Ep 132 – Leah Leaves, Alderaan Operations Solutions – Break the Bottleneck: How Operators Reduce Burnout and Unlock Scale
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Featuring: Leah Leaves, Alderaan Operations Solutions
In episode 132, I talk with Leah Leaves, founder of Alderaan Operations Solutions, where she helps remote digital agencies grow without the grind. Known for her no-fluff, systems-first approach, Leah and her team embed expert operations managers directly into agencies to break bottlenecks, reduce burnout, and build businesses that can scale without the founder in every decision.
We dig into what causes owners to become the bottleneck, the difference between goals, systems, and team accountability, and how every agency—no matter the size—can start building a foundation that prevents burnout and supports growth. Leah also shares how to identify when it’s time to bring in an operator, how to delegate effectively, and why even the best creative agencies need structure to thrive. We wrap by exploring how AI fits into internal operations and why every agency needs an AI Ops roadmap, even if it’s just six months ahead.
Key Bytes
• Burnout often begins with unclear goals and missing systems; clarity is the antidote.
• Leah outlines four agency owner archetypes—the Trusting Optimist, Firefighting Founder, Reluctant Gatekeeper, and Visionary Leader—and how operators help each evolve.
• Delegation isn’t dumping tasks; it’s empowering your team with context and ownership.
• Documenting the “why” behind your systems drives consistency and accountability.
• Operators create the scaffolding for scale—allowing founders to focus on vision, not firefighting.
• Every agency, regardless of size, benefits from an AI Ops roadmap to guide internal efficiency.
• Start with what you already have—processes, checklists, or recurring workflows—and build from there.
• Systems don’t kill creativity; they protect it by removing chaos and decision fatigue.Chapters
00:00 Intro and welcome with guest Leah Leaves, founder of Alderaan Operations Solutions
02:00 The Star Wars origin of “Alderaan” and Leah’s path from journalism to operations
05:30 From creative to systems thinker: finding flow in operations
08:00 How unclear goals and missing systems cause bottlenecks
10:00 Guardrails vs. micromanagement: empowering the team without overengineering
13:00 The burnout cycle and why delegation is a creative act
15:00 The four types of agency owners and their operational challenges
20:00 Shifting from bottleneck to visionary: the operator’s role in scaling
23:30 Why every agency needs an AI ops roadmap
26:30 Putting “robots” in the org chart and making automation work
29:00 Low-hanging AI wins: onboarding, recruiting, and workflow automation
32:00 Rapid-fire Q&A: distilling systems, theme songs, and unexpected client wins
34:45 Closing thoughts and where to find Leah
Leah Leaves is the Founder of Alderaan Operations Solutions, where she helps remote digital marketing agencies grow without the grind. Known for her no-fluff, systems-first approach, she and her team embed expert Operations Managers directly into agencies to break bottlenecks, reduce burnout, and build businesses that can scale without the founder in every decision.
Contact Leah on LinkedIn, on the Alderaan website, or take their Agency Owner Quiz.
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Steve / Agency Outsight (00:01.028)
Welcome back to Agency Bites. I'm your host, Steve Guberman from Agency Outsite, where I coach agency owners to build the business of their dreams. My guest this week is Lea Leaves. She is the founder of Alderin Operations Solutions, where she helps remote digital agencies grow without the grind. She's known for her no fluff systems first approach. She and her team embed expert operations managers directly into agencies to break up bottlenecks, reduce burnout, and build businesses that can scale without the founder.
in every decision, which man, we need that more and more. It is so good to see you. I am so grateful you're here with me and how are you today?
Leah Leaves (00:38.478)
I'm doing great. I get to spend the next few minutes with you, so this is a good day already.
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:44.386)
Upside for me, yay. All right, so Alderan, Alderan, I know it's a Star Wars reference. I'm probably butchering the name a little bit because I'm not a huge Star Wars nerd. I know you're super into it. Give the back, give the backstory on the business, your background that led to the business and the origin of the name.
Leah Leaves (01:06.188)
Yeah, well, and thank you for having me on here because I always love talking about Alderaan. And you're right. Yeah, Alderaan, is a Star Wars reference. It is Princess Leia's home planet in Star Wars. Yes, the one that got blown up. But yeah, it's really funny to see, especially online, who gets the reference immediately because they'll come into like a Zoom room with me. They'll be like, hey, Leia. Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (01:21.104)
Perfect. Makes perfect sense.
