Hartmann: Your bar is very low, Mike.

Mike Rizzo: I love it.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah, well we are, we are super lucky. We’re, we’re, unfortunately we don’t have Naomi with us today. Um, but uh, we’ve got lots of fun plan stuff planned with all of us over, over the next, uh, couple months as we wrap up 2022, the year of the MO Pro. Um, but today we, Mike and I get the, the pleasure.

We may have to opt for ease here to Rizzo and Hartmann, but, uh, to join us is, uh, to talk about the, the, you know, the [00:01:00] broken nature of marketing project management, which is for those listeners know that I, like I can, it’s one of the couple of soap boxes I will get on is talking about project management.

But joining us to talk about that is Amara Omoregie. Sorry, I, God, I practiced it like crazy. I still got it.

Amara Omoregie: you sounded great. You did awesome.

Michael Hartmann: Thank you so, So you could tell she’s already like gracious president of Amara Amara reps. So she has an inbound sales and marketing agency. We had talked about Amara reps. She’s also a speaker. She has a passion for using her expertise in strategic approach from working with and supporting a vast number of companies from Fortune 500 businesses to building startups and small businesses.

She’s been able to help companies generate and raise millions of dollars in capital through investment and product and service sales. Her vision is to create an environment where entrepreneurs and businesses can obtain top quality sales marketing slash revenue operations and implementation support, but can also have access to resources and education for the latest marketing and business [00:02:00] development best practices that they need to employ for their innovation, innovative brands and products.

So Amara, thank you for being gracious and thanks for joining us today.

Amara Omoregie: The pleasure is all mine.

Michael Hartmann: Well, good. So I think, I know I’m, I’m excited about this conversation. It is definitely an area that I think, um, is an under underappreciated part of marketing operations is project management and probably marketing overall. So, uh, like I wanna get dive, dive in. But before we do that, why don’t we start with like you sharing with our audience, our listeners, a little bit about your kind of career background and, uh, cause I was in looking, kind of prepping for this.

Right. You have an interesting, I think, path to where you got to where you started this business and why, how that ties into passion about project management.

Amara Omoregie: Sure, absolutely. Well, I’ve started out in sales when I was 19 years old. I worked for Toyota, which was a very interesting experience. So I brought my sales background into, [00:03:00] uh, marketing. When I started out in marketing, I worked for several companies and a few agencies, uh, lots and lots of, uh, bigger companies, uh, when I worked on the agency side.

And one of the things that brought me into the project management piece was first and foremost, even with the presence of project managers, I felt like it was a bit of a wild, wild west. It was a bit of a free for all. Everybody kind of just does what they need to do to kind of get what they think needs to be done.

And, you know, those, uh, Things are constantly shifting day to day, minute by minute, hour by hour. And depending on who you talk to, conversation to conversation

Michael Hartmann: it’s the GSD methodology

Amara Omoregie: Yeah, yeah,

Mike Rizzo: The get shit done.

Yes,

Amara Omoregie: And then we wonder do, or how much is actually getting done. Right. Uh, and so, you know, as a agency owner and someone who’s worked on marketing teams, uh, I think that’s just been the question, like, which shit is getting done? Is it the right stuff that’s getting done? And, uh, who’s actually doing it?

Cuz we all know [00:04:00] when we don’t have a way to manage it, things fall through the cracks quite easily. And so, um, I actually worked as a project manager in several roles at other agencies and other marketing companies. And I just always noticed that even when I had other project management colleagues, we all just did things differently.

Uh, and it was really hard to just align as a team, let alone as an organization on what we need to be doing. Um, and so when I started my own agency, . It was interesting because I’d work with other agencies. We’d white label our services, uh, sometimes and the bigger the agencies and companies, the bigger of a, we can say shit show, we can

It was

Michael Hartmann: It’s a safe space.

Mike Rizzo: You can

Amara Omoregie: the bigger the shit show that project management was not even just a project man, but just the ability to get things done. Uh, business owners underestimate how long it takes to do things and don’t appreciate, you know, the strategy and the approach and all the things that we do to get things done.

Uh, lots of things, a lot of mistakes happen because things aren’t documented, Just all kinds of stuff. So, um, [00:05:00] yeah, I just knew there had to be a better way and so I studied lots of different methodologies and I just didn’t like chaos, honestly. and so, Yeah, I’ve just tried to inject project management where the project management lacked in a lot of those, uh, instances.

Michael Hartmann: So I real, at some point I wanna get, go circle back to the don’t like chaos part cuz there’s a part of me that I like the structure in having the, having the structure there, but I also don’t like the other extreme that is the opposite of chaos where you can’t get anything done because you’re spending all your time with the process, not the actual work.

Amara Omoregie: That part.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah. Okay. So I think we’re in the same page about there. Um, All right, so let’s, so let’s talk about, why don’t we start just at a high level, cuz you have done this, you’ve studied, you’ve done a lot of work with different agencies and businesses. You know, from your stand that standpoint, like what are, and maybe I touched on something right there, [00:06:00] which is like, what are the like major lessons or recommendations you’ve learned over time that, that you could share with our listeners about how to approach project management?

Maybe in an environment where it is chaotic and marketing ops person, maybe your team of one and you’re just trying to juggle everything. Like how do you inject that into the organization and.

Amara Omoregie: Well, first I’m gonna touch on you what you had just said about having things be too strict so you can get nothing done, right, Because there definitely is you have to strike a balance between the two, right? Um, number one, first lesson I would say would be prioritize the needs of your team and organization.

I think a lot of times when I work with project managers and other ar marketing teams or um, even project managers that I’ve worked under, they want things to be their way. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s what’s best for the team and what’s best for the organization. And I’m, I’m usually not a huge fan of that because a lot of times we don’t take into consideration of the [00:07:00] needs of the different types of, uh, talent that’s on the team and the different departments that we’re working within.

Uh, one of my mentors, and one of the things I learned in leadership training was Walt Disney had to understand every single aspect of everyone he worked with in order to build Disneyland and Disney World and to get motion pictures out, right? And so I think project managers that tend to be a little bit too rigid need to vet, need to prioritize the needs of the team in the organization.

And anyone that’s championing any project manager needs to make sure that they’re doing what’s best for the organization and not themselves, especially when it comes to task organization prioritization, and so on and so forth. , I’m being very PC in that statement. So

Michael Hartmann: Uh, like, so if our.

Amara Omoregie: you guys laughing. I see you guys laughing.

Michael Hartmann: I’m like smiling, nodding my head like, Yep, all that.

Mike Rizzo: yeah.

Michael Hartmann: truth.

Mike Rizzo: When this show goes to video mode, it’s gonna be like, everybody’s gonna be like, Oh, that’s what their faces

are doing every time.

Michael Hartmann: It’s gonna be like, I’m not sure that’s gonna be a good thing. I mean, I’ve got a face, as they say, I’ve face for radio, but,[00:08:00]

Amara Omoregie: That’s too funny. Um, I’d say the second lesson would be just keep things simple. Break things down to the ridiculous, right? Cause I think that there’s, uh, a lot of details that get missed and we spent waste a lot of time having to go back to fix things. Um, a lot of people do things differently and so just making sure that we’re all doing the most important pieces.

