How Jakub Grajcar Uses Content to Build Powerful Networks

[00:00:00] Hector: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the 'How to Scale a Business' podcast. My name is Hector Santiesteban, and I'm your host for today, your guide, if you will. And we're here with Jakub Graitzar. I did my best there. He's the content marketing manager at Zenpilot and someone I'm excited to chat with today because he's going to talk about something we haven't really talked about yet, and that's content based networking and how you can use content to develop relationships, grow your pipeline, grow your referral network partners, things like that. And so, Jakub, welcome and thanks for hanging out with us today.

[00:00:30] Jakub: Yeah, Hector. Thank you so much for the invite. Excited to do this. This was a pretty spontaneous and pretty quick thing and I can't wait to record this. Especially about content based networking, which I'm really passionate about. So I really welcome the opportunity to talk about it.

[00:00:43] Hector: Well, it's very meta, if you will, because this is exactly what you're talking about. I think we're approaching 200 episodes now, but even then, one of the big things that we saw as a value from the show is getting the chance to connect and have conversations with people like you. And so it's very meta. I'd love for you to take us through your journey. You're now the content marketing manager at Zenpilot. And so I'd love for you to share a little bit about what you guys do there, but more importantly, how you got to that, position cause I think it's relevant to today's conversation.

[00:01:08] Jakub: Yeah, networking in general has been a big part of how I got to where I am in my career right now. To begin the story, I was always passionate about writing, about English, not always passionate about marketing. That came a little bit later. I studied English. I did my turn as a translator, interpreter and English teacher. A lot of people from my faculty do, but then they find their own path. So the way I found my path initially is I joined actually a software development agency here in Poland. And initially I was the one man marketing show, primarily focused on writing blog posts, social media, website copy, sales presentations, you name it; I wrote it. Gradually, we built out a team and at my previous company is when content based networking first came in. It's when I first discovered it. This concept was coined by James Carberry from SweetFish Media. Anyone here who's into podcasting, they're a great voice in the space. What James was preaching at the time is this concept of using your content, not to broadcast that people, but as a platform to have them actually join in with your content. That really caught my attention. I am like a self -professed non -expert. I love to highlight the expertise of other people.

[00:02:18] Jakub: Of course, here I'm sharing what I know, right? But this really spoke to me. At my previous company, that software development agency, we were trying to reach CTOs, VPs of engineering, and we were creating content for them. But it dawned on me as I discovered content based networking. And this was 2020, the pandemic just hit, everybody was looking at webinars, live streaming, trying to spin up more of these online events. And I realized that the best content for VPs of engineering and CTOs is going to be by VPs of engineering and CTOs. So we started a show and I was super excited to host that show, especially since it was focused on the engineering layer and the leadership layer. Myself, I wasn't the one man marketing show at my previous company forever.

[00:02:56] Jakub: Eventually I got to team lead, I got to manager, I had at the peak point, 10 people. So I learned so much about leadership by interviewing these people. And then I just noticed people just say, yes, people are so enthusiastic to be able to share what they know. I mean, it's true that it's meta. I'm sharing what I know here on this podcast right now. So people are really enthusiastic about it. And then I realized that collaborating on content is one of the best ways to grow your network. That's one of the key takeaways here. If you've never tried it, you should try it. If you have that, you should scale it because it really works. So trying to make a long story short here, the way I landed at my current company, Zenpilot, is also through content based networking, in a sense. It all starts with a tool called ClickUp. It's a project management tool. They would probably call themselves a work platform or work OS. I introduced that to our marketing team at my previous company. And got really excited about it, drove adoption throughout the whole marketing team and the sales team. I was so excited about it that I reached out to them and I said, " Hey, I've been using you for a while now. I'm really excited. How about you make a case study out of me?" I haven't heard, of many situations like that, but it really clicked with them.