Leah Leaves (01:34.734)
and wink at me. that is a little bit about where that reference came from. And I was very lucky that when I started my business back in the day, I actually started as an independent contractor and I was working more on the marketing side myself. I was doing content marketing. My background had been in journalism. So I started to transition that to SEO and content marketing very early. And when I had sat down and was trying to think of this really creative name,
Steve / Agency Outsight (01:37.55)
Hahaha
Leah Leaves (02:04.558)
you know, I was just banging my head against a wall and my husband walked by and, he's like, it's Alderaan. It's so simple. It's so straightforward. And, so that's where it came from. And I have to give credit where credit is due to him because he is definitely the creative one, you know, and then I'm the systems one. And I found that out because I kept working in agencies where I was surrounded by other incredibly creative individuals and my natural like,
Type A personality started coming out where I just started organizing them and the things that they were doing and the customers and the communications. And it just, it felt so organic and natural. And that was how I started shifting from the marketing side, from more of that externally facing, client facing side, more internally to internal operations, administration, business management.
And it really flourished from there because once I was able to be a part of a little bit of everything, things started to click even more into place. And it kept growing to the point where I was able to be a full-time COO with an agency for several years, had such an amazing time, but did what a lot of agency folks do and burned out because I tried to do everything myself. And I had to learn that lesson the hard way.
Like again, many people do. And once I shifted my perspective on the who, the what, the where, the when, the why, the how, and really started to look at the bigger picture rather than all of the details, particularly when I was then a fractional COO for multiple agencies. And I was seeing the greater picture across not just one agency, but multiple agencies and then the industry.
That's when it really started gaining traction. then luckily for me, and the reason I say luckily is because it was such a shift, but luckily for me, I had an opportunity to have that pivotal moment that I think a lot of agency owners do when they're the bottleneck. And I was able to acutely, like from a third party perspective, view that and go,
Leah Leaves (04:25.76)
my gosh, I'm starting to do it again. I'm starting to burn out because I'm the bottleneck and I need to shift gears. And what does that look like? And so for me, it was getting out of the seat of fractional COO and actually shifting into the CEO mindset and being the business owner. So now we have other fractional operations professionals that get to do what I did and love to do it for one or two.
agencies at a time instead of three, four, five at a time. So that's how it's evolved over time and to where I'm at now, which is actually in the owner's seat, in the CEO's seat, and being much more of the true visionary that I had, I think, bottled up for a long time. So it's been quite an organic evolution in the business.
Steve / Agency Outsight (05:15.535)
And how many years in are you?
Leah Leaves (05:18.362)
So technically I started the business back in 2013, but that was as that marketing contractor. In its current iteration, it's been just about five years.
Steve / Agency Outsight (05:28.111)
Okay, so it's interesting just kind of thinking back to that kind of storyline how you break out and separate like the creative from the analytical operational etc kind of person and I I get so many people in my life were like I'm not a creative person I can't design anything or paint anything or whatever and I argue that I think everybody is creative everybody has potential for creativity and I especially look at
really good ops people, really good account people, really good PMs. That's a lot of creativity to juggle what they do, to manage what they do, to look at the bigger picture of the vision of the CEO and say, all right, as the ops person, how do I help execute? Like it takes creativity to make that happen. It's not just spreadsheets and Venn diagrams and all that. You know what I mean? So I just, always think it's interesting how we put those in separate boxes as opposed to like,
fluidly kind of connect them in some ways. So yeah, it's just an interesting observation.
Leah Leaves (06:30.158)
I would agree. Yeah, I would agree with you because I think one of the superpowers of most operators is their problem solving ability. They have very high functioning quick start ability to take disparate information and distill it down into an action plan, next steps, takeaways, and that you're right is a very creative function. think where we've
recognized for most operators is that that creative function, just like any creative, needs to be nurtured and needs to be supported. And we've just found that it's in a slightly more structured way than what we would deem more traditional creatives. So actually having a group of operators together, it's amazing how
They are, I think, just as fluid with their ideas as, let's say, a more traditional creative, as we would term it, like a graphic designer and a design group. So you're right. I think there are a lot of similarities. And for the sake of most conversations, know that most operations folks also, it's natural when you're problem solving to start categorizing, synthesizing the information. So we immediately start bucketing things.
And it again, goes to exercising that creative muscle of being organically, operationally minded.