Each and every time we approach something, not reinventing the wheel every time we do the same things over and over again. Right? Um, don’t bite off more than you can chew, right? Be clear on what you can chew, right? Um, I think some of us have different personality types. Some of us tend to be more, uh, like, Yes, person, Thank you for giving me a task.

I’ll do whatever you in front of me. And some people are like, don’t wanna do anything, right? And so just having a clear understanding of what you can and can’t do. And then also as a project manager, setting expectation for how long it takes to do things so that if someone, it takes someone a little bit longer to do something, maybe it’s a skill gap, maybe it’s a training gap, maybe it’s, they’re not clear on what they’re doing.

Maybe it’s miscommunication. Who knows? Right? Um, [00:09:00] you have a baseline for how long it takes to do things generally, you know, if there, as long as there aren’t any, uh, crazy extenuating circumstances, right? Um, things will always take longer than we. More often than not, right? And so allowing us a little bit of wiggle room, right?

And not planning down to the minute of our day, just giving ourselves a little bit of breathing room in case things slip through the cracks or new things get added or things change. And last but not least, let data be your guide. I think there’s way too many opinions about what marketing should be doing, what, who should be doing what, and so on and so forth.

What’s effective, what isn’t, What’s working, how long things take, et cetera, et cetera. I think as project manager, we have to be really disciplined about the data, and I think a lot of project managers haven’t even looked at their data and like data project management, What are you even talking about

Michael Hartmann: Uh, so it’s so funny, I, so for our listeners, like I’m just coming into this recording, having been at, uh, some offsite planning and leadership meeting kinda stuff and, and team building exercises and [00:10:00] part of what we did was, uh, we did Myers Briggs, so you, for whatever you think about that, but it was interesting to do it as a group and I, I was telling people from a leadership standpoint, like I, I, I have to, I always have to check myself cuz I know I optimistic, I try to be realistic, but I.

Overly optimistic. I’m, I’m, it’s what’s resonating here is where I’m getting to is that some of those things you just described, I think apply not only to project management, to leadership too,

Mike Rizzo: Hmm.

Michael Hartmann: a little bit of time management. I think there’s that, the idea that like there’s, you could do anything right and you can try to take on more and more and then it’s not always the right thing to do.

Right. And that’s the, the real difficult thing.

Amara Omoregie: I think as marketers, right? A lot of what we do is behavior center around human behavior, right? It’s data, human behavior, and all these different things, and I think we sometimes miss that. We have to look at the human behaviors within our own teams as.

Michael Hartmann: I I, that reminds me so much that it was one of our early show early episodes with, with [00:11:00] Brandy Sanders and she talked about the, like the things that she would recommend people learn for getting into marking ups. One of was learn how to play chess, which I think gets to like the strategy and thinking bigger picture.

The other was, Learn about human psychology or human behavior. So I, it’s really interesting that you’re bringing that up cuz it’s, you know, it’s not the first time we’ve heard that with one of our guests.

Amara Omoregie: I do think that at the end of the day, project managers equal parts, obviously planning projects and so on and so forth, and it’s getting people to actually do those projects and things like that. And so, um, when you have systems and things like that to kind of offset people’s natural, uh, tendencies, , people’s natural tendencies will get them get in the way of success.

And so when you can recognize those things, you can put systems in place to make sure that everything stays on rails so people don’t let their own stuff get in the way of things getting done or moving forward.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah. The, um, the one challenge that I’ve always had with pr, [00:12:00] like project management, you know, call it, it, blending project management and campaign ops, so to speak, um, is, you know, by way of example, right from, from my, my past roles and all of that, I get hit up and it says, you know, Hey, we put this request in, you know, 30 days ago.

Like, what’s the status of it? It’s like, well, , uh, we don’t know what it is that you actually want. And so I, you know, I think there’s this challenge that comes with, uh, transparency around what’s the team doing is what the. Is working on, as you sort of said, like the right stuff, uh, how do you communicate that back out to your organization so that they can have some sense of like, you know, no one’s just sitting on their hands and twiddling their thumbs, like there’s work being done.

Um, but how do you push back the right way to [00:13:00] say, when that question comes in, says like, Hey, this thing was put in forever ago, you know, what’s going on here? Um, how do you then sort of prioritize and champion, like, look, this is, and like, you know, this is what the team’s doing and here’s, here’s where it sort of falls in, or Hey, it hasn’t been prioritized and here’s the reasons why.

Uh, and I think what often comes up is, I think as I, as I reflect on some of the examples that I’ve had, is these requests will come into your queue for maybe this new campaign or this new program that you wanna put out into the world or, or some sort of new asset that needs to be created for the team and. Um, the context is missing. You know, the individual making the request doesn’t necessarily know what it is that is needed in order to fulfill on the actual deliverable. And so project management, in my mind and, and marketing’s responsibility is, [00:14:00] is equal parts having to train the team on, Hey, as you go to make this request, here’s all of the inputs that you need to provide to us, and here’s why you need to provide them so that we can actually deliver on something in a relatively, you know, timely manner.

Right? It’s within our limitations of whatever it is that we’re working on or the, you know, resource constraints that we’re faced with. But like, if you don’t take the responsibility as an organization to hire somebody to serve that function, or at least, I mean, I hope you hire someone to serve the function , but at least give somebody the responsibility to like, Say, Hey, you need to teach the entire organization how to make a good request of this program, of this team so that we can go build something.

And that that is like, I don’t know, it’s a part of project management, but it’s like, so like starting to go outside and it’s like how do you even deal with that? And I know you probably deal with this [00:15:00] regularly, Amara, so

Amara Omoregie: Absolutely. And it, and my latest blog for marketing ops that I wrote, I touched on that briefly. Who should own this project management function and what is it that they’re actually supposed to be doing? Right. And I know in the marketing ops report, say the marketing, um, ops per report, um, There’s a lot of really great information in there that kind of ties into what you’re talking about.

I think that marketing, marketing operations, project marketing, project management in and of itself needs to be better to find first and foremost, right? It can’t just be someone that’s good at marketing that gets thrown into make master checklists, right it.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah.

Michael Hartmann: But so often I think that’s people are expected because they’re running it quick, running a campaign or running an event that they should also be good at doing all the other components of project management besides just actually executing.

Amara Omoregie: Right. And so without proper training, and [00:16:00] let me, let me back up for a second. So way back in the day when I was 16, um, a gentleman from my church allowed me to work from him, work for him in his law office. And so I was. Kinda just interning, but I got to understand how they organized things. Every time we answered the phone, we answered it the exact same way.

Every time a piece of paper came into that law firm, it had a place, and I knew exactly where that place was based on the piece of paper. It was. If it didn’t fit any of those a hundred criteria for that piece of paper, I’d go ask somebody and they’d tell me where it would go. Or they’d make something up that was new.

Right? And I look at marketing, and we don’t have that structure. We don’t have that. There is no go to like structure for marketing professionals as a whole. And so we’re, that’s why there’s just inevitable chaos, right? Where does someone go to learn all this stuff, right? How to teach your teams how to work with marketing teams, right?