[00:04:02] Jakub: They were just about to start a new format of case study of client so I came in at the right time. They did a case study of me. Later on, I found this roundtable article that they did, and some of the listeners to this podcast might not be familiar with roundtable articles. But basically, it's the type of article where, instead of writing something yourself, you provide a platform for other guests experts to share their knowledge. You should look up Databox, for example. They're the kings of that kind of content involving others. So this was a content based networking play by ClickUp. Now on their blog, I saw that article and I said, "Hey, I was just featured on your website in that case study," that article was about project management for marketing, " how about I leave my quote here and it helps my personal brand. You get a free update for your content. Everybody wins." They agreed because they liked me from the previous project. Within that same article was Gray McKenzie, the co founder of Zenpilot. Zenpilot are operations experts for marketing agencies. They know all about how to run project management at agencies. So, of course, his quote was there, my quote was right next to him.

[00:05:02] Jakub: It made it a very easy outreach to message him, we got on a call soon after that, we spent a lot of time in touch. Two years later, I ended up joining Zen pilot. So even the story of how I ended up here as content marketing manager now primarily focused on online events, live streaming, podcasting with some blogging, creating just a lot of content for agency owners and project managers. That whole story is also a story of content based networking. That's more or less how that happened, Hector.

[00:05:28] Hector: And so just to continue the story here, just to give people more context, now at Zenpilot, you guys are an agency that help organizations implement and integrate ClickUp into their operations, right? That's how that came full circle.

[00:05:39] Jakub: Yeah, we're working on our messaging. Ever since we joined, we're trying to spruce it up. The easy way to say this is we help agencies fix chaotic project management. If things are falling through the cracks, deadlines are being missed, especially if there's missing accountability that people say that they weren't aware of things that they were meant to do, they don't have that visibility or clarity or higher management doesn't know how many hours of their teams are committed to clients or what the profitability of projects or service lines is. All of that can actually be fixed by implementing ClickUp, some integrations, and we actually currently work not just in ClickUp, but also using teamwork dot com. The co founders of ZenPilot, Andrew Dimsky and Greg McKenzie, they're going to have some words with me for that. They tested over 70 different project management tools. We arrived at the ClickUp and Teamwork as the best fit for agencies. They're flexible and customizable enough while still being user friendly and they get the best results.

[00:06:30] Hector: Yeah I think that's its own conversation that we should probably have. Maybe Gray or someone will come back and talk about the importance of that work OS, right? I've never heard that concept but I think that as people are becoming more remote and hybrid and such, that is increasingly critical. I would imagine it's not even important, it's critical. However, what I would like to focus on- you say it better. What is the name of it? You have a such beautiful word for

[00:06:50] Jakub: Content based networking.

[00:06:52] Hector: content based networking. So I'm curious about two things.

[00:06:55] Hector: The first thing is, who might it be good for? I think about me, I'm extremely introverted. I don't like going to mixers and networks, and passing out business cards, or even conferences are like a little overwhelming. Jesus, like thousands. I'm the type of person where at a party will have one or two, deep conversations with somebody as opposed to my wife who meets everybody.

[00:07:15] Hector: She talks to everybody. She'll have 100 different conversations that night. And I can't do that. So I'm wondering if this content based networking is, better, for certain types of people. And then in that vein, if there are particular advantages over other types of networking. My wife runs a social group and this is one path and so I'm wondering if it's better or worse for any particular type of person or if there are certain advantages that you see over other types of channels, if you will.

[00:07:41] Jakub: Of course. Well, that's a big question to unpack. I'll start by saying that I'm very much like you, Hector. My level of discomfort rises as the number of people involved in a situation also rises. So I love... Deep one on one conversations. If you're like myself and Hector here, then you're going to love content based networking particularly. There's various ways to do it, like with general networking, but one very popular way of doing content based networking is having a podcast, or a series of live streams, and interviewing people that way and allowing them to really shine as experts, build their personal brands, promote their companies in the process, promote their book. A lot of experts or, you know, higher level executives, they'll write a book or come out with a new project, or maybe I don't know, ClickUp might be launching a new version of their software. And then they want to do the whole podcast circuit.

[00:08:33] Jakub: You want to be part of that circuit because that allows you to just spend one hour on a call with a person that you might otherwise not have access to. At all.

