What can Wreck it Ralph teach you about running an online business? Not much, but Jason Berkowitz from Break the Web can teach you plenty. Not only has Jason mastered SEO, but he’s also an expert in delegation and agency building. Luckily, Jason took some time to give me his OBT for creating a virtual team.
SOP’s At Your Fingertips
Running a fully virtual company requires fully virtual resources for your team. One of the most vital virtual resources is an SOP book - a place to store all of your company’s tried and true processes, checklists, and employee expectations.
Break the Web uses an online productivity tool called Notion to keep things running smoothly around the “office.” The team Wiki allows Jason to delegate the right tasks to the right people and evaluate current performance. “As a team member starts going through specific tasks, they start tracking how long it might take them to complete a specific task. So that allows for bandwidth allocation. Let's see how long it might be taking, or do they have more availability to take on a bit more? Are they overworked?”
Lifetime Learners
This central Wiki also allows Jason and his team to update the workflow and SOPs as needed. “We encourage our team members to also improve our recipes. So if they find a better way to do something, we're going to document that down [and] swap out the old one.” This encourages his team to try new things and learn from their experience.
Your business can’t survive if you’re not willing to learn through the process. “I'm learning more about the business side every single day-- things that we didn't even think about beforehand.” As you learn those things, you’ll need to decide how and where your business needs to adapt. For Jason, that meant delegating more tasks, but for your business, it could mean changing something dramatically.
“You should never be complacent, and you should never stop learning. Because while you think you may be at that right point in your business or your agency, you guys are doing very, very well, you're going to get hit with a brick so hard it’s going to knock you the hell out.”
If you want to find out more about Jason and his web breaking team, just head to Google and look for Break the Web, Jason Berkowitz, or Jason SEO - thanks to his SEO genius, he’s normally the top result. You can also catch up with him on LinkedIn.