Rwy'n gweithio, wrth gwrs. I'm Tim Deeson, and I'm here today to talk about creating a collaborative agency culture that scales. I wrote that title about 10 minutes before the submission deadline, and I didn't really know what I was going to say at the time. As I wrote it, I realised that what I was writing was the story of our groan pains as we've grown and developed as an agency and increased in size. I think what I found was writing the story of what's worked, what hasn't worked, and what we still don't understand about what we're going to do next. I've deliberately left some time for questions at the end, because some of this stuff to me is most interesting in discussion and in the detail rather than the big theory, because I definitely don't have the magic answer of how you do this, but I can say what's worked for us and what hasn't worked for us. In that same time of writing the story, I realised a lot of that was also my own personal development, learning how to get out of the way, learning how to work in a very small team to a much bigger team. I didn't really find there was a right way or a wrong way to do that, or a way that I would definitely recommend that everyone should do it, but I thought there was definitely some lessons and some kind of findings that I thought were worth sharing. It's a bit of background about who we are, because I think it's important to understand the size that we are now, the size of where we came from to understand the context of what I'm saying. So today we're just over 30 people. I think we've probably added a couple of people in the last month or so, and we're about doing about £2 million worth of Drupal build services, so we only have full-time permanent employees. We don't use contractors and freelancers that much, and we tend to do full service. We do a discovery and a production phase, and that means we have the UX, the design, the project management and the development all in-house. Over the past probably two or three years, we're growing about 30 or 40% year on year, but in the past our growth was much slower than that, which I'll talk about in a sec. We started back in 2001, which I realised made me about 20, which I think was probably responsible for some of our growing pains. I had a development background. I was working doing project management, the new business stuff, and initially just working with a designer. The two of us were all together in one room. We didn't really need lots of documentation and process. It was quite easy to collaborate. We didn't have a Google calendar where we'd put meetings down and things, because that would have been ridiculous. It was really, really efficient, so we spent lots of the time on the work. We didn't really have to spend lots of time planning how we were going to schedule things or how we were going to manage things. We won some small accounts and we started to grow and add a couple more people. We won things like the British Alpaca Society and helped them manage their herds as one of our early projects. We carried on growing. We picked up people like Robbie Williams about six years ago, Johnson & Johnson, some B2B enterprise work, people like ITV, who are one of the big media companies in the UK. By about 2012, we were about 16 people. We were doing about £1 million, probably a little bit over in turnover. On paper, things felt good. We had a very slow growth in some ways, but I think that was partly because we'd started a little bit accidentally. I don't think we meant to start an agency. I think we just started doing some work, so there wasn't really a big plan. We were still really, really efficient. There was minimal meeting still with those 16, 18 people, minimal unbillable times. We were spending all of our time on client work rather than on internal process stuff. Most of us probably only had one or two, maybe one even, unbillable roles. Pretty much everyone was focused on delivering projects every day. I think it was around that sort of time it started to be probably a bit painful in some ways. I think where it felt easy and fun, easy and fun, it didn't really seem to be true anymore, or quite as true. I was involved in most decisions, and I think that was through that organic growth that we were still very flat, or flat plus me in a way. Obviously, if you're involved in running an agency or working an agency, you know some of the sorts of tasks and issues that you're dealing with, and often some of them are very short-term focused. We need to do a pitch on Thursday. We need to do six days of pitch work in the next two days. We've also had a deadline for three months. We need to hear we're running our recruitment pipeline, we're running our sales pipeline. There's lots of conflicting pressures that I think you can be in an agency environment, and some of them require that long-term view, and some of them require a much shorter-term view. To me, scheduling is a... I've always hated scheduling, I think. It's a really complicated, annoying thing because you've got so many different dependencies between clients signing things off, if they're late signing something off, then by the time you push back your front-end build, for example, then that team's waiting for work and knocking into another piece of work. There's just that. There's those really difficult to get around issues that also have a commercial impact, I guess. I think when you do it badly, it starts to get slow and difficult, and we were starting to get to the size where there wasn't a simple way to schedule those teams anymore. Also, holding the major client relationships, which when we were dealing with someone like the British Alpaca Society, they had a relatively unsophisticated digital requirements, but as we started to pick up those bigger clients, what they wanted from the relationship with us was much more complex. I think they wanted to be able to be looking at their kind of three-year plans with us. They wanted to be really spending a lot more time and kind of engaging with us, and we hadn't really built a way for the team to be working on projects that weren't defined quite well. I think that was starting to leave me with a feeling that my head was starting to hurt, that it wasn't... it didn't really fit in there any more, I guess. That was probably an expression by Friday afternoon that was fairly common. Aside from me, I became more conscious that I think we were definitely wasting people in the team's time and probably their motivation. I see those as two different things. You can waste people's time in the sense that they don't have something useful to do, but I think when you waste their motivation, when you waste their time a lot, you start to waste their motivation, and that kind of teaches them that it's not useful to be looking for the right things to do because there's always going to be an inefficiency or a blocker in stopping them doing that. I think that can start to kill that kind of spark and enthusiasm when you're always kind of thinking, well, should I bother going to find out what's going on with this? Maybe not, actually, because I don't think I'll be able to resolve it. I kind of realised, I think, that it was effectively I was micromanaging people, and I don't think it was an explicit, deliberate kind of thing that I did. I think it was kind of an accidental organic growth, and these were smart, talented people that we'd worked really hard to recruit, that we respected their opinion, we would put them in these roles for a reason, but I think we were struggling to then actually make sure we used the capacity they had and the skills and the ability. I think it was that point we kind of felt really stuck in a way because we'd had this kind of success and growth working our way through things, but we didn't really feel kind of, it didn't feel like more of this was possible because if we kept growing it felt like these kind of problems would get kind of worse, I guess, not better, and I'd always really been, I think, excited about our future. I obviously started the company and kind of driven it along, but I thought, well, actually, I'm not really sure what we'd have more of if we carried on doing this, and growth, you know, there wasn't really possible to plan for growth, I think, at that point because it wasn't clear how would we do that. And so we kind of started to, I mean, I started thinking there's obviously something kind of we're going to need to change to have, you know, a bigger kind of brighter future and trying to kind of understand the background of what was there. I think there was obviously the fact I was a bottleneck, we kind of, what had been really efficient in a small team was starting to kind of cause a problem. And looking at the root causes of that, I think we didn't have the right data. So we didn't have systems that were giving us good information about what was going on at the time. And that's both, I think, retrospectively and kind of forecasting that. We didn't have the right structure of people, so we didn't have the kind of the roles that where people could make the right decisions. And we didn't have the kind of process point, so we didn't have a place where there was a natural place for that person to make the decision at the time. And up until then, kind of everything had been in my head, which had been efficient in the sense that I could kind of map it out, but it wasn't in my head anymore because we were too big. And it was really clear that we had these people with skills and knowledge and expertise that was greater than mine in probably most areas, if not all. And we were kind of wasting that opportunity because they could have made these better decisions more quickly than I could, but we weren't kind of giving them that opportunity. And that was really because of that kind of slow, centralised model that had worked at a small size, but now really wasn't working at a larger size. And that was obviously frustrating. I didn't really feel that I would be doing, I was doing my job as well anymore. It certainly wasn't as much fun. And I think it was probably frustrating for everyone else, particularly the people who really felt that we could do something differently or move more quickly. And I think that was kind of, it became clear there was kind of fundamental changes we needed to make. The engagement, restoring that kind of energy and drive that we'd had to make sure that we could keep pushing on into the future and finding a new operational model, finding a new way that we could keep working that was going to have to probably be a complete replacement for the old one. And I think often the challenge with kind of organisational change is you're still delivering projects. So you still have these commitments, you still have these deadlines, you still have recruitment, you still have sales, you have all these things going on. It's kind of changing the, you know, the tyre of the car going down the motorway type problem where you're trying to kind of both, you both need to think the distance to be able to have the insight to see what you need to change, but you also need the actual time to implement those changes as well. And I think that can be, that can be something that can be quite difficult to find. And so we started to kind of think about some kind of quick wind solutions, you know, what could we do? And one of them was, well, you know, management has been around a long time. It's not kind of a very new concept. So, you know, could we hire managers? Is that what we were kind of lacking? And on paper, I think obviously, yes, you can have a management hierarchy, you can have delegation. But I kind of felt that people knew what the right thing to do was. I didn't really feel that we needed to add people to tell these people what to do. I think I felt the problem was that people weren't really empowered. They didn't have the right information to kind of hiring people in to tell people to do the thing that they already wanted to do in the first place. Seemed a bit kind of expensive and weird. And I think, you know, there's kind of, it felt like there was a software option, I guess, as well. So there's kind of those agency management tools that do everything from your sales pipeline to your bug tracking, to your resourcing, to your forecasting. And I didn't really know anyone who'd had a good experience with them. I didn't really believe in them, actually, to be honest. But also I think they would have just given us more information