In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the importance of mentorship for small agency employees. They explore various approaches including informal and formal mentorships, organic development of mentor-mentee relationships, and bringing in external consultants for mentorship.

Gini shares her personal experiences, highlighting the challenges of forced mentorship and the benefits of organically developed relationships.

The hosts emphasize the need for managers to support and mentor their employees, leveraging both internal and external resources, and the value of making time to mentor individuals outside one’s own organization.

Key takeaways

• Gini Dietrich: “Keep in mind that in a really good mentor-mentee relationship, the mentor keeps their mentee’s best interest at heart, even if it’s not the best thing for the organization.”
• Chip Griffin: “There are a lot of more modern approaches to mentorship because of all the technology and tools that we have available to us.
• Gini Dietrich: “Being a mentor almost always benefits you in the long run.”
• Chip Griffin: “There’s this fear, I don’t have time to be a mentor. Make time.”

Related

• Helping your agency’s new managers
• Managing employees in a small agency
• Helping agency employees to improve their PR skills

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I think I need a mentor to help me through this whole podcasting process. Can you be my mentor?

Gini Dietrich: Yes, I would love to. Thank you.

Chip Griffin: Excellent. Excellent. So we are going to talk about mentorship today because this is something that I think a lot of small agency owners may realize that their team members need.

I mean, they may need it themselves too, but we’re going to focus on it from an employee standpoint. You know, you’ve got, you’ve got employees, you want to try to help them to get to the next level in their careers. But honestly, most owners don’t tend to invest a lot of time in it themselves as far as helping to bring along team members because they’re all caught up in the day to day.

And honestly, I think a lot struggle with how do I even do this effectively? And so I’ve seen a lot of different things over the years. I’ve seen forced mentorships in larger agencies where people are like, okay, you five new employees, you’re going to have designated mentors. And so they just assign people. I’ve, I’ve seen ones where people are encouraged to get mentors, but not given any guidance as to how to find them or how does it work?

And so I think the, the question really becomes whether it’s a mentor or something similar, how do you help your team members get to where they need to be to, to be that future employee and not just a current employee?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think it’s… They, they’re, I think you made this point somewhere along the line too, but it’s, it’s less, sometimes it’s not formal.

Sometimes it really is, you know, for me, I’ve had situations where I’ve been informal mentors to clients. Like especially their, their young professionals on their marketing and comms teams. And where I have found that people look to me as their mentor, whether or not it’s formal is when I’m helping them with professional development and teaching and explaining. And so, you know, lots of one to one meetings or lots of education during meetings or it’s that kind of stuff. Like it’s helping them learn the next step in their job and, and kind of think through their career path. And, and like I said, maybe it’s formal and maybe it’s not, but as agency owners, I think we can think about that. Like how, how we’re best suited and you know, we can’t be a mentor to everybody, a formal mentor to everybody on our teams.

But we are best suited to be able to say, okay, your strengths lie here, so I can see that you would go here, but having that conversation to say, hey, listen, you know, what do you, what do you want out of your career? Where do you think you’re going? How can we help you get there? And then say, here are the strengths that I see that you have.

Let’s work on this together. So it could be part of a formal review process. It could be an informal, like, this is just how we run things. It could be part, it could be part of your culture. But there is the opportunity for all of us to really look at the people that we work with and say these are your strengths, let me help you play to them so that you can progress your career.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and to your point, I mean, I think that my own view is that the, the, the best mentorships develop organically. They are not, they’re not thrust upon you. They are not something where you’re actively seeking a mentor. It’s one where, you know, perhaps you’ve got a current or former boss who just, you know, really that you click with, both professionally and personally, and you can have open, honest conversations. I would say it’s generally, mentors are generally better when they’re not doing a performance review of you, but you can still, you can still be a mentor if you are the direct supervisor of an individual. And I think Managers in general need to view part of their role as being a mentor, even if it is not in a more formal organized sense, right?

We need to be thinking about all of our team members who report to us in a way of how can we be helpful to them? And it, it shouldn’t be just, how can I be helpful to them in terms of what’s good for, for me in my role or my business, but how can I help them advance? Because if you help them move forward, that is ultimately good for you. It may not be exactly what you want when they decide they’re going to go off somewhere else, but down the road, they might become a new client, or they might be a boomerang employee, or all sorts of potential opportunities for you. So, so you need to give selflessly of yourself to the people who report to you. But in general, mentors are people that, that, that the individual just really meshes with.

And I, I think it’s really hard to force that. And I’ve seen a lot of mentorship programs that, that try to do it in a more organized way and it’s better than nothing, but it doesn’t work at the same level of effectiveness as ones that develop organically.

Gini Dietrich: I’m sure I’ve told this story before because it was very traumatizing for me, but I was probably a year and a half or two years out of college and I worked with a woman who was on a PIP.

And my boss came to me and said, Hey, we want to give you some leadership and mentorship experience. We’d like you to work with her for the next 30 days as she’s on this PIP to see if you can get her out of it. To see if you can get her to exceed these goals. And at the time, you know, I’m a year and a half or two years out of college and I’m a young whippersnapper.

I really thought I could help her do it. It was the most awkward, unsuccessful thing probably I’ve ever done. Because she didn’t want anything to do with me. She was older than me, and had more experience than I did, and was like, what do you mean I have to work with her? I don’t like her. I don’t trust her.