[00:08:41] Hector: So tell me, Jakub, you mentioned that we're kind of similar in that introvertedness. As you've gone throughout the process, though, if there is some things that you wish you would have known at the beginning or some things that you learned along the way. I look at our podcasting journey or my podcasting journey, and one of the mistakes that I made was thinking that the content and the positioning and the branding was all I needed. And so I neglected the relationship part of it. I wasn't following up. So I'm curious if there are some things that you learned along the way, or looking back on some of the pitfalls that people might be able to avoid as well.

[00:09:12] Jakub: Well, Hector, tons, literally tons of things I would have done differently if I were to start over. First and foremost, I would have been way more brave with my outreach from the get go. This kind of show, it takes a while to get going. That's true. But I was so surprised when I reached out to people from Google, Microsoft, or even ironically, Monday dot com was on the show once that I ran, which is a ClickUp competitor. That's why it's so ironic. Number one. You can be more audacious with the outreach. You never know who from what company is going to come on the show. Actually, Ty Rosenblatt from Google, who was on my show, he's still a friend to this day. What you mentioned though, really tracks like a lot of people don't realize when you have somebody on your show. That's great. But it's just the first step on a journey and keeping up with them, following up with them is really important. What people are realizing recently, I was just on a podcast last week, recorded a very nice episode with somebody, I suppose it's a typical thing to say we should do this again, but I think in the near future, repeat guests are going to become much more of a thing as people realize that having just this one touchpoint, this one podcast episode is just the first chapter of the story of a relationship.

[00:10:21] Jakub: Another thing I would have started experimenting with earlier is there's a lot of one on one podcasting, one on one live streaming. But I feel like there's a lot of potential in these round table formats as well, having a few voices in there. That creates an interesting opportunity where imagine you're running a high ticket B2B business, you can have somebody on the show who is, for example, a repeat guest to bring the enthusiasm and familiarity. You can bring in somebody who is your current client and you can bring in somebody who's a very strong prospect, maybe in an ABM approach that you want to reach from a company that you would really love to work with.

[00:10:53] Jakub: Get these three people plus a host on one stream. There's so much benefit to it when the guest who is already a client can talk to the prospect, weave you in in such a more natural way than if we were to just pitch slap them after the recording. I would have experimented with that a lot more a lot earlier.

[00:11:10] Jakub: I only did a few of those and I think these have a ton of potential. And it's good to build a system for these kinds of things, whether it's podcasting, live streaming, a series of webinars. And I don't mean to treat it like an assembly line with guests. They still should feel like it's a personal outreach, but a lot of the parts of the process honestly are repeatable. So you should have a strong email template. The calendar invite is actually really important to have the appropriate links, the appropriate detail in there, just so guests feel well taken care of. I can say for this podcast, this has been awesome. I got some automated messages, even a text message from you on the day of the show so I knew what to expect. That's an important piece. It also comes over time. You can start small, you can start imperfect, for sure, but do keep it in mind that at some point you want to think in terms of a process, it just makes it so much easier to produce more episodes of the show. And I could go on, honestly, there's so many learnings from this type of project. Definitely, I would emphasize, though, Because that's being neglected. I think that these relationships are not being nurtured after the first contact. I don't think you can become close friends with all of your podcast guests. That's impossible. You don't have the capacity. But if there's somebody you really care about, either as a person or as a prospect for your company, honestly, because a lot of companies do that to grow their business, then you need to create additional touch points. You were on a one on one episode, get on a round table. You're on the round table, we're writing a blog post, we're going to quote you. We're going to quote you from your podcast episode, you don't even have to do anything! But hey, maybe you want to post about it on LinkedIn, because we're highlighting your expertise again, there are so many opportunities here, it's just a matter of creativity and consistency.

[00:12:42] Hector: Yeah, you're blowing my mind here, Jakub. And I'm glad that we had this conversation because we came up and we said, "Oh, we make podcasts so podcasts lends itself really easily to that." kind of strategy. But we weren't thinking big enough in the terms of, now we have that, how can we leverage that content into creating blog posts or writing these discussions and continuing to add value to them and their brand and also potentially without it even requiring more of their time. One of the other things that I think is really beneficial that listeners are probably picking up on that is the lack of friction or how less friction there is than a typical sales conversation. My very first job out of high school, I was like a direct salesperson, I was calling hundreds of people a day trying to get four of them to let me come over and pitch our stuff. Whereas with this sort of approach, if you send it out, let's say to 10 or 20, you're gonna have a significant number positively respond back to you as opposed to if you're just trying to hop on and pitch them, or hop on and get coffee, or hop on and just chat or pick their brain.