Steve / Agency Outsight (08:02.477)
Yeah. So I think at any size agency, solopreneur running a team of contractors, 10 people, 50 people in-house, whatever, that idea of bottleneck and burnout is a reality for probably all leadership roles. Maybe even down into like the junior people that are doing all the grunt work. And from your perspective, like what are those key identifiers where it's like, Hey, I need to put an operator in-house as this
person that's going to build systems, put things in place, alleviate some of the pressure on these key bottlenecks. Like what are those identifiers that you look for?
Leah Leaves (08:41.206)
Yeah, so this goes back to how I think of all systems and how I think of all problems is we first need to identify the goals. We need to identify what we're going toward and why, and then the systems that we can build to achieve those goals, and then the team to use the systems to achieve those goals. And the issues more often than not,
can come back to all three of those steps. One, that you have unclear goals or you have no goals at all. That is a primer, unfortunately, for bottlenecks and for burnout syndrome. It's because when you are just reacting all day long, you're going to cement yourself as that bottleneck where everybody's gonna keep coming to you for absolutely everything. And because there's no bigger picture of why.
What are we aiming for? Why are we here? What are we going towards? So having clarity and goals can help prevent that. I think then next in the systems, very similarly for bottlenecking, that if you don't have systems, and when I talk about systems, I'm talking about some of the basics of, let's say, your client journey of your customer onboarding, your customer management and retention system, and your customer offboarding.
Steve / Agency Outsight (10:01.604)
You're talking process or procedures, not necessary or SOPs or whatever, not like a platform like ClickUp. When you say systems, that's what you're referring to. Yep.
Leah Leaves (10:09.39)
Correct. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. The concept of systems rather than the literal platforms or tools. Exactly. Yeah. And so when you don't have those things identified or clarified or documented, and it doesn't need to be at a procedural level, it doesn't need to be literally the how-to of every step along the way. I think a lot of agency owners think that they have to have that in order to be successful. And more often than not, your team is much more capable than you think they are.
with just a little bit of context. And so if they have the background context of why are we doing this, then they have the background context of why we do it the way we do it and how we want success to look like. Then that's a system right there and then. And then that could help.
Steve / Agency Outsight (10:56.528)
So so more guardrails with like a start and an end as opposed to step one do this step two like not the minutiae don't micromanage the system for the Talented people that you've put in place because you put them in place to trust them More this is where we're starting. This is the goal of the end. These are the guide rails along the way go execute, right? Okay
Leah Leaves (11:04.579)
yes. Yeah, for sure.
Leah Leaves (11:19.68)
Yes, exactly. Yeah, it can be the 80%, you know, that needs to get you most of the way there, you know, rather than 100 % with every little detail along the way. so, honestly, I'd say for most agency owners to help prevent, you know, more of the bottlenecking, you know, of themselves, you know, and then also the long-term, you know, burnout, you know, is to get some of those documented, just the basics, you know, the framework, you know, of some of these systems.
Again, it doesn't have to be to the detail level of every step along the way because then when you get to the team, this is the most nuanced because you are dealing with people, right? You're dealing with different personalities, but honestly, they can be incredibly successful with, again, just a little bit of that context from the goals, from the systems. And then once you empower them to use those systems and to aim for those goals,
More often than not, again, they're more capable than you think they are. so where I'd see a lot of agency owners really leaning in, unfortunately, to that burnout cycle is they're starting in the reverse, right? So they're micromanaging the team. They're in every single conversation. They're in every single email. They're jumping in and doing it themselves, right? Because they haven't set any frameworks. They haven't...
Steve / Agency Outsight (12:35.941)
Mm-hmm.
Leah Leaves (12:45.422)
explicitly communicated any of their goals or where they want to go with the agency. And so that's where they get stuck. Now they're micromanaging. Now they're losing their joy for what they started, the business in the first place. And so if we just flipped it back and said, okay, why are we here again? What are we doing? And then how can we achieve that? And with simple systems and frameworks and just like a little bit of scaffolding.
Steve / Agency Outsight (13:14.864)
Mm-hmm.
Leah Leaves (13:14.942)
And then now it's nurtured the team with it, you know, and let's communicate it with them. Let's be transparent with them because they're here for a reason. Yeah. And it's very, very clear in my mind, you know, with most agency owners, when you have clear goals and then you have some scaffolding of systems, it's very clear then who wants to be there and who's going to stick with you versus who's just punching the clock and you can get rid of, or they're going to self-select out.
