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Why I Have 12 Full-Time Employees (as a YouTuber)

2023-03-22 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali, Jakub, Angus, Tommy, Dan, Saf, Inez, Gareth, Tintin · recording, 30:44 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Business and entrepreneurship · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: His own products discussed, His own numbers, His medical past, Lesson from a book, Sponsor segment present

Ali gives three reasons for his 13-person team (freeing his time, doing more and better things, and the fun of working with people in person), walks through each role in its Content Squad and Money Squad, and answers Twitter questions on generalists, margins and profit targets, hiring, team happiness, salaries and the £1.5 million fixed costs.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Introduction: team members say their names; plan of the video

  • ★★ For the first two years of his channel, 2017 to 2019, Ali did everything himself, scripting, filming and editing, until one of his mentors told him to outsource his video editing. — 00:01:00

00:01:02 — Three reasons for a team: freeing his time, doing more and better things, and the vibes

  • ★★ Ali was spending three to ten hours a week editing videos, so his first team member, Christian, was hired to free up his time. — 00:01:29 · Christian
  • ★★★ Ali delegates three kinds of work: things he does not enjoy, such as editing; things he is very bad at; and low-value work. — 00:01:29
  • ★★ Filming a video is high-value work only Ali can do; the main point of his team members is to do the work in the business not valuable enough for him to do himself. — 00:01:58
  • ★★ Ali's second reason for a team is doing more and better: two full-time video editors let the channel put out two high-quality videos a week, and three a week would probably need a third editor. — 00:02:27
  • ★★ As Ali added people to the team, his own ambitions for the business rose too, as with his bar for a good podcast once he could delegate its production. — 00:02:57
  • ★★ Ali's third reason for a team is the fun of it: the one thing he used to say he missed about medicine was banter with coworkers, which he now has with his own team. — 00:03:26
  • ★★★ Ali wants a business that works with a small group of people regularly and in person; hiring full time in London costs more, but for him it is worth it because it is way more fun. — 00:03:55
  • ★★ Ali finds it nice to have full-time employees, who are wedded to the success of the business. — 00:03:55
  • ★★ In any future business, whether an offshoot of his channel or not, Ali thinks he would always want to work with people in real life, because of the vibes. — 00:04:23

