Maggie McClure: Operations Wizadry and Fractional Magic
Maggie McClure is a business owner, a mother, a wife, a very funny storyteller, and, for the sake of this podcast — at least, I can attest — that she’s a badass at operations and systems optimization.
I’ve first-hand experience working with her, and I’m excited to bring her onto the show today.
Please welcome Maggie.
Favorite Maggie McClure Quote
“You can’t keep throwing things in the garage and expect to actually use it — it’s time to turn the lights on and start cleaning. And so I come in and help turn the lights on.” – Maggie McClure
Additional Resources
Full Transcript of Our Conversation
Introduction: Meet Maggie McClure
00:00.69 – Brian David Crane
Please welcome Maggie McClure. She’s a business owner, mother, a wife, a very funny storyteller if you follow her on LinkedIn, and for the sake of this podcast at least, I can attest that she’s a badass at operations and system optimization. I’ve got first-hand experience working with her, my team and I do, and I’m excited to bring her onto the show today. Please welcome Maggie.
00:20.50 – Maggie McClure
Welcome myself. Hello, Brian.
00:24.76 – Brian David Crane
All right, so for those who are not familiar with you, how did you wind up as the owner and starting Fractional Magic?
00:33.22 – Maggie McClure
Funny enough, when you and I were working together, however, many years ago, at a company that we shall not name because it is kind of embarrassing, not because of the company, but because of the products we were selling,
00:48.82 – Maggie McClure
It was metal detectors, and I don’t love to tell people that, because it’s not it’s not who I am as a person, any who. We were dealing with going remote during the pandemic. And we had about 48 hours to figure out how in the world we were going to do that. And I onboarded ClickUp. And ever since then, I have sold my soul to that platform.
01:17.88 – Maggie McClure
Um, and I’ve just been coming back to ClickUp in particular over the last five, six years, but that’s only one part of it. The other part is that every job I’ve ever had in my entire life, all the way down to like babysitting when I was 13 years old.
The Road to Fractional Magic
01:37.80 – Maggie McClure
I have found ways to make things easier for people, to get their daily jobs done, to get their weekly life a little bit more streamlined. And so I was transitioning away from marketing my entire life. I had been in the marketing world in some respect. And I never loved it. It’s not like I woke up Monday morning and was like, woo, marketing.
02:06.59 – Maggie McClure
um But I had to figure out what else I wanted to do because I was not going to keep doing marketing. And I found a position that allowed me to teach people how to run their businesses more efficiently in ClickUp. And it was like the dream job for me. I got to work from home. I was compensated well. Every single day was something different. It scratched that ADD part of my brain that needed new challenges all the time because I’m implementing new projects, I’m onboarding new clients all the time. And then that job was I want to say the words taken away from me, I left because of decisions leadership made that impacted me personally, and I could not abide. So I took everything that I had learned throughout my career and figured out how to work with small teams distributed remotely and needed to improve their operations holistically and within ClickUp. And that is how fractional magic was born. That was a really long answer.
03:14.50 – Brian David Crane
And that’s a good answer. Yeah. And I think that the part that you didn’t touch on prior to fractional magic is you got a lot of enjoyment out of seeing other people appreciate your work, right?
03:26.84 – Maggie McClure
Oh man, yeah.
03:26.81 – Brian David Crane
Like you would come in and solve problems for them. And they would be, wow, that’s so much better than we even anticipated. And it was consistently. Yeah, rewarding for you in that respect, I imagine.
03:39.61 – Maggie McClure
Yeah, and that’s true. You know, one of the many marketing hats I wore was working in luxury hotels. And I had a really bad habit of never being at my office because I was constantly interacting with guests, trying to figure out how to make them happy. like What can I do to surprise these people, delight these people, make their days a little bit brighter? And so you’re absolutely right. like and Having the ability to feel that gratitude from people is like crack. Like how could you not like, how could you not want to do that every single day? Well, I mean, I’m sure some people don’t care for it, but I do. And it was super motivating. You are correct about that.
04:25.75 – Brian David Crane
Yeah, that’s cool. And as you know as you transitioned from, let’s call, let’s say, metal detectors to this agency that you were working for that was that was really focused on click-up optimization or process optimization for others, what did you notice when you got in kind of the catbird seat and you could see multiple agencies? Like how Were they all but were they Making similar errors? Was it driven by personalities? like how did you approach what people were doing inside of ClickUp?
Turning the Lights On: Fixing Dysfunctional Teams
05:00.44 – Maggie McClure
It was similar, like everybody was suffering in the same universe of dysfunction, but there were certainly different planets that people lived on. um One of the biggest issues that I saw then and I still see now with the clients that I’m working with is this — it’s like trying to operate in the dark. It’s like they live in a dark garage that they’ve been throwing stuff in, Christmas trees, somebody’s old car, baby clothes from 35 years ago, and they know that it’s too cluttered and they can’t actually use the garage anymore. You can’t keep throwing things in the garage and expect to actually use it—it’s time to turn the lights on and start cleaning. And so I come in and help turn the lights on. And suddenly, you realize it’s also infested with roaches. And everybody’s roaches are kind of different. So, you know, you’ve got people who are operating without any processes whatsoever. And I’m still not clear how those people get anything done. They do [get things done]. They assume that because they can pay their employees, they must be doing well. So total blindness from a workload management standpoint, total blindness when it comes to whether or not they are actually profitable in terms of effort, time, and expenses to execute on client contracts, total blindness when it comes to managing their team. Teams don’t have actual job descriptions. They don’t have metrics that they’re tracking towards. And so people are very comfortable, or at least, no, I’ll use the word comfortable. People are comfortable living in this overcrowded, super-dark attic until they experience churn.