Cause they don’t have that education either. And so, to Mike’s point, right, your, your team doesn’t know how to ask for requests. They’re [00:17:00] gonna send it every which way. They’re like, We just had this great idea. Come on, marketing, do your magic, right? And we make it look easy. And then you’re just like, Okay, we just know this is a fly by night idea.

If they hit us up next week, we might, if they, they’ll maybe forget it by next week. So hopefully we can just keep doing what we’re doing. And if they bring it up again, , if they keep

Michael Hartmann: Hope in a prayer. That’s the new, that’s the other methodology, right?

Mike Rizzo: I

didn’t see that. Oh, I must have deleted that email.

Sorry.

Amara Omoregie: what happens. That’s what happens. So there’s tools and there are things that you can put in place to alleviate that.

Um, but again, they’re not taught this. They’re just kind of like thrown at the wolves and you’re just like, Make all the requests happen. Let’s go. Right. And so like SLAs for example, right? Service level agreements. Internal service level agreements, right? We think about marketing ops and sales ops. Rev op. and we use those day to day to make sure that marketing’s generating the right leads for sales, that sales agrees are good leads. And then we use those for on the sales side and so on and so forth to make sure that, you know, sales is answering the calls or calling people back in a certain amount of [00:18:00] time, whatever.

Right? We have SLAs to kind of keep everything balanced, but when it comes to execution, we don’t think of project management as an ops function. Right. And if we did, we’d actually look at data and we’d look at it, we’d give it a data driven approach to how we even take in requests. Like we use click up and there are forms within click up.

If someone needs business cards, just create a stupid form so that they’re like, Hey, I need business cards. And you’re just like, Well, what do you want on it? And then it becomes a stupid back and forth, right? You create a system for submitting business cards, right? And they just fill in this info and then it gets created.

Boom. All the frictions eliminated all the back, and. , boom, done, right? But we don’t create these systems to ease our life. We’re just like, Oh God. Another request from this other department, right? But if we start to compartmentalize and start to think of these requests and and buckets and create service level agreements, right?

Like, hey, if you submit a request, we will respond within 24 hours that we received it. Like we don’t even have to talk to you. We’re just gonna respond that we got it within 72 hours, we’ll report back on what our plan is to [00:19:00] execute or set up an appointment to go over it and get more details about your project, right?

There’s all kinds of little SLAs that you can put in place to protect that so that your teams can know what to expect from you. So if they know after 24 hours they haven’t heard from somebody, ding, ding, ding, something’s wrong, they probably lost my request. Or within 72 hours if we haven’t had a meeting, or they haven’t given me a due date, a project plan, or we haven’t had a meeting yet, then my project’s not getting done.

Period.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah.

Michael Hartmann: So I, You’ve mentioned data, like data is part of like informing, I think. I think it’s more about informing project management, and I want to get to that. One of the things I’ve struggled. I in when it comes to project management and the things, I think it kind of falls into a couple different levels, right?

There’s like big, big sort of strategic projects that hopefully are part of an overall goal and objective for your team or the marketing organization, right? Implementing a new big system, right? Um, or revamping what you’re doing with your marketing automation. Then you’ve got, um, [00:20:00] sort of, I think, I think of it as sort of, I’ll call medium size things.

It might be like supporting an omnichannel campaign, right? From a campaign op standpoint and the reporting goes with it. Or it might be, you know, we need to fix the integration between our systems or we need to change, uh, the way we’re tracking sources for leads. Yeah. Relatively small. And then you’ve got like very tactical, like almost ticket like stuff.

Um, what, So those are like, to me, like three levels that I’ve

Mike Rizzo: I want to send an email to the database

Michael Hartmann: Right. Um, but, but then on top of that, then you have personal, it’s like time management. And I think a lot of what I’ve see a lot of people struggle with is how, like not really treating those as different things. And in my experience, I haven’t seen great tools that do all of those.

Well, so I’m curious, like, have you seen things that work well kind of acro, like at those different levels of complexity and size and scope and time? [00:21:00] And, and if so, like I’m all ears because I still am in search of something that could do it all.

Amara Omoregie: so, Oh,

Mike Rizzo: Wait, so the question is, can there be project portfolio management that has some sort of tie in to global KPIs and then all the subprojects and micro tasks and people management all roll up to the like sort of, there’s a connection between all that. If I’m, if I’m

Michael Hartmann: That is, Thank you. Yes.

Mike Rizzo: I happen to work for an organization that used to make project management software,

Michael Hartmann: Ah, See

Mike Rizzo: So I have like a very like, uh, what is it? Tip of the iceberg exposure to the concepts,

Michael Hartmann: right.

Amara Omoregie: right? And so we all know how brilliant SaaS companies are at selling their prod products, but not so great at helping people use their products. Well, shots fired Sorry. Um,

Mike Rizzo: I wrote that piece like 10 years ago, so don’t worry about that. You’re fine.

Amara Omoregie: So let me [00:22:00] actually, that’s actually two different, two completely different things I’m gonna address. So first and foremost, . When you stop focusing on the software and focus on the methodology and your approach, it becomes a lot easier to kind of understand what you need. And so first and foremost, like there’s how tasks get done and how people need to work within those tasks.

And then there’s how tasks are created originated, right? And so when you, when you think of it, when you think of it that way, it becomes a little bit more less about the software and more about, um, like, here’s how our team needs to be to operate. Is this software going to be able to sustain and support us in the way that our team operates?

So what is it that your team needs in order to be able to operate well and operate efficiently? You need to be able to prioritize. So there’s the project manager’s prioritization, then there’s the organization’s priorities and team’s priorities. Will this, will our approach work within this [00:23:00] tool? Most companies don’t have an approach, so they can’t make it work within the tool.

It’s not gonna matter which tool they. You can use a million tools and it wouldn’t matter because you don’t have a methodology, you don’t have a way of working that you can just say, Oh, okay, cool, I can use this like function or integration or feature or whatever to support the way we do this, that, you know, whatever.

So, um, without that you are gonna fail at implementing any kind of tool and getting any kind of adoption cause everybody’s just gonna approach it every which way. And then SaaS companies don’t really have, um, even ones, even mar marketing project management tools that are made for marketers don’t really have an approach that they can teach you so that you can leverage the software appropriately.

So we had to come up with our own, cause we acknowledged that this was the problem. So he first came up with the methodology because we started using click up and we were just like, we can’t figure this out. Like , there’s so much that we could do with it. And then we realized it wasn’t

Michael Hartmann: so flex, so flexible that you could make a do just about anything,

Amara Omoregie: correct.[00:24:00]

Michael Hartmann: but they couldn’t really guide you to what was the best way to use it for your scenario.

Amara Omoregie: correct. And so we helicoptered up a little bit and thought, Okay, how do we need to use this software? And so we took our experience with Agile Scrum, getting things done, all those things. And we just came with the methodology. We came methodology for how we, our teams use the project, or our teams need to work, right?

