Revenue isn't the problem. The founder is

Yeah, absolutely. It's a pleasure. I'm very excited to do this with you.

Yeah, thank you for doing your your research on me. two two very different industries. I've studied university for both of them and I was working in Waldorf Astoria, in restaurants particularly, and I thought that was it for me. Like I was definitely drinking the Kool-Aid and making really low pay, working really insane. hours and holidays and on a personal note my dad passed away suddenly and it became really clear that it wasn't worth missing any more holidays or weekends, you know, with my family or enjoying I wasn't able to enjoy life as much as I think I should be. In the US at least we work too much. you know, we live we live to work. So at twenty years old I was or I was twenty three at the time. I was like, there's gotta be more and he always was sending me like accounting clerk jobs and kind of pushing me to use that side of my brain. And so that's what really flipped flipped it upside down and I said like I have to do something different. and there w d there just happened to be a job opening in my hometown. at an e-commerce agency and they were hiring for someone to do the invoicing and also like plan the company Christmas party. And so someone that I knew, he was a server of mine, was like, didn't you go to school for these things? And so I was like, Yeah, I'm glad my two degrees could amount to something, you know, planning snacks and parties and sending out bills. So I took that job and knew nothing about e-commerce or the agency industry. And learned very quickly and never never turned back. So

Yes, so we work with e-commerce agencies exclusively. and we help them with all things operations and finance. Operations still is not a very it's a very like vague term, you know. So we help agencies with all things like HR, legal, true like resource planning, capacity planning, utilization reporting. we do build out financial forecasts. And it's interesting because we say the word consulting in the title, but we aren't consultants that just come in and give you a bunch of homework and tell you things you already know. Me and the team, we roll up our sleeves and we actually build the things for you and train your teams on how to use these tools successfully. So yeah, and it's not just me, it's not just Tier Dragus. There's a whole team behind me as well.

I yes, yes, yes.

It it that's a great question. usually they are growing and so revenue is not the issue, but the issue is everything is kind of coming across the founder's desk in order to like get out the door as a deliverable and they're getting busier and busier and so they don't have the time to keep up with it, nor do they have the time to like properly train everyone. or or like build processes so the agency has become founder dependent, which has like held their growth back. And other areas are they have team members but they have no idea what everyone is working on. The team is coming to them and saying like I'm busy, I can't take another project. And we have no they have no data to back that up. or maybe they have multiple service lines. So maybe they do design and development for brands. They also do retention marketing and maybe they do paid media. And all those three separate teams are operating as their own agency. And so there's no one holding the glue together. And so that's when they'll come to me and say like we need help and we don't have the time to do it. And maybe they have like an external bookkeeper, but they don't really have an internal grasp on If these pipeline deals sold, what does that do to my PL? If I hire these team members, what does that do to my PL? Kind of having an agency lens on department and role style PLs.

Sleep better, you know. I don't know if any founder sleeps well, but I yeah, we'll try to help them sleep better. and and be yeah, if if they have goals for MA, for merger and acquisition, if they have goals to sell or they just have goals to, you know, hire more team members, like how can we do that in a smart way?

That's okay. Yeah. I am notorious for calling out CEOs. I do a lot of presentations and I'm usually trying to talk to my fellow ops people in the room and by default I usually call out the CEOs. And so if I can tell them, you know, a few things, it's like drop your ego. you know, especially my my US CEOs, there's a big Ego of saying like how great we are and how many leads we have and how great everything is. And if that were the case, then I wouldn't know you kind of thing. Like you wouldn't need support, right? And so be a little bit more willing to share what's not going so well, you know, and where you do need help if if you really do want to get better and grow. And the other thing is once you can kind of admit it's like. It's like going to AA or something. You know, you have to admit there's a problem. But first, but then get out of your own way. If you have hired a leadership team to come in place, but they don't have visibility into the PL, then what what good is their role? You know, they aren't empowered to make any decisions or to see be a part of the forecasting, then there's no really point in having them as a leadership team. And so I find that those are really like soft skills in the founder to be able to drop the ego and and trust are two big things that we work with a lot of our our companies on.

You know, I think as it relates to the work we do or or even on the the heels of like giving my CEOs advice, we oftentimes like set we know what goal we want to achieve, whether that's personally or professionally, right? But how do we actually get shit done? How do we actually achieve that goal? And I think unless we've broken down that goal, I like to use two frameworks, objectives and key results. and key performance indicators together. I feel like the objectives and key results gives us the destination on the GPS and the KPIs is the speed limit or how fast we're going on the way to that destination and they work together. And so we can have all these loftly goals till we're blue in the face, but unless we have tangible action items of how we're going to get there and what targets numerically we want to hit. in increments to that main goal, then we're we're just gonna be at the next year, we're gonna be saying, like, that's still my same goal, right? and we haven't done anything to measure our progress along the way or actually meet that. And so that's really like our specialty and where we kind of help turn like goals and actually get them done.