06:51.72 – Maggie McClure
The things that typically turn people on to hiring somebody to improve their operations are massive, massive waves of client churn or employee churn. They’ve gotten enough feedback from clients or employees where people have said, I don’t know what you guys are doing, but it doesn’t feel good. Then somebody reaches out, and they’re like, we need to turn the lights on in the garage, and we need to start cleaning.
07:22.07 – Brian David Crane
And are they? Yeah, because then it sounds like they’re at least good at sales because they’re able to bring in clients at the top end, but then they don’t actually know how to service them.
07:33.71 – Maggie McClure
So the other huge problem that I see, and this is across industries, is there’s just a chasm between sales and delivery. I work with some teams whose delivery team cannot tell me what their salespeople are actually selling to their clients.
The Sales to Delivery Gap
07:53.78 – Maggie McClure
So the delivery team has absolutely no idea what they’re supposed to be delivering to their clients. Um, I mean, that’s one of the hugest contributors to scope creep. If you have no idea what you’re supposed to be doing, how do you know what you’re not supposed to be doing? Um, yeah, so sales, I like sales is definitely not the problem. It’s the follow-through and it is that huge gap between sales to delivery that causes a lot of issues.
08:24.42 – Brian David Crane
Yeah, I saw something I was reviewing that you’ve written previously about crystal clear expectations buttoned up deliverables and communication templates as being some of the things to mitigate scope management or sorry.
08:31.09 – Maggie McClure
Wow.
08:37.43 – Brian David Crane
Well, sorry, not to mitigate scope management to actually enforce scope management, let’s say, right.
08:41.85 – Maggie McClure
That’s right.
08:42.15 – Brian David Crane
And I think that’s, you know, my experience with you is you’re an excellent communicator. It’s also part of how fractional magic has grown because you’re good at communicating a story and in a written way. And this would tie in with you needing to be very clear about what you’re promising and what you’re not upfront in sales because then the deliverable is much easier to satisfy and your team actually knows what to do.
09:07.90 – Maggie McClure
Yeah, if they don’t have anything, it’s not just that the delivery team doesn’t know what they’re supposed to be delivering on in terms of discrete deliverables, but it’s also that the deliverables themselves don’t have definitions. So the sales members definition of implementation is completely different from what the delivery team has built and operationalized. um So yes, that is absolutely this.
09:41.03 – Maggie McClure
Agencies are so happy to tell you that they are flying the plane while they build it. Like it’s some sort of badge of honor. And I get that to a degree, but you have to decide. It’s been eight years. Maybe you should finish building the plane and like the FAA can actually allow you to fly safely.
10:07.40 – Maggie McClure
So it’s kind of a funny thing where, like I said, people assume that just because they can pay their employees, they must be doing fine. And that is not the truth.
Maggie’s Wake-Up Call: Tracking Time and Efficiency
10:16.74 – Brian David Crane
Yeah, there was a story I think you told on LinkedIn, and please recap it for those listening, about a client of yours who was convinced that she was doing amazing, I think she was working 10, 12 hours a day, didn’t but also didn’t really know where her revenue, I got the feeling from the story, she didn’t know where her revenue was going, she was also spending a tremendous amount of time working, and when she started to quantify what she was spending time on,
10:45.26 – Brian David Crane
She actually found out, number one, that she wasn’t very efficient, and then also she wasn’t very profitable, right? Like both things. They were, yeah.
10:54.22 – Maggie McClure
Yep, that is correct.
10:54.08 – Brian David Crane
You want to tell that story?
10:55.47 – Maggie McClure
Yeah, so it’s also me.
10:55.44 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
10:59.46 – Maggie McClure
You’re actually telling the story of me.
11:04.54 – Maggie McClure
That was my own story. um Because when I first started you know working for myself, I didn’t have anybody. um And so, of course, I treated myself like I would a client and I started to look at how much time I was actually spending. So one of the biggest problems is what do you do after a call?
11:24.48 – Maggie McClure
And so that’s, imagine, you know, you’ve got a delivery team and all of your account managers have, let’s call it 12 clients that they’re exclusively responsible for. um At a minimum, you should be having, I will give it 12 meetings a month. That’s still not enough, but let’s say you’ve got two touchpoints a month with your clients. If you’re in that call for an hour and then you also have You need to send the follow-up. You need to turn all those action items, all those things. That adds up to an astronomical amount of time for one person. So imagine that across an entire delivery team. um And so figuring out how to systematize a phone call and turn it into automatically generated click-up tasks and automatically generated draft um that emails the summary. And then taking the transcript from that call
12:21.28 – Maggie McClure
Extracting out any highlights that can be then massaged into LinkedIn posts that can then be turned into potential case study fodder in the future. Figuring out where all that time is wasted helps you see what types of things you’re doing that you shouldn’t be doing.
The Bird Murder Method: Working Smarter
12:43.61 – Maggie McClure
What types of things that you’re doing that should be automated or systematized in some way, and what things that you’re doing that can trigger out 17 other things that you shouldn’t have to do in the future anyway, but should get done.
13:02.25 – Maggie McClure
So it’s what I call my bird murder method.
13:02.57 – Brian David Crane
Right yeah, and I think that’s something well I think that’s something that you’ve pushed on with us is we need to be using something like Fathom for so recording these calls or these meetings as you’re talking about and then being able to, in a more efficient way, translate
13:04.49 – Maggie McClure
Like, if I have to do one thing, OK, I’m going to do it, but how many other birds can I kill at the same time?
