EP 19 – Mastering Social Media & Agile Coaching with Greg Mester

Dave: Hey everyone, Dave here with another episode of the Philly Tech Connect podcast for the PTE Philly Tech Entrepreneurs Community. Today I’m here with Mr. Greg Meer. He is an agile cheerleader, freelancer from Philadelphia, and agile coach. The host of the 5 AM Master Scrum podcast, which is the third-ranked agile coaching podcast as of speaking. Greg, how are you doing today?

Greg: I’m doing great, and thanks for having me on, Dave. Pleasure as always.

Dave: Yeah, no, love to talk about agile, scrum, concepts I’ve heard a little bit about. We have a member of the community, Gary, who I chatted a little bit with as well, getting his take on it. So it’ll be good to kind of put the two of you guys together and maybe I’ll finally get it. But one thing I want to learn about first is, you know, as a fellow podcaster who’s kind of new to the game here, I see in your background you have the 5 AM scrum out there. So tell me a little bit about what you’re working on there, how the podcast got started, what the concept is, why 5 AM?

Greg: 5 AM started out because no one else was awake at the time and my house was quiet. So when I started this in the year before the big 2020, it was a quiet time. I had some young kids, so it was good and quiet. And it was just free time when you had to commute to work and you had to drive, you know, an hour and a half to work or whatever. It was a decent time, and like I said, it was quiet. The animals are awake; they already woke me up. I was starting my early morning rise stuff, so it worked out perfect.

Dave: Uh, are you still doing it at 5 AM, or now that, you know…

Greg: Well, I’m still getting up at 5 AM, but then people realized, I can really tell you were half asleep when you were doing your show, and there really wasn’t any audience at the time. So, it was just me, and I figured I’ll do it a little bit later. Sometimes I get people that jump in when I do it between 8 and 8:30. Today, I was a little bit late; it was almost 9:00 when I started. But in that range, you get people to jump on.

Dave: Very cool. So what’s the concept here?

Greg: The concept is, well, it’s always evolving. One of these podcasts, they always evolve into other things. One of it’s me just sharing my knowledge of agile and scrum with people that are in business or are scrum masters, just because I have so many years of experience, you know, 30-some-odd years of experience. Just sharing it because you can’t give it all to everyone if you’re just coaching a couple teams. So you mill just been off, and there’s so much to it every day that it never stops. So I do a daily podcast. I just keep it small. If you ever heard of a daily scrum or a daily standup, daily standups classic in any business organization. I keep it under 15 minutes. So I kind of want to prove that you can have a show in under 15 minutes. You can do a daily scrum. It doesn’t need to be an hour long, you know. Every time I come to a company, “Oh, we have an hour-long daily scrum.” Like, what are you talking for an hour? What are you doing? You don’t need that. So that 15-minute window helps. And from a podcasting standpoint or broadcasting, it makes it easier to produce. The smaller it is, the less admin work you got to do, flipping it over, doing a little intro and stuff like that. So it makes sense.

Dave: Yeah, I mean, I’m impressed, and again, you know, I’m limited in my knowledge of scrum and agile, but to be able to produce daily content every day on a topic, you know, you never seem to run out of ideas or worried about like, “Oh, what are we gonna talk about tomorrow?”

Greg: Well, a lot of it is my own experience too. So even when stuff comes up, I may not talk about it that day. I might have an event. I’ll put it in my phone, you know, you put little notes in your phone, and then I’ll come back to it, and I’ll kind of mold it into a topic that I’ll do. So I try to bring in real-world that because one of the things is practical advice and practical and tactical, not necessarily lofty theory. So it’s here’s how I apply it. So a lot of scrum masters like that or a lot of people in the agile because it relates to them. Yeah, right. It’s not some grandiose. Not saying anything wrong with it, getting a big, huge, expensive consulting company to come in to revamp your whole organization. Like, well, you don’t really need that.

Dave: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it seems to be, you know, resonating with people, as you’re saying, because you mentioned it’s one of the top-ranked agile coaching podcasts. And, you know, maybe that the space is a little bit more niche than others. Nevertheless, though, you know, there’s something to be said about being one of the best in the biz. So, you know, what is it that you feel like has allowed you to kind of get this title?

Greg: I’m gonna say this word: consistency. You’d be amazed how many big billionaires talk about being consistent that are in these podcast things, that you’re consistently putting stuff out. By doing that, there’s so much content. You build that rapport that they know who you are, and they, you know, you’re not making something up just to do a sales routine. That is really big, and I think why it got ranked the way it does because I’m out there every day putting stuff out there.

Dave: And I can tell you a little bit when I use a system where it allows me to be, and I do podcasts, I do all the video, I do YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, business, right? It all goes out at once. And then I found a way to do some more. I found a way to do Twitter and everything with the $10 a month they pay for the software. But it allows you to be in every system. Right? You know, Gary Vee talks about you should be putting out 50 pieces of content every day if you know Gary Vee in the market world, right? Well, if I do what I did, I just put out 10, and I’m, it’s only one person, and that doesn’t count a little Instagram photo or something from my show or a little snippet, you know, and a short or like a a YouTube something or a Tik Tok or something like that. So, you know, if I’m just one person in a company doing these, put these up, then when you have a company, you can easily hit 50. There’s like no, yeah. It makes sense. I’ve been trying to put out a little bit more content myself. Obviously, we do the weekly show here. And I’ve been, you know, more active on LinkedIn, but I’m impressed with anybody that can really kind of commit to something daily. But consistency is the key. You mentioned that you do some agile coaching individuals and businesses as well. I’m curious, like, on the individual level, you know, how that works because I always think of agile scrum as sort of like this team dynamic and the way people maybe work together. But, you know, when you’re coaching individuals, what is that relationship like?