Like, all of these things, and I’m like, I can help you so you don’t get scared, right? It’s terrible. But they wanted to give me that quote unquote experience. To be able to say, okay, these are the kinds of things that you should be thinking about. And, and truthfully, it did give me the experience to be able to understand what works and what doesn’t and what a mentorship, mentorship should look like.

But it was a very, very awkward experience and truth be told, she, she didn’t make it the full 30 days. She, I think she quit after two and a half weeks. It was terrible. It was terrible.

Chip Griffin: I mean, a PIP is the last time, you don’t want to be setting up a mentorship when someone’s in a PIP. I mean, PIPs are awful anyway.

I’ve talked about this before. PIPs are stupid. PIPs are only to CYA. And if you actually think a PIP is going to work, you’re crazy.

Gini Dietrich: It doesn’t. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: But, but that is the, the time to look for and try to facilitate mentorships is when someone is doing generally well or is fairly new and you don’t have a lot of…that they shouldn’t be used as a corrective measure. And I have seen that before, where you, whether, maybe it’s even someone who’s not on a PIP, but someone just, you know, the boss feels like that, this person just needs a little help in progressing, they’re not quite where they need to be, maybe we’re not at a PIP, but we, we still want to help them out, and so a mentor is the solution. Not the solution. Mentors help you to become even better, they don’t generally serve to fix something that is wrong. And so if you’re looking at it that way, you’re, you’re probably going about it the wrong way.

But let’s say that you’ve got a team and, and you, you’ve got some, some more junior employees who you think would benefit from mentorship, you know, how do you try to arrange for them to find those opportunities? And I think it’s a little bit more challenging today where we don’t have the same natural connection points because we’re not in offices in the same way that we used to be.

And, and this is, while I, I generally, believe in, in remote work, this is one of the areas where I think it does create additional challenges because in the old days, you could build some of these relationships by going out for coffee or hanging out at the water cooler or the copy machine or the fax machine or all those things that we used to have back in the day that, you know, you younguns who are listening to us are like, what’s a fax machine?

I, I’ve heard them reference it in a doctor’s office, but I don’t know, I don’t know what it is. So, you know, how do you…

Gini Dietrich: The server, hang out at the server.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. So how do you, how do you help out team members to find mentorship relationships or, or build them in some fashion?

Gini Dietrich: I think it depends, which is the key to our podcast in general.

Chip Griffin: Indeed. We could just say that just, I mean, every episode, it depends and then walk away.

Gini Dietrich: See you later. Okay. Peace out. You know, I think it depends on what the goals are and what your culture is like and what the person or the team has in mind. In some cases, the mentor might be external and it might be somebody who can help them with

networking or with leadership skills or pitching new business or whatever it happens to be, right? And it might be external. So it’s, I think you’re right when you said earlier that it’s really about somebody that you bond with and that you, because the real key to it is you have to trust one another and you have to trust that they have your best interests at heart.

And if it’s somebody internal, that’s a little more challenging because you have to trust that they have your best interests at heart. And sometimes your best interest doesn’t align with the company’s best interest. Because it, that may be that your best interest is your employee’s best interest might be that, you know, two or three years from now they leave the organization to go on to do something else.

And the company’s best interest is to keep them here, right? So you also have to keep that in mind that a really good mentor mentee relationship is the mentor keeps the, their, their mentee’s best interest at heart, even if it’s not the best thing for the organization. So, so it may be internal and it may not, it just depends.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I think there are absolutely pros and cons to both. And, you know, I think in an ideal world, it would be someone external because it does give you additional freedom. At the same time, someone who is, is internal can also commiserate with you in a way that that someone external might not be able to or they would understand some of the specific unique challenges that you have without you having to explain it in excruciating detail.

You know, well, why is this person difficult to work with? Why are the expectations, you know, it requires you to go through a lot more. Now there’s benefits to explaining those things sometimes, because sometimes being forced to explain what the problem is can help you to see it more clearly yourself. But nevertheless, I think there are, there are clearly advantages and disadvantages to each approach.

I will say that, you know, I’ve seen a couple of different approaches that organizations have taken to facilitating mentorships when they’re not organic. I think that there are, again, pros and cons to each. The first one is sort of, and I’ve been part of mentorship programs like these where it’s sort of a speed dating approach where you have a group of potential mentors and you have a group of potential mentees and you do the whole speed dating thing.

You go around, you sit and you talk for, you know, two or three minutes. And then at the end, the mentees typically will make a list of their preferred mentors and then some organizer will make matches for that. And that’s, there’s, there’s one particular program where I’ve done that, multiple times with, and I will say that those are, it’s hit or miss.

Because you still run into the issue of, you know, maybe in those two or three minutes that you had, you know, during the speed dating thing, you know, there were some connection or, or maybe, maybe there even wasn’t, but, but the, the mentee wanted to work with you because of what you do and who they think you can open doors to or whatever.

And so, you know, I, I think that there are some challenges there, but it, it, it ends up getting you a mentor mentee relationship at least. And so it can be productive from that standpoint that you actually are moving the ball forward and some of them will survive the long term and some, you know, will fade out after three, four or five months, whatever.