13:30.29 – Brian David Crane
What was in the meeting and discussed into action items or into to-do items. Is that right?
13:35.36 – Maggie McClure
Yeah, for sure. Because in all of that context, I’ve told you before that I would never, ever allow anybody to not have a call recording system. But y’all have gotten so good at not having a call recording system that you are an exception to the rule. So it’s just like, imagine how much more effective you’d be if you took the discipline your team already has.
14:04.44 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
14:04.75 – Maggie McClure
But, you know, allowed a little bit of AI to make life easier for you and to spread that context far and wide. It’s a I don’t think AI is, go ahead.
14:17.59 – Brian David Crane
Can it? Yeah, I want to know what you do. And so that advice, I, I’m not sure I’m super comfortable with Fathom or AI listening in on every work call that I’m doing.
14:34.38 – Maggie McClure
Mm-hmm.
14:36.98 – Brian David Crane
What is the balance between being efficient and also keeping things private or discrete, right? Especially inside like if you’re discussing well and both internally inside of a company, but also you know if you’re talking to a client.
14:50.87 – Maggie McClure
Sure. My clients sign, you know, privacy, and NDA-type things if they need me to. Otherwise, I think most people, and I do not, obviously, you’re not one of them. Most people have just resigned to the reality that their lives are being listened to and just accept it as one of the modern-day inconveniences of being a human in 2024.
15:21.21 – Maggie McClure
But I think if you are still hesitant and concerned about AI eavesdropping on everything that you say, the balance would be finding those conversations you know is either going to be context-rich or action-item-rich and making that the exception. Okay. We need to have a transcript we can refer back to.
15:48.03 – Maggie McClure
We need to absolutely have and every single action item written down um so that you can share it or at least reference back to it.
15:59.86 – Maggie McClure
I hear what you’re saying, but I think that there’s the positive from a productivity and system optimization standpoint that outweighs that negative, but that really is a personal choice.
16:00.00 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
16:15.50 – Brian David Crane
Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, I get it. Thank you. um so um So okay, let’s let’s let’s talk about tools like beyond ClickUp.
16:29.48 – Maggie McClure
Mm hmm.
Tools, Tech Stacks, and Simplifying Operations
16:31.75 – Brian David Crane
As a means of context, ClickUp is now trying to become the everything tool for, and well, digital businesses, let’s say, right, or at least remote teams.
16:42.12 – Brian David Crane
They have a chat feature now to take on Slack and Microsoft Teams and whatnot.
16:42.33 – Maggie McClure
Yeah.
16:49.16 – Brian David Crane
What do you like with ClickUp? What are the tools outside of ClickUp that you like when somebody comes in and says, hey, Maggie, we have problems operationally?
16:56.30 – Maggie McClure
So I hesitate to ever recommend people use ClickUp’s features like the first six months that they roll out. So let’s talk about chat, for example. um The chat feature that they rolled out a year ago was not great. And the new version of the chat feature that they rolled out two months ago is less great.
17:25.59 – Maggie McClure
But I’m saying that because it’s not Slack. So you know I would. So I don’t know what the numbers are, but I cannot imagine Slack’s market share is anything short of 80%. And so if everybody is so accustomed to using Slack, it is ubiquitous to daily life. It’s like saying, oh, I’m going to Google that. People say, I’m going to Slack that.
17:51.15 – Maggie McClure
It doesn’t operate like that. And so it feels clunky. It feels unorganized. But if you had a team that didn’t have Slack or Teams at all, it is a good option because one of the huge benefits of having one tool to rule them all, as ClickUp would like me to say in my not sponsored marketing pitches, they,
18:19.12 – Maggie McClure
The benefit of having ClickUp is that you can run so much of your business from one platform. So having Slack within ClickUp is a great option. um But whiteboards, for instance, inside of ClickUp suck.
18:33.46 – Maggie McClure
Ah just the work, like the most suckage of any whiteboard tool ever. And so I think ClickUp knows that and they make it possible to embed Figma or Miro directly into ClickUp. So you can use the tool Figma that is actually meant to be a whiteboard, but you can still use it in ClickUp. So from a balance standpoint, ClickUp wants to be one app to rule them all and it’s Great for teams that are small, that are budget conscious. I mean, well, to be fair, ClickUp will try and extract as much money out of you as you possibly can. They’ve done a very good job of gating premium features. um But from a digital marketing standpoint, the operations, not the delivery. I won’t touch on the delivery, but from an operational standpoint, it’s not that complicated.
19:31.27 – Maggie McClure
You need an email client, you need a project management tool, you need some way of communicating with your team. Slack isn’t even necessary if you have a well-disciplined team in the project management tool and you need a way to pay people and be paid. um It doesn’t have to be much bigger than that. So when teams come to me and they’re looking for operations help,
19:57.49 – Maggie McClure
The first thing I do is look at their tech stack, not the first. One of the first things I do is look at their tech stack because it gives me a good indication of what kind of decision making ability they have and how that translates to their project management and operations style. So if I see somebody and they’ve got 20 plus pieces of technology to run a 20 person or less team.
20:24.54 – Maggie McClure
They’re impulsive. They don’t think things through. They’re probably not paying enough attention to their P&L. um And those are pretty uncomfortable signs that are going to lead me to bigger operational issues down the road.
20:44.02 – Brian David Crane
Yeah, they’re going to be drawn to like a new tool. Somebody says, Oh, you should use this. And they sign up for it and they use it for a bit. And then it doesn’t really get incorporated into, let’s say, core company culture.
20:56.30 – Maggie McClure
And now you know you’ve got all this bloated salt.