Steve / Agency Outsight (13:40.88)
Interesting. Yeah.
Leah Leaves (13:42.126)
So it kind of takes care of itself at that point if you follow that in order.
Steve / Agency Outsight (13:48.527)
Yeah, the big picture that screams to me from that whole scenario is we need to teach more people how to delegate and what to delegate and why to delegate. there's a whole workshop there. I'm going to write that down, that on the on the vision board for later in the year. But is there a size that this is like more prominent in your experience agency? Like, is it the sub five people's, know, 25 person? Like, where is the owner, the
biggest culprit of this.
Leah Leaves (14:20.014)
Ooh, that's a great question because I would argue that I see this at every size of agency. So whether they're 50 million, you know, or they have a hundred people or they have five people, we still see it. We still see, you know, that agency owners can be in this cycle of being the bottleneck and then ultimately leading to burnout. And burnout is really insidious, you know, in our industry. It's such a terrible...
Steve / Agency Outsight (14:24.972)
Okay, that's fair.
Leah Leaves (14:47.904)
issue that we're dealing with that I don't think, you know, people really talk about in depth. You know, there's a lot of reference to it, but not necessarily a lot of conversation on how best to prevent it, which I agree, you know, big part of that is delegation, right? And learning how to in EOS terms or entrepreneurial operating system terms, it's called delegate and elevate, right? And so, so I do think that
It can happen within any size of company, any size agency. And that being said, there are some trends that we'll see. So for example, we see typically agencies that are under a million that have maybe just a handful of team members. And when I say team members, mean, it could be contractors, could be employees, it could be full-time, part-time, doesn't matter, just number of team members that they have that they're working with.
So typically on the smaller side, maybe like five, know, like a handful of them, we'll see typically that small where they are what we call the trusting optimist, where they might have hired some of their friends or people that they really liked, you know, but that aren't actually the best fits, you know. So they trust, you know, that, everybody just is here for the right reasons, you know, and everybody just knows what they're doing. And so they're not leaning into systems because they feel like that
Steve / Agency Outsight (15:55.952)
Mm-hmm.
Leah Leaves (16:09.11)
is going to actually be too much like corporate and red tape. So they're flying a bit too much by the seat of their pants for it. And again, that can leave.
Steve / Agency Outsight (16:16.4)
Also, if I could jump in, if they're hiring friends and people they trust, they probably are not really good at extending authority over these people or be acting like the boss person to say, is how we should do things. They're just trusting that so-and-so is going to get it done because I've known them and they've done it. So, you know what I mean? Like there's more of a friendship than a boss, employee, boss, contractor kind of relationship. And I think that's a detriment.
Leah Leaves (16:42.348)
Yeah, there's a huge lack of accountability, a huge lack. And it's solvable, with again, a few spices that we add in of systems, for example, like an accountability chart. Literally just putting pen to paper and saying who's responsible for what can help actually increase true trust or real trust in that situation.
Steve / Agency Outsight (16:54.522)
Mm-hmm.
Leah Leaves (17:06.67)
So that's typically what we see, know, in really, really small. And once they start building into the accountability, they start leaning into some of those systems and they're like, my gosh, you know, I really see some of our gaps, you but then some of our opportunities and I want to grow and I want to hit that million dollar mark and I want to go above. then we start seeing them as we see, you know, falling into the firefighting founder trap because typically one to 2 million, one to 3 million.
It's often, it's still actually all on their shoulders because they haven't really documented those systems clearly. So they may have spit out a quick SOP. know, they may have hired a VA to help with one task, but they're not thinking from the top down. They're not thinking big picture. They're often thinking just in task mode. And so they're very reactive and honestly, they are just...
Steve / Agency Outsight (17:54.778)
Mm-hmm.
Leah Leaves (18:01.234)
my gosh, they are in firefighting mode to the nth degree, where it's every single part of the business that they're in. And that's when they're feeling most of the bottleneck feeling, because they just don't understand why nobody else can do things and they have to keep jumping in.
Steve / Agency Outsight (18:17.967)
Or it's just quicker to do it myself than explain it to so-and-so or yeah, I hate to ask so-and-so to stop what they're doing to do this when I can just do it myself. It's the worst mindset to have. Yeah.
