Three Ideas: Green Pen Strategy, the 10/80/10 Rule, and Finding the Room

Chris DuBois00

So what's different? All right, trying something a bit different with some of these upcoming episodes, where I'm just going to share ideas, some of the things that are on my mind, different concepts, frameworks that I've been playing with, or that I've talked about before. Basically, we've got school starting up again, and so between driving back from dropping off the kids or heading out to pick them up, it's like I got time to record. Why don't I just do some of these, like share thoughts, get them packaged in. I've also got this dog that needs constant walking and and attention in the morning, and so walking around on the back porch, just talking through some of these ideas, I think is a great way for me to kind of firm up the ideas and and improve my way of thinking about them, but then also I can share them with you. So, if you have challenges that you you want some ideas for how to work through them, I might have a framework already lined up. So shoot me a message. We'll make sure it gets answered in some future content. And otherwise, just enjoy. I got three three ideas lined up for you today. Listen to those, see how they can apply to your agency, and then we'll go from there. All right, I want to talk about a concept for strategy making called green pen, red pen, blue pen. It's not the actual name, but that's how I remember it. So I figured it'd be easy, easier to start there. The idea behind this: When I was in the army, the there was a course that I attended for to advance career-wise, and this one portion of the course was called intelligence preparation of the battlefield, and that's essentially the model as well that we're using, so that we could go into like any situation, and you had a general framework for how you would kind of look at all of the different variables that you have going on in order to know what the best course of action for yourself is. Now, with it, this could be done very quickly. It could be done with a lot more time. So, right, like a invasion of D Day, it's going to be very different than if we're just like rolling up to check out a building or something. And so, what I did was kind of repurpose this for the business world, specifically for agencies to be looking at their positioning and how we tackle positioning here, because it is a strategic thing, right? Your strategy all stems from your position, and so when we look at, let's just get into it. When we look at green pen, red pen, blue pen, the idea first is that it has to be done in this order, okay? And there's a very specific reason when we're looking at the green pen. So anything on a military map is the green is going to symbolize terrain. The red will symbolize the enemy, and then blue is for anything like friendly forces. Okay, so when we're looking at the green, the reason we want to start here is because this is the environment. This is everything that everyone has to deal with, whether it's the enemy or us, right? We we have to figure out how we're going to work with this from a military perspective. If there is a cliff in the middle of a battlefield, it's like that cliff is something we all have to to deal with. That cliff could be an advantage to either party, depending on where they're at, what they're doing.

Chris DuBois04:23

Right, an enemy on top of the cliff is going to be very different than an enemy at the bottom of the cliff. But regardless, the enemy also has to deal with this cliff, and so their actions are going to be influenced by it. And so the first thing you want to do strategically is just look at the market, right? What do your target buyers? What are they caring about right now? What fears do they have? What are the things that are going to get them to want to buy? When we look at like the 11 differentiation levers, hey, what of those levers do they care about the most right now? Is it the. Methodology, like they want to find some new way of doing things. Maybe it's a delivery model. Maybe people are incredibly busy right now, and they just want someone to come in and do this for them without needing a ton of meetings and all these other things, right? Or maybe everyone's very price sensitive, and so your economic model is going to be what people care about the most. Whatever it is, right? We want to figure that out. We also want to look at some of the other market things, like just have situational awareness over the market as a whole. Are things growing, shrinking, right? Like what's happening everywhere. Now, once you have that mapped out, right? We know what people care about. We know what things are influencing them, like all of that. Then we move on to the red pen, and so we're looking at what is the competition doing that we need a plan for. In the military sense, we're looking for their most likely course of action, right? Like, what do we expect them to do, and then also what is their most deadly course of action? And so we want to be able to like look at our competition and go through both both of those. The most likely is usually much easier because everyone like kind of gravitates towards certain certain things, right? If we see that most most agencies in the industry are pricing like this, we kind of assume that everyone else is going to keep pricing like that. But what if someone was able to come in and you know just undercut everybody on pricing, and they're still able to have a sustainable business model while doing it? Like that would be pretty detrimental. If at the same time the market really cares about price right now, and someone was able to just unlock that pricing piece, and they could just beat out everybody else, right? That would be probably the most deadly course of action. I'm using air quotes; you can't see that. And so, what we what we want to do is map both of those out, right? And so, you want to find first the competition should be the people who are coming up in conversations that your current prospects are already considering you against. I would not just do a like blanket. Hey, here are all of the agencies that I'm competing with, or here are the the agencies that I would love to be competing with. Because if you're not coming up in those conversations, anyways, like you're not being compared to them, and positioning is completely inactive. Like being compared to something, and then get being put in our own box inside someone's head. Right. So find the ones you're already being compared to, and then look at them through that lens. Like what? What are they most likely to continue doing here? And then if for this specific competitor, is there something that they could do that would kind of disrupt everything else, right? Like maybe you do see how one of them has this benefit of being able to change their delivery model. Like maybe you know a bunch of the team members on their team are super skilled, and they're I don't know they have other other businesses going on or something, right? They're all fractionals or something, and two of them just sold their businesses. That might be something they could use as a talent lever to be able to say, "Hey, look, all of the people here have done exactly what we're going to do for you for themselves, and so now, right? You're seeing these things and you're able to map that out.