20:58.72 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
21:00.27 – Maggie McClure
You’ve got this bloated tech stack. You’ve got one source of truth for this category, another source of truth, and the two sources of truth are not talking to each other.
21:07.17 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
21:11.35 – Maggie McClure
But it’s also a pretty good indication that they don’t have much systematized or standardized. um So I see I see a lot of times companies with a bloated tech stack also are some of the worst offenders when it comes to their sales teams making it up as they go because they don’t have one location to look at the definition of services, the definition of deliverables, because where is it? Where’s it? Where is it supposed to go? Which team member is going to access that piece of information?
21:47.06 – Maggie McClure
So those It seems small, but it’s a red herring of a bigger issue.
21:56.35 – Brian David Crane
I’m looking for, I think you had just one slide as well so people can’t see this, just listening but it talks about three steps here, audit, optimize and streamline. And on the audit side, it reduces or fills unused seats that you’re paying for.
22:10.53 – Brian David Crane
In other words, remove users that aren’t feeling the value, like optimize, upgrade existing tools with better integration category capabilities and then sunset the rest and consolidate overlapping tools and do this twice a year, right?
22:21.10 – Brian David Crane
Like, I thought this was spot on and something that, Yeah, I think we do a pretty good job of this, but also what comes out of doing this is you actually look at your P and&L as a business and say, why are we paying for this subscription? Are people actually using it consistently? and you start to see yeah you start to see weird, weird, weird bleeds or just legacy stuff you signed up for and then don’t actually need or use.
22:51.82 – Brian David Crane
So when people are coming to you, and this discussion is taking place, are the majority of these people on G Suite, are they using Google Suite, or they’re using something else for their email client?
22:56.13 – Maggie McClure
It’s all Google.
23:01.44 – Brian David Crane
Okay, yeah. And so then is the optimal setup um Google Suite or Google and then they’re doing like if they need a chat client, are they, so you recommend Slack or do you recommend that they use, let’s say they’re starting from scratch, that they’re that they should use the chat inside of ClickUp.
23:19.66 – Brian David Crane
Should they use Google Chat? um I don’t know if that’s the actual name of it, but Google does have this chat feature for G Suite users. So for phone calls, like what like how would how would they do those things?
23:30.76 – Brian David Crane
Outside of clickup they got ClickUp, they got GSuite.
23:31.10 – Maggie McClure
Yeah.
23:34.78 – Brian David Crane
How do they work with those two?
23:36.99 – Maggie McClure
Yeah. So I definitely would not recommend using Google chat for anything. Um, I have worked with one client in the past that used it and they made it work for them. And I still don’t know why they chose that over Slack, but as I said, Slack is just so intuitive, and it’s so feature-rich.
23:55.28 – Maggie McClure
And the integrations between Slack and every other thing on the planet, it’s worth the cost to have pro-like access for Slack. Click up, yes. You need some sort of means of hosting calls, whether that’s Google Meet or Zoom. And then I am a huge proponent of recording. Now, I think that the Zoom recorder and the meeting summaries that you can pay for as a feature inside of Zoom sucks.
24:23.77 – Maggie McClure
So like I, I’m big on Fathom, but there are plenty of other platforms out there. But, um, like I said, in order for the operations of a business to run from a day-to-day standpoint, as smoothly as possible, it does not and should not take much.
24:41.80 – Maggie McClure
Um, so as long as you’ve got some semblance of a standardized hierarchy between those things.
24:41.94 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
24:50.61 – Maggie McClure
So by that, I mean like. If you’ve got a structure inside of ClickUp that is space, folder, list, you’ve got that all hammered out, your Slack instance should be fairly close to that if necessary. Your Google Drive hierarchy should mirror what’s in Slack and ClickUp. like All those things need to be um mirrors of each other so that as your team is looking for stuff or finding whatever the case may be,
25:22.20 – Maggie McClure
The objective when you’re building out a tech stack, if it’s the first time or it’s the first time you’re auditing something, the objective is to reduce as much cognitive burden as possible on your team and doing that with, standardized naming conventions between PM communication, data storage. It seems some people think that it’s overkill, but I cannot emphasize enough how much of a difference it makes when your team does not have to ask somebody, where do I find that thing?
25:58.66 – Maggie McClure
Because it’s just easy to find.
25:58.65 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
26:02.27 – Maggie McClure
So playing that game, it’s not it’s checkers.
26:02.31 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
26:08.75 – Maggie McClure
It’s not chess.
26:10.47 – Brian David Crane
Yeah. And I think there’s, yeah, I don’t know how you phrase it. The cognitive, let’s call it preserving your team’s cognitive horsepower.
26:22.20 – Brian David Crane
That’s not the phrase you use with something close to that.
26:22.50 – Maggie McClure
Oh, again.
26:24.24 – Brian David Crane
I think it also plays in with if you have a remote team, people are in different time zones teaching people how to communicate with one another and also helping them get their tools set up so that when something comes in at two in the morning or something like you, you need to get them so that their notifications are not set up or that they can actually, you know,
Protecting Team Attention and Reducing Urgency
26:48.75 – Brian David Crane
Like outsmarting them in the sense of making it so that they have work-life balance so that when they’re at ClickUp, they can work. And when they’re not at ClickUp, they’re not being pinged about everything that’s going on ah related to their topic, right? Or related to the projects they’re working on. Because this is something you and I, we needed to fix with respect to our notifications and ClickUp, we were addicted to it. But like, you want to talk about the, like, basically like the human management portion of this tech stack as well. Like how do you get people to,
27:18.29 – Brian David Crane
Not churn if you’re in a company.
