- In middle school and all of high school
I was fully engrossed in this game called
World of Warcraft.
World of Warcraft, if you don't know,
is a massive multi-player online game.
You could become one of many characters in a fantasy world,
and fight your way to the top.
It doesn't sound super addicting
when I give a synopsis like that, but World of Warcraft
took up at least 10 hours a day,
every single day of my childhood.
And the reason why I bring that up today
is World of Warcraft taught me a crazy amount
about management and running a business,
particularly botting in World of Warcraft.
Botting if you don't know is using a computer
to play the game for you, and the reason
why I started botting is if I wanted to level
and wanted to keep moving in the game,
I could either hire somebody online to power level me,
or I could use a robot to play the game for me.
Botting in general has come a long way,
and I think it's banned totally in the game.
I haven't played World of Warcraft in about a year,
but what it used to be is you go to a location,
and you set a path.
Let's say a circle or whatever path
you think would be most effective.
Then you'd set what skills to use,
and your character would run in zig-zag,
or they'd run in this path killing monsters
and gaining experience.
Here are three things I learned about management
botting in World of Warcraft.
Number one is patience.
The same with hiring people.
Running a bot isn't gonna get you results right away.
In the old World of Warcraft, it took three to four months
to hit the top level of level 60,
and with botting it took even longer
because instead of doing quests, which provide you
with a lot of xp at once, these guys were just grinding,
which means killing monster after monster,
looting, and slowly making progress.
That meant any strategy I created or put in place
would take weeks before I saw some results.
You might see preliminary results,
but even those I would set a bot in the morning
then go to school throughout the day,
have no way of checking it and then have to see at the end,
which taught me patience.
It's the same way with your employees.
For instance, Rinaldo who runs our marketing.
We're working on a new strategy for video edits.
I don't know if the strategy is gonna work.
He doesn't know if the strategy's gonna work,
but we took our best guess and now we're testing daily.
Similar to that Instagram experiment
we did a couple weeks ago, I didn't know
if becoming Gary V was gonna be great
for the Instagram channel, or if it was gonna crush
the following and if everyone was gonna leave.
But it was only through patience that we found out.
Number two is test everything first.
It seemed really easy in World of Warcraft
to go to a zone and plan a circle
and then just go off to school,
but what that would often lead to is my bot getting trapped
behind rocks or the process failing
sometime throughout the day.
What I found most effective instead
is to run the circle myself at least once,
kill the monsters, do an entire run
similar to how the bot would do it,
and then record and use the bot that way.
And it's the same thing with business.
We could have hired someone to do Adward's consulting
for us, but we're gonna learn a lot more
testing it ourselves, coming up with our own strategy
than we would if we had hired a consultant right away,
and that's my advice to anyone who hires Consultants,
which I went through in another video
about when advice from YouTube doesn't work.
Before you end up with a consultant,
or before you end up taking too much advice,
it's always good to run things first.
The same with your employee.
Before you outline an entire strategy for them to run,
especially when it comes to cold email
or any sort of marketing strategy, it's always good
as the founder to test it yourself first.
I was just on a consultant call with somebody
who wrote an email script and the next day
was sending it out to 100 people a day,
and the first thing I told them was, "Stop."
The first step's to write 20 emails manually
and send those, see how those do.
Make sure they're as different as they possibly can be
before writing a script because things you pull offline
aren't always going to work in your favor.
Every business is different.
So our management team now does the same.
They test things themselves first
before sending them off to our contractors to do the work.
Number three is I learned to be hands off.
Once a bot is doing his route, maybe he's out in the barrens
killing raptors or my favorite spot,
maybe he's out in feralas killing giants.
The trick is to let him be.
You have a route that works.
You know the process is working, so let him be.
And it's the same thing for our contractors.
It's the same way that I approach the people
that work for us.
Once a process is running,
I'm gonna let them do their thing.
Back to what we're doing for marketing right now.
Rinaldo's goal as our marketing manager
is to get me featured on one publication a week.
Huffington Post, Fast Company, anything like that,
and that's his lag measure.
His lead measure is to send a certain number of emails,
but as long as he's getting that booking once a week,
we were just featured in Huffington Post.
I don't have to tweak anything, and actually, going in
and editing the email scripts that are already working
just to try to make it better will break it.
Just like jumping in in the middle
of your botting experience and trying to delete loot
or using your own spells is gonna throw off
the entire system.
The lesson there is once it's working, leave them alone,
let them work.
If you found this video valuable,
I'd love if you'd share it with a friend or two.
We're trying to hit 100,000 subs this year,
and any share would be much appreciated.
And if you need marketing support for your digital agency,
check out experiment27.com.
Thanks.