Leah Leaves (18:26.688)
Yes. Exactly. Well, and it goes back to your point about doing a delegation conversation and like, what does that really look like? You know, because it's not just shoving shit off of your plate onto someone else's excuse my language, but it's true. It's like, it's not just taking all of this stuff that you really hate and just throwing it onto someone else. It's got to be strategic. It's got to be thought through. You know, so, so we see a lot of people getting stuck in that particular bottleneck phase, which then
burns them out hardcore because they're working eight hours a week. They're not seeing their family and they're starting to resent their business. And it's again, really insidious of how through through line this burnout culture can become very quickly. And so if we can kind of right the ship and get them back on track with having clear goals, building the system, starting to trust their team, really let them do what they should be doing. Then once they're into like
We see typically like three to six million is more so where it's kind of funny because they become a different kind of bottleneck. It's not the everyday for everything. This is where they start to become a little bit more of the, well, wait a second. I'm actually out of that system now. I'm not in every email, but I've got too much time on my hands because they haven't planned for what they're going to do.
as a business owner when they're not in client service, when they're not in the operations of every little piece of the business. So these are what we call the reluctant gatekeepers because they don't actually want to be back in there. But it's kind of like when people haven't planned for retirement and all of sudden that retirement comes of age for them.
Steve / Agency Outsight (20:12.315)
Mm-hmm.
Leah Leaves (20:16.558)
And then you hear the story of, okay, they sit on the beach for two weeks and then they get absolutely bored out of their skull. It's very similar in these smaller agencies, like the three to five, three to six million, where they just didn't plan ahead and think of the goals of what do they want to do once they're out of being the bottleneck of delivery, the bottleneck of recruiting in HR. And so they start to...
poke holes in other people's work, not because they're trying to micromanage, not because they don't trust their team, but because honestly, they have a little bit too much time on their hands and their mindset hasn't shifted. Once the mindset shifts into being more of that CEO, more of that business owner, that's when we start seeing them as, again, what we call them the visionary leaders. So have four agency owner types that I've just kind of walked through. And that fourth one is the visionary leader, where they are confident in their team.
They know where they're going. They've got the right systems, and they have others to handle it for them. And I'll be honest that an operator is needed at every single one of those stages because otherwise they'll get stuck on their own. So equally as important, they'll need some level of support structure. So whether that's like a mastermind group or an executive coach,
We do highly recommend that they literally have someone else third party to talk to you as well, because they'll be doing a lot internally with an operator, but they still need kind of a gut check with someone else. But that's kind of how we see. Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (21:51.588)
I know a guy. Yeah. Well, it's interesting because I see so many agency owners coming to me screaming about, working too many hours, not being able to do the work that they love doing, whether it's, you know, brand strategy or design or whatever they want to be doing. Cause they're doing all these other things. And once we like really dig into it, it's, you need a second in command. You need somebody that can come in and run this thing for you because you don't want to run it. You
You launched a business because you didn't like the way the other person was doing it. And now you're stuck running a business and you really would rather be doing UX or whatever it is that you love doing. So that second in command, to your point, at all of these different levels needs to do that much more. That role needs to scale with the business as it scales, as the system scale, as the CEO steps away from the day to day. There's more things that need to happen. So you talk a lot also, I think about like,
How do you transform this even as a non-billable role, like embedding one of these operators and having them kind of put playbooks in place and accelerate the agency's growth? It's a force multiplier. And so it's got to be at a certain size agency where they can do it in a non-billable role because small shops just can't afford it. So, you know, it's a highly strategic role. It's not a cheap role. It's not an inexpensive service that you guys provide or, you know, that they need to put in place.
so I want to be, I want to talk real quick about AI and what you're seeing in the operations space for automations and how agencies are, or maybe they're not in, in like, implementing AI into their internal operations. What are you seeing the miss? What are you seeing the, you know, the cliff coming at them with this as a missed opportunity?
Leah Leaves (23:43.373)
Yeah, I would say that everyone should have an AI ops strategy at this point and an internal roadmap of what they're doing with AI, what they're doing next, even if it's basic stuff. And what I mean by basic, for example, is taking a manually, taking a meeting notes recording, because the AI note takers have been around for a long time now.
Steve / Agency Outsight (23:49.914)
Hmm.