Yeah, you know, I was it it kind of goes hand in hand with get shit done because my personality and I feel like ops and my team, we are so get shit done focused that sometimes we forget to give our clients like the context and the why. It's like okay, we know you need a capacity planner, so just give us the access and we'll get it done. And then We hand it to them and they're like, okay, well, what does capacity even mean? And how am I supposed to use this? And so sometimes especially for my team where they are more executors and maybe like the strategy side of things we're still working on. We've gone through with clients, like we've built all these things, and then at the end of it, there's they're still like back on stage one of like, well. what's the goal of this or why did we do this in the first place, which can be so frustrating for my team and and a mistake that, you know, we've had to learn the hard way of like, okay, well let's zoom out first and educate before we get shit done. it's a fine line there.

Yeah, that's a great question. It really is dependent on the agency's team makeup. So if they have one, if they have a person sitting in an HR role, for example, then we may get shit done when it comes to capacity and finance, but when it comes to ensuring that we have an org chart, job descriptions, OKRs and KPIs. I may do more consulting with their head of HR so that I don't step on their toes or totally railroad things that they have in place. I wanna be gentle about I know I don't come off as gentle, but I do wanna tread lightly and respect and be respectful for whoever's already in those seats and do more consulting with them.

Yeah, absolutely. I have I have there's one company where my first week working with them, I became fractional COO and they invited me to their like annual, you know, retreat or planning session. And so I pulled all the utilization data year to date and I brought it to this in person meeting and I knew no one's name it that in this report and all of a sudden everyone had their hands raised before I could even get one word out. And it was a long week. successful and I'm still with them two years later. But yeah, the data can be people can be defensive, you know, about that data, because we're talking about their teams or the the the money, you know, that went behind spending money on on their teams and activities. And so we really try to make data informed decisions, not data-driven decisions. And so I will never come to a meeting and say, You know, we didn't hit our numbers, everyone must go, kind of vibe. it's more about we didn't hit our numbers. This is why I think this happened. Allow them to tell me to fill in the blanks of the story that I may not know if I'm not as integrated in the team. And then let's put a plan together to make small improvements if we're not in like a dire situation. You know, we have flexibility to do that. And then we try to get ourselves to a stable spot and then also make sure that I'm working with leads to to ensure that they trust the data that I've put together. You know, if there are maybe we're missing people's planned time, maybe I'm missing context. And so using the data to collaborate with them versus telling them we have to make decisions, I think that's when I have the most success in that.

Yes, certainly. My agencies are using it a ton. They are all all using it internally, you know, to run their own processes and operations. and now they are not all of them, but I think by next year all of them will be working it into their services for their clients. because I think the clients will be expecting it. And I think we're in this like window of time where we can explore still and kind of figure out what we're doing. we use it for our clients by building all of like the financial dashboards and utilization dashboards. We use AI to build those. And we pull in, you know, the time tracking systems, PM systems, their CRM systems to feed that data and we can build something custom for them. So that's been really fun. And then internally, We, you know, big fans of Claude. We build our own dashboards. We're big lovable fans is our AI tool of choice. but we share skills, we share projects, and I really use it to debrief every call I have to automatically send tasks, follow-ups, Slack messages, and really be like my admin and help with like project management as well.

Yes. Yeah, I'm kind of lost without my note takers. If I forget to bring in another call or something, I'm like, my gosh, how am I gonna follow up from that?

Hundred percent. Yes, absolutely.

That's a great question. I really want to focus on education, I think next year. I am part of a wonderful community called the e-commerce agency growth community that's led by Rachel Jacobs. And we are it's a community for e-commerce agencies all across the globe. And I've done a lot of education with them in that community. But I really want to take it more publicly and do courses and boot camps for e-commerce agencies still specifically, but kind of train them on, you know, financial visibility, operational visibility. And yeah, that's that's what I see for myself. Maybe there's a book in there. I've I've thought about doing a book just with all the stories, even with my

Founders, personalities, I could write a chapter on each one. So maybe there's a podcast in there. and really continuing to help e-commerce agencies that that really want to get better. And I say this last, but it's really the first goal I have, which is to I want to see my team grow and excel and and do the things that they want to do and learn, you know, we've dug so much into AI. I feel like they're now all AI experts, but like what else do they want to learn? What do they want for their careers? And like how can I pour into them?

Okay, that's good to know. Yeah. Maybe maybe I'll do the courses first, then book comes after. Yeah.

Absolutely. You can send me a message at Tiara at Tregusconsulting dot com. My website is Tregusconsulting dot com. Or you can reach me on LinkedIn, Tiara Tregus, or our company page. We have two Tregus Consulting and Tregus Recruiting.

Thank you so much, Micholas. It was a great time. and I'd hope to be a guest again.