Cause software can’t do everything right there. Software’s not gonna set your SLAs, The software’s not gonna tell you how many productive hours each team member has on your team. Your pro software’s not gonna tell you how to hand off a task. You need to have a process for which you hand off and have internal SLAs so that, um, your team is using the tool the exact same way and understands what things mean when they’re in a certain state or what have you.

Um, so that’s kind of how you fix that. You have to actually have a methodology that a, that addresses all the things that you guys just talked about, and then put it in a system so that, um, the system pretty much helps you. Generate that [00:25:00] data so that you know, like, Hey, hold on. This person has 80 hours on their plate this week.

We need to reprioritize. Or Hey, we’re working on things that really have nothing to do with our organization’s goals, right? Um, this team is sending us a hundred tasks a month for little, tiny, stupid updates that don’t add any value to the organization, but they still need to get done cuz they’re, they’re getting in their way of the work.

Maybe we need to advocate for more head count so that there’s this one person, maybe an entry level position where they’re just taking care of these little tiny things so that the rest of the team that’s more senior and doesn’t need to be doing stupid things, um, that don’t actually add any value or aren’t part of our organization’s goals.

We can advocate, advocate for that head count cuz we know how many tasks those are. We know how many hours that was. Uh, and we can say, Look, ev other departments, you can either give us somebody else or we’re gonna keep getting distracted with stuff that doesn’t matter and your stuff’s not gonna get done.

So that’s why you have to use data to be your guide. Like I said earlier, uh, versus just saying like, we [00:26:00] don’t have enough people. Cause no one ever listens to that

Michael Hartmann: Right. Okay. So we’ve come back around to this data point, like, let’s, like, I will break this down a little more cuz you’ve hinted, I think of a couple of things that are in there. You know, SLAs maybe as a piece of it, I’ll call it capacity and product, like, I like the term productive hours. I haven’t heard it thought of. Meant that way, but, Or, but as you were talking, I was thinking, oh, uh, how could I think about, you know, how much of my team’s time needs to be allocated to big strategic projects versus those day to day tactical things that, um, I’m not gonna use the word stupid cuz I don’t believe that. So there are probably some of that are really, But there are a lot of things that just, they just need to get done, but they’re not, it doesn’t require, uh, a more senior person.

Right. They could be done. They’re relatively like the, the, the risk level is relatively low if there’s, if they’re not done well or the time is not met and that kind of stuff. But like, how, so what are the, like what are the, how do you, Cuz you’ve [00:27:00] said, I think I’m gonna go back to my notes here, that it’s marketing project management, not just about systems, it’s more about data and data management.

Like, I wanna drill into that a little more.

Amara Omoregie: Okay, so when you get, when you do some sort of marketing or, uh, project management certification, I’ve never seen one that actually teaches you how to use software with it. Have you, They’re just theory approach, blah, blah, blah,

Michael Hartmann: I see, I see. I’ll see templates right in

Amara Omoregie: Yes,

Michael Hartmann: and I’ve seen it in Asana and Reich and I haven’t used click up, but I’m gonna assume that they have a marketing marketing campaign template. Right.

Amara Omoregie: Right. But they don’t teach you how to necessarily in like, put that the methodology or whatever the. into a system, into technology, leverage technology with it. We use several tools actually. We don’t just use click up. So if you back up, right, I think there’s three key roles within any, When you look at project management, right, from an [00:28:00] ops perspective, you have people who are handling tasks.

That’s every single person on the team. You have the people who are creating the tasks. That’s where the data management comes into place, right? That’s where making sure that your project managers aren’t being lazy. I said it, and not adding time estimates to everything. How are you gonna get workload and capacity planning if you don’t have time estimates?

Mike Rizzo: Yeah.

Amara Omoregie: you know how many clients I’ve consulted with and getting their project management system set up and their project manager looks at me and they’re like, I have never used the time estimate. It’s like, how did you plan on doing workload by counting how many tasks you have? A task is just a task. It’s like a thing.

It’s like a grocery list. You don’t know if you’ve got a big old thing of toilet paper or a thing of grapes, like you don’t know if you can fit it all in a cart cuz it doesn’t have any context, right? So being disciplined about how you create tasks every, if you have multiple project managements, project management company, every single project manager has to put that data in the system the exact same way in order for the data to roll out and for you to be able to make [00:29:00] decisions.

Does that sound familiar in what we do with marketing ops or sales ops, or DevOps, et cetera, et cetera.

Michael Hartmann: Uh, only

Amara Omoregie: yell at salespeople,

Michael Hartmann: Yeah.

Mike Rizzo: I think it does. I think it, I, I think it sounds super familiar. I mean, we’re, we’re constantly trying to like write size and effort, uh, around, you know, hey, you’re asking Hartmann, I think you called it a medium size text, but like, Hey, we’re gonna sort of redo the lead sourcing like structure. I’m like, that’s a, that’s a really, that’s like a big medium.

Amara Omoregie: that is, yeah,

Michael Hartmann: Yeah, Yeah.

Mike Rizzo: I’m just teasing you.

Michael Hartmann: No, no. But I mean,

Mike Rizzo: constantly right sizing or constant right sizing, so,

Amara Omoregie: So, so yeah, as far as data goes, like you have to first start with making sure that the project manager’s disciplined and understands what we’re solving for, right? Um, having, having, uh, time estimates on your task, having, being able to prioritize some systems, use priority flags on tasks, um, having start dates and due dates so that you [00:30:00] can assign them to sprints and things like that so that, uh, you know, when these tasks are getting started.

So guess what? When you have a time estimate and you have things assigned to sprints, you know what someone’s workload and capacity are, and then when, you know, when you have established what someone’s, uh, productive hours are gonna be, cuz as much as we love to get eight hours of productive time from every single person, that’s not realistic.

I usually say, Okay, we can probably get about six productive hours from somebody worth of work. And I look at it a few different ways. So maybe we estimate that it takes us 10 hours to do this project, but they’ve gotten so good at it, it takes them six, even if they got it done in six, like they’re still able to produce a lot of work and less time and accurately and well.

Uh, and so you wanna bonus that person. You wanna pay them more because they are killing it. They are getting stuff done way under budget. Maybe this other person on the other team needs that full 10 hours and that’s not a bad thing. But you can now start to like, give people performance, uh, raises and things like that, um, because they’re performing good.

But you would never know that without any of [00:31:00] this information. Right? And so,

Mike Rizzo: can make the argument too, like for those of us that are not so fortunate to have, uh, a project manager on our team, which like, I have not, sorry, I’ve not worked at a SaaS organization yet on a marketing team that actually had a project manager dedicated. Even when I worked at a project management software company, we did not have a dedicated project manager to help manage this stuff.

Amara Omoregie: And if they did, most of them don’t focus on any of this. They’re just like,

Mike Rizzo: well, we try to create, and then like, it, it creates a little bit of chaos around like trying to create, you know, project management practices, um, within someone who’s, that’s not their like sole focus. And, and, and it’s hard, right? Cuz it’s not their, their sole responsibility. But for those of us that don’t have it, um, I could make an [00:32:00] argument that just like starting with the idea of measuring your ability to complete tasks in general.