00:04:30 — Sponsor read

00:05:48 — What everyone does: Content Squad and Money Squad

  • ★★ Ali's team is split into a Content Squad, which helps him make good content, and a Money Squad, which makes the business profitable and sustainable in a non-scammy way. — 00:05:50
  • ★★ Tintin, the team's YouTube producer, helps with everything on Ali's channel; Ali enjoys explaining topics, not working out titles or making thumbnails. — 00:06:23
  • ★★ Amber, the podcast producer, set the strategy for growing Ali's podcast and its content, and picks, contacts, schedules and books its guests. — 00:06:52 · Deep Dive
  • ★ Ali says a podcast sounds simple but needs a whole production machine: all the big podcasts have teams behind them. — 00:07:51
  • ★★ Becky and Gareth run all of Ali's social media outside YouTube: Gareth handles Twitter, LinkedIn and email, Becky TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. — 00:07:51 · Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook
  • ★★ Besides YouTube, its biggest audience, Ali's business has about a million followers across other social media platforms and about 250,000 people on its email lists. — 00:08:20
  • ★★ Because not everyone wants long YouTube videos, Ali's team does not stay platform-specific: it works out how to say the same thing in a way native to each social platform. — 00:08:49
  • ★★★ Ali's business is almost fully reliant on his YouTube channel; growing on other social platforms gives it something to fall back on if anything happened to the channel. — 00:09:18
  • ★★ Ali singles out the email list as the only platform his business fully controls. — 00:09:18
  • ★★ Ali sends his newsletter Sunday Snippets every week with a few thoughts and links; Gareth runs its strategy and scheduling and is building a referral program. — 00:09:47 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★★ Inez, the team's researcher, works closely with Ali on research for his book, checking whether science backs his ideas; ideas the science does not yet support stay out of the book. — 00:10:17 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Saf and Addy are the team's full-time video editors: Saf, a former Part-Time YouTuber Academy student, was hired a few months ago; Addy, based in Delhi, India, joined a month ago. — 00:10:46 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Dan, the team's webmaster, works to grow the audience of Ali's website, which gets large monthly traffic from searches, and on a system to turn YouTube videos into website articles. — 00:11:15 · aliabdaal.com
  • ★★ Dan is also Ali's executive assistant, handling his emails, scheduling and calendar. — 00:11:15
  • ★★ Dan is also head of legal, finance and HR in Ali's business. — 00:12:02
  • ★★★ Ali's business gives away 99% of its content free and sells 1% as paid courses to the 1% of the audience who want them, a flywheel in which course sales fund more free content. — 00:12:31
  • ★★ Jakub, head of marketing, makes the course landing pages, tracks their analytics and devises a marketing strategy that sells the courses in a way that is on brand and not scammy. — 00:13:15
  • ★★★ The Part-Time YouTuber Academy, run as live cohorts for about two and a half years, holds its very final live cohort in April 2023; Tommy, who sells it, is creating the next products, meant to be evergreen courses. — 00:13:44 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ Alison is head of customer success on Ali's team. — 00:13:44
  • ★★ Bhav, a former Part-Time YouTuber Academy student, is the operations manager for the courses side of Ali's business. — 00:14:43 · Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★ With the live cohorts ending, Bhav is moving into an innovation role, working closely with Ali to make every area of the business more efficient. — 00:15:41
  • ★★ Angus, now general manager, started working with Ali three years ago as a freelance writer of website articles, quickly became a full-time employee and rose to run the whole business. — 00:16:06 · Angus
  • ★★★ Angus, the general manager, is the main reason Ali can stay chill with a big team: managing 13 people himself would be a nightmare, he would be terrible at it and it would not be fun. — 00:16:06 · Angus
  • ★★ Having a big team is really fun, Ali says, provided you have a really good general manager doing the day-to-day management. — 00:17:05

00:17:12 — Twitter Q&A: generalists, margins and profit, corporate mode, hiring framework, team happiness, salaries, challenges, whether he is happy

  • ★★★ Ali's team skews generalist rather than specialist; he first hired generalists by accident, being one himself, and later on purpose. — 00:18:03
  • ★★★ Rather than hire someone with ten years of experience running a team, Ali let Angus, with none, become general manager: he wants a business that promotes from within, with a growth mindset and levelling up. — 00:18:33 · Angus, growth mindset
  • ★★ Because his business evolves rapidly and he changes his mind a lot, Ali finds it very useful to have generalists who can adapt to any role rather than highly specialised people. — 00:19:02
  • ★ Tommy did a law degree and worked in corporate law, at Amazon and at Google before joining Ali's team as an operations associate of the YouTuber Academy and becoming its director. — 00:19:02 · Amazon, Google, Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★★★ Ali's business aims for 60% margins and a £2 million profit, both figures he says he picked arbitrarily, which needs about £3.3 million in revenue. (hedged) — 00:19:31
  • ★★ Ali says businesses with very high margins of 85 to 90% tend to be software businesses with recurring revenue or very lean teams, while most traditional businesses run on margins of about 5 to 20%. (hedged) — 00:19:58
  • ★★ Of a £2 million profit, Ali reckons £400K would go in corporation tax, a million into an investment fund, £250K to his own salary and £350K into property or crypto, all numbers plucked out of thin air. — 00:20:24
  • ★★★ Asked how a growing team avoids slipping into corporate mode, Ali says he used to think corporate was a dirty word but now thinks corporate is good: a business needs a sweet spot between its craft and the systems of being corporate smart. — 00:20:53
  • ★★ Will Guidara (quoted): In Unreasonable Hospitality, restaurateur Will Guidara writes about being restaurant smart and being corporate smart. — 00:20:53
  • ★★ Ali's team found that targets in the Google sheet where everyone tracked their KPIs, such as 30 LinkedIn posts a week, had become too much of a focus; the fix was to tweak the numbers rather than scrap them. — 00:21:36 · LinkedIn, Google
  • ★★★ Ali's hiring framework used to be "we have a thing to do, let's hire someone"; now it starts by asking whether they are absolutely sure they want to do the thing. — 00:22:05
  • ★★★ Before hiring, Ali asks whether a system or automation can do the work, then whether the existing team can reprioritise, then whether a part-time contractor or freelancer can, and only then hires full time. — 00:22:29
  • ★★★ Hiring is not a decision to take lightly, Ali says: each person added raises the complexity of communication and slows things down, so his rule now is not to hire unless absolutely necessary. — 00:22:59
  • ★★ In the early days of a business, with no one on the team, Ali thinks people should be quicker to hire, because hiring teaches you so much and helps you level up faster. — 00:22:59
  • ★★ Ali's team tracks its happiness with anonymous surveys every few months and held a session with coach Eric Partaker on what would make the business the best place to work. — 00:23:47