27:21.38 – Maggie McClure
Man, humans are the most difficult part of managing operations. Sure, do you wish you could predict what they were going to do? But that’s what keeps me employed. So I won’t complain about that much longer. So, from the human side of things.
27:40.48 – Maggie McClure
In respect to team, like team members, I think what founders, agency owners have to remember is that anybody who was born like 1990 and after, they give two shits about the company that they’re working for. They give several shits about how their day-to-day life feels to them.
28:08.72 – Maggie McClure
And having to create systems specific to that mentality, it’s not difficult, but it does have to be intentional. So, like you’re saying, you want to make sure that you’re teaching people, how to set notifications. So specific to you guys, you had way too many notifications because your team was, in ClickUp, they were observers on the way too much stuff that did not actually, have any impact on their day-to-day or week-by-week lives. But because they were being inundated with so many notifications, what they were supposed to be paying attention to get diluted. So, the care and concern go from what you want.
29:02.13 – Maggie McClure
People making decisions about their scope of responsibility. And instead, because they’re being attacked all day long with notifications, they’re simply making choices. And those are not nearly as valuable. And so having to curate your team’s experience so that they are able to make better, higher caliber decisions is an intentional choice. And so figuring out that right mix between notifications in a project management tool, what types of meetings you’re going to have, and at what cadence,
29:43.42 – Brian David Crane
And who’s attending?
29:44.71 – Maggie McClure
And who’s attending. Like What is the structure? All those things matter. And a lot of times, people just don’t stop and think about it. They just assume, oh, we’re having a meeting.
29:55.90 – Maggie McClure
Everybody should attend, and everybody’s going to benefit.
29:57.64 – Brian David Crane
Yeah. Yeah.
29:59.08 – Maggie McClure
And, of course, that’s not the case. And so when you are needlessly inviting people to meetings, or you are needlessly assaulting them with notifications throughout the day that don’t pertain to them, you are diluting how much they care about what they’re doing day to day.
30:16.77 – Maggie McClure
And that’s the biggest motivating factor for a lot of people, including a lot of employees at digital agencies. Who is that generation?
30:16.81 – Brian David Crane
You know, Yeah.
30:25.13 – Maggie McClure
Millennial? Are those millennials? I’m an elderly millennial, so they must be millennials.
30:32.16 – Brian David Crane
Yeah. How I would paraphrase that nugget is to say you’re not respecting their attention. Like you’re that like By constantly bombarding them, you don’t so you’re not teaching people to say, your attention is important, my attention is important, and so therefore, like treat mine with care, and I will treat yours with care.
30:53.55 – Brian David Crane
It’s more like, but I want you to be hooked up to this fire hose.
30:56.77 – Maggie McClure
Yeah.
30:58.39 – Brian David Crane
That way, in order to Yeah, basically, I just want you to be hooked up to this firehouse. But the second part to my first question was also about teaching your team members how to use their devices so that they’re not getting pinged by notifications all the time, or that they um because it’s also part of that attention economy, or not attention, but like but you’re protecting their attention. So you basically say, like cool, these are the expectations.
31:23.76 – Brian David Crane
We don’t use Slack for project management primarily because it creates a sense of constant urgency. Everything is in ClickUp, but you should not have ClickUp notifications set up on your phone because it’s not urgent, and it can wait until you’re at the computer to reply. Do you have any kind of guard guardrails here or how do you frame things for people?
31:44.72 – Maggie McClure
Yeah, unless you are a heart surgeon, I don’t think you need work notifications on your phone. That is a personal belief of mine. I think a lot of the um operational turmoil is 99.9% self-inflicted. And I suffer from this too. I worked on Thanksgiving Day because I inflicted my own operational turmoil.
32:11.47 – Maggie McClure
But that’s it. No one is dying if you have an e-comm store. Well, if you sell diabetes products, maybe they’re dying, but it’s just, yeah.
32:22.78 – Brian David Crane
Yeah. But you answering the ClickUp ticket about that on Chris on Thanksgiving is not going to necessarily get somebody their insulin. Go ahead, yeah.
32:30.88 – Maggie McClure
Yeah. But I mean, that it truly is not that serious. And so, your team most likely doesn’t feel like it’s that serious either. And so if you, build a culture of communication and urgency, like you said, um that is within context and it is structured, then the output from the output is of a higher quality. Your teams are going to feel much better about working there because, like you said, their attention is protected. They are working, hopefully, at top of license on things that are driving meaningful change for their clients or for the agency or team, whatever the case may be.
33:17.27 – Brian David Crane
Mm hmm.
33:20.39 – Maggie McClure
But yeah, like you have to treat you have to teach your team, but not only that, you have to teach your managers. It is truly the managers that I work with that cause the most problems.
33:31.87 – Maggie McClure
They are the most frantic when it comes to trying to solve problems. And I think it comes from a good place. Like they’re trying to unblock their team members. They’re trying to get answers. But because it’s done in a rapid fire way, the team members, even if they don’t have notifications on their phone, for example, they feel like they have to constantly be on or engaged so that they are being seen as a team player by their manager who has a lack of control. So it’s not just training the team members, it’s certainly training the entire organization and developing a culture of calming the hell down.
34:20.57 – Brian David Crane
Really well said. Yeah. Yeah, really well said. Yeah. And when. I mean, I think that the protecting of people’s attention, it’s yeah, it’s a sign of respect in a lot of ways. And it definitely going to come from the management level of yeah, like, just it just comes from the management level. So, I want to dovetail into something because there are definitely different styles of management. They’re also different, let’s call it personality styles. And you have somebody who, let’s say, is a visionary. They don’t like project management.