Like, hey, I have a system. I logged the things, the activities that I had to do in the last month or last quarter. Here’s all of them relative to the backlog of additional tasks that I have not yet. Completed, uh, it based on what I’ve been able to accomplish in the last two or three months, it looks like, without trying to size up any of those tasks, and you should, I hear you, you absolutely should listen to a ma on that one , but without trying to size up any of them, at least the jumping off point of saying like, All right, in about a month’s time, on average, I’m able to complete 20 tasks or whatever it is.

Right. Uh,

Amara Omoregie: Task velocity’s important.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah,

Like that’s a wonderful jumping off point and then get better and be like, Okay, well I, I size [00:33:00] these and appropriated them in a way that says the reason it was only 20 is because 10 of them were like actually massive, massive, like undertakings. Right? Uh, and so it, anyway, just, I would make an argument that like, you don’t have to jump all the way in to, for those of us that don’t have a project manager and you’re just trying to figure out.

And maybe you disagree, but of us who are just trying to figure this out, like how do I do some form of project management on my team? Um, start with some of the basics and maybe, I don’t know if that’s the basic, but maybe there’s something even more basic you could share

with us. That’s where my head went.

Amara Omoregie: My approach is, I’ll go back to what I said before. Don’t reinvent the. If this isn’t the fifth, you know, whether you’re just generating like a, doing a lead magnet where you have a landing page, a thank you page confirmation, email confirmation, email seers, like you kind of do the same things each time.

Do this one type of thing. And if you have your process document, which is annoying, no one wants to document their own processes, no one [00:34:00] wants to write it down. But if you kind of have like a templated way in which you do it, even if you’re not using a system, you know, like okay, using a template to create our landing pages and our thank you pages and our emails and stuff takes me about an hour and a half to do the landing page.

Takes me an hour and a half to do the thank you page, takes me whatever, however long it takes, right? You can tell a story for like, this is a 12 hour project, even though you think this is simple.

Mike Rizzo: Mm. Mm-hmm.

Amara Omoregie: And then you have to go and then you have to approve all this stuff. Like I have to send this back to approval and make sure it’s right And then any changes.

So let’s not, let’s not say we’ll have this done in three days cause it’s 12 hour projects, let’s give ourselves two weeks cuz there’s back and forth and. Make sure you send me all of these things so that a, it takes a lot of work to get to that point, but you absolutely protect yourself and now you get to the point where you can teach someone how to work with you and work with the marketing team at, at large in the organization.

Cuz a lot of people just don’t know. They’re just like, Well yeah, let’s just do it. I just thought this up. You got, you got it done in three days last time. That’s a kiss of death[00:35:00]

Michael Hartmann: So,

Amara Omoregie: you did it fast once.

Michael Hartmann: Right.

Mike Rizzo: Oh, there’s so many things

there. Okay,

Michael Hartmann: Yeah. We’re kind of our, It can be your own worst enemy,

Amara Omoregie: Are you, are you triggered

Mike Rizzo: Just, I’m so like, it just brings up so many memories of like being on teams that are lean and mean and efficient and doing the best they can. And then it’s just like, Yeah, we can’t do that. And then somebody gets really mad and they’re like, Why? It’s like, because marketing is hard.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah.

Mike Rizzo: Sorry. I like, it is hard work.

It is not fluffy. Like there’s a lot of thought that should go into everything you do. And, and I think that actually, sorry, Hartmann, I know you want to jump in on this, but I do want to come back to this idea like, marketing is hard. You create a system to teach people what it takes to put in a, a strong request so that something can get done. Where like, do you find that there, there’s a place where you can go too far and you make it too [00:36:00] difficult because like, For example, , your sales team or whoever is that’s putting in this request, maybe it’s client success this time. Do they get sort of turned off by the fact that there’s like too many questions for them to fill out to give us the right information to go launch a campaign?

Like is there a balance that you have to figure out between, like, look, they can’t give us everything, which means we actually always have to get on a 20 minute call to figure out the

Amara Omoregie: And that’s okay. Especially if you’re in a remote environment. If we need to sit, get on a 20 minute call to figure out what our requirements are so we’re not spinning our wheels and having to start and stop our project a million times. And if they’re just like annoyed cuz they can’t actually answer all those questions, guess what’s gonna happen during that 20 minute call?

They’re gonna leave that call realizing that they don’t have enough information to actually launch a campaign. And they’re gonna go back, not necessarily with the tail between their legs, but more empowered to actually get that information. It’s like, and you can guide them, Okay, well we need content for that.

Well, I’m not gonna, I don’t know how to write the content. Well go get with someone that does [00:37:00] or you know, or like, you know, if that’s not us, then who is the person that would write this type of content? And so you can at least come up with a plan to get all the information together. And it’s like, once we have all this info, we can get a start date and an end date for it.

But until we have it all, and we’ve kind of got an idea, half the time these requests would just disappear because they’re not fully fleshed out and they don’t make sense. So that 20 minute conversation can shave you from having to do half of these stupid projects that never get launched anyways because, They just were never fully flushed out to begin with, but you’re already 10 hours into it.

Cause she started building stuff out cuz someone had a wacky idea that wasn’t fully flushed out.

Mike Rizzo: yeah, yeah,

I think

Michael Hartmann: so demoralizing when you do all this work on something that doesn’t actually. make it to, So the

Amara Omoregie: creates a lot of friction cuz now marketing doesn’t wanna listen to this department cause they never have their is together. Right. And then they’re like, why doesn’t marketing wanna listen to us anymore? And we’re like, cuz you don’t get your is together. And it’s like, okay, let’s all slow down.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah,

Amara Omoregie: here’s what having this together looks like[00:38:00]

Mike Rizzo: Yeah. I like that you used the word empowerment for the individuals or organizational, you know, departments to feel like they now know what it takes, uh, to, to come back and, and, and do something, you know, that can get done. Um, I also love that it celebrates the, like the, you know, the difficulty that is marketing, right?

Like, it, it, it sort of like educates the market on like, hey, you know, we, we really, we really do try to think through everything that we’re doing. Um, and I know sometimes in marketing ops it sounds like we’re saying no, but we’re not. Uh, it’s really about just trying to understand what exactly is the, the why behind the request and the how can come. But it’s, you know,

those conversations matter. Right,

Amara Omoregie: I think what we don’t wanna do is say that what you wanna do doesn’t matter. I think what we wanna be able to say is, Okay, this sounds like a great idea. Let’s tell, let’s talk about it. Let’s [00:39:00] see what you’re trying to accomplish here. Cuz now you can start to brainstorm. Okay now

Mike Rizzo: Like, let’s have some fun with it.

Amara Omoregie: Right, Right.

And so I, at work, I have an agency and so for me, I deal with companies that don’t know what they’re doing. They just see some, their peer doing something. They’re like, We wanna build this funnel. And I’m like, Oh no, what are you doing? Hold on. But I don’t tell them no. I’m like, Okay, great. Let’s have a conversation about it.