[00:13:38] Hector: All of a sudden, you just have a much bigger chance of getting on their calendar.

[00:13:42] Jakub: Yeah, honestly I feel like companies are waking up to it more and more. These are two separate functions that you have. Building these connections, sometimes that's building an audience, sometimes that's more of a relationship building networking play. That's like one field of play where you need to Excel.

[00:13:58] Jakub: And then from that group, some people will raise their hand and you can't really force them that much. They will raise their hand and they say, "Hey, I'm ready to talk with the sales side of your business. Some businesses actually are taking it to the point where these are two separate brands. Funnily enough, this is what James Carberry is preaching now because content based networking was this thing a few years ago, building media brands. And that's what Sweetfish Media does right now. instead of saying that they're going to help a company with a podcast, they say we're going to build a whole separate media brand for you. This visible engaging content based thing that creates an audience of the people you want to sell to; they have affinity, they trust you, they've been taught by you, entertained by you. They have this, even you might say parasocial connection to you; such an easier sales conversation than just calling and trying to get somebody to allow you to pitch them as you put that. These are 2 separate skill sets, different types of people, still those 2 sides, even if they're 2 separate brands need to closely work together. So that really resonated what you said. Right there.

[00:15:00] Hector: I want you to share a little bit more about what Zenpilot does because I think that a lot of business owners who are listening to this show, they're in that point of scale and they've started to grow past themselves. They've grown past that freelancer, that solopreneur stage and they started, maybe adding on some contractors or V.As. But now they're to grow past themselves and the need for systems, and the need for people, and the need for processes, it's just so much more critical because they can't do everything.

[00:15:27] Hector: And so I'm curious. Just quickly, or however much you might want to share on in terms of that and that importance for businesses to make that transition and how a work OS or how a ClickUp or how any of these different management tools might do that.

[00:15:40] Hector: And then obviously, what Zen pilot might differ from some of the other agencies that are out there too.

[00:15:45] Jakub: In a lot of things that you're doing, it's very important to cross the T's and dot the I's and the consistency of what you do. The attention to detail is going to make all of the difference, especially in client work. Agencies know this very well. It's all in the details and it's all in how quickly you send the email follow up, how informed you are when you get on a conversation with a client, how well information is passed between team members. Is there a single source of truth actually, for example, about the status of your clients so that everybody knows if there's a client fire or a client is actually super happy and it's time to do a case study. So we know that this is very beneficial to focus on, and the way to do that is to focus on three things.

[00:16:26] Jakub: Actually, this brings to my mind a story. At that software development agency, I met a guy called Paul. he was, in a product, strategy role. Let's say he was helping clients just conceptualize our product free spirit. Okay. He once at one of our conferences, started meditating on stage instead of doing one of the speeches. It was great. And he told me one thing, Kuba, when it comes to building products or just running a business in general, there's three things and they come in order: process, people, tools. And process comes first. I've mulled on this thought for years, and I realized that your company's processes are like it's second brain.

[00:17:01] Jakub: It's your IP that really stays with your company as people come in and go. I mean, you can have great talent. You need to have great talent, but that talent should be leaving something behind when they move on to other opportunities because they will. that thing is process. So What ZenPilot does is it leaves agencies with a watertight project management process that covers everything. And it covers a variety of roles. We're called Zen Pilot. And this Zen's feeling comes from; You start your day with ClickUp, you end your day with ClickUp. At the beginning of your day on ClickUp, you see the tasks that are before you. It's not super easy to do, but you can get your agency to the point where a team member logs in, sees those tasks, and they know these are the only things that they need to do that day. Once that list is done, they're okay to pull something maybe from the tomorrow list if they prefer, but there's this clarity of, oh, there isn't some administrative additional tasks that was missed, or, there isn't important client deliverables. No, it all lives in one system in ClickUp or Teamwork, and you have that in there. So that's one end of the spectrum- the individual contributor. On the other hand, it's so hard for an agency to answer questions like, " do we have extra capacity to take on new projects?" Or actually, are we understaffed? People are burning out and we're going to face that kind of problem soon. Actually, it might even happen in an agency where the delivery team is saying that they are understaffed, whereas when you look at the balance sheet, it seems like overstaffed is the situation. Having a single source of truth and having that clarity is extremely important. And with the right system in place, I mean, this goes into automation, integrations, and advanced functionality, but ClickUp can do that.