But it still can be beneficial to the individual if they’ve never had a mentor before to sort of see what it might look like. And so they can start thinking that through. So that is, that is certainly one approach to consider. Probably you would need to have a larger small agency. You know, 20, 30 employees as opposed to two or three employees, because obviously it doesn’t make as much sense if you’re really small.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I think the other thing you can do is you can encourage your team to look to people they respect in the industry. You know, if there are thought leaders or industry influencers that they really respect or they like the way that they think, that’s a good way to do it. You know, I probably get

I don’t know, a handful of requests every year from especially young women who are looking for mentors to help them kind of through their career path. So, and I almost always say yes, you know, and certainly depends on how busy we are, but I almost always say yes. So I think that that’s a good opportunity too, to look at, you know, thought leaders, subject matter experts and industry influencers that, that your team respects.

And have them reach out, have them do the, the work to set to, to figure out if this is the right person and, and do the informational interview and, you know, do all the things that they need to do to make sure it’s the right person for that. But really support them in being able to do that.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, no, I, I think, and I think that the agency owners ought to be open to being mentors to people outside of your own organization.

You know, you do have to be reasonable and not say yes to so many that you, you really can’t give the mentee what they’re looking for or what they need, right? Because then you’re not really serving them anymore. But I, but I, I think that’s less of a problem for most people than simply not saying yes enough.

Because there’s, there’s this fear, I don’t have time for this. Make time. It’s, to me it’s, it’s like the pick the brain conversations that, that people are, I don’t have time for that, you gotta pay me for that. No. Look, if, if someone, if someone reaches out to you for career advice, wants to, to work with you potentially as a mentor, you ought to be open to it and try to find a way to make it work.

Because you probably had people like that in your career that helped you to get where you are. And so you, I believe, you have an obligation to give back in some way. Now, if it’s not a fit or you just literally do not have time, it is what it is, right? Be honest with the person. But at the same time, lean towards saying yes as opposed to instinctively saying, Oh my God, I don’t have time for this.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I will say that, first of all, it doesn’t take that much time. It really doesn’t.

Chip Griffin: It shouldn’t. If it does, then it’s not a mentor mentee relationship. You’re a free therapist or something.

Gini Dietrich: Right. Fair. But it almost, I mean, karma is great. It always, almost always benefits you in the long run. Like, I have someone that I mentored years and years and years ago, and she’s at her third company now where they’ve hired us.

So, we, my agency essentially follows her to every job, and it’s because of that relationship that we developed probably a decade ago. So. There are always benefits to it. It’s longer term. It’s a longer term investment for sure, but there are always benefits.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. Now, the other thing that I’ve seen, this is, this tends to be again in more mid sized organizations, but I’ve seen, it’s not quite a true mentorship, but I’ve seen where the organization has brought in a consultant coach type who serves a similar mentor type role to individuals.

And sometimes it’s with, and it, I wouldn’t call it a true like executive coaching kind of thing. It’s not true mentorship. It’s kind of a hybrid.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: But, but someone who can come in who has experience either on the human resources side of things or on the actual agency side or something like that, who can share perspective.

Now, the trick here is that if you’re bringing in someone from the outside who is paid by the agency, that the employees have to feel like they can still open up. So it’s going to take some time for that person effectively to prove themselves to the team that they can be trusted with your deepest, darkest secrets, professionally speaking.

Because if someone can’t open up to you, then you can’t have a productive mentoring or coaching or any kind of relationship like that. But it is, it, it, particularly if, if you are, if you really want to provide that kind of guidance and help and support for team members and you just, you don’t have the means to do it internally, bringing in someone from the outside can get you probably 80 percent of the way there.

Obviously it requires an investment. It will take time for the trust to build, but that is another option that I have seen.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And to that end, Vistage, which is a worldwide organization for, started out for CEOs, but now has grown into all leaders, has a new emerging leaders program. I want to say it’s like 1200 bucks, maybe two grand a year.

 But you can do something like that too, where you, they, they can go into that program and it teaches them the leadership skills they need. You know, all of the things that they need to help you grow your, your business. Plus it gives them a group of people. That they can trust and they sort of quote unquote grow up with that they aren’t working directly with day to day and that’s pretty successful too.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and, and, and that’s the other thing to consider is that, you know, there are a lot of more modern approaches to mentorship because of all the technology and tools that we have here, available to us. And, and certainly, you know, we see that regularly in the Spin Sucks community where there are, you know, more junior communicators or marketers in there who are asking questions and building relationships with folks.

And so there are a lot of these kinds of things out there that you can take advantage of and you can encourage your team to take advantage of as well. So that, you know, again, it’s, it’s not the same as a one on one mentorship, but there are, there are a lot of different ways to get the resources and support that you need in order to advance your career and help your team members advance their careers.

And so you ought to be taking advantage of everything that’s out there.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. Yeah, I think it’s a good idea. It helps everybody. It helps you in the long run. It helps them for sure. And like you said, there, it may be that they leave and come back. I mean, they’re always, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t shy away from it just because you think they’re going to grow out of working with you because that’s going to happen anyway. And there’ll be opportunities for you to maybe bring them back later.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. So, find a way to, to support your team members, find a way to, to help them find mentorships and, and cultivate mentorships and become mentors themselves, and you should be one as well. With that, that will draw to an end this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast.

