Mads Singers on Effective Business Leadership and The 80/20 Rule of Management

Thank you very much, Stephen. Yeah, my name is Mads Singers and I’m a management coach. I have spent the last 10 plus years, 11, 12 maybe now coaching business owners. So that’s everything from e-commerce, lots in the SEO space, a lot in online businesses in general. Have had a few sort of fiscal clients as well, the majority of my clients at the moment at least is sort of in the virtual world and online businesses and so on. And yeah, my passion is really helping people build amazing teams. So hiring the right people, firing people when needed, how to delegate, how to pick the right people, put the right people in the right seats and so on. That’s really my sort of core passion.

Yeah, I used to work in the corporate world. So I worked in management and IBM for many years. And that was, you know, even in the corporate world, a lot of people get promoted into management, don’t really know what they’re doing, try their best. And that is very similar to the small business world where, you know, a lot of people, they suddenly bump into some e -commerce company and suddenly they start hiring people and they don’t really know what they’re doing.

All right, so the whole point is that I realised I can help people significantly by giving them some guidance. And yeah, that’s what I love doing. So a lot of simple tips can often help people grow and scale significantly.

Generally, our customers are generally people who are, I say, hitting at least 500k a month, right? So they’re at a stage where they have figured out what they’re doing, they have figured out the product they’re doing and so on. They typically have a few people, so that could be a couple of EAs, that could be local staff or whatever, but they kind of started the journey and they realised that, you know, management is a different skill set than e -commerce.

And generally they realise that getting help from someone who knows what they’re doing is very helpful and can sort of catapult that journey for them. So, or with them, if you will. So that’s sort of the ideal audience. I’ve worked with people doing anything from half a mil up to 200 mil, I think is the biggest e -com guy I’ve worked with. So a lot of sort of difference in terms of the clients. I’d say the issue is always the same, right? So a lot of e -com guys really do what they’ve always done and they have a hard time letting go, have a hard time sort of handing over responsibility and very often for most people it’s the first time they’re hiring so that they don’t necessarily know what they’re doing on that front which is sometimes tough.

For me, I think it’s definitely a sort of background. So I’ve worked, one, I’ve worked with many online businesses. I’m also in a lot of networks with tons of online entrepreneurs of different kinds. And my core competency, if you will, is the disk behaviour framework, which I teach all of my clients and for me, that’s absolutely core competency in terms of helping you find the right people a lot of time, right? It’s not just asking the right interview questions, but it’s really understanding. Okay. I’m talking with you, Stephen, you know, what is your natural strengths and weaknesses? Because the problem is most people don’t know themselves well. And if you don’t know how to sort of read them and understand them, then, you know, you’re likely to not get it right when it comes to hiring.

And I think that’s probably my biggest strength. And I’d say also from a business standpoint, like I own six companies right now, we have over 300 employees in total. So I definitely, you know, I play the game as well. So I’m not just someone sitting around talking. I definitely do the work as well. So.

So basically what I do is that I take what I call the 80 -20 of effective management and I really put that into a training course. So if you have a small business, you can buy it as a training course and you can go through it. It’s about, I think, five and a half, six hours or something like that of training. And for me, that’s 80-20. So if you get that piece right, obviously, it’s not just watching the videos, but it’s actually implementing. But basically, if you get that stuff right, you’re better than 90 % of the managers out there. So the core thing for me is really getting the basics right because obviously, I could spend months talking about management.

But I know that most entrepreneurs are very, very busy. So my core focus was really trying to boil it down and say, what are the core things that you’ve to get right to win? Right. And that’s really what I’ve done in training. And I’ve worked with over 700 clients in total now. So lots of clients that have gone through that. So, basically it’s either a course training or if people have managers and so on, they often get me in, to do it in person, similar to what we are doing here. Right. So we do it with the entire group together.

And that’s generally the other option, but that is my starting point for all clients. And that is fundamentally because I want everyone to be on the same boat, so they’re the same page, right? And I want to make sure that we all talk about the same, because if people start hiring me for one -hour consultations here and there, I end up covering the same stuff. It just ended up being way more unstructured and so on.