and we didn't really have a model to make decisions with that information in, so it wouldn't have actually really fundamentally addressed the problem. And I think, you know, what we really needed was both kind of better tools. We needed a way to have this information, but we also needed a way to have a new model to actually make use of that information. And then I thought, well, again, you know, I don't think this is the first time, that agencies aren't new, digital agencies aren't new. This isn't the kind of the first time that anyone else has been here before. People have grown and outgrown their kind of model before. And of course, you know, yeah, they have. This question is much older than digital agencies, much older than agencies. There's a guy called Ricardo Semla in the 70s in Brazil. And he, I think he had about, I think it was tens of millions or low hundreds of millions of turnover. And he was a, he owned an industrial manufacturing company. So they produced, you know, industrial dishwashers, industrial washing machines, et cetera. And he's kind of saw huge inefficiencies in bureaucracy in the initial organisation. And one day, he just decided to sack about 60% of the management. And he thought, well, we're going to have some problems if we do that. But actually, I'd rather have the problems that come with this than I would have about having one of these managers who kind of get in the way. So he created this system where the teams could hire each other, or within the team, they could hire each other, fire each other, set their own pay, choose their own suppliers, choose their own product lines and their own prices. So he really had decided that those managers weren't kind of adding value anymore. And that was something that would be far better done by the people who were delivering the work day to day. And that felt, I think, really intriguing. He'd written about it in this book called Maverick in the 80s. And he'd gone through a kind of a through iterations with it and had some success. Although he'd changed some bits of it quite fundamentally later on. And it felt, I think, like the right direction, but it also felt like a huge leap. It didn't feel that it was something that we kind of had the confidence to say, well, if this worked for a fridge manufacturer in Brazil in the 80s, it would definitely work for a group agency in the UK. I mean, one's a product business, one's a service business. There's quite a few things there that I didn't really feel that this was kind of an obvious thing to just jump in and do. There's some kind of closer-to-home kind of interesting kind of writing and thoughts about this as base camp. They've written a lot about the kind of motivation, company culture, scaling beyond a founder. They've got a couple of books, Signal vs. Noise and Rework that are worth reading. They're quite good on the principles, I think. They're also a product business, so they're slightly harder to apply again directly to an agency, but they don't kind of waffle on too much either. They're quite kind of short and succinct, so they're worth a read if you just want to kind of get a conversation going at the office or try and explore some of those topics there. They're worth a look. There's also a start-up in the US called Buffer, and they've been documenting their journey on their blog about self-managing teams, so I think they've been doing it for a couple of years, and they've been quite honest. They've given some quite good write-ups about kind of what's worked and not worked. So they do things like, the team set their own salaries, they got rid of management appraisals, I think, so that you can each, the individuals kind of score each other and set salaries and things, and they've actually put back in place some of the things they took away, because they found that those, for example, mentoring really did have value, so not giving feedback to people and experiencing them, tell them how they were doing, they actually realised it was something that they did want to keep. And there's also a really interesting talk I saw yesterday, which I just slipped into the slides this morning. I think it's pronounced LEAP. They're a Swiss company. They're a Drupal agency, actually, and they're quite a lot further down the road with this than we are, and it was a really good talk called Teal is the New Orange, which you can find the recordings that hold as it's very at-structure. I think there are about 100 people and doing about eight or nine million Swiss francs worth of turnover, so they've managed to kind of scale quite a long way through that, and I definitely recommend having a look at that and talk if that's something you're interested in. And so kind of from that background reading, and unfortunately I didn't see the talk yesterday before, so I was working on bad information at the time, but on that background reading, on the themes that I thought we really should kind of need to apply, I think one of those was intrinsic motivation, so if someone's intrinsically motivated to do something, if it's something that they just enjoy doing and would kind of do if they weren't getting paid for it or if no one was standing over them making it do it, I think you can kind of start to understand your organisational culture based on if there's things that people just really hate doing and you've created an environment they hate doing in it, then management starts to become a cost of how do you monitor and force people to do? If you can find the right people and the right tasks and create the right environment, then you're probably not going to have that resistance of how many ways can we force people and how many ways can they try and get away with not doing something. I think you can kind of start to break away a lot from that is what I've found. And also I think as a company, it's something we've failed to do for a long time, I think, was probably setting clear goals, so really high level, probably quarterly annual and three year goals, and you can also do a 10 year goal if you really want to make sure you kind of have a really clear arc of direction that you're taking. If you don't do that, then you're not really enabling people to act independently or to kind of collaborate without your direct instruction, because without any clear kind of purpose, how can people make those kind of right, smart decisions on your behalf? And I think that was something we kind of got stuck in a loop in almost of having to be two directional because we didn't really have this big picture clear idea of where we're going. We'd grown luckily and successfully through a kind of opportunistic an opportunistic approach, but I think as we got bigger there wasn't that, that wasn't really going to kind of cut the, cut it anymore. And I think finally this is definitely really relevant to founders or management team. If you're going to do these things or try and roll them out, you need to look really hard at yourself I think to make sure that you can actually see through your part of the bargain. So if there's no point kind of saying these things if your actions immediately discount them. And I think that kind of personal reflection and the personal growth you might need to do to make sure that you can actually try and kind of support these kind of initiatives. If it is something you choose to do, it's something that's well worth kind of focusing on. So kind of into the action I guess in January we started kind of rolling this out. So we spent kind of a little bit of time in the painful stage and a little bit of time working out what we were going to do. And we started kind of creating a new decent handbook. So there's another director, Simon. We put kind of together in a Google doc how we thought the kind of the highest level kind of company operation stuff should work and probably spent about a week or two on it. I think we kind of built up in our heads kind of an idea of how we thought it should go. And then we shared it for kind of comment changes in debate. So we deliberately put it in an open document format that everyone could have input into and we probably spent, I think about a month working on it with everyone and it did change a lot. There was things that we thought we wanted that people really resisted and I think they were really right to resist actually. I think there were some bad ideas that got cleaned out in that process. There were some kind of questions about things where people just didn't really feel confident or that it was clear how things would work. I think it was a kind of edge case, well what if this and what if that kind of stuff that we we tried to satisfy with a kind of a different approach rather than creating a kind of 400 page long document that had every possible outcome in. And to kind of to drive that document I think we thought it would be we needed to kind of create some principles that we all could agree on and I think a key part of that document was the kind of debate and discussion process was what made it something everyone bought into rather than it just being something that was kind of pushed on people because I don't think it would have really worked if we'd taken that approach. So we created these five principles and we also kind of made some fundamental modifications to our working practices because we thought we need to get this different kind of mindset happening if we're going to continue to kind of grow in the future. And so those new principles the first one was our team members are intrinsically motivated to do their own job best so not spending lots of time on monitoring people not spending lots of processes on working out what people are doing or if they're doing what they should be doing we're going to make the assumption in the company culture we build and the systems we build that people actually do want to get their job done and the company's job is as much to get out of the way of that as it is to try and enforce it because do we want to put that much energy into the kind of enforcement aspect of things. Principle two was everyone must have a meaningful input and a culture of continuous improvement so by meaningful input we meant that it's no point saying well anyone can change anything or we always want to hear what you think if you don't act on that and if you don't provide a process that actually happens within then people are going to learn really quickly that you actually don't care or haven't found a way of caring yet so we wanted to make it sure that it was really clear that if someone could make a change that was within their kind of remit I guess that they should just make that change themselves because we did need discussion than the smallest group of people possible should make that decision as quickly as possible rather than it being something that we were kind of waiting on a hierarchy to do. Principle three was focus on results not process so we need as a company or a project on whatever level we're working on to determine what the results were looking for we need to launch this thing by this date the process of how we get there we should have as little touch on as possible but enough to make sure that we're not kind of reinventing wheels Principle four was around knowledge work so we do knowledge work in agencies we're creative whether that's through coding or design we're solving problems and we're using bits of our brain that we can't just turn up at work for six, seven, eight hours a day and the work happens it's not work that we can do by being present we actually have to bring that kind of time and energy to it or that focus to it and we all have good days we all have bad days we all have times of the day where we're not that productive and we don't have lifestyle choices or commitments that mean our lives are different shapes and what we wanted to do was actually say we really will care about the results and we don't really care about measuring who's in the office at 9am isn't really any useful measurement of productivity it just shows who's physically in the office at 9am and principle five was that big principles are more useful than small rules so we really wanted to keep this kind of really simple we didn't want to end up with a kind of contract of employment style intranet or kind of system that governed the kind of working practices we wanted to just make sure we had some bigger tests to kind of ask around those things and we felt that we were trying to give people kind of a map and assume