Visionaries vs. Operations: Finding the Balance
35:06.91 – Brian David Crane
How do you deal with that person becoming adept at running a remote team? Or let me put it a different way. So is there a certain personality type that is really well-suited to remote work and then another personality type or types that should just stay the hell away from it no matter how good the no matter how good the systems are, right? Like the systems just can’t sell solutions for this person’s how they operate.
35:35.06 – Maggie McClure
I’m laughing because I’m currently working with a founder right now who is 100% in his own way. And I, three weeks ago, had to tell him in exact terms, you need to knock it off. For the rest of the year, you need to experiment with not talking to your team. You have these core objectives. Everybody else gets to do what you hired them to do, and you cannot step in. um And he is a strong visionary. If you think about like visionary and integrator terms from the EOS world, strong visionary cannot successfully operate an organization unless they have the self-discipline to monitor
36:20.36 – Maggie McClure
what comes out of their mouths and what ideas they communicate to their team. Because as the visionary, they’re just operating at a higher metabolism than the rest of the company ever will. But oftentimes, they have the same expectations of their team members that they do of themselves. And that is like guaranteed to churn out the entire team over time, just burnout central.
36:46.97 – Maggie McClure
When I work with visionaries who don’t have that self-control, one of the first things I do is hand them a job description for an operations manager and say, go hire one.
37:00.53 – Maggie McClure
Because not at all.
37:00.47 – Brian David Crane
Yeah, because anything you do subsequent to that, it’s not going to stick basically.
37:05.35 – Maggie McClure
Like it takes about a month, maybe less, of my working with them to uncover how much their operational issues are cultural, I can start to pinpoint, like lack of agendas for meetings, lack of context sharing before tasks are assigned, those kinds of things are cultural. And no matter how much time, money, and effort I, as a fractional operations manager, spend within their organization, unless they’re dedicated to changing their behavior, it will never be valuable. And so it’s, you know, when I’m trying to figure out who I want to work with so that I myself can feel like I’m providing value, I don’t do good at that. I’m not great at this now, but I certainly am identifying the visionaries that are open to improvement, but that’s partnered with a promise to put in the effort.
38:12.49 – Maggie McClure
Those are not, those do not always go hand in hand. So you’ve got to go ahead.
38:16.41 – Brian David Crane
You almost want, yeah, you almost want to hire or start a hiring service to find this, uh, um, yeah, operational. Full-time person that could be slotted into these organizations because when you come across this visionary and go, Hey, given what I’ve seen in talks with you and how this is going inside, like, I think you should just bring in this person who I’ve already trained according to my methods.
38:42.96 – Brian David Crane
They can do an excellent job for you and it’s going to save you, you know, you’re not cut out for, you’re not, you’re you’re not cut out for this.
38:49.88 – Maggie McClure
Yeah.
38:51.47 – Brian David Crane
Like it’s like, it’s not, it’s not, whatever I say is not going to really land for you because you are just based on what I can see.
38:57.42 – Maggie McClure
Your brain doesn’t work that way.
38:59.11 – Brian David Crane
Exactly.
38:59.49 – Maggie McClure
Their brains simply do not work that way. That’s why they literally created labels to differentiate between how people’s brains operate.
39:02.45 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
39:09.58 – Maggie McClure
But Brian, that’s a great idea for a new service offering.
39:09.57 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
39:13.74 – Maggie McClure
Thanks.
39:15.31 – Brian David Crane
I mean, really like it would be, yeah, if yeah if they’re certified Fractional Magic, right.
39:16.28 – Maggie McClure
No, I’m serious.
39:20.23 – Maggie McClure
It’s in the works, and I’m excited. But that is like that’s the crux of it. You have to be able to convince people you should not be running this business.
39:31.49 – Maggie McClure
You can sell it.
39:31.33 – Brian David Crane
Hmm.
39:32.37 – Maggie McClure
You can you know be the visionary, but you cannot be running this business. You are sucking it dry.
39:42.11 – Brian David Crane
Yeah, you almost have to be an executive coach as well.
39:46.67 – Maggie McClure
I am often told that people hire me because I feel like a therapist to them because they need the media.
39:56.94 – Brian David Crane
Confide in you.
40:00.25 – Maggie McClure
That’s why those NDAs are in place. But it’s really helpful for operators, visionaries, and even the team members themselves to feel validated.
40:02.06 – Brian David Crane
Think.
40:16.62 – Maggie McClure
They know that what they’re feeling feels a lot like suffering. And so they just don’t know, especially the younger ones, like the younger team members who if this is their first, second or third company that they’ve ever worked for, they don’t have a lot of experience to compare it to.
40:37.49 – Maggie McClure
And it’s very validating for them to be like, oh, it doesn’t have to feel like this. And so it’s a great um opportunity for the young ones to realize that ah they can in fact do better
40:44.10 – Brian David Crane
Mm.
40:54.03 – Maggie McClure
Operationally within the organization. And those people often become like huge champions for any of the changes that are implemented to improve operations. You give them the chance to like mature their thinking about how things can run.
41:14.05 – Maggie McClure
But that’s, I mean, that’s not always, well, sure, yeah.
41:15.00 – Brian David Crane
And alleviate their suffering.
41:18.96 – Maggie McClure
But like, I think about it, for like when you’re playing the long game, when you’re improving operations, and you’re playing that long game, you are investing in your team, you are investing in the education of your team, not just the you know the bottom line of the agency. and so From a ah reduction in churn standpoint, when your team members feel heard for the first time and then they see
41:52.26 – Maggie McClure
change being implemented to make their lives easier, that goes a long way. CAnd that’s the same thing for clients too. Like when you are reviewing your operations and trying to figure out how you can do better, you should absolutely be interviewing your clients as well. What did onboarding feel like? What is your, how do you feel from a monthly standpoint? Where can we be improving?