Greg: Well, sometimes I get too eager for my individual coaches, but it’s one of those things where I try to help if they are in the agile business. There’s two areas. One, if they are in agile, I try to relate what they’re doing to agile thought process and terminology. So what you know, and I try to make them think about it, question what they’re doing. Now, if you’re doing that, how does that fit into scrum or how does that fit into agile? Or why do we do this activity in scrum, like we do a sprint review, right? What is that? You know, how does that relate in business? That’s so you can demonstrate and have an endpoint in what you do, right? So from that, and that has involved into what I’m offering. And I’m going to be offering in the future more open is masterminds. I learned about masterminds, and I learned that masterminds were missing something that I saw in agile and scrum. And I combined the two where I would have a mastermind group of individual coaches where I coach them, but we help establish goals. What do you want to really accomplish? I’m not just there to talk about, “Oh, I had a bad day today,” or “This is not working.” No, no, what are your goals? Let’s establish some goals for the quarter, right? And doing quarter. And then we work towards those goals. And we use the mastermind so there’s more than just me giving feedback to those goals. So we, I made my coaching more into a goal-oriented process than just me being your psychiatrist sitting there and solving your problems, like, “What is your goal? What from a business standpoint? Career point.” You know, I don’t go into the personal coaching, but in that area, where do you want to go? And we work together using, “Well, how could you do this? How could you do this with your team? How can you experiment with your business?” So I kind of put that into that. And then I still have my corporate coaching, which I’m also going at doing more of, where it’s a part-time coaching. So if you ever hear, and this is a big thing in agile, you see in LinkedIn, “Oh, agile’s dead, scrum is evil,” all this stuff. Well, it’s not really. It’s just how it’s been implemented, who’s doing it. And I wanted to start offering a part-time coaching for small businesses and big businesses. I got a contract right now I’m helping where I’m only coaching the scrum masters, helping with the team, getting them ready. But I’m not there 40 hours a day. So rather than paying the big salary, the big hour rate for 40 hours, I’m just charging for the hours I’m with the team. I’m doing one-on-one coaching with the scrum masters, people that own the business, managers. So it’s a lot less expensive, but they get the agile mindset. And not, you know, you’re not trying to fill up your time with busy work or anything. I’m just like, you know, I’m really big on getting a lot of value, not spending a lot of time and having fun on the way. So my goal is to carve that time up to be very valuable when we do meet, right?

Dave: I love that. I think people would appreciate that as well, right? Because everybody’s looking to kind of get the best ROI on their money, on their time. And for context, you know, when you say masterminds, you know, that term, at least correct me if I’m wrong, but I always think of it as kind of a group of people getting together who have similar goals and then, you know, essentially trying to work, give each other feedback, give each other advice, give each other support to help achieve those goals. And then maybe, you know, adding almost like this group coaching element to it, which just sounds like you’re doing where someone who’s maybe a little bit further along or with a bit more expertise to help guide them. Is that right?

Greg: Yeah, and what I do at the mastermind, everyone gets to see what their goals are together. We actually use Jira, if you ever heard of Jira. We actually use it to manage what they want to do. And everyone gets to see it, so people can challenge you on how you’re doing. And then we make the people in the group present what they’ve done in their sprint, per se. We accountability, right? That’s what it’s all about. And that’s something if you read any mastermind book when you create a mastermind, there’s no accountability, it just dies. And that was a key. It’s only one little sentence. You get a whole book and it’s just like one sentence. Accountability is key, but they don’t go into it. So I combined the two because scrum is very big on accountability because you have a time box and a time to do it and you have to show what you do and people hold you accountable.

Dave: I like it. It makes perfect sense to me incorporating those principles into the service there. Well, Greg, thanks so much for kind of educating us a little bit about the podcast, agile coaching, and kind of how to blend the methodologies there. For people that want to learn more about you, what you’re up to, where should they go?

Greg: Well, if they want to find anything about it, they can do like 5 AM Mr. Scrum, search it, you’ll find it everywhere. And one of the things that I just want to add this one tip to everyone, if you do post on LinkedIn, your blog, your video, or your podcast in Bing, it’s just full of it. I just noticed it the other day. I went into Bing and I said, “Oh, my everything, everything in LinkedIn shows up in there.” So if anybody uses the Microsoft search and you’re not posting on LinkedIn, you’re missing out, right? It’s just platter. But 5 AM Mr. Scrum, you can find me there. I am relaunching my company, my idea, Communic Networks, and there’ll be ways to get a hold of me for individual coaching, which you could do in 5 AM Mr. Scrum too, or corporate coaching.

Dave: Awesome. Thanks very much, Greg. We’re looking forward to that upcoming launch, and thank you for being on the show today.

Greg: All right. Well, thank you, Dave.