that people we recruited and had within the team would have great judgement that was why we recruited in the first place so let's not spend loads of time then assuming that they don't want to do the job or they're not happy or they're not going to be engaged and I think some of those things they're kind of not I don't think many people would necessarily disagree with them personally I think they kind of seem obvious but I think it's a lot harder in practice or in company cultures where you evolve what you would like to kind of say on your poster if this is how things are but it's actually a lot harder to make sure those things happen every day and it was something we were really kind of conscious of is that this didn't really feel kind of like rocket science but it also felt like something that we certainly weren't in the place when we introduced them that certainly wasn't true we also had these the kind of the work in practice stuff that we changed so in the past we've been quite traditional everyone was largely based in one office working kind of a nine to five and we started to roll out these changes so things like a personal tool budget so every member of staff I think it's £500 a year they can spend on whatever they think helps them do their job better so the company still supplies kind of laptops, software the kind of core stuff and we deliberately didn't put this up for approval so you didn't need to get approval before you bought something you could use it for a standing desk, a wireless mouse a window shade, whatever it is that kind of helps we just put it in a central Google Doc so that there's that transparency and particularly for tool sharing if someone bought a Wacom tablet or something so make sure that we didn't end up with eight and actually we only ever needed kind of three at once we also introduced kind of flexible hours so effectively you could decide when you wanted to work there's some kind of we introduced the only limitation to that was really around core hours so if it was a day that you were going to work then you needed to be available I think it's between ten and two but other than that you can hit your kind of hours target for the week at any time that you want to and we also introduced distributed working at that point so you can decide where the most appropriate place to work could be a home could be a different city could be a cafe in town whatever their kind of choices when we first introduced it and up until now we've had a guide of that three of those days should be in the office but we're kind of trying to work out whether that actually makes any difference or not and whether it's actually quite different for different roles because if you're working in reception for example greeting clients that's quite difficult to do from home because those are a lot more straightforward and we also we kind of had this but didn't really say it very clearly I don't think we introduced an unlimited training budget so that people just needed to demonstrate the business value of what they wanted to do but really selling people's kind of expertise and if we felt that if someone we wanted to have no barrier there really if someone felt they needed those extra skills then they should kind of go and get them if you were pitching kind of kite surfing or something I think you'd have to work a bit hard that there was a business value case but otherwise you could kind of go for it and to wrap those up to kind of put some structure around how that worked we had a target number of billing hours per week so as long as you could kind of do all those things in any way you wanted the thing we were kind of really caring about the thing we knew that mattered to us as a company as a company that sells time was the weekly billing target so that was the kind of structure around it it was up to you how you got there and there's lots of reasons you could miss your weekly target so it wasn't that there was this kind of a punitive issue if you didn't hit it you might have been doing R&D you might have been training there's all sorts of reasons why you wouldn't hit it but it was just there as a kind of an awareness thing really that if you weren't going to hit it that you were kind of thinking about what else you were doing that was useful with your time to kind of to help people kind of work out what the right thing to do was we added these self-check so kind of questions that you could ask yourself or someone else if they were saying I'm going to go and work in Belize for the next three months we wanted to make sure there was a kind of a litmus test to hold these things up to and to see if they were if that kind of action would be compatible with what we thought was really important and these were the three things that we thought were really important is the way I'm working making our clients happy and effectively collaborating with my team and I'm happy with the quality of my work so really those were the things we thought were most important and actually if you were able to say yes to all of those then it was probably going to be okay what you were doing so that kind of gave us the working principles and the practices but it didn't really fundamentally change how we were going to work as an agency that didn't give us our kind of operational changes and back to those points we kind of needed that better data for people and we needed a new way of making decisions so at the same time we kind of changed how we were using some of the SaaS platforms we had introduced some new ones and also changed some company structure so we've been using Harvest for a while we used that for time tracking across the whole company for project budgets and we find that to be pretty good to be honest we've more recently started using Forecast which is kind of a sister product to Harvest that is for team resource planning base camp pretty standard for kind of baseline kind of team collaboration or client collaboration and comms document storage we used JIRA for more complex projects or bug tracking or task tracking about the same time we rolled out Slack I think previously we've been using something horrible I think we've been using Jabba actually using iChats with Mac based and there was no group chat I don't think it file transfers didn't work I'm surprised actually we stuck with it so long because looking back it was a complete nightmare that Slack has been really awesome actually I don't think a lot of what we've done would have been possible if we hadn't shifted to Slack and also we've been using Zero which is a cloud based accounting package and that meant we could give everyone access to the financial information to credit scores to invoising information to the right people this kind of collection of tools meant that everyone could pretty much see everything that was going on all the time the problem that we kind of found was that is that we had endless different systems kind of spitting out endless bits of data and the kind of the short term there's a longer term solution I'll come on to later but the short term solution is we started kind of mashing that into Google Sheets and that kind of works so we kind of have a dashboard of project statuses and project health that we can see as an overview of all projects that we're working on and some different kind of other company metrics but it's definitely not ideal but it was a lot better than what we had and to kind of to use this information that we had we were kind of adding these new meetings so we had a scheduling meeting that had kind of the key some of the key roles were involved in that and a delivery management meeting so they would happen every week there'd be a group of people they included me initially but they don't anymore and those people would get together to kind of resolve delivery management is project problems and scheduling is just the team scheduling so scheduling was now made by kind of a that kind of key project team people and they would discuss kind of schedule conflicts or blockers issues that needed resolving and that probably was probably about February I guess that rolled out and there were some negatives you know going back to that last slide with a billion dials we did have endless amounts of stats but I don't know that we were in some cases kind of much wiser for them so we were generating huge amounts of performance information but I'm not sure who was actually going to look at it or what they were going to do about it we'd also gone from kind of not much internal meetings in process and now we had lots of people in lots of meetings and we hadn't really in hindsight we hadn't really worked out a good meeting or maths we didn't have good meeting discipline so I think things were a lot better but they were the meetings were too long and unfocused I think and we were kind of sharing back to that dial slide in a way we were sharing everything with everyone but it wasn't really clear who was supposed to do something about it necessarily so kind of everyone being able to see everything doesn't necessarily mean that someone's going to do something it's it can get a bit messy but actually my feelings from what I know of the teams it was overwhelmingly positive I certainly felt re-energised I think there was a new purpose and a new insight into what we could be doing in the future people felt I think a lot more enabled to be able to make changes to use new tooling I was talking to someone from the team last night and he was saying that the amount of development process changed that we underwent at the same time and I was saying would you think this was related to that and we were kind of uming and aring about whether it would have happened anyway but it certainly felt like there was a big shift in our ability to kind of solve problems and do things better and I think that probably came in some ways from that energy and autonomy and certainly I think we were having conversations about the important things again so rather than lots of kind of detailed nitty gritty week to week problem stuff that doesn't really change the world we were able to start talking about were we going to start hitting these bigger goals what was going on and people were talking about should we add more team members for example so there was definitely a shift into the quality of conversation and also I was really surprised I genuinely didn't know what was going to happen around revenue and profitability I didn't know if we were going to see a slump through change or if we were going to have a rough period where we had to do a lot of reorganisation whether this was actually going to work or not but what we found was that revenue which had been growing actually grew a little bit steeper and profitability actually increased so I think what we were seeing was some of that the wasted time and energy that the previous model that we had kind of outgrown had introduced we were actually able to be able to be delivering in a much more kind of focused way you know I had some kind of well I think probably everyone did involve we had some kind of realisations I guess as we kind of went through that and some of them were kind of fairly quickly apparent you know I think one thing we found which didn't seem obvious was that lots of the team loved their actual job so they loved being a designer and the idea of sitting in a kind of scheduling meeting for two hours every week is pretty toxic to them and I think we kind of got along with the idea of oh everyone can control the destiny everyone can kind of change whatever they want isn't that a great thing and I don't think it is actually I think you need to be really selective about who's going to do what and why but surprisingly not all designers want to run an agency in hindsight I don't blame them actually I think realisation too that it was probably a personal growth one I think was that leadership isn't control and control isn't leadership and I think being able to let go of control where it's the only way you know how because you've grown the business that way in a way that you've been used to having that control I think understanding that I had a different purpose that wasn't about kind of keeping all those plates spinning that there was people who were going to be able to keep better plates spinning faster wherever I'm going with that analogy but they had a kind of it was much clearer that what the purpose of how those things could work and I think also there wasn't the perfect time