Leah Leaves (24:10.834)
And we've been using them for a long time, but not a lot of people have been leveraging them. So taking the meeting notes and running it through maybe like a custom GPT that has been written specifically to listen for red flags in client communication. So you can have your account managers take their meeting notes, run it through this custom GPT that you've written for them or that they've written for themselves that specifically is listening for any of those
like those language cues, those verbal cues that we may not have picked up in the client meeting, but afterward we can analyze for. That's a very manual process, but that's an example of utilizing kind of a basic, straightforward AI process right now that could help anyone learn to better support their clients and increase their client retention.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:04.911)
Yeah, that's a low hanging fruit. Easy to do, easy to implement. The roadmap that you talk about, you seeing that they're assigning a key role in our, you're in charge of how we figure out AI as an agency, whether it's internal or selling to clients, or is it like, hey, anybody who can figure it out and bring an idea to the team Wild West, let's all just go gung ho onto it. Are you seeing one or the both?
Leah Leaves (25:28.182)
yeah. I would say we're seeing more of the latter, the Wild West, and we're heavily, heavily suggesting that everybody goes to the former, that they have somebody that owns it. And that often, more often than not, is the operator, right? That they need to be, maybe not the AI visionary, they don't need to be the one that brings all of the different ideas to the table.
but you do still need to have somebody that manages it and that prioritizes it. Because it's just another layer of the goals. It's just another layer in systems, and it's just another layer in your team. If you're thinking of your accountability chart and you're looking at some of those assistant, like AI assistant roles, that needs to be on the accountability chart. Again, that goes back to then HR and operations that needs to own it.
Steve / Agency Outsight (26:18.213)
We're putting robots into the org chart now? Yeah.
Leah Leaves (26:21.07)
Uh, yes, we have, we have been, and I would highly encourage, you know, that it is identified because that is a task that somebody is responsible for. And if somebody needs to be articulated in the accountability chart with like a different color so that people feel more comfortable that like, here are the human roles and here, you know, the AI roles, like whatever works for you, as long as you're starting to.
use it as long as you're starting to plan for it, as long as you're starting to be strategic for it. Because we see the most successful agencies right now actually have a plan. It's not that they've AI-ified everything. It's not that they're ahead of the curve and they've figured it all out. It's just that they have a plan. They know what they're doing today. They know what projects are being worked on that have AI in them. They know what's coming next.
They don't know exactly where it's all going to go. We're not talking about like a three to five to 10 year plan for your AI roadmap. We are saying at minimum, you should have the next probably six to 12 months, at least identified of like, are those pieces of your business that need to have an AI angle? know, so client service is a great example. There are so many opportunities there. But then just as equally, if you can look internally and look at your recruiting systems.
there are tons of playbooks that could support your recruiting playbooks, your recruiting processes, your workflows there. Even in HR, I'd say finance, at least from my perspective, has lagged a little bit. And that's just because of more security concerns and HR sometimes as well. But there are strides being made every single hour, let alone every single day in this. So at the end of the day, as long as you can have a plan,
You can have some simple projects that you know that everybody is working toward or where you want to go. Again, this goes back to the goals. Like have your goals identified, you know, because then you can start building out the systems and then you can really empower your team to be leveraging them on a more regular basis.
Steve / Agency Outsight (28:27.035)
Yeah, I love that. And I don't think it can be beyond six to 12 months because who the heck knows what we're looking at beyond a year. It's impossible to predict that it's transforming so darn quickly. Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I love this more for the ops side and automating processes and reducing hands on work verse like doing the actual creative or dev stuff. I don't know that that's primetime ready yet.
Leah Leaves (28:38.103)
Agreed.
Steve / Agency Outsight (28:55.749)
but you can automate internal processes and client onboardings and things like that. And it's just a time saver and I'm a big fan of that. I'm blown away by what people are doing with AI operators now and tools and automations. And I try and do simple stuff and I get error messages from it all day long. So I'm still figuring it out myself.
Leah Leaves (29:16.054)
No. Well, and to that degree as well, something that you mentioned, you know, about like client onboarding, know, like automating client onboarding and using AI in it. Like that has not changed actually for years. You know, like think of like the automations boom, you know, several years ago where like all of a sudden you could automate everything and like everyone was doing things in Zapier and it was so exciting. And it still is, get me wrong. You still should be, you know, leaning into that. But it's a, it's a showcase, you know, of
It doesn't have to be honestly that new or innovative in your AI roadmap. Like look at what you already have, you know, that people have been telling you to make processes and systems out of since day one when you started your business, you know, or day now, you know, so it doesn't have to be like this really big new thing that I think a lot of people get really overwhelmed with. You know, you've got a lot of low hanging fruit in your business that you could leverage and
There you go, like there's a six to 12 month roadmap right away. Just what you have internally and what you have right now that you haven't systematized or you haven't automated yet. So this is a great opportunity to weave in AI into that roadmap.