I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the complaint from owners that AI is preventing junior employees from learning how to do their jobs the right way.

They refute arguments that AI is detrimental to learning the fundamentals, comparing it to outdated technologies like fax machines and card catalogs. They advocate for embracing AI, citing its efficiency and evolving intelligence in completing tasks.

They emphasize training teams to use AI effectively, focusing on editing and verifying AI-generated content rather than doing things ‘the old way.’ The episode concludes with practical advice for integrating AI into agency processes and improving productivity.

Key takeaways

• Gini Dietrich: “Things evolve, things happen, technology happens to make your life easier. That doesn’t mean you don’t know how to do your job, or that your team doesn’t know how to do their job.”
• Chip Griffin: “We are at the early days of AI and it is only going to get better. So, figure out how to use it.”
• Gini Dietrich: “Use AI. Stop being stubborn.”
• Chip Griffin: “Teach people how to use AI the right way, question it, verify it. And that is a far more productive use than to tell your juniors, do this without AI.”

Related

• What does ChatGPT and generative AI mean for PR agencies?
• AI should be your agency’s friend, not foe
• Agencies succeed through consistency and evolution
• Introduction to generative AI for agencies

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: Gini, I, AI, I just, with AI, I don’t know how to do anything anymore. I mean, it just, I just rely so much on it that I’m not even sure I could figure out how to walk anymore.

Gini Dietrich: I’m still waiting for it to do my laundry and my dishes.

So I still have to do those things, unfortunately.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, look, AI is a great thing, and I think we’ve talked about it a lot on the show before. It’s something that most agencies should be taking advantage of to help them do their jobs quicker, more cost effectively, get better results, all those kinds of things. But I’ve been troubled lately by the number of times I’ve heard that Because of AI, young people in, pick your industry, for us, let’s pick marketing communications, just by happenstance. That AI is, is preventing them from being able to figure out how to do their jobs the right way, because it just does so much for them.

I have to tell you, this gets me irritated. It’s really, really irritated.

Gini Dietrich: It doesn’t make sense. Like what? That, yeah, this is akin to saying that email… Because you’re not faxing anymore, you’re emailing, you don’t know how to do your job. Or because you’re not using the Bacon’s Green books, you’re using an online database, you don’t know how to do your job.

People – things evolve, things happen, technology happens to make your life easier. That’s not, that doesn’t mean you don’t know how to do your job, or that your team doesn’t know how to do their job. They’re learning how to do things differently than maybe you learned how to do them, but they’re still doing their jobs.

Chip Griffin: I mean, look, this is, this is not a new argument with AI. This has been an argument every time new technology comes along. You know, I, I remember when, when the transition took place from using the old fashioned card catalog at the library to find books. And people started using computers to look them up and people said nobody’s going to know how to use a card catalog anymore.

They need to learn how to use that before they’re able to use the computer.

Why? Why? Why? Why?

I mean, if you go to a university library these days, not only you’re not going to find a card catalog, you’re not going to find a lot of books. Right. I mean, university libraries are, are increasingly removing books.

Instead of talking about how many they’ve added to the collection, they talk about how many they’ve removed and replaced it with other resources.

Gini Dietrich: This is like saying you don’t know how to use the phone if you didn’t use a rotary phone first. It doesn’t even make sense. That doesn’t make sense.

Chip Griffin: I mean, it does, it does give rise to some entertaining moments.

I think I may have shared this on the show before, but when my younger son was in a hotel a number of years ago, and we were showing him how to call from room to room because we had a separate room from the kids. And so, you know, showed him how to make the call from room to room, and it was a corded phone.

And so after he’s done with the conversation, he’s holding the phone, and he says, What do I do with this now? Because he had never used a corded phone, and so he was used to hitting the end button on a cordless phone, or the hang up button on a cell phone, or something like that, but didn’t know. Corded phone, , you have to put it back in the holder for it to hang up.

Things change.

Gini Dietrich: Yes. Things change.

Chip Griffin: You know, and, and I guess the, more close similarities would be things like grammar checkers and spell checkers. Sure. Right. And Yep. You know, I mean, at the end of the day, all you gotta be able to do these days is spell close enough that the auto correct gets it for you.

Yep. Is that the end of the world? No, not really. No. I mean. Unless you plan on entering a spelling bee, I don’t really care that the computer is helping you do it, because you’re always going to have the computer.

Gini Dietrich: Right. Correct.

Chip Griffin: I mean, almost nobody, it’s the same argument, I see this argument in the local community Facebook page, you know, the schools are not even teaching you cursive anymore.

Why would you? I mean, I think it would be helpful if you showed, if you taught kids and made them regularly actually sign their names, because

Gini Dietrich: Yes, they don’t know how to do that.

Chip Griffin: My kids don’t know how do a signature.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chip Griffin: At least it’s better than X, I suppose. But still, I mean, there are some basics that you ought to learn somewhere along the way, but I think that viewing AI as an obstacle to, whether it’s junior or mid level, senior people learning how to do their craft more effectively is just, it’s a losing argument.

What you need to do is figure out how to integrate those things. The only reason it would ever matter. Is if you said, look, I think this AI is a passing fancy. And, and it’s something that’s not going to be available to us in five years. If you’re using something that you legitimately believe is no longer going to be available to you, which is rare with technology, but if that’s what you believe, okay, now then you may want to think about understanding how to do it without that tool.

