Level 4: Team lead | The 9 Levels of Business Mastery at BlitzMetrics

Level 4 is the second of the three triads. Levels 1 to 3, 4 to 6, and 7 to 9. Just like Level 1 is the hardest of the first trio, Level 4 is the hardest of the next. This is when you become a team lead.

The jump from optimizer to leader

At Level 1, you’re doing assigned work. At Level 2, you’re an individual contributor who communicates well. At Level 3, you’re troubleshooting at the client level and optimizing campaigns. But when you go from Level 3 to Level 4 as a team lead, you make a significant jump in your power.

Teaching what you’ve learned

As a team lead, you’re not only doing the work yourself, you’re helping people at Level 1 and Level 2 develop. You’ll have more projects than you can do all by yourself, and because of the mentorship model, you’re expected to teach what you’ve learned along the way, which reinforces your own knowledge.

You own the project

In RACI terms, you are the A. You are accountable. The buck stops with you. Someone’s on vacation, someone’s sick, someone’s computer broke, someone didn’t get the email. You can’t take any of those excuses because you own the project no matter what. The client comes to you, you represent BlitzMetrics, and you have to proactively identify problems before they occur.

Recognizing patterns

It sounds tough, but with experience you’ll learn it’s the same issues every time. The plumbing didn’t get set up, you didn’t get access to the site, the creative didn’t work, the client only wants bottom-of-funnel, the audience is burnt out, expectations are unreasonable, pricing is too high, or there’s another agency involved.

Managing client relationships

At Level 4, you can get on a weekly call with a client and manage that relationship with very minor support. You speak eloquently, make the team look good, and answer most questions they have. You can teach all the people at Level 1 and Level 2 while balancing multiple projects, doing more delegating and higher-level troubleshooting than hands-on campaign tuning.

The true test

The true mark of moving from Level 3 to Level 4 is that you’re so well organized, you know your team so well, and you know where to ask for help, that you could actually step away for a few days and not have everything fall apart.

Reading the signals

There’s actually delivering against the goal and there’s the perception of the goal. Clients will start to say things that are polite and you might think they’re happy, but actually they’re not. You’ve got to learn the signs where communication breaks, where they don’t reply, where something’s not quite right.

You’ve got to be proactive. Reach out to the client with new ideas instead of waiting for them to come to you asking what’s going on. The number one reason clients leave is because we’re not delivering results and we’re not communicating.

The difficulty pattern

Level 4 is the most difficult level after Level 1. And after Level 4, there’s Level 7. Levels 1, 4, and 7 are the most difficult levels in the system because each one is the first of its triad.

This article connects to BlitzMetrics processes including Digital Plumbing, one-minute video, SEO Tree. Each of these concepts has a definitive article that explains the full framework.