for the perfect action it will never be the right time to make fundamental changes and you'll never get it right the very first time and I think I'm glad really that we did just get on with it we accepted that there was going to be some bumpiness and we did have to change things as we went but we knew we could adapt we knew we could adapt it and we knew that we wanted to set an aspiration we really wanted to raise the bar and kind of assume that there wasn't going to be people abusing the system assume that there wasn't going to be those problems and actually set a really positive bar out to go this is how we want to work and if there really was problems deal with it but not kind of build into the system that there was people who really didn't want to do it that way so that kind of took us through to probably around August kind of time and that's where we've kind of moving into the next round we've been kind of changing some of those things as we've gone but now we're kind of looking at another round I think of bigger changes and that's particularly around growth where we've been able to kind of keep that growth going but also around distributed recruitment what's going to be possible in terms of UK and Europe of how we recruit because now the kind of the historical team has that flexibility and it's increasingly distributed we've had a couple of distributed hires I think in the last month it then means we've kind of our London and South East recruitment pool is much wider now and I think we've failed in our kind of knee jerk swing to the opposite direction but accountability the first time round I don't think it was clear to anyone including me who was definitely accountable for something to be happening and in the past it kind of been in a broken way I think ultimately me but we kind of just introduced a different type of broken and I think that can still waste time and energy and it kind of gets frustrating and I think we've been lucky that there's a really kind of good team ethic they've worked together a long time we don't really hit big problems with it I think there still can be that frustration of who's going to make the final call on a scheduling decision for example if the six people who all have conflict in different projects or three different project managers with ten projects someone has to win or lose each time and I think there's not always a clear way that that can be a kind of democratic decision around things like resourcing so there's a couple of points I'll make later about how we've kind of changed that but I think we tried to introduce kind of democracy right through the kind of the base but we've done it slightly differently I think we're going to move we're kind of discussing it at the moment smaller fixed teams so rather than trying to schedule across 30-35 people as a resource pool which is great in theory because you can bring lots of people to a project quickly in reality that's not I don't think how projects work and how people run projects and clients so by having smaller fixed kind of pods of teams who always consistently work together I think we can kill most of our scheduling complexity and accountability problem because that team will always work together and is responsible for delivering those projects I think that kind of once your resourcing gets to beyond a certain point I think it just becomes really complex and I'm not sure it's a problem that's particularly worth solving because it won't be a free solution and those pod teams will be multi-disciplinary so that's a designer, UX, PM solution architect a couple of developers would be kind of a typical base team so they can completely control all the things they need to do to deliver a project I think one thing also was around kind of company scorecard so we hadn't really found a way to set out we'd set kind of some annual goals but I don't think we've really found a way to make what were actually connected day-to-day actions in with those so we're looking at the moment of how do we build a weekly company scorecard which has the kind of stats that change on every week that we want to have a conversation about if there's something that's not kind of looking right and I think a big part of that is something I was reading about recently was the kind of idea of trailing versus leading indicators and I think new business is a good example to demonstrate the difference between the two so revenue for example is a good trailing indicator it's the outcome of lots of tasks that you do and eventually you actually sell something the leading indicators to that are really going to a pitch doing a chemistry meeting how many people have you met at a marketing event for example so there's lots of things you might do ten marketing events to do five pitches to send three proposals to win one piece of work and with leading indicators what you're really trying to do is measure the lead through to that final piece of revenue because the leading indicators are the things you can influence if you know you're not going to that many marketing events for example or anything you can change quite quickly next week to actually go and influence your revenue next week is really difficult because you've probably got a two month leading kind of trail on that and those high level company targets I think also were something that we wanted to to work on on a quarterly an annual and a three year basis so that we had a kind of ramp of how if our three year goals are this how do they connect back to much more short term tactical goals so within that scorecard we'd have for each of those roles in the company whether it's marketing the delivery of projects recruitment, finance kind of three or four key stats that we think give a really good idea of how that area of the business is working and if there's a problem with the numbers that's a good thing really because that gives us a chance to talk about it at the right time so it's not kind of a performance management tool it's much more about understanding where do we need to spend kind of time and energy rather than someone's necessarily doing anything kind of right or wrong and so looking at the kind of what we were trying to do is also build this kind of model that would allow us to kind of recruit around UK and Europe so finding a replicable simplified model that we could then kind of clone out so that we didn't have to work out how to keep going through different growth barriers and I think there were definitely we're going to hit different challenges and kind of rolling this side of things out but I think it feels like there's a kind of a simple way of doing things that will actually be more straightforward and I think kind of in conclusion my kind of takeaways from what I've learnt so far I think we're definitely around in the early days I didn't really, I couldn't understand the difference between the signal versus the noise of what we were doing so where we were having problems and growing pains and things I think we got stuck in a loop of doing lots of short term fixes and actually understanding the root cause and recognising that we needed to do kind of a model change much more quickly so I think that's definitely something that I would want to make sure I pay more attention to myself in future I think for both, for culture you have an operational model and you have a company culture and I think it's definitely true that you have one of each whether you like it or not you will have a company culture whether you choose to engage with it or understand it or influence it is a different question but there will be a culture it's not something that you stick up on a poster or if you don't have a poster then it won't happen and I think both are really hard to see clearly particularly when you're really close to them and it was useful for us having kind of external debate and advisers to be able to just gain that much more insight and see what we were doing really well at and it was worth celebrating and see things that we weren't doing well at and we needed to change and I think for both of them again what we found is the process and the ongoing process really debating and defining both of them involving everyone that's really important it's not that you can you can't just kind of apply it to people and it will happen, you need to really engage people and work out what fits you and what will work for you and that's I think what we found looking at a fair bit of research and reading in some ways there isn't, what I realised I guess is there isn't a perfect model it's not that the model on the shelf is kind of good or bad it's your challenge in how you're going to apply it how are you actually, how relevant is it to you and what's your route to actually making it your own and I think that's the bit that it wasn't kind of clear at the time it's easy to get excited about let's do helocracy, let's do this, let's do that all of them are going to be a really long journey from where you are today probably depends where you are but you need to understand what kind of fits with you but then start making those small changes all the way rather than spend, kind of get stuck in analysis, paralysis of we could spend three years understanding different models in hindsight I wish we'd spent probably a little bit less time looking at options and more time looking at what immediate incremental changes could we start kind of rolling through and for the future I think self set pay is something that companies that go in this direction is something that people choose to do more and more I don't know if we'll go that way I think it's some of the most acutely personal and sensitive stuff that can go on and I don't really understand how that would work for us yet but it's something that is a natural conclusion in lots of the models that peer reviewed pay is something that people kind of work towards I think also self managing business units that's where going back to Ricardo Semla Brazil he ended up by kind of creating business units that could act independently because the overhead of managing these really large units was just really inefficient and bureaucratic so trying to create small business units that could self kind of manage is something that is interesting I don't really know I think we're too small for quite a while for that to be relevant to us but I think the idea of having those kind of inputs and outputs connected really closely and directly is an interesting one and something we'll definitely kind of keep an eye on in the future so yeah thank you very much to any questions so the question is how big is the company today it's about 33 people and about 2.5 million, 2 million worth of turnover so we're mostly based in so historically we've been based in a town called Canterbury in the UK which is just near London we're now over the past kind of six months or so we've become more and more distributed so we're probably only about 10% of the people I think by the end of next month we'll be not based in that area but we're deliberately kind of putting in the infrastructure that means it's much less relevant whether you're working at home 10 miles from kind of our historical location or if you're working 100 miles away the kind of the systems and practices we're working on now means that should be less relevant I think for us to grow the south east of the UK is a really for recruitment is a really difficult market so that's something that we're looking at of how would we continue to grow with the kind of people that we think are a great fit that we need to look a bit more imaginatively than where we have done in the past so the question was what's our largest project I think in terms of initial spend I think we'd probably be looking something like 200,000 UK so that would be a full service build with design UX and then some clients would spend that on a new basis on the same platform for example I don't think we've delivered as a one-time project anything larger than that and I think for us to do those kind of projects I think they change nature quite quickly I'm not sure if we were going to do kind of a half a million pound project I think that would require too much of a total percentage of our people that I'm not sure actually it would be healthy or a good idea necessarily Yeah, it's a shame I didn't put a kind of a slide in What I'd kept coming back to was really that the journey in the kind of how we do things is much more important than our actual size if