But here’s the reality. AI is not going away, right? We are not going to lose access to it. It is, we are at the early days and it is only going to get better. So, it seems to me, figure out how to use it. Don’t lament the fact that it’s making it so that people aren’t, you know, writing a press release the old fashioned way.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, so I just saw, I just saw research that said that 97 percent of U. S. teenagers are using ChatGPT for their homework. And everybody’s all up in arms about it. And it’s like, okay, I’m sure that’s the case, because last year, in fifth grade, there was a little boy in the class that was using ChatGPT for his homework. And the teacher was like, you, you can’t do that. So if they’re doing it in fifth grade, it’s exponentially more in high school and college, right? And that is the world that we live in. So if you’re worried about junior level employees joining your team and they’re using AI to help them do their jobs, I would be less worried about that because the AI is pretty smart.

And I always say like Claude is my really smart intern because it can do things so much faster and so much more intelligently than an intern can. Because I, I have to tell it one time I say, okay, I’m going to train you on this or I’m going to upload all this to my knowledge base or I’m going to create a project and have all of this data and documentation in there and you’re going to learn from it. And you only have to tell it once.

That’s not the case with a, with a human. So now you have junior level people joining your team and you say, okay, we need a news release and it needs to say this, this, this and this. And you have, they have the AI draft it for them. It’s going to be a better piece. What you should be focusing your junior level team on is editing, prompting, like those kinds of things, because the, the true value comes in the, in the expertise that you have and making sure that it’s, it’s legitimate and valuable. I just saw, that the Google AI Gemini has, had suggested that if your cheese is falling off of your pizza, perhaps you use non toxic glue in the cheese. That was like, well, it’s not quite there. So I think where you’re, what you have to be training your team on is

Chip Griffin: Although if it’s non toxic…

Gini Dietrich: fair. I mean, it’s glue, right? If you can eat glue. Some, some people eat glue when they’re kids. If you’re training your team on editing, ensuring that the information is correct, sourcing, and driving the expertise, who cares if they’re using AI? Who cares?

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s the key. It’s, it’s, it’s figuring out how to use it, how to use it in the right way, understanding what the potential pitfalls are.

And you know, you mentioned fifth graders and chat GPT, and it sort of reminds me of 15 years ago when there was all the hullabaloo about students using Wikipedia for reports.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: I know you need to go to the actual encyclopedia or the original source or those guys. Okay, cool, great. How about instead you just teach them what are the risks of Wikipedia and how you have to follow up on things and you have to be careful with controversial topics because of the editing wars that take place.

Teach people how to use it the right way. Teach people to question what ChatGPT or any other AI comes up with. And, and how do you verify it? And how do you test for potential copyright violations and all of that? How do you think all of those things through? And that is a far more productive use than to tell your juniors, do this without AI.

Show me how, let’s, let’s figure out how to do it without AI. Because unless you think AI is going away, there’s no value in that. The value comes from understanding how to use the tools you have in front of you and how not to use them.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I mean, I’m going to use this example again, but that is like saying to them, I know you have Muckrack available to you, but we’re going to use the big green Bacon’s book.

So that you really understand the value of going alphabetically and looking up the publication and then finding the reporter. And then going through and picking up the phone, like, that’s, that doesn’t even make sense. It’s the same thing. Let them use the AI and teach them how to use it appropriately.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, look, there was a time where I would have loved to have forced my juniors to use the X Acto knives like I did when I was getting started to cut the articles out, tape them with scotch tape onto a piece of paper, take it to the copy machine, make a photocopy, stick it in the fax machine, fax it off to somebody else instead of just logging into one of these platforms and instantly seeing something that was not on, not published yesterday or the day before, like we were doing with the X Acto knives, but were published in the last hour or the last few minutes.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yep.

Chip Griffin: It is entirely different and you need to rely on the tools that are there in front of you. And, you know, that the folks who are arguing things like, well, you know, you can’t use a calculator without understanding how to do long division or whatever. Why? When was the last time you had to do long division on your own?

Gini Dietrich: In your head. The only time I had to do it is when my sixth grader is like, Hey mom, what’s? And I’m like, And then I have to give her the answer. Right. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: I mean, when I went to school, we, we didn’t have calculators, generally speaking. Sure. And you certainly weren’t allowed to use them in class. Now you can.

And you ought to be.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: Because it’s a common tool that we have. Yes. I mean, when I was in elementary school, I had to learn how to write with a dip ink pen.

Gini Dietrich: No, you did not. Yes. You’re not that old.

Chip Griffin: I went to a private school for a few years and they made you do weird stuff. So you had the little inkwell and you had to learn to write with that.

Gini Dietrich: Wow.

Chip Griffin: Which was silly.

Gini Dietrich: That is silly.

Chip Griffin: I mean, they didn’t make us do everything with it, but we were actually taught how to do this.

Absolutely no value. There wasn’t value to that in the 1980s when I did that, let alone the 80s or 70s. It was early 80s, I guess. That’s ridiculous. Yes, that school did a lot of ridiculous things.

Gini Dietrich: How often do you use that skill?

Chip Griffin: Uh, precisely never.

Gini Dietrich: Guess what you’re getting for your birthday this year.