Generally, always building businesses. I like either acquiring companies, like acquiring parts of companies, becoming partners and so on. So I love building teams. So just like I love teaching people how to do it, I love building teams. I love putting the right people in place in different businesses to really grow and scale them. And that’s my core passion. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

man, I’ve been through it all. Everything from hiring bad people, even though I teach it. I’d say probably one of the biggest things was particularly when you’re growing from yourself, that there’s definitely an easy way to anxiety when you haven’t really got a solid plan in place, right?

You have these ideas, have these goals and you have these things you want to do. But when you have a small company, least, then you start worrying about cash flow, you start worrying about things and sometimes you start making irrational decisions. So one of the core things for me is that business is fundamentally about taking asymmetrical bets and winning big. So what I mean with that specifically is that It’s all about looking at, know, if I can take a bunch of risks or if I can put a thousand dollars in a bunch of places, if there’s a chance that one of those thousand dollars become a million, that is generally worth the risk of a lot of bets. Right. So when I look at business versus having a job, like having a job, you know what you’re getting. You’re putting in dollars, you get a certain outcome. Right. But for me, business is fundamentally about looking at where can you take risks that have a, compared to the input of resources, have a reasonable potential expectation of an output.

That’s really how I look at business. And that definitely took me a few years to kind of get into that mindset and really understand how to run a business on my own. Because again, working in a large corporation, that was definitely a little bit different, right? Because IBM have unlimited money, right? So if you have a great idea, there’s always money to do it. But when you’re an entrepreneur, well, you can go out and raise money and borrow money.

I’m definitely slightly more conservative by nature. So I definitely had to learn the game of the business in the early years. And I definitely did a bunch of mistakes in that. But fundamentally, I think the core thing with most people is that when you keep chugging away at the same thing over years, you’re going to succeed. So the biggest issue I see with most entrepreneurs is they’re constantly, they want two years and then they change direction and the grass is always greener.

And I was very, very lucky to sort of start out with my management piece. And I’ve never done it full time. So I spent about 30 % of my time doing management training, but that I’ve always been a very sort of strong staple, right? And yeah, that’s been very helpful sort of from building my companies and so on.

Yeah, I think from a business perspective and particularly I’ll take it from a people perspective here, which is everyone tells you to delegate, but most people don’t understand the concept of delegation. So from a mindset perspective, the most important thing is to look at your company as a pyramid and really look at growing the value of a company like growing a pyramid, right?

Now, as an entrepreneur, you’re the top stone. And the way you increase the value of your business is to increase the value of your hours. So the way you increase the value of your hours is taking some of the things you’re doing that can be done by someone else and letting them do it so that you can do more valuable things.

I think the biggest thing most entrepreneurs struggle with is that they are often busy and they work a lot but they don’t work on the right things. They’re not looking at it and saying, you know, what is the most valuable thing? What is the one thing I can do to really push my business forward there instead, because they’re busy, they have this idea that, you know, they should be busy as an entrepreneur. They end up working a lot, but they just do the wrong things. Like, and sometimes it’s, it’s very important to really slow down and really seeing, you know, what is it going to take to go and double my business? Like, what needs to be different, what needs to happen here, what are the changes that are required to go and do it.

Yeah, I mean, we help a lot of e -commerce business as well. So we have a very good outsourcing company called Aristo Sourcing. And with that, we hire a lot of people in South Africa. So that’s probably also a tip for your audience. So a lot of people hire in like India, Philippines and so on. Our favourite place, we do hire a bit in Philippines, but our favourite place is definitely in South Africa.

And that is really just because of a mix of sort of Western culture, native English, and a better time zone. So if you’re working with US clients, most Filipinos are happy to work in the middle of the night. But my experience tells me that you rarely get the best work out of people at 3 am in the morning. So definitely from an outsourcing standpoint, I definitely recommend people to take a look at South Africa or even just general recruitment, right?

You don’t have to go to an outsourcing company if you have an in -house team. But that’s definitely a big recommendation as well.

Awesome. Thank you.