42:16.10 – Maggie McClure
And then when your clients see you making those updates to how you interact with them, they’re like, ah, that’s great. Thanks so much. I feel heard. Let’s keep going.
42:27.92 – Brian David Crane
And what do you, inside of a team, what is a practice or what is yeah what does it look like on a weekly or a monthly basis to ensure that the team members feel like they’re being heard?
42:46.51 – Brian David Crane
And I’ll add some context.
42:46.74 – Maggie McClure
From the room.
42:47.47 – Brian David Crane
Yeah, let me, yeah, there it’s a remote team. You and I, I’ll give some context to that question because you and I had looked at doing a, like a weekly survey that was sent to people as like a Google form that just asked them how their week was, and then was meant to, you know, give their managers a sense of how this person felt like.
43:07.51 – Brian David Crane
How this person felt like the week went for them work-wise, where they were stuck, and where they really felt like they excelled. And we didn’t do that. We didn’t implement it. Well, it didn’t get implemented. It’s not to say it won’t be in the future, but what is the way that yeah these remote teams keep up with the lifeblood or the livelihood of their employees who they’re not face-to-face with?
43:31.71 – Maggie McClure
Yeah, so I think that your organization does a really good job of this. Like I see how you guys communicate in ClickUp and in Slack and it’s a beautiful thing.
43:43.27 – Maggie McClure
I hope one day you can bottle that up and figure it out,. I asked you that question recently, and you’re like, I’m not sure I can put a name to it. Like whatever you’re doing, it appears to be working very well.
43:51.45 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
43:59.64 – Maggie McClure
Let’s just say like a survey, a weekly one-on-one, a monthly one-on-one, whatever the structure of that feedback cycle looks like within an organization, it really doesn’t matter. There are a thousand different tools out there that you can use, from Google Forms to something that you’re actually paying for that facilitates that conversation.
44:20.93 – Maggie McClure
That doesn’t matter. What matters is what you do with that information once you get it. It’s completely useless and a waste of time if you send out that survey and look at it on a quarterly basis.
44:26.61 – Brian David Crane
Okay.
44:33.27 – Maggie McClure
Because at that point, people have been fed up for three months about something and then it’s too late. And so before anybody institutes any sort of feedback cycle with internal or with clients, you need to answer the question, what are we going to do with this information? That should dictate all the other answers that come from that conversation.
44:59.40 – Brian David Crane
And do you, do you then see, okay, that there is with remote teams that they should, they should be having more, one-on-ones, they should be having fewer one-on-ones.
45:13.45 – Brian David Crane
Like, is there, I think you and I are in the same camp of like big meetings where neither one of us are fans of them for a lot of different reasons.
45:22.69 – Maggie McClure
Here.
45:22.62 – Brian David Crane
Maybe there’s, maybe there’s circumstances where it works, but like one-on-ones when the team is remote, yeah, like how do you approach management in that way with a remote team?
45:33.68 – Maggie McClure
Yeah, so let’s say a monthly one-on-one between every manager and every one of their direct reports, but that monthly one-on-one needs to be very intentional. If the intention is simply to um stay connected and have a casual conversation with your employees, you can’t just walk into that conversation blindly.
45:56.69 – Maggie McClure
Like you have to be paying attention to how they’re communicating any sort of personal anecdotes they happen to bring up in conversation. Like you can’t just walk into that conversation and go, hey, how are things?
46:11.13 – Brian David Crane
Yeah, yeah.
46:11.54 – Maggie McClure
So if you’re having, if you’re, one-on-ones are more structured towards a career development. What are the questions that you want them to be asking you?
46:23.56 – Maggie McClure
What are you going to be asking them? If it’s, yeah.
46:26.90 – Brian David Crane
You’re saying it as you’re you’re their manager in this scenario, right?
46:31.70 – Maggie McClure
So, every time you implement an ah conversation, it should be very intentional.
46:42.31 – Maggie McClure
It should have an agenda. It should have a prep step. And then there should be action items that come after that conversation because otherwise it’s just a waste of time.
46:53.28 – Maggie McClure
So, from a remote standpoint, that culture of communication timeliness.
46:53.34 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
47:02.81 – Maggie McClure
Like you use the word constant, use the phrase constant urgency. um If there are things that are truly urgent, figure out the best way to systematize that unblocking or the responding to of those urgent requests. Like you said, for team members that are remote all over the world, people need to be relying on each other to respond to these urgent things in a timely manner. That does a lot to make people feel heard and like their output is valuable.
47:40.26 – Brian David Crane
Yeah, that they’re not being ignored, right? Yeah.
47:42.92 – Maggie McClure
Correct. That’s a daily rhythm thing on a weekly rhythm. I do think team meetings are important, and it’s, you know, where you’re looking at, um, what’s blocked, what’s due this week, what is a problem we need to solve for the very near future, and having an actual agenda that people prepare in advance with, um, so that the team.
48:08.49 – Maggie McClure
Has the chance to see each other face to face. I’m a huge camera-on-culture person, too, especially for remote teams. Like I and so I think that that’s becoming more and more difficult, and it’s not uncommon to have the camera off, but it does make a difference when you can see somebody’s eyebrow twitch
48:25.09 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
48:28.19 – Maggie McClure
When their manager suggests a new project, you need to be able to look each other in the face and go, Brian, I saw that you just had an eyebrow twitch to that suggestion. What’s going on? Tell me what you’re thinking. Having structured, honest, productive conversations are a requirement for having a successful remote culture. But again, that’s culture. That’s not operations.