Chris DuBois08:18

But okay, finally, you move into the blue pen, which is your plan. You know what your levers are, right? You know what what you want to be tackling, but because we now have the an understanding of the market, we know what they they care about. We have an understanding of the the competition to know like what they're actually going to be good at, then you can look for gaps within that. Find the opportunities to chase, and so if that, I mean, if everyone is doing a like a strong, like lower priced option, maybe you could stand out by actually doing a higher priced option, and you lean into some of the other levers that people really care about right now, and and that premium option sets you apart from everybody else and allows you to do different things because you have more budget to actually do it, and so these are a couple different things you should be thinking about strategically, like red or green pen, red pen, blue pen, right? Work through it in that that model, and you can go through most of your strategic like like planning through this. All right, so the 1080 10 rule, pulling another thing from from the army, the idea behind this is that a lot of times we don't delegate very efficiently or effectively. But the so what we want to talk about right when you are giving a task to someone, a lot of times like founders will avoid this because it's going to come. Back then, they're going to be making all these changes. It's not going to like. Why am I even giving this to you in the first place? But if we reframe that and say, "Hey, I'm going to for this this task, let's just let's say it's 10 hours for so we can do some easy math here. It's a 10 hour task that I'm giving someone. I will take one hour of that time to prep the task, to make sure that the person getting this task has everything they could possibly need. I'm answering every question. I'm giving them every resource. I'm going through all of the details that they would want in order to to not have to lift their head up from the project. Right? They can just sit down and they can do that entire task. The 80% is then handed to that team member, so that they can do 80% of the work. They can they can knock all of that out because you've prepped them with everything that they need. Okay, the final 10% is the project coming back to you, and you running your tweaks, making corrections, right? Because you've spent so much time prepping this, and then the 80% is like done. This last 10% you shouldn't have a ton of corrections that you have to be making on this. In the off chance you do, you make sure that this has all become like getting documented, so that the next time you do any similar task or anything else, this gets included in the initial 10% to make sure that you're like giving them all of the context. Like, hey, last time these are the things that I had to change, so now you know this going into this next one, and now your entire delegation process starts getting easier. So yes, you're still spending a lot of time, but over time, that you don't need to spend as much. So in this 10-hour task, I've spent two hours on it, but then I completely forgot about it for the other eight. Like I was able to let someone just run with it. Over time, team member gets more efficient, we get more efficient, right? And so maybe I'm only spending an hour just because we've gotten that much better. The bonus here is that when we start talking about AI, right, we start unlocking some real benefits because most people are still trying to like one-shot a prompt, get something in there so that they can get the result. But imagine you had a 10-hour task you were going to work on, and you spent one hour just getting AI everything it would need to knock this out perfectly, okay? Full hour. You're just like context. You're doing like connections. Hey, you're going to need access to these tools. You're doing all of those things, okay?