that makes sense so we needed to keep a culture that people looked out for each other it was fun to do people enjoyed their work that we felt like we were delivering really good work that we were doing the right things for the clients we always have kind of really long term relationships with clients so we're often saying don't build this 50,000 pound feature it's just a bad idea I think those are the things that we felt or some examples of the things we felt were really important to keep rather than moving to kind of a very sales driven culture where the target was we need to hit this revenue this quarter no matter what and we'll compromise whatever it takes to kind of go that and I think during this process it was interesting actually to kind of and we just did some kind of seconds and three year and ten year goals actually and they weren't really around financial targets they were actually around much more about the size of what we do but making sure that we kept those other things in balance at the same time and I think it is important to make sure is your purpose to be a certain size or to hurt a certain size of revenue, size of people type of profitability if you can't answer that actually a level where you're setting the strategy I think you're going to have endless confusion in actually how can other people go and operate independently if they don't really know what's the best thing that could happen if they were all this happiness or this, this hello the question was around results versus process how do you not compromise that everyone's doing things in wildly different ways within the company I came I came from a development background myself so I've always I think been slightly too interested in the methodologies that we use or the IDEs or those sorts of things but I definitely don't know what I'm talking about anymore probably only borderline did at the time but I think what we found is that the cost of standardisation, I think there's a sweet spot really, the cost of standardisation can potentially be too high so where you think that standardisation is really important it isn't free, you have to train people, convince people possibly force people push those kind of tools or those practices onto people and what we wanted to say was actually if we've all followed the right methodology but the projects three months late and over budget well actually that's not success the success that our clients are buying from us and that the company can take to the bank is the project on time and on budget and those were the kind of if we had to choose something we thought well actually if developer A wants to use that idea and developer B wants to use a different one that's probably not the most important thing that we're going to hold up at the end of the quarter and say was that the kind of important decision we made so I don't think there's kind of a black and white answer to it I think it's just that you have to be careful not to get too bog down in things that actually you're kind of smart, talented, motivated team can probably work out five different ways and how much time within the company do you want to spend necessarily I mean it could be and I think there's also a balance between something like knowledge sharing versus mandating so it may be that you spend lots of time encouraging people to do things but you don't want to lose their motivation by forcing them so we have some things like security policies there's some things we just say this has to work this way and then there's another layer of things so if they would risk the company integrity client integrity, contractual issues there's some things that we say you just absolutely must do and then there's other things that we say well as long as you hit the big things does that answer your question yeah yeah so we use and that's a good point so we do use scrum actually and it hasn't come up as a a debate about whether we shouldn't yet and I think that would be an interesting one actually if someone said oh you know we fix team we want to do this in a waterfall way I think that would be an interesting kind of debate actually because we said we don't mandate those things but I think we probably might at that point so yeah yeah so in the past we did them as appraisals mostly me doing them and mostly the time I didn't get round to them often enough which I think was a really bad thing actually it's not good for anyone we then moved to peer reviews so we tried to keep it really simple we asked I think three peers two questions and I think the questions around can you tell me three things that I'm doing really well and three things I could do differently so that's completely self driven you just fill it out in a google doc it's up to you to go and choose the people that you want to ask those questions of and you just have to record it in a place that I think you and your manager can see it but you can choose to share it with everyone if you wish and you also set I think a goal at that point for the next quarter but again that goal could be I'm going to come to work and no one's going to challenge that it's up to you because in the past we've kind of been pushy I think about setting people's goals and I realise that if it's not your goal you're not going to do it it's just no point they have to come from the individual it's too much process around that appraisal stuff I think is just it's a false economy it doesn't really get what you think it is from it you just make people just keep jumping through the hoops but nothing's actually the real important stuff isn't changing had any problems I wouldn't have always had if that makes sense so rather than forcing most people to do things in a way they don't want just to make sure that one person isn't going to do the bad thing if that makes sense we kind of said well if someone has an issue at work that things aren't working that well they're probably going to have that no matter what so let's not make everyone work in a model that forces them not to be to do things in a certain way so the question was around how do we allocate projects to teams and capacity that's changing at the moment so in the past we could we would put a project team we would win a project we always try and bring the project team to pitches and to work and do the estimating and quoting on projects so we try and we don't have a separate pitch team or a sales team who are doing that we bring the people who are going to do the work into that process right from the start so they're the ones estimating specifying etc but occasionally that isn't true because either the right people aren't available or we need someone senior who isn't going to be the person doing all of the work if when we do win that project then we put together the right team to deliver it which should have been the same as the pitch team and that then but that's where we end up in that really complex resourcing environment because anyone could work across all of those different projects that's what we were finding wasn't efficient and we try and keep people on the same project for years if we can because you get that continuity but what I think we're doing in the future is we'll win a project different project teams different pods will pitch will be working on the pitch of the project and then that pod will deliver the project so rather than the resourcing being across 30 plus people it will just be it goes to this pod it goes to that pod the talk I mentioned yesterday Orange is the new teal or teal is the new orange or something they talk in a bit more detail about how they do things like business development at scale that then matches back to those individual pods too they're a bit more advanced than we are in doing it so it's probably worth watching soon Anything else? Great, thank you very much


Good morning, Hylis. I didn't expect to find you up so early. It is unusual, but my thoughts were so taken up by a subject I was exploring last night that, finding I could not sleep, I resolved to get up and take a walk in the garden. Well, that was fortunate, because it allowed you to see what innocent and agreeable pleasures you lose every morning. Can there be a more pleasant time of the day, or a more delightful season of the year? That purple sky, those wild but sweet notes of birds, the fragrant bloom upon the trees and flowers, the gentle influence of the rising sun. These and a thousand nameless beauties of nature inspire the soul with secret raptures. Its moods at this time are also fresh and lively and fit for those meditations to which the solitude of a garden and tranquility of the morning naturally dispose us. But I'm afraid I interrupted your thoughts.  It is true, I was, and I would be obliged to you if you permit me to go on in the same vein. Not that I would by any means deprive myself of your company, for my thoughts always flow more easily in conversation with a friend than when I am alone. But my request is that you allow me to share my reflections. With all my heart. That's what I would have requested myself if you not prevented me. I was considering the odd fate of those who have, in all ages, in order to be distinguished from the common people, or from some unaccountable turn of thought, pretended either to believe nothing at all, or to believe the most extravagant things in the world. This, however, might be tolerated if their paradoxes and skepticism did not produce consequences of general disadvantage to humankind. But the mischief lies here. When people of less leisure see those who are supposed to have spent their whole time in the pursuit of knowledge professing ignorance of all things, or advancing such notions that are contrary to plain and commonly received principles, they will be tempted to entertain suspicions concerning the most important truths that they hitherto held sacred and unquestionable. I entirely agree with you about the ill tendency of the exaggerated doubts of some philosophers, and the fantastic ideas of others. Lately, I've even gone so far in thinking this way that I have abandoned several of the sublime notions I received in their schools, and turned to popular opinions. I give my word that since this revolt from metaphysical notions to plain dictates of nature and common sense, I find my understanding strangely enlightened. I can now easily understand a great many things that before were all mystery and riddle. I am glad to find there is nothing in the reports I heard about you. What reports were those? You were represented in last night's conversation as someone who maintains the most extravagant opinion that ever entered into the human mind, namely that there is no such thing as material substance in the world. I am seriously persuaded that there is no such thing as what philosophers call material substance. However, if I were made to see anything absurd or skeptical in this view, then I would have the same reason to renounce it that I think I now have to reject the contrary opinion. But can anything be more fantastic, more repugnant to common sense or a... Sample complete. Ready to continue?


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com, coming at you with a 14 team random number block randomizer that's gonna unlock flawless figure team one that's coming up in the next video. There's the description of how this works, if you're not familiar with it. There are the teams involved right there, a lot of great teams. Here are the people involved.  We've got all 10 spots right there, there are the numbers right here, let's roll it, let's randomize names and numbers five and a four, nine times each. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and ninth and final time. After nine we got Brian down to John. That's the ball game. Jonah Heim walks it off. Rangers beat the Cubs four to three, bottom of the 10th. Great game. All right, so Brian down to John. After nine and then nine times for the numbers, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and ninth and final time. After nine we got zero down to five. I would give you the redemption spiel, but falls generally traditionally does not have redemptions in this. But Brian you've got zero, Stephen K with three, Eugene with eight, John with one, Eugene with seven, Bob with six, Stephen P with two, Eugene with four, John with nine and five. Working nine to five. Let's sort by a number right here. And in the next video, we'll see in the next video for the break itself, jaspyscasebreaks.com, bye bye.