And then I’m like, Well, do you realize that this company’s in this position and has this type of client and does X, Y, and Z? Like I didn’t actually think about

Michael Hartmann: and has four times your budget, right?

Mike Rizzo: Three times the team members,

Amara Omoregie: Right. And the problem that you think you’re solving by doing that thing isn’t actually feel like we really wanted to solve this pro project problem. Get into agile thinking. Like we could launch this very quick, very easy campaign to test to see if that’s actually a real problem we should be solving for versus spending all this time and effort building this huge, grandiose thing that might not have the impact.

We think it will. And so the other aspect of Project management’s super important [00:40:00] is how do we take this big, huge request and make it a smaller request that we can just get done and we’ll still have big impact?

Michael Hartmann: Yeah.

Mike Rizzo: Aim small, Ms. Small. It’s my favorite thing to say.

Michael Hartmann: I, I, I, there’s so many things going in my head here and like, I, I think we’re, we’re gonna end up needing to have another conversation cause we had other stuff we wanted to get to. But this is too important I think. So this, I think if our listeners are like me, I wanna go back to like, I’m going back to where Mike actually Rizzo brought up the idea like, oh, I don’t know, many places actually has a project manager in place for marketing or marketing ops even.

So, you know, my, what I suspect is out there, our listeners are going, That all sounds great. Going back, defining those SLAs, what do we really need? How long does each of these kinds of things take? Um, like I think nobody would argue like that would be a valuable thing. What I suspect they’re going through is, is like this gut.

Like pain of going, like, how am I gonna stop doing the stuff I’m being [00:41:00] expected to do? Because it’s just the way we’ve done things to stop or slow down to do that work. Right? So how do you, especially if I know like, oh, I’m, I’m gonna be expected to be sort of the sort of the project manager, uh, the bad guy, um, to, to go through this just to say, start saying no more, right?

Like, I’m like, that’s, I think that’s what might be playing through some people’s heads. So how do you, how do you respond to that, right? How would you, So if like, I come to you like this, I love it. I wanna do this, you know, I’m, I’m excited to try something new, teach me how to do it, but I really like, if I do this, I feel like I’m gonna drop the ball on all these other things.

Amara Omoregie: um, I have a few answers for that. Number one, awareness is half the battle. I’m hoping that the listeners of this podcast episode. Learn some new things about data and project management. Cause I think that’s a whole rabbit hole that you can get down. Um, as far as the fact that you should even be managing, [00:42:00] measuring what you’re doing as from a project management standpoint.

And I think when you start to, as Mike said earlier, measure some things, even if it’s velocity, like how much you’re actually getting done, or even just how many requests they’re getting. Like forget how much you’re getting done, like just star stuff in your Gmail or Slack or whatever. And just keep a list of like, I get 50 requests a day, I get 50 requests a week.

This doesn’t make any kind of sense, right? Just start counting something to help advocate for what you need. Right? Start there. Start just at least presenting data to advocate for what you need. Now, if you’ve been tasked with project management and you just realize, Oh crap, I don’t have the training, I don’t have the tools.

Like I saw in your report that folks are using spreadsheets. I’m sorry, what? There’s spreadsheets, right? And so

Mike Rizzo: the number one tool for marketing op.

Amara Omoregie: right? And I’m thinking to myself, Okay, well if you don’t even have the right tools, [00:43:00] maybe it’s, we talked about some tools earlier. Let’s start advocating for a tool, right? Again, what’s going back to the awareness?

We don’t have a methodology. Let’s start thinking about how we wanna approach prioritization, how we wanna approach having our team communicate on tasks like we use our tasks like you would in a call center. One of my many jobs, back in the day I worked at aaa, and so I worked in a call center and you had to make notes.

You know when you call your credit card company and they’re like, We’re just making notes on the account so that next time you don’t have to repeat your story over and over again if you have to call back in. You know, being able to like leave. We have a very strict protocol for the type of notes that you need to leave on your task so that we’re not having to have all these trip ups and be, Hey, did you do this?

What did you do, da, da, da. Like having a project management tool, SaaS, whatever application that you use. can make a huge difference. So if you’re are going from spreadsheet to a system, like acknowledge, like we might just need a system to streamline things so that I don’t have to sit there and tally every single thing, but actually measure how many tasks we’re doing.

Cause it’ll tell us, [00:44:00] right? Um, again, just think agile. What would be the next thing that we can do to just incrementally improve our current project management situation? Identify the problems you’re currently have and identify the solutions that you could potentially, uh, use to solve them. Find the things that are minimally viable.

Start trying to see if you can implement them without some kind of, uh, need for approval on something so you can at least make your life easier and maybe the life easier for your, your teammates and stuff like that. And just know it’s a uphill battle. In that blog, that post that I wrote for, for you all, uh, I talked about how there’s a lot of change management involved that I think people underestimate when you try to implement some sort of project manage.

Methodology, technology, uh, role. Cuz people are gonna be like, Wait, I’ve been doing everything my way, my whole life, like my whole career, whatever. It’s like now you’re gonna have this person telling me what, And then once it happens, people love it. So like, oh, I have someone that helps me [00:45:00] prioritize. I don’t have decision fatigue, so I’m not having to juggle this task versus this task all the time and it becomes nice.

Michael Hartmann: I’ve, I, at a prior job, I fought pretty hard to get a project manager in, cuz we had just a number of really big strategic projects plus the day to day like campaign operations, stuff like that. And part of what my pitch was is like, if you’re asking me to do it, I’m gonna, I’m gonna not do it well because I’m doing it as like a fraction of my time and I need someone to hold me accountable too.

Right? So it wasn’t just that I was say, Oh, we need project management to hold everybody else. It was like, I’m also expected to do certain things and I’m not getting into ’em because I’m doing project management. I’m leading a team. Like, so I think, um, I am a huge advocate for the idea of it. I, one of the, I wanna see if I’m getting this right though.

It sounds like between what Rizzo said, what you said, like almost like start small. Start measuring something that’s relatively easy to measure and then [00:46:00] go from there and learn is the underlying sort of implication. Cuz I’ve done, I actually, this is the way I’ve done it a little bit, is start with the, the small type task requests, right?

Almost doing ticket management, like using that as a starting point cuz it’s relatively, usually the turnaround time’s pretty quick. You know, it’s high, relatively high volume compared to bigger projects. Um, and then using it from that to build up to the next level of more complicated, interdependent kinds of efforts.

Amara Omoregie: Ish. I’d say, um, cuz everybody kind of has a lot of different roles, right? When you’re in more senior roles, you don’t necessarily have as many. Menial tasks to do? I’d say so to kind of address where everybody’s at in, in these organizations and even at agencies for that matter. I think streamlining how you take task requests is a great place to start, start there and say, Hey, I’ll get back to you within 24 hours.

[00:47:00] Or, Hey, after 12:00 PM I don’t request, I don’t respond to same day requests. I’ll get to them the next day. Put things in place to protect yourself and protect your time so that people, you can manage the expectations of people who, um, are sending you things and so on and so forth, um, so that you can take some time to measure it, right?