  • ★★★ Ali tries to remember that his team's happiness is not his job: his job is to give them clarity, a role and an environment in which to do work they are proud of. — 00:24:17

    “their happiness is not my job. My job is to give them clarity and to give them a role”

  • ★★★ Hiring has diminishing returns, Ali says: a 15th person on his team would barely raise its overall productivity, unlike the jump from a second to a third person. — 00:24:47

  • ★★★ To keep a growing team effective, Ali makes sure everyone owns something big and everything big is owned by someone, citing the saying that a dog with two owners dies of starvation. — 00:24:47

    “a dog with two owners dies of starvation”

  • ★★★ Ali's business is paying about £740,000 in salaries in 2023, including National Insurance and pension contributions, according to Angus. — 00:25:30 · Angus

  • ★★★ Ali's salaried team is 11 full-timers, one person working three days a week and one working four days a week, not counting Ali himself. — 00:25:53
  • ★★ The biggest benefits of a team, Ali says, are leverage, being able to delegate, the vibes and finding people better than him at things. — 00:25:53
  • ★★★ A big team brings revenue pressure: with about £800,000 in salaries and £700K in other expenses, Ali's business has fixed costs of about £1.5 million in 2023, which it must make just to break even. (hedged) — 00:26:20
  • ★★ When the business misses a revenue target and Angus cannot fix it, Ali has to step away from writing, filming and teaching to look for costs to cut, which he does not enjoy. — 00:27:34 · Angus
  • ★★ Although he says his team's happiness is not his job, Ali still feels personally responsible when a team member is unhappy, as parents do for their children. — 00:28:02
  • ★★★ Like parents who would not give up their children, Ali loves having his team: despite the challenges, his life and his business are more fun than before he had one. — 00:29:00
  • ★★ Asked whether he is happy, Ali says he genuinely is and thinks he is the happiest person he knows. — 00:29:00
  • ★★ Ali says he genuinely looks forward to work on Monday mornings, a feeling he credits to working with his team. — 00:29:22
  • ★★ Ali's team spent the week before this video on a retreat in Lisbon, getting a lot of work done and levelling up the business. — 00:29:22
  • ★★★ Ali would 100% recommend hiring a team to anyone thinking of it. — 00:29:22

00:30:08 — Pointer to the video on the failures of 2022 and sign-off

  • ★★ Ali has made many mistakes in three years of having a team; in 2022 his business missed a revenue target by a mile. — 00:30:08

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Ali's team holds a 90-minute all-hands meeting every week for big topics; minor matters such as video editing are discussed afterwards. — creator comment
  • ★★ Elizabeth still works with Ali's team on the Part-Time YouTuber Academy, leading its advanced YouTube sessions. — creator comment · Elizabeth, Part-Time YouTuber Academy
  • ★ Ali leaves former team members out of the video mostly because they would rather he did not talk about them, and he wants to respect that. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Angus · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Also: People: Addy · Alison · Amber · Becky · Bhav · Christian · Dan (staff, mentioned from 2021) · Eric Partaker · Gareth · Inez · Jakub · Saf · Tintin · Tommy · Will Guidara

Projects: Sunday Snippets

Works: Unreasonable Hospitality

Organizations: Amazon · Facebook · Google · Instagram · LinkedIn · TikTok · Twitter

Concepts: diminishing returns · flywheel · generalist · growth mindset

Places: Lisbon

Only in the description or credits: Elizabeth

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