Hey guys, it's Nate, AKA The Foot Accountant. Welcome back to the channel. We need to talk about the market this weekend, heading into team of the year and the crash that could be coming literally starting today. And some of it's already happening right now on this market and talk about how you guys can be prepared for this, stuff to watch for. And of course, if you're planning to build a team, when might be some of the best times to buy that kind of stuff. And just what you can expect with, I think, is what's gonna be basically our team of the year, market crash this weekend. Now, you can already say that it's already started happening. We've had sell-offs coming into team of the year, but I think this is what I would label as the actual team of the year market crash because it is right before. Kinda like that last extended dip of Panic on the market. This is the loading screen we got today. They added the card design, which I think it looks absolutely unreal. I love just the stuff, like the royal kind of stuff going around the bottom of the card. I honestly think it looks incredible, fantastic. I love what they're doing with cards this year, not just making them like two-dimensional, adding that kind of layer around the outsides and around the bottom. Making this card more of like a three-dimensional shape is just something that's kind of an extra added flair and really cool to the card. So I really am a fan of this card design. I think it's fricking sick and I want one in my team really, really bad. So I wanna talk about this card design really quick because some people, when they saw this today, thought that this might be a split between two different cards with like this line right here, maybe being kind of like showing two different sides of maybe there's a nominee card for the SBCs, it could be coming or like whatever or in the team of the year card. But I think this is actually a team of the year card design. I don't think there's anything else. This is a split between two cards. I don't think it is. I think this is the team of the year card design. And I basically think that because of what this pack design looks like. So this is gonna be the team of the year pack design. Since it has that kind of split in it, between this like blue and white and the golden blue, since that split is on here as well, I think that this is just the team of the year pack design because at first it kind of looks like it might be split between like a nominee and a team of the year but it's got the nominee with the gold flakes and it's got like that extra team of the year flair to it. So this is the card design, it looks fricking sick. I'm stoked. Can't wait to see these cards in foot in the coming days. But before we get those cards and before we get that stuff in the game, there are some market movements happening that I want to talk with you guys about and it is already starting to happen right now. It is Friday night when I'm recording this and that is usually not weak in the Excel off time but some of these things on the market have literally been dropping tonight which is kind of, it's kind of weird, right? Usually Friday nights or Saturday mornings is one of the most higher times of the market but I think people are so scared about stuff that's coming is that they're hammering their games out or they're not even playing weak in league at all and they're selling some of these cards. Like look at Neymar right now. Neymar is 669,000 coins and if you look at his price today, literally on Friday, he started the day at 700K, he's dropped 40,000 coins in one day with a lot of that being in the past couple of hours. Since 6 p.m. UK, he was about 690 then and he's down to 669 at the moment right now. So this card, Mbappe, Messi, Ronaldo, those big meta guys are really starting to come down right now because people are anticipating that these cards are gonna get team of the years or whatever and they just wanna get their coins before team of the year which makes sense, right? So if you still have any of these guys left in your team, to be honest with you, I might hold. Like if it's a card that you see yourself using in your team after team of the year and you have other coins you don't need to sell the card, some of these cards like these, like the Messi, Mbappe, Neymar, I might even hold them because this card might eventually be back up to 750 or 800K after the team of the year packs come on the market, after people realize these cards are expensive, the team of the year cards, I mean.  This card should definitely rebound, like Mbappe, the Messi, the Cristiano Ronaldo, those meta guys should rebound their gold cards even if they're in packs the week or so, even the couple of days at the end of team of the year and after that they should rebound because people buy teams back, sort of like after Black Friday for this promotion. But if you're somebody who is looking to buy one of these items, like let's say you wanna buy Neymar for your team, you're starting to get really, really curious about now. If you haven't bought that card yet, last weekend this Neymar was at like 66670. It was, this was, like where he is right now was his lowest point last week. I can tell you right now that this card probably will be 630 or 620 tomorrow night, Saturday night, tonight when you're watching this video. Saturday night is might be one of your best buy times for the meta guys like this and some of the out-of-packs informs and other special cards on this game that I think you might want, like some of you guys might want them in your teams, right? Maybe you want like InformVVD. Now he's probably getting a team of the year cards, so there might be a little bit of extra panic selling coming maybe a little bit later on a card like this because it hasn't been panicked all the way yet. How much is VVD's Inform right now? It is 675, okay, that's not crazy. 652, that's getting down there. I wouldn't be surprised if you see some undercuts on this card at like 600K at some point this weekend. So I know a lot of you guys might want this card in your team or other out-of-packs informs. If it's an out-of-packs inform that is not getting a team of the year card this week, I would say that the Saturday night timeframe, let's say you want like Scream, Hamas, Rodriguez in your team for whatever reason, right? Let's say you want this card. Say you want Scream, Hamas, Rodriguez, how much is he at the moment? I know he's down a lot. 210,000 coins, 211K for this Hamas, Rodriguez card. According to Footbin, he was, I'll take you guys across and show you this. This is kind of the stuff that you can look for with some of these cards. You can look at their last weekend price, right? So he went down to 210K after the last weekend with a sell-off, went back up to like 212. This you could see under 200K tomorrow night. I think there's gonna be another extra level of panic selling this weekend on a lot of the out-of-packs specials and that could be your buy time for some of these cards. What did he do after Black Friday? After Black Friday, this guy went from 260, 250, up to almost 300. So, I mean, not a crazy, crazy card but there's a lot of cards like this, especially a Van Dyke, especially a really, really meta card in this game. It's an out-of-packs special card that a lot of you guys might want for your teams. Maybe even like this Bobby Firmino record breaker hero card, whatever this is. I still don't know the card design. I think it's a hero, right? Is this a hero card? Yes, it's a hero card. So this guy at 140K, he's cheaper right now than what he was in packs, right? So this card's continuing to drop. One interesting thing I would wanna note out or make a note about is the team of your nominee cards, I'm not entirely sure if they're gonna be put back into packs yet. So if that's the type of card that you want on your team, let's say you want somebody that's a team of your nominee card, I would be hesitant on some of those still because I do think there's a possibility that these cards get put back into packs during team of the year to kinda just help the promo along and that would be a cause for concern for buying these cards ahead of time for team of the year. So if there's any of these team of your nominee cards that you want on your team, I would hold off on buying those just yet and kinda watch and see if they're gonna be put into packs during team of the year and if they're not, then maybe you look at buying them then but if they are, then you're gonna wanna wait until later in team of the year as they get packed. So, but other than that, like other informs on the market maybe you're looking at a team of the group stage, Levandosky, is somebody who you don't think is gonna get into team of the year and you wanna get this card in your squad, right? This would be the type of card you wanna watch this weekend in the Panic Sale, watch the open bids on Saturday night.  That's the kind of stuff that I would say, look at this weekend if you're interested and this would be for buying a team purpose only. Like unless you have millions and millions of coins and you wanna buy a bunch of special cards that you think are gonna rise after team of the year and stock those cards in your transfer list, you could do that, I guess, but I'm talking to the people that might wanna buy a team in the next coming days. That's the kind of people that I'm talking to and that's what these Panic Sales on the cards, I would really be interested in looking at. Some other cards that you might wanna be interested in taking a look at, maybe from team of the group stage, maybe a guy like De Bruyne. You know, De Bruyne's special cards are pretty, they're decently low right now, man. He's probably gonna get a team of the year card, it's probably gonna be upwards of 1.5 to two to, even maybe 2.3 to 2.4 million coins for that card because we just got this new inform, it's 691K, which is continuing to drop down there, but this is still kind of out of the price range for a lot of people, right? So maybe you look at like one of these KDB informs, the best center attacking mid in the prem, I think, in my opinion, but he's also versatile because you could play in box to box. This guy was 250K before Weekend League of Roads, I bought him and sold him at 280. If you see this guy getting like 230 or 240, I would get very, very interested in that in a card like that, but again, if you're somebody who's trying to build a team with some of these cards that are getting panic sold this weekend, definitely look at these cards' prices on Saturday night, like team of the group stage in Bape. Maybe you want to get in a Bape card for your team. This is the next best one, 1.7 mil and Bape's team of the year card last year was like three and a half million coins and it was a right mid, I think, if I remember correctly. This year his team of the year card probably would be somewhere around, again, three, four million coins, maybe in my opinion. So I think this card has some room to rebound. 1.75, if you see this like under 1.7, like 1.6 maybe, what's his price been? Wow, he was 1.69 earlier today. So like that price right there, I would say looks to be a really decent buy price. He was 1.9 mil Thursday after awards and then today he was even down to 1.69 at one point. So this guy under 1.7, maybe even like 1.6 mids could be a really good buy there because I think he would have some rebound potential with a sick dynamic image and some of that. So then team of the group stage cards, they're actually kind of rare on the market now. We knew how incredibly supplied they were during the actual promo, but these cards are actually decently rare on the market. These cards as well, Militao is 512K. There might be some people that sell Militao, let's say if Ramos gets in, they wanna try a Ramos team of the year card, but this would be a card that I would expect to see some rebound on after Black Friday. I mean, he went from 630K to 730K after Black Friday and I said that incorrectly the first time, I would expect to see a rebound on this after team of the year, not after Black Friday, but. Again, if you're looking to buy teams and a lot of this out of pack special card stuff, informs, road to the finals, team of the group stage, ultimate scream cards and stuff like that, especially if it's a really, really meta card, like maybe a Benyeter inform, watch the panic selling into the night, into the night on Saturday. Like late night UK time is some of the time when it's actually kind of the lowest in this game. Like that's oftentimes Saturdays is when it's kind of the lowest on this game. It's not Sundays anymore. A lot of people actually buy cards on Sundays because they're told is the lowest and then it's actually not the lowest at that timeframe. So that's one thing that I wanted to mention with you guys as well. Now let's talk about investing for a little bit. A lot of you guys are looking to do, maybe get your coins liquid, maybe you don't want to buy a team just yet and you're thinking like what can I invest in during a team of the year? Well, high-rated in like gold, SBC fodder right now, I'm not a fan of. If you guys have SBC fodder, this stuff is still maintaining a pretty high value. I think it's just the base icon pack that is making people, there's not much to do in the game right now. So people are doing base icon packs. That's what it seems like to me. 84s are inflated, 85s are inflated, 86s are even inflated, 16K for all of these, man. I would take the money. If you're in on any high-rated and you're in the money, even if it's two or three K card, I would take the dough because I think lightning rounds are gonna start on Monday when the team of the year goes into packs and these guys are gonna drop because the first day they usually don't drop