It gives yourself a little bit more breathing room. Um, I think there’s a dangerous small tasks. They are, The dopamine that people get from being able to just get stupid little things done all day is just insane, and it keeps people from doing big things. What I would suggest is that, , calculate all those little things that you get told to do and why your, why your brain wants to actually do those things.

Cuz you get that dopamine rush. You get that like satisfaction of just easy completion and to say, Hey, every time this enters my cue, I am not touching a mission critical task. And use it to advocate, to give it to, not to say give it to someone else, but make someone make a decision. Do you want this mission critical [00:48:00] task completed or this thing that’s actually gonna move the needle and change the bottom, effect the bottom line.

Or do you want a senior person doing this type of work? Just use it to advocate and make people make decisions with that. That’s data.

Michael Hartmann: I think it’s a good mental model. I think that’s really interesting that you bring up the, that dopamine effect of the satisfaction that comes from checking a box right on my to-do list.

Mike Rizzo: I, um, I’ve had a, a number of conversations with the Stack Moi team throughout my last two years as they’ve been partners with us, and now I’ve decided to help them out with some of their advisory board stuff. And, um, I, I can’t, I swear there’s an article about it or something like that, that they wrote about forever ago.

And one of the points was exactly that. It was like, it’s like the satisfaction of like getting the green check mark on something, um, that like, is, is, um, I think DOPA means a really great way to describe that, right? Like, there’s this like, uh, joy that you get out of it, but like those [00:49:00] small things that don’t contribute to the bigger picture, it’s like, ugh,

Amara Omoregie: Which is why I said going back to human psychology and human, what people are naturally gonna gravitate towards as a senior person, you’re gonna wanna. Small tasks for I’m, I’m arguing that you’re gonna want to do them cuz they’re like, Oh, look at all the stuff I got done today. There’s a lot less, there’s, it’s a lot less gratifying to do a four, six hour, 10 hour task, right?

But if you take those tasks and break them down to the ridiculous, kinda like I said earlier, you still get a little more dopamine cuz you’re making a little bit of progress on those tasks. And so, again, going back to being agile, I don’t like to have tasks that have 10 hour, 18 hour, whatever buckets. I like to break them down as much as possible in a one to two hour buckets or one to two hour things.

So it’s like, I still accomplish this thing and I’m working towards getting this big monster completed. And so when you think like that and you know that that’s how your team operates and how they’re gonna avoid these big, chunky tasks, you can project manage to people’s what they’re, what they’re gonna naturally [00:50:00] do.

They might not like that two hour task, but they’re gonna not avoid it for weeks and weeks. , they’re gonna at least tackle it when they have a window or at least advocate for a two hour window. And plus when you have an eight hour task, it’s like, can someone really be gone for eight hours without talking to anyone?

That’s like, it’s kind of rough,

Michael Hartmann: No, it’s, I, I think, I think based on everything I’ve seen and heard, that there is a, there is a, there’s a practical limit to how much time someone can stay focused on a individual thing.

Amara Omoregie: Correct.

Michael Hartmann: And so that’s why when we’re like, I was just in all day meetings, I’m like completely exhausted from just being, just trying to stay focused for eight plus hours a day for four days straight.

It’s really, really hard.

Amara Omoregie: Mm-hmm.

Michael Hartmann: Okay. So I, I I think we’re gonna have to, I wanna ask one more question and then I think we’re gonna have to wrap up a little bit here. But you’ve, you’ve mentioned agile a couple of times. I have like, sort of like physical reaction to that term cuz I think it’s been mis misused by a lot of people.

So it doesn’t really mean a whole lot,

Mike Rizzo: Misused or mis implement[00:51:00]

Amara Omoregie: Ah, I

Michael Hartmann: think, But

Amara Omoregie: former.

Michael Hartmann: I think both. I think both,

Mike Rizzo: Yeah. I hate Agile. I know this, like this makes a Marra cringe. . I think I hate

Amara Omoregie: like, I like, I think Scrum as a practice is not agile enough for marketing teams because things change so much. Scrum scrums great for software where it’s like, we have a feature, we’re building it ships. Marketing is never that linear,

Michael Hartmann: Right.

Amara Omoregie: never, right? And so I do think agile planning is important.

Michael Hartmann: So explain that

Mike Rizzo: Okay. I could, I could see where you’re going there, but I’m all waterfall all day long. Sorry.

Amara Omoregie: you use them. Do

Michael Hartmann: for our listeners, you should have just seen the look that

Mike Rizzo: You should see. She’s like,

she’s like,

I don’t think we could be friends

Amara Omoregie: Ugh. . No. Now. So again, going back to focusing on the objective. Do we need to build this meaty, crazy, stupid funnel to [00:52:00] accomplish what we’re trying to do? Is there something that we can do that would take less time and be more effective thinking, thinking agile. Like what is the mvp? What is, what is something we can do so we can start seeing a result?

So it was before you even take the request, like just bring this, this mindset to the, to the table when you’re actually thinking about what it is that you’re gonna do. Cause you don’t have to just be an order taker and just be like, Oh, this part wants this thing. Okay, slow down. What is the objective that you’re trying to accomplish?

Do we need a funnel? Like could we just make a video about what we wanna communicate and it accomplish the same thing and send it to the like whatever. A lot of times there’s more than one way to do it, to accomplish the same thing. That’s where we as marketers can interject our professional input and say, Hey, you can spend, we can wait two months to this thing, or we can get this out in two weeks.

Which one do you.

Michael Hartmann: So I, you hit on a word that I was good, like, I really like to use the word mindset, cuz to me this is not about a methodology per se. Like it could be, you could use waterfall, you could use something that’s agile or screw up. Like I don’t really care what you call it. What I do think is [00:53:00] really important is, is having that mindset of, okay, someone came to me and they want this thing, right?

They want a box and a hundred percent of what they want. First off, they probably don’t really know what they want anyway. No. I mean, like, and that’s not meant to be like, I don’t know always. Like I, so I, I may have a, I may have something in my head, but actually articulating it is really, really hard if it’s a conceptual kind of thing.

Because people hear words and they, they interpret ’em differently. Like we just talked about Agile, right? I think we probably all have probably a different idea of what we mean by agile, right? But, um, but what I do think is having the conversation to go, um, there’s a cost of doing all these things, right?

So, and there’s a marginal cost of going from, we’ll call it MVP just for ly simplicity here, right? Maybe it’s 80% of what somebody wants, but it’s gonna take another, you know, that takes 20% of the time it would’ve taken to build a hundred percent thing, but you’re learning faster[00:54:00]

Amara Omoregie: mm-hmm. , it’s iterative.

Michael Hartmann: and you might find that like, actually that little bit of effort that got us close in the right direction.

So I like directionally correct stuff is, is, was good enough, or we learned and we said, Oh, that’s not really what we wanna do, or we need to adjust what I, So I think that is the, the downside of. . Yeah. Like that’s why I think the mindset needs to be, not to be about fulfilling every request at exactly what they requested, because a, I think that’s, as soon as you get it a little bit bigger than just the very minute tasks, right?