Steve / Agency Outsight (30:29.275)
Yeah, well said. love that. Thanks for pointing that out. All right, I want to wrap up with a couple of real quick rapid fire questions. Man, probably nothing to do with Star Wars, but maybe we'll see your spin on it. So the first is, what's a skill that you've mastered that most people would not guess about you?
Leah Leaves (30:46.54)
Ooh, that people wouldn't guess about me. That's a hard one because I'd say my biggest skill is being able to rapid fire distill a lot of complex information into a very short three-step system. I put everything into the role of threes. I think everybody can remember it, beginning, middle, and end. And so if I can take this big concept and big idea and boil it down for you into three steps, I absolutely love doing that.
Steve / Agency Outsight (31:01.861)
Wow.
Leah Leaves (31:16.238)
So that may be something that some people know about me though, but that's what comes to mind.
Steve / Agency Outsight (31:20.965)
Yeah, yeah, that's, I do love that. I think it's always important to just keep distilling things down. If you can get a system to 10, can you get it to five? Can you get it to, so I love that. And I think, yeah, I kind of nailed that about you the first time I met you. It's like, you are that keen on systems. If your life had a theme song, what would it be?
Leah Leaves (31:44.719)
should have thought about this beforehand if I had a theme song. It's going to sound a little cliche, but I'm going to still say it is order out of chaos. think there's still a lot of disorganized, all this kind of Michigan that kind of energy, like crazy kind of energy that I'm always putting into order. So order.
Steve / Agency Outsight (32:09.123)
Is that an actual song though?
Leah Leaves (32:11.444)
No, I don't know enough songs. know, I'm thinking of like, would the, what would the name of the song be? Cause yeah, I'm not enough of a music nerd, you know, to have like a song, you know, that I could pull out.
Steve / Agency Outsight (32:13.15)
Okay
Steve / Agency Outsight (32:23.067)
Fair enough. I would also say maybe something directed by John Williams. Didn't he write the Star Trek music? I'll throw that out. So he can write the music for Comm Out of Chaos for you. So there you go. What's the weirdest or most unexpected way that you've landed a client?
Leah Leaves (32:40.45)
Thank you.
Leah Leaves (32:46.976)
this is one from many years ago. There was, and I'm completely forgetting the app's name, but there was this app, a social media app that had come out where it was audio based and you could pop into different rooms and just, it was like all these different thematic rooms and I cannot remember the name of it off the top of my head. It'll come to me. Clubhouse, yes, thank you.
Steve / Agency Outsight (33:12.126)
is it Clubhouse? Yeah.
Leah Leaves (33:15.478)
Yeah, so I was on Clubhouse and I was going around to different rooms and I jumped into a room that specifically was on, it was on recruiting, but from the angle of specifically for marketing, you know, jobs. And there were a lot of people that were in the room that were looking for jobs. And I was not looking to hire necessarily immediately, but I'm always looking for the right connections, the right...
you know, networking areas to be in. And one of the speakers in that room was an agency owner who we instantly connected like in the room. And we just started riffing and chatting with each other about like all these different recruiting systems and agency this and agency that and marketing this and marketing that. And kind of forgot that there were other speakers and like other people in the room. But just like had such a great time. And so we followed up later and he became a client.
a few months after that.
Steve / Agency Outsight (34:15.941)
Very cool. Yeah, I did not, I don't think I ever engaged in Clubhouse more than like one call. was just, it wasn't my bag, but that's very cool that you were like honed in on this person, you know, and it was a good match. thank you so much for joining me. I'm super grateful for your experience, what you bring to the agency space. Folks check out Alderaan Operations Solutions. Leah Leaves is a gem and somebody that you should definitely connect with. So thank you, Leah.
Leah Leaves (34:43.554)
Thank you. It's been such a pleasure being on here and I'm really excited for continuing the conversations.
Steve / Agency Outsight (34:49.85)
Always. Yeah. Thank you.