any crazy SBCs. It's usually later on down in the line when they start to drop those SBCs which we know we're getting some flashbacks and some player moments. So we should be getting seven SBCs for like seven days of team of the year but that first day, you're probably gonna see a ton of packs open. People that have safe packs, they're gonna be opening these cards at some point or opening those packs at some point. And usually first day is when you see the SBC cards hit a low on the market because oftentimes the SBCs don't come that first day. So maybe some discard informs as well, like 84 informs for like 12 K. If you're gonna invest in some informs, use this footpeg page right here, cheapest players by rating on footpeg. You get there by going up here to the top, drop down, cheapest players by rating. You can click on this gold inform and apply filters and it'll show you the cheapest gold informs on the game based on rating as well. And one little tip if you're investing in these, if let's say you wanna invest in some 84 rated informs, right? Focus on ones that are not in this week's team of the week like playa. Playa's at 13 K, you know, he doesn't have any supply coming this week with weakening rewards. This guy's been like 12, 13 K all year, right? He rose to 17, he actually peaked at 20 K for one point. This was probably like Messi's player the month, the SBC maybe or some foot miss SBC that made him go to 20 K. But this guy's been out for a while and that means that he's not really been supplied. So that means he has less supply on the market. So if you're investing in any informs that are like discard value or cheap informs, try to stick to ones that are not in this week's team of the week that are gonna be out of packs. So if an SBC comes that they should have, they should have less supply and more of a chance and more of an opportunity to rise up after that. Now mentioning SBCs, I wanna make one point. We keep flipping back and forth on the screen. So bear with me right here. But Pogba, a lot of people think that this card is going to get released. This is a flashback to FIFA 16 team of the year, Paul Pogba. A lot of people think that he's gonna get a flashback or a moments card. Marcello is another one. Iniesta is another one that people are thinking could be coming as an SBC type player during this promo. I think that is possible, but it would be insane. And I think that this SBC would be very, very highly priced. So I'm kind of tentative on this and how I feel about if this is coming or not. But I do think that at some point it's gonna be a really good shout to get in on some of the cheapest players by rating and stock your club. We'll try to find the cheapest point on the market for these cards for the 86s, 87s, and 88s. But at some point during this promo we are gonna want a club stock for stuff like that. Now again, I wanna mention, we're talking about the market crash again. Let's say you wanna buy somebody or a team like Sun. I bought Sun for my weekend league today just to try him out because I have not used his card at all this year. I bought him for 269,000 coins. I'm probably gonna lose a little bit on his card. Yeah, he's the same price that I bought him at right now. So if you want a guy like this during team of the year, obviously if they do put the team of the year nominees back in packs, this guy might be out of packs, right? His gold card could be out of packs. So you could see a little bit of a rise there which would be very intriguing. But a lot of this stuff, if it's a gold card that's going to be in packs during team of the year. So let's say somebody like Kyle Walker. Kyle Walker's gold card's gonna be in packs during team of the year. Again, just like Black Friday, a lot of the stuff that might be a expensive-ish card that is still used by a lot of people like this. Kyle Walker, I think I overestimated his price there. I'm not entirely sure what he goes for. He is like 25K-ish. So this card's like 25,000 coins. He's probably going to dip a lot during team of the year. This guy might be under 20K easy during team of the year just because of the amount of packs that are gonna be opened. And he could rebound, yes, because he's one of the best gold version of right back in the prem.  Like how much is Lucas Mora? Is he still holding a price? How much is he? How much is Lucas Mora's card? 6K, 7K? All right, so Lucas Mora's like 7,000 coins. This guy's gonna get dumped again in price a lot during team of the year because he's just gonna get packed and packed over and over and over. Obviously people are still gonna use this card in their team and it could rebound a little bit, but these are the types of cards that are gonna get destroyed during team of the year again because of all the packs that are gonna be opened. So just a quick note on those cards. If you're buying a gold card that's going to be in packs, I would wait to buy that gold card until after next weekend's weekend leak, right? So we have the full team is gonna be in packs probably Thursday through Sunday of next week for the team of the year if they structure the packs according to how they have in the years past. If anything, it's a gold cards in packs like that Walker, I would look to buy it on like a Saturday night. Again, timeframe of next week because that should be a combination of maybe we can leak sell-off and still packs being opened for this promo. But again, out of packs and forms, like if you wanna buy this left-wing grease, I don't see a team of the year card really affecting this price too much.  Today I saw him at 250K say that 250K for this card is anywhere out of reason. Very good card in the game. That could be a card you look at to buy in the panic sell. This team of the year nominee, Messi, is down 100K today. I sold him on Thursday night into Friday at 1.8 mil. And today he's been under 1.1 multiple times, like 1099 there. I saw one for 107, I think. Yeah, right there at 1070. So this card's dipping down a ton. That's just gonna be an interesting market movement to watch because if these aren't in packs for team of the year, obviously Messi's gonna get a team of the year card. So this card would probably have some rebound on it, potential there and his team of the group stage. But this one's gonna be interesting to watch too because he had the player of the month, SBC. So if you guys have any specific questions on specific cards, I didn't talk about icons. Icons, basically for all the icons, I'm saying hold off and wait unless it's a low tier or mid tier icon. I don't think those icons are gonna be panic sold too much during the week when the team of the year players are going to be released. So maybe if you want somebody like, like I have a baby Rush right here, 87 Rush. Maybe that's somebody you want for your team. Watch him in the panic sale this weekend. If you can pick him up for like low 200s-ish, that would be a great price for this card. You know, he was 240, 230K before this weekend. Right now he's 233. So he's down a decent amount right now. He was 260 on Friday night. Now he's 233. I'm not gonna buy that because I don't even know if I can flip it at 250 which wouldn't be much profit but this one's got a bit of 230 on it. This card right here could definitely be 200K or close to under that easily, I think, on Saturday night tonight. So if you're looking at a low tier icon like under 500K, then I would look to get those types of cards this weekend. Again, I used this card as an example last year. During team of the year last year, obviously, wow, 460K for this card. This is a card that went up a bunch last year after team of the year because of the Kante that was in team of the year. This guy was like 600K or something then last year it went up 100K after team of the year came out just because this is a type of icon that a lot of people like to use in their teams and a lot of people like to use a card like this. So again, middle tier cards, I might get on those if there's an icon. Middle tier icons, I might hop on those in the week and we sell out this weekend but a guy like Middle Vieira and I just missed on clicking on him, 88 Vieira right here. This is the type of guy that I would stay away from and wait until lightning rounds come out to try to mess with a guy like this because this guy's price is gonna be directly hurt or correlated to whatever the price of team of the year Kante is. So last year when the attackers came out first day I remember George Best took a massive hidden price. This baby card, which was a lot more expensive last year than it is now. What is he right now? 700K-ish. Last year this card was like a mill and I got it for 100K undercut and sold it fresh like an hour later for 100K more because there were so many people panic selling these right mids, strikers and left mids based on what cards were in team of the year that the attackers on the icons and the upper tier upper echelon of the attacker icons took a hit last year. Like a prime Figo would be somebody who might take a hit this year. What is he, 1.1? Like maybe you see this card at like 950. You could easily rebound like 10, 1,050,000 or something like that. Just kind of watch the prices on these prime icons because they're gonna get packed a lot but there's people who are gonna be getting coins. So if it's the icon that a lot of people wanna use that's a pretty popular striker maybe even like this prime Crespo who people might try to link messy to. This guy's 1.1 right now which is really low for him and he's just continuing to drop. Maybe you see this guy like a mill flat on a snipe during lightning rounds. You know, you might be able to sell that in the next day after those lightning rounds for first day with the panic on some of these upper tier upper echelon icons. That was something that we saw a lot of last year. Depending on which day it is like the mids when the mids come out like Vieira should get hit Hullet should get hit and stuff like that maybe a petite prime card but when the attackers come out whether that's first day or third day you might have again some of the strikers left mids, right mids and stuff taking a hit at price events. So that should be some good information on you guys for you guys depending on what you're trying to do with your teams, right? If you're trying to invest if you're trying to build a team and that's your main point or one of your main things that you wanna do during team of the year definitely watch the prices tonight, okay? Saturday night and Sunday watch the prices get on the open bids and stuff like that as we head into team of the year. It's always a little bit risky to buy beforehand but when these cards are out of packs and there's not a lot of stuff in team of the year that's gonna hurt the prices of a 100,000 coin Modric inform, right? He's not getting a team of the year most likely he's a 100K card. All these team of the years are gonna be over a million at least in his position. There's true to be much that really hurts this card. So that's why I think you might wanna take the gamble and try to get the best price beforehand. Literally the only thing that I see affecting most of these out of packs informs would be some sort of flashback or player moments, SBC that would drop the price on some of these as like a substitute good on the game. That's the only thing that I would see as a problem area causing these cards to go down a little bit more but I think that probability is low as well. So again, building teams Saturday night, Sunday kind of is your watch time to look at those, watch those prices and see what happens. Should be a fun time. Like it's crazy to see these cards continue to drop. How much is a Bope? The dude just keeps tanking. He's like 650 or something like that, 660? 650K for a Bope man, crazy. That could be like 600K. You might be able to buy Neymar and a Bope for around like 1.2 million coins combined for both those cards. And that's what one of them used to cost earlier on in the game. So it's crazy how those cards have like almost cut in half for more they were at earlier in the year. But again, big time panic selling. We head into team of the year, big time promo. We'll talk about more stuff as we get closer to the day.  I'm excited to see what they give us today on Saturday for content or for other stuff like a loading screen because they keep giving us little teasers and loading screens and stuff like that. So last thing, I would expect another league SBC to come before team of the year. And if you're somebody who likes to grind league SBCs these are going to be used a lot during team of the year to grind tradable packs. That's something to keep your eye on. And then we did get a milestone player today as well. A Japanese center back from the league Un which I think was a decent looking card. I'm probably not gonna grind for it. Here he is, Shoji. It looks like a solid card on the face stats. Not a terrible card. High, high work rates, it's fine, it's okay. But if that's something that you're gonna grind for then GGs, again, hold on to the group reward for an additional upgrade opportunity. We have no idea how these cards are gonna get upgraded. So that's still a pretty big mystery. But good luck if you guys are still stacking packs. We'll talk about upgrade packs and a little bit more of that type of SBC stuff maybe as we get further into the weekend if we see any more movements in the SBC market section of things. But again, market crash stuff, it's coming, it's here, the market's down and I'm ready for teaming the year boys. I hope you are too. If you enjoyed this video, smash the thumbs up on it, comment down below if you have any questions and of course subscribe to the channel. If you're new, it's been Nate, the Foot Accountant, catch you guys later. Peace out.