[00:18:41] Jakub: You can have a view of every single person, how loaded are they with work? Every single client, what level of profit is it bringing you? Every single service line, how profitable is it? Where should you make cuts and how should you optimize for efficiency? So. basically, we helped fix all of that. We bring in the tool, which is ClickUp or teamwork. We bring in our people who consult and there's a ' done for you' element to it, but we prefer to teach rather than to just deliver the service. What stays with you is at the end of an engagement with ZenPilot is the processes. We teach your team, we show this cadence of accountability that's really needed for people to own their stuff and to deliver what they actually committed to doing.

[00:19:22] Jakub: So I hope that answers the question there.

[00:19:24] Hector: Yeah, fantastically. I know we've used ClickUp a little bit, but the challenge is knowing what's under the hood and then knowing how to get the most out of the car. Right? And

[00:19:33] Jakub: Oh, yeah.

[00:19:33] Hector: that's, great. That's a great benefit of having, someone like ZenPilot at your side.

[00:19:38] Jakub: We've got a saying at Zenpilot that the biggest advantage of ClickUp is that it can do anything. And the biggest drawback of ClickUp is that it can do anything. It can really lead you astray if you don't know how to configure it. Sometimes you commit to a certain way of configuring it. And all of a sudden you find out that actually with the way you configured things, if you're using checklists instead of subtasks, you actually can't do accurate reporting using that. So it's really important to have somebody show you the way to an optimal setup.

[00:20:05] Hector: Yeah. Jakub, where can people find out more about you, get more connected with you and also ZenPilot?

[00:20:09] Jakub: You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm a high functioning LinkedIn addict. Can't seem to get away from it. So I'm Jakub Graitzar on LinkedIn. Jakub Kuba Graitzar, actually, and When it comes to Zenpilot, go to zenpilot. com. If you're curious about what we do, the best way to do that would be to get our ClickUp for Agencies Guide.

[00:20:27] Jakub: We also have a Teamwork for Agencies Guide. So if you use that, grab that. It's a 47 page in depth guide. Actually coming into this marketing role, I was almost surprised as to how much Zenpilot gives away its expertise in that guide. It goes into everything- the habits you need to build, the optimal setup, how to think about click up statuses, the pitfalls of that.

[00:20:48] Jakub: I could talk about that at length, but that will show you. If what you have in mind and what Zenpilot does clicks for you. It gets granular. It's a well honed process and it takes some work to get there. The benefits I already spoke about. So grab the ClickUp for Agencies guide. You'll start getting a drip campaign after that, possibly from yours truly. There's a newsletter called First Class Operations that you can also find there. That I'm the Host of, you might say. If on the other hand, you feel like getting some consulting for your agency project management, you could call with us. And that's the fastest way to find out if we're a fit. We actually won't engage with you as a client.

[00:21:22] Jakub: If we don't see that one year from the start our engagement, you'll get at least four X or Y from the cooperation because we care about you achieving the result that you want, that helps us grow our reputation in our business. So you can grab a call with us and just find out.

[00:21:36] Hector: I love it! Go and connect y'all and thanks for being here as always and sticking with us. We would appreciate and love a rating, a review, wherever you get your podcast. If you know someone who is in the midst of scaling their business or thinking about starting one, send it to them and let's grow together cause especially this tactic, I think is great at any stage. Whether someone is brand new or someone is seasoned. So it's totally relevant. And as always, thanks for being a part of the tribe. We'll see on the next one. Later y'all.