48:57.26 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
48:57.87 – Maggie McClure
So, a lot of the big problems that people face, they think, are operations, but it is largely culture.
49:06.57 – Brian David Crane
And when they bring you in, do you talk about, do you evaluate and then talk about their culture?
49:14.85 – Maggie McClure
Yeah. A lot of the time, um, one of the, one of the first things I do is interview their team members one-on-one. And I do ask them questions like, do you, trust that you’re going to get answers from leadership. Do you know what leadership expects of you? Do you know what success in your role looks like? Do you feel like you have a means of communicating with the organization where you feel heard, whether that’s from a productivity standpoint or a feelings standpoint? And it is ah a lot of founders are horrified by what their team members tell me because it’s very open and honest. But it is the most valuable conversation their team can be having because it’s actually uncovering the stuff that needs to be solved. Founders don’t often know what issues the clients are facing. It’s the delivery team. It’s the actual execution team. And so founders oftentimes think they know what the issues are.
50:24.50 – Maggie McClure
And it’s not until they get that forthright feedback from the execution team that they go, oh shoot, this is worse than I thought.
50:32.99 – Brian David Crane
Yeah. And then they, yeah, I can see that. They’re like, but it’s also that they didn’t diagnose it correctly and that they think it’s a problem for the execution team.
50:44.83 – Brian David Crane
It’s actually probably their problem, and if they’re on the sales side as the founder, they have over-promised and made things difficult for their delivery team. Let’s put it that way.
50:54.21 – Maggie McClure
Yep. That is correct.
50:54.95 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
50:55.60 – Maggie McClure
So if you are, like, if you’re bringing in an operations person for the first time, the relationship between that ops person and the founder and the ops person and the individual team members should be completely different.
50:59.40 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
51:09.03 – Brian David Crane
Would you have that ops person be, yeah, let’s say, okay, let’s say as the founder that, I’ll use myself as an example, like I don’t particularly love being on calls on ah on a daily basis. I understand the value in them. I’m a little bit reluctant to take them. Should your ops person then be like your chief of staff, that they should be taking those calls on your behalf and that they should be the one who has the pulse on the entire business, the different projects that are going on. Can they, kind of like substitute for you and be your eyes and ears? Is that a good substitution?
51:49.29 – Maggie McClure
I think so. I’ve seen it be successful, especially when you have one person that is essentially triangulating the issues.
51:51.79 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
51:58.82 – Maggie McClure
So your chief of staff is going to hear from leadership, hear from the team, and also have their finger on the pulse of clients. They’re going to have the ability to put all those, they should have the ability to put all those pieces together and go, Oh, here’s the actual issue.
52:15.43 – Maggie McClure
Here’s the actual issue, here are the actual wins. Here’s how we got to those wins. Having somebody who is ultra involved, somebody who just truly inserts themselves, even when they’re not asked to, can be a huge benefit to the organization’s ability to make meaningful change for the team members, for the P&L, and for the clients.
52:35.18 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
52:46.54 – Maggie McClure
It’s certainly, somebody needs to be listening, for sure.
52:51.25 – Brian David Crane
Who then can speak to the founder? Yeah.
52:54.07 – Maggie McClure
Yeah, and that has to be a really honest relationship. You have to be able to look at the founder and go, hey buddy, um, that was dumb. What are you doing, bud?
53:06.36 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
53:06.98 – Maggie McClure
And you’re lucky if you can find that person and it’s an instant connection. I think that’s, to toot my own horn. That’s something that I’m very good at. It’s just absolutely breaking that barrier from the get go.
53:23.46 – Maggie McClure
And so having that really is what’s why I call myself a capable class clown.
53:24.43 – Brian David Crane
And doing it, doing it in a nice way and in a funny way, you know?
How to Work with Maggie McClure
53:31.50 – Maggie McClure
There is something to have a disarming effect. It just allows people to talk more freely and it’s that free conversation that you actually get to the root of the problem.
53:46.72 – Maggie McClure
It’s not, I’m sending too many emails on a daily basis.
53:46.93 – Brian David Crane
Yeah.
53:51.24 – Maggie McClure
I’ve been overworked, and nobody’s paying attention to how much they’re putting on my plate before asking me. Those are two completely different problems to solve, and you’re only gonna get to the real problem if you’re having those conversations.
54:07.18 – Brian David Crane
Well said. Well said.
54:09.33 – Maggie McClure
Thank you.
54:13.02 – Brian David Crane
Okay. On that note, Maggie, if people want to work with you or they want to learn more about fractional magic, where should they go or how should they get in contact with you?
54:20.28 – Maggie McClure
Yeah, pretty simple. Fractionalmagic.com. I’m also on LinkedIn. It’s Maggie McClure. It’s my shining bubbly face in the profile picture. But I literally have the phrase capable class clown in my profile. So you’ll know it’s me when you find me.
54:39.95 – Brian David Crane
I think if you’re listening and you just want some humor in your LinkedIn feed with good storytelling and also has a moral to the story, let’s say go follow Maggie on LinkedIn because her little tales of its X amount of days since I quit my dream job are both informative, educational, and pretty funny.
55:01.71 – Brian David Crane
So thanks, Maggie, for coming on.
55:04.61 – Maggie McClure
Yeah, thanks for the conversation.
55:06.20 – Brian David Crane
All right. Talk to you later.
55:07.98 – Maggie McClure
Bye.