Everybody forced here up in 2023 iMac baseball hobby a box case number for random team style get a sip water while you check those results out Making me found any time at latentsportscards.com Let's do it. Let's do it first case of the night was fun guys. Get your personal boxes for late and channel 2 right now I think Matt has a long queue at all Personals on channel 2 open queue right now. No wait, but it looks like I'm not sure what you mean Nicholas force Oh late night like like fantasy football like adding Late night ads that's always I got a little skeptical there. It's not like daytime hours Like waiver wire days patch odd patch card is Yoshida for the Red Sox to 25 for the mummy Green Goss, I think that is exactly how you spell green Goss Lane Patch card Yoshida Red Sox. The mummy is a good ride Patch auto to 99 tink hens cardinals Triple relic auto is on hell Martinez the 49 guardians acetate. There we go jumbo logo patch Kyle Harrison two of ten for the Giants That's a patch right there patch auto now Yuri Perez the 49 for the Marlins and Jumbo bat relic auto is gonna be Brooks Lee for the twins jumbo bat signatures to 25 Brooks Lee Twins Dominguez homework again Better than judge Anybody out there hanging on their Dominguez cards still it must be going up in value quite a bit Jersey card Ben sheets to 15 Brewers Patch auto to 25 Wilmer Flores Tigers Jersey auto to 99 for the Mets Kevin Parada Where Sam, I don't know He's not here. Thankfully Pops, he's hanging on with that actually got Jersey card to 35 is a Navon Rodriguez for the Rangers You got the best breaking duo in town Dean. Don't worry. Go White Sox Jersey auto Paul Cunerco to 9 to 19, right? Yeah, 9 of 19 Paul Cunerco redemption Ellie Dela Cruz Clearly immaculate signatures for Cincinnati. I Take that Dean all day top 8 LSE list. Yeah, let's go. I just have to know Where's Donnie on the list compared to me? What you say next determines whether your list is even a hint valid or not Nice Ellie redemption for the Reds umpteenth That sounds lower than eight. So all right Patch card at 25 is Vakero for the Nets Eric Chavez auto for the A's the 25 got a Protector relic auto to 25 Jerome. Oh, I think it's a catcher relic I M s sounds like a Something that happens it hurts. I am s material signature, I guess Big-time rowmodes dummy thick dummy thick. I say Asking for a Jeter friends. Do you guys ever pocket these cards? That was that was funny That was a good question asked though because like it just show like yeah Jersey card Accors leave for the Cardinals Doing everybody was just in our chat like oh, yeah, that's that's the cheater in him right there. That's the that's the Yankee in him Jersey auto it's a 99 say Don Raffaella Red Sox Yeah, we had to we had to watch sam a lot when he first started Yankees fans. So we knew Gotta be careful. Jersey auto said on raffaella. Nice one of red socks and another redemption here Is Brewer's jumbo bat signatures blue Jackson choreo Jackson choreo Brewer's Yeah, Richard Michael Rubin responded really well. We're just like no way and everyone's like wouldn't be here if you did Wouldn't be on fanatics live That's the cool thing about fanatics live is that you at least know all the breakers there are uh Very vetted And watched So I know you guys can't see it but on fanatics live when we have that like just like the phone view Where there's like the little r-cam and then like the hand the hand camera we like to call it There's also a third feed that only fanatics and the breakers can see and it's Used for security. It's like a big like so like our overhead cam but even more like it covers Like the entire table cool bat rail like zero men gnats to 11 We ship cards every day timothy Prospect patch auto to 99 Miguel blaze for the red socks Usually after a break it'll take like Four to five days to get cards out. We're a little behind right now. Those has taken longer Patch on to 99 Miguel blaze for the red socks Triple relic auto for the raise mason hour to 49 Yeah, so first week of the month usually slows it down a little bit with international shipping because it's all done in one week Patch card to 40 jackson holiday for the orioles Nice holiday jersey auto to 99 white socks culsing Montgomery jersey auto red socks to 15 wade bogs Jersey out of the 15 wade bogs for the red socks Floor is open for purcells on channel two everybody No cue There's a cue now. I just don't recommend Entity division is down to one now patch card number to 25 for the Padres Samuel Zavala And there's tend to go on the spectra mosaic four box mixer as well everybody tend to go now Redemption is davis indelo Santos Prospect patch autograph printing plate yellow. That'll be a one of one Okay, diamond backs on the davis de los Santos you diamond backs and enjoy weimar jersey auto for the brewers the 99 Jersey card for the red socks rick ferrell to 25 jumbo bat relic auto cam collier to 25 reds That's very nice for the reds And moments autograph for the brewers is robin yount two of ten robin yount for the brewers Let's go brewers tied it up. Let's go Patch auto junior or junior coming arrow to 25 tampa bay. That's gorgeous. That's going into a mag. Congrats to the raised dudes a monster Kid is a big piece of the future for tampa bay Redemption for the red socks now prospect patch auto red marcello meyer Telling you guys this stuff is loaded with prospects Patch auto to 99 everson para for the Yankees another nice hit for the Yankees This is uh case number four. I'm at case number four jumbo patch three of ten is jackton choreo for the brewers White socks autograph is robin ventura to 49 Ventura Jersey to ten is gavin stone dodgers Patch card won been showed at 25 cardinals Jersey autograph number to 99 is pico armstrong cubs pirate jersey auto nick gonzalez the 99 Jersey card for the red socks weighed bogs to 35 And that'll be game worn Next up is a reds auto cam collier to 49. What do we have? What do we have 2023? Yeah, that's it. It's just listed strangely It's the only 2023 uapis sapphire we have Got collier to 49 reds autograph And big mac jersey auto for the a's three of seven martin reguire Game worn for the a's And guys just basketball and football left. I think there's only one nt division There's a lot of teams on sale and that p yt nt case tonight We have flawless basketball left side sewer numbers This is specter specter basketball full case Got a prospect patch out of the 49 is cartaya for the dodgers Nice cartaya Monster here to a five the martian homerid again tonight Jason domingas prospect patch auto for the yankees Yankees Christopher p congrats christopher p Beauty on that domingas Button relic auto for the guardians is espino one of eight One of eight espino The button relic auto Careful down the button kind of sticks out. So I need to go in a probably 180. I would think Mariana Rivera jersey card number to 10 for the yankees Jackson maryl patch card to 25 for the pod race It was kind of cool to see a rich pool like andy pettit auto That'd be a 360 on that anodograph Uh for the reds mario soto 35 I think it should have been a pirate. Why is that? Pretty much everything outside of like a handful. Okay, so specter mosaic is down to nine the specter cases at eight Six to go on that first box of flawless. There's 23 to go on luminance now I'm at collegiate at 13 nt p yt at 19 Again, just wanted to go on that division's case of nt. All right recap time Got some relics here mariana Rivera jackson maryl weighed bogs Juan bin show jackson choreo Gavin stone rick ferrell samuel zovala jackson holiday ryan zimmerman Dennis ecclesly as a cardinal christian vaquero evan rodriguez ben sheets Kyle harison with a very nice jumbo logo patch there masataki yoshida I'm sorry trey Sorry to hear that man The autos of espino soto cartaya mark mcguire cam collier pico armstrong nick genzales robin ventura red sox redemption marcella mire prospect patch auto red Got a avicen perrera cam collier robin yacht to 10 joey weimer D-back redemption davis indio los Santos printing plate redemption there prospect patch auto Wade bogs as a red sox colson montgomery mason hour miguel blais sedan raffaella Eric chavez paul canerco kevin parada A wilmer flores brooksley yuri pares on helmar zinez tink hence Brewer's redemption is jackson choreo. Congrats brewers jumbo bat signature blue We had a union camion arrow patch auto to 25 for the rays Romo relic auto to 25 rockies elli diller cruise red redemption clearly immaculate signatures And jay santa mingas to five on the patch auto for the yankees Thanks again everybody moving on now to case number five