Chip Griffin: Please do not. Those things are insanely messy. And unless you’re doing, like, calligraphy for artistic purposes, there’s really no value in it.

I mean, that said, I do like modern fountain pens for writing. I mean, those

Gini Dietrich: Sure. Of course. Yes.

Chip Griffin: They do a nice job, but that’s, that’s not the dipping.

Gini Dietrich: You’re not dipping it in ink.

I’ll get you a feather and some ink and you can

Chip Griffin: Because then you’ve got to clean the nibs and all that. I mean, it’s just, aah, That was, it was a whole lot of no fun.

Gini Dietrich: Well, yes, I think that’s a really great, really great point. You don’t need to have your team dipping into ink to write.

Chip Griffin: I feel like we’ve gone almost completely off the rails here already.

Gini Dietrich: Amazing.

Chip Griffin: You know, I, I think that it is, as an agency, practically speaking, you do need to think about how you’re using AI and how, what kinds of programs you have in place for training, not just your juniors, but everybody. Because AI is new to everybody on your team.

And so whether you are just getting started or whether you’ve got 10 years or 20 years or 30 years of experience, you need to learn how to use it the right way. And so as an owner, your job is to work with your team to come up with policies and processes and training and education that helps you to get there.

And, and I would not fight AI. You will lose.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: Even before we get to AGI. You’re going to lose. So figure out how to put it to work for you in the right way for your business and you will get much further than torturing your team by making them do things the old way.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and it’s, I mean, it makes you so much more efficient. And it will help your junior level team learn and it will help your junior level team understand.

But they don’t have to necessarily do it themselves. I mean, 10 years ago, I’ll never forget this as long as I live. Christopher Penn said, we want to think about AI as conductors. So you are the conductor, and you are, you have your symphony of AI robots, and you will be conducting them. And at the time, I didn’t fully understand what that meant.

And today, I understand that you’re, you’re conducting, your team is conducting. The Claudes, the chat GPTs, the Geminis, the, all of those, the napkin AI, all of the things that you have available to you and getting out, getting the work out of it that they need so that you can be more efficient and, you know, more profitable and all the things that we want to be able to do, this allows you to do that.

So I totally 100 percent agree. Do not say, well, you have to write a news release on your own, because that’s not the way the world is going. And that’s not where you should spend your time.

Chip Griffin: Right, and this is not the first time we’ve had an episode talking about fighting AI, right? Because agencies just seem determined to fight AI at every turn.

Whether it’s fighting your team using it because they’re not going to learn the fundamentals if they do that. Or whether it’s because you’re fighting, you know, changes in pricing models because you can now create content more quickly and more effectively, but you still need to charge the same amount.

No, you don’t. No, you don’t. No, you don’t. As you save time doing things, you find other ways to leverage the time, and you do, you produce better results more quickly for your clients. You don’t say, well, just because we’ve got these things that are going to help us, we’re either not going to use them because we need to justify our higher prices. Or we’re going to just charge you exponentially more because we’re giving you the same thing. You are and you aren’t. Figure out how to use all these things to make yourself better, to make your team better. Yep. Don’t view them as the enemy.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, it’s and it’s not. And I totally agree. If you know, if you can find ways to be comfortable with it, it’s going, you will be so much happier.

It’s so. So much happier. Like, even, even for me, there have been, there have been things on my list for years that I’ve always had to do, that I haven’t enjoyed doing, that I’ve always procrastinated because I know how much brain power it takes. And those things, if I can sit down and at least ask AI to get me started, like, it does, I don’t procrastinate anymore.

There might be other things I procrastinate on like laundry and dishes, but like, I’m not procrastinating on the big like brain things anymore because it helps me get started. So it’s, it’s just the argument that all of the things that you just said, all of the arguments that we hear, it’s ridiculous.

Use AI. It’s amazing.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, to, to your point on procrastination, I mean, this podcast is a perfect example. When I finished a podcast and I had the video done, I would often procrastinate on the actual editing to, you know, to get it all looking good and, you know, I used to want to try to, you know, spend a lot of time on camera switching and all that kind of, it was, it was a pain.

And so then I said, well, forget that. We’re just going to go simple side by side.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And, and more recently I’ve started using AI editing. And so at literally the click of a button, it does automated camera switching. Is it perfect? No. Is it good enough? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And I’ve had people tell me that it’s more interesting to watch these now because they can see the camera switching back and forth between the two of us.

And so, I mean, that’s, I mean, that’s video editing 101. Don’t have a static shot for 15 or 20 minutes. Right. And so, even though it doesn’t change the substance, at all, having that one click allows me to stop procrastinating. I do it very shortly after we’re done and I wrap it up and I send it off to Jen who does all the fancy other stuff, show notes and that kind of things.

But even that is all assisted by AI. It comes up with the first draft of the chapter markers for YouTube. It comes up with the first draft of the key takeaways. It comes up with the first draft of the transcript. Does it need touch touch ups to get to where we want it to be? Absolutely. Yep. Although, frankly, you probably could let it largely just go untouched and you’d still be close enough for the use of most people, but I’m a little bit of a perfectionist, so.

Gini Dietrich: Well, that, and it will probably spell my name wrong every time, so.

Chip Griffin: Yes, well, that can be entertaining. But in any case, I think that’s probably a good place to wrap up.