It, it becomes an interpret interpretation thing. If you interpret things incorrectly, then you spend time on something that somebody doesn’t really want and a lot of times to get to what they want. This marginal cost of going from the 80% to the a hundred percent is, is a really large amount of time, effort, money, depending on what it is,

Amara Omoregie: And let’s make that, Let’s have that conversation and make that [00:55:00] decision. Like, let’s be conscious, let’s consciously throw it out on the table. Like we can spend a hundred hours on this thing and we don’t know if it’s gonna work. We could spend 20 hours on this thing and we think it could work at least this much.

Michael Hartmann: we could learn from it.

Amara Omoregie: We could learn from it, right? And get it out faster and iterate and improve. Right. And I think we have to give ourselves permission as marketers. So you’re not saying no, Kinda like I was saying earlier, you don’t have to say no. It’s like, okay, let’s, let us help you figure out what, how to meet this objective.

And if there’s still hellbent on doing what they wanna do, it’s like, why are you so hell bent on doing, Oh, cause our competitor’s doing, or cuz da da da, like whatever. And then when they get it on the table, they’ll realize it sounds stupid. I’m sorry, I’m blunt. They’ll realize it’s kind of sounds stupid, it’s not really a real reason.

And they’ll walk themselves off the bridge. It’s usually what happens, right? And so

Mike Rizzo: Yeah, I

Amara Omoregie: changing the conversation a little bit and sometimes people don’t and that’s fine too.

Michael Hartmann: No, I,

Mike Rizzo: feel like so many people will just keep fighting. They’re like, No, no, no. I swear

Michael Hartmann: and that’s, and that’s fine. You know, I think that’s okay. But if you go into it and say, Okay, if you really want to go, you know, have that [00:56:00] conversation where you say, I think we can get to, we can directionally get towards what you’re trying to achieve. Um, you really seem like you want to go all the way to what you believe the ultimate vision is.

Um, without making it like learning along the way, that’s fine to do that. Here’s what it’s gonna take. And you understand like all these different things that need to come together to do that. The resources, are you ready to commit? Are you gonna review things on time? Like all that kind of stuff you can have the conversation about that and then you st like, okay, so do you still wanna do that?

And if it is, then that means also you’re trading that out. Uh, cuz what’d you say? Call it productive hours. We have certain amount of productive hours across the team, and if they’re all being consumed by this, we’re not doing other things.

Amara Omoregie: and now you’re doing what I said earlier. You’re letting data be your guide.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah,

Amara Omoregie: You’re not facing this on, I just don’t wanna do it. It’s like, Well, if you look at it, we can’t or we have to. [00:57:00] There’s tradeoffs. What trade off for you? Consciously wanting us to make?

Michael Hartmann: I’m a,

Mike Rizzo: a good episode.

Michael Hartmann: Yeah, I think I, that’s such a way to, I think that, that it really encapsulate, like, to me, so I, I have

Amara Omoregie: My friends are triggered, friends and family watching, listening to this episode,

Michael Hartmann: right. Like,

Amara Omoregie: they’re just trying to breathe through it,

Michael Hartmann: I, you know, I, I keep, I keep bringing back in, like, I’ve got teenage children and they want so badly, I think to see the world, as we probably all did, right, is it’s, it’s right or wrong.

Um, or there’s a way to do something or not. And I’ve just gotten to the point where I’m like, just about every decision we make, even in small ones, right, there’s a trade off. So you’re making a trade off between something you, you could do, uh, versus something else you could do. And sometimes they’re both good things, but you can’t do them both,

Amara Omoregie: make a conscious decision of what we’re not going to do. And when you make people, when you put people’s feet to the fire and make them decide, it’s like, mm

Mike Rizzo: [00:58:00] Mm-hmm.

Amara Omoregie: How, paint the picture of how you see this happening. Maybe I’m missing something. Mm.

Michael Hartmann: So, uh,

Mike Rizzo: not gonna

Michael Hartmann: this is, so this is like, I’m I, I wanna just like, keep going, but I know we can’t. Um, so, but I will give you one. So, one last opportunity. Is there anything that we didn’t cover that you, like, I needed to make sure that the, the listeners heard about this, that we didn’t cover

Amara Omoregie: we covered so much that we didn’t cover everything. Um,

Michael Hartmann: we made trade-offs.

Mike Rizzo: we, we, we made trade

Amara Omoregie: trade offs. We sure did. Um, honestly, I think the one thing I wanna admit or just acknowledge is that you’re not crazy. You’re not alone. Don’t feel like you’re inadequate because you can’t figure it out. Our industry, this is a very broken part of our industry and we took it upon ourselves to fix it and help other agencies and help other marketing.

Figure out what we figured out along the way because we have better [00:59:00] things to do. We need to get cool stuff done and keep growing and iterating cuz the industry’s growing so fast and more and more it’s expected us, of us every day with less resources. Right. We don’t time to like sit there and it took us five years to figure it out.

Right. And so you’re not inadequate. You didn’t, It’s not because of lack of education, it’s broken. There’s, there’s no place to learn all of this. I’ve been doing this for 15 years, so I’ve taken all my experience and I spent a lot of dedicated time trying to figure it out. So the one thing I wanna leave you with is you’re not an idiot, you’re not alone.

But there is a way to fix it and start by advocating for what you need and, you know, hit me up. I’m always, you know, down to get whatever, help whoever I can. Cuz it was a huge problem for us that I just had to figure out. There just had to be a way

Michael Hartmann: All right. Well, so let’s, let’s go there. Like, if, so, if people do wanna hit you up and they want to, you know, learn from you or connect with you, what’s the best way to do that?

Amara Omoregie: Uh, I love LinkedIn. Uh, you can amara amara reps.com, A M A R A [01:00:00] R e ps.com. Uh, yeah, just reach out and, uh, we, I have some webinars coming up on project management and for marketing teams and stuff like that. We do provide support to agencies and, uh, marketing teams as part of our operations, uh, what we offer for operations as well.

Michael Hartmann: Fantastic. And I think we’ll need to make sure that we put, um, some show notes, Mike, in with the link to the, uh, blog post that Amara did just recently. And this is for the listeners who might be coming up on this later. This was, we were recording this in publishing it in October of 2022.

Mike Rizzo: Yeah, that blog post actually hit our announcements channel in Slack and then, uh, Amaro fixed it and then it broke the link. So it was actually her fault, but then it was my fault for not

Amara Omoregie: There’s a typo. I’m

Mike Rizzo: but it was great because, you know what’s great is everybody in this community will tell me when I do something like that and I break something. Um, so they told me the link was broken, we fixed it. So

[01:01:00] we’ll have it in the show notes for you folks. No

Michael Hartmann: Nice. Well, Amara, thank you so much. And Mike, thank you. Um, all our listeners, thank you too for letting us, uh, invade your personal space and, you know, put an ear, you know, get in your ears and your head. Uh, thanks for supporting us and if you have other ideas or suggestions for, for topics or guests, uh, always feel free to reach out to Mike or Naomi or me.

With that, it’s a wrap. Thanks everyone. Bye.

Mike Rizzo: Thanks everybody.