Chris DuBois12:35

Then you give it to AI. It has like I'm using air quotes here, eight hours to work through this, and then you have an hour on the back end just to do edits and work with it to get things tweaked. Like that, whatever task you just gave it, you should be getting that back, and it's going to look awesome. It should be 100% to your liking. And most people are are just giving it a prompt saying, "Oh, it didn't come out. I have to spend all this time, anyways, and they're actually wasting time trying to correct it and like working back and forth when they didn't give it the context in the first place, right? If you treat AI like a team member and you run this 1080 10, you will get better results from AI, right? I promise. If you have team documentation, team context folders, like a second brain for your company. You should be giving it access to all of that to help with all of the context finding for initial tasks. All of this, but 1080 10. Use it with your team. Use it with AI. I promise you, you will get better results from your delegation. Okay, I want to get you thinking differently about where you're doing your marketing. Okay, so we're going to break this down into platforms, channels, and rooms. Now, starting with platforms, right? Not to insult anyone's intelligence, but these are just the the larger place where all these different things can happen. These the platform hosts the channels and the rooms. Okay, so a platform could be LinkedIn, it could be Google, like Reddit. All of these different things are platforms. They exist, and you can have multiple ways of marketing on them. Now, the channels. Okay, if we look at like the definition, right? A channel. We're going to take something from here, transmit it to somewhere else. We want to move someone from the platform to us. Okay, whatever that means for us. And so, the channels you could be. Let's take LinkedIn for example. On LinkedIn, I could be doing organic posting. I could run ads. I could do just DMs. I can comment on other people's posts. We have our our profile, like just getting people into the profile page. Like, there's so many different things that I could be doing on LinkedIn, and the channel is like we have a set of skills, right? Especially if we're marketing agencies, like maybe I'm an ad agency. Okay, so I'm going to be able, I'm going to try to run ads. One that lets you use a permissionless demo, but also it lets you increase the chances that what you're doing is going to work, right? So, so we have all those channels, and we know generally what we want to be doing For for our marketing, now we need to find the rooms that people are are hanging out in. The room, if we imagine just four walls like contained space, the we want to operate within that room if we can. This is what gives us the best signal chance, right? Like we can actually see what's working, and it's going to mean that that like we can we can just reach these people. Period. All right, that was falling off the train of thought there. So when we like, let's take LinkedIn as a simple example here. You probably have contacts right now in your LinkedIn that are maybe from a prior industry. Maybe they're just people who are trying to sell you something, and they just they exist now in your like your contact list. Maybe like they're just friends, right? And so none of these people are going to engage with your content unless they just really like you, and they're they're bros or something, but like most of them are they're gonna see it and they're gonna move on because it's not something that they want to see all the time. Now, when you post new content on LinkedIn, right? The algorithm is going to serve up that content to a bunch of people from your contact list. Now, none of those people engage with your content. That tells LinkedIn, hey, this is crappy content. We don't need to serve with anybody else, right?

Chris DuBois16:44

So, just looking at organic posting on LinkedIn, you don't have a really tight room to be able to work in. Now, you compare this to like a group where everyone in there is your ICP, or maybe an influencer who, in the comment section, is everyone that you would want to do business with. If you can get in there and market to them, then there is a a much better chance that you're going to like see the signal of what's working, what people care about, and you're going to be able to interact with them and hopefully get them off the platform via your Channel, cool. So, as you're running your marketing, think through the platform. Think through your channels that the ones specifically that you're good at that you can deliver well on, but that exist on the channel or on the platform. Excuse me. And then find the rooms where people are already hanging out, and I promise you, you are going to start seeing better results from your marketing.