Gini Dietrich: I agree. Use AI. Stop being stubborn.

Chip Griffin: AI is your friend. It is not the enemy.

Gini Dietrich: That is right.

Chip Griffin: I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the importance of satisfaction from the work you do for clients, both for agency owners and their teams.

They explore how satisfaction can drive motivation, the significance of setting boundaries with clients, and the need for purpose in work. The conversation emphasizes the balance between achieving satisfaction and pursuing business growth, as well as the evolving nature of what satisfaction means over time.

Key takeaways

• Chip Griffin: “Pay attention to red flags, otherwise you will have short term revenue gains, but long term structural problems for your business that you’ll be miserable running.”
• Gini Dietrich: “There’s nothing wrong with saying no. And I think many of us, myself included, build our businesses by saying yes to everything.”
• Chip Griffin: “The flip side is that the more perfect you want your satisfaction to be, the more restrictions you’re putting on your ability to grow and thrive.”
• Gini Dietrich: “The majority of your day should be energetic and productive and you should be happy to be in the work that you’re doing. Because you’ve built a business that brings you great pleasure.”

Resources

• The Rolling Stones – (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (Live- Ireland 1965)

Related

• What to do when you feel burned out as an agency owner
• Using paid discovery to get better clients

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I could start singing the Rolling Stones here, but I think that’s probably not the best idea for any of us.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, please. Please, please.

Probably get a copyright strike anyway. And I know how much you care about copyright.

I do care about that. Yeah, you’re right.

Chip Griffin: So, we’re setting a good example, plus, again, nobody really wants to hear me singing, well, anything. But there’s a song, Satisfaction. I think it’s an important theme.

Gini Dietrich: It is.

Chip Griffin: I think as owners, we need to get satisfaction from the business we run. We’ve talked before about the importance of actually getting what we want out of our business.

But I think it’s just as important that we get satisfaction from the clients that we’re working for. And I think a lot of times we worry too much about just chasing after whatever the, the latest and greatest money is. Or saying, you know what, I’m going to put up with this from this client because they pay me a lot of money, or those kinds of things.

And I don’t think we need to love every client. But we’re never, I mean, most agency owners, I, I know that I haven’t loved every client that I’ve had over the years. There have been annoying clients out there. I know that’s a shock to everybody. I mean, I, I know I’m the only agency owner who has ever had a client who was ever annoying at any point in time. But I think we need to feel satisfaction out of the work that we’re doing.

I think our teams need to feel that too, if we’re going to reach our full potential. So that’s what we’re going to talk about.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, for sure. But I really wish you would sing the song.

Chip Griffin: You really do not.

Gini Dietrich: I really do.

Chip Griffin: It’s not going to happen.

Gini Dietrich: Okay. Well, I thought I’d try.

Chip Griffin: I guess you won’t get any satisfaction today.

Gini Dietrich: I get no satisfaction from this podcast episode, I guess. That’s, that’s really disappointing. Okay, well.

Chip Griffin: I’ll just, I’ll just add it to the list.

Gini Dietrich: I agree with you on the satisfaction. I think we do have to be satisfied with the work that we’re doing, with, you know, I, I just said this to somebody the other day. You, you spend the first part of your career, especially in what we do, you know, all gung ho about selling toothpaste. And then the second half of your career, you’re like, is this what I do now?

Am I giving back to the world? Am I making a difference? I’m selling toothpaste. I’m hawking toothpaste. And I think that that comes with understanding what drives satisfaction. And I’ve mentioned this before, but Daniel Pink wrote a book called Drive. And in that book, he talks about what motivates employees.

And I think it, it resonates here too, which he’s, his hypothesis is that is essentially the, at some point you make enough money. If you make enough money to pay your mortgage and your car payment and your bills and you have a little bit left over for a vacation, the job becomes less about the salary and more about the satisfaction.

And the example he uses in the book is, let’s say that you’re asked to sit in the middle of a warehouse, big empty warehouse. Nothing going on there. No windows. Your job is to just sit in a chair in the middle of the warehouse. And if you can do that for eight hours every day, you’re gonna make a million dollars in salary.

How many of you are actually gonna do that? Like, you can’t. You can’t. You don’t have a computer. You don’t have a phone. You don’t have a book. Like, you just have to sit there. People need purpose. People need satisfaction. And so, that goes for you as well. If you’re building something and you’re trying to build something that will create a legacy or even give you a lifestyle, you have to be satisfied from the work that you’re doing. And not just the work that you’re doing, but to your point, the clients, the team, everything.

It has to give you a reason to get up in the morning and not dread it.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and look, you and your team can get satisfaction in different ways. We’re not all the same, right? Sure, absolutely. So it could be just that you’re working with and for good people. And it may be that the satisfaction isn’t from the actual work you’re doing or from the actual product that’s being sold or whatever, but it’s that the people that you’re getting to engage with. That might be your source of satisfaction.

It might be the end result. It might be the cause that you’re pushing or the product that you’re selling or something. It might be any number of different things, but you need to find the way that you get that satisfaction. And you need to find a way for your team to do it, for that very point that you said, it’s about motivation.

If, if you are, if you are not satisfied, it’s really hard to get up and give your best effort. And if you’re not giving your best effort, the business isn’t going to achieve what it wants. If your team isn’t isn’t getting up and having that motivation, they can’t deliver the clients the results that they want, which is going to lead to retention problems.

So you need to understand what kind of satisfaction you’re looking for, and then figure out how to get it for the business, for the agency, so that you’re not just, again, just chasing whatever the latest trend is or the advice that you hear from some of us. It’s going to be different for everybody. You need to feel satisfied that you’re actually doing something.

Gini Dietrich: And I would say that if you’re not, that you have to find ways to work through that. So I’ll give you a really good example. We have a client who loves to do all of his planning on Sunday afternoons. So on Sunday night, he will send meeting requests for the week. And he doesn’t ask if it works for you. He doesn’t look at your calendar.

He just does it on what works for him and he expects you to be there. And so you get up on Monday morning and I experience this too. My team, it’s not just my team. We all experience it. You get up on Monday morning and your inbox is full and you’re just like, Oh my gosh, like. And for someone like me, I’m highly introverted and I like my routine and I’m going into Monday, I like to know what my week looks like so I can plan out all the stuff I need to get done.

Right. He blows that up. And. So for a while there, I was pretty miserable about it. And so I finally said to myself, okay, you can do something about this. And so I had to kind of work with him and get him to the point where he would stop doing that. And we could talk about like, let’s plan for this and let’s plan for that and figure this out and we’re not quite there.

We started this process in October and we’re not quite there, but he’s significantly better. And so I no longer have the Sunday scaries because of it, but if I had let it continue to go on, we probably would have fired the client because it would, it’s, it was miserable. It was miserable for all of us. So it’s a really great client.

It’s a really great case business. We really like their purpose. So we were satisfied from that perspective, but this one piece of it was making it miserable for all of us. And so I had to figure out, is this worth me fighting the battle to kind of fix it? Or not? And it was. And like I said, we’re not quite there.

He’s, he’s so much better, but we’re, we’ll, we’ll be there soon.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, no, that’s, that’s something I had to learn a number of years ago to just put my foot down to being summoned to meetings.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. You can’t, you can’t.

Chip Griffin: Meetings shouldn’t be about being summoned. They should be about being scheduled.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: And, and if you’ve got clients who don’t respect that.

You need to deal with that sooner rather than later, because if, as soon as you allow it one time, it will just get worse.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And so, you need to be very clear, and, and look, I’m not talking about, you know, they’ve got a 50 person meeting that they’re inviting you to, right? That’s not the same thing. To me, the summons is where it’s, you know, one on one or, or them plus your agency, and they’re just dictating, this is the time.

Those need to be collaborative decisions.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: They need to work for all involved. And I, I mean, you look, you need to be flexible for clients as much as possible. Sure. To try to accommodate their schedule above your own, but not just allowing them to say, we are absolutely meeting at this time, take it or leave it.

And, believe it isn’t even allowed. So, but you know, that is a clear area where you’re going to feel dissatisfied very quickly if you allow that behavior to continue. So, you know, we’ve talked a number of times on this show about the importance of trying to mold your team, to mold your clients so that you can work with them in the right way.

And so that’s an element of the satisfaction side of things. But I think you also need to think about you know, what are the results you’re producing? Do you feel like you’re actually making a difference in the work that you’re doing? Yep. I don’t mean making a difference in, you know, changing the outcome of the world or solving world peace or those kinds of things.

Look, we can do those things and you want to do them, great. But I, but I just mean, you know, do you feel like all you’re doing is just generating random numbers on a spreadsheet, or do you feel like it’s actually moving the needle in some way?

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: Because it’s, it’s really easy to fall into the trap that, you know, well, client wants to see website visits up.

So we’ve, you know, we’ve done the earned media and the shared and no, and then. It’s helped generate, you know, more numbers on their website. So what? Right? Most people want to see that that’s leading to something. And so it’s helpful to understand that. It’s helpful to ask the questions of the client if you don’t see it directly.

But it all helps with everybody feeling like there’s a reason why I’m putting in my eight hours a day on this. There’s a reason why I’m going through these eight rounds of revisions on a blog post or a press release or whatever. And, and you need to, not just for yourself, but also for your team, help them to see that so that they’re getting the satisfaction out of the effort that they’re putting in.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, it’s important for everybody. And like I said, you know, different things motivate different people and different things are satisfactory to different people. So figuring out what those things are is important as well. So really understanding your team and where they derive that satisfaction. Like I have one team member who loves the fire.

We’re like, okay, absolutely throw meetings at me at the last minute. Doesn’t bother me at all. And that won’t work for me. So, you know, really understanding that it has been instrumental in us figuring out what, how we can manage this client and everybody be happy. And it without understanding that I would have made just a blanket request and the client would have probably been pretty unhappy, but instead we were able to give him some other options.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and that’s a great point that you need to understand the satisfaction, how everybody gets their satisfaction. Because it is different. I mean, I, I’m very much of a similar mindset. I, I love fires. Right? You know, you give me a disaster and I, I’m looking forward to jumping in on it. You know, the, the more chaotic it is, the better.

You know, the, the higher the pressure, the better. I mean, I, in various organizations, I loved it when there was a major catastrophe that required working around the clock to solve the problem, whether that was a tech problem or a messaging problem or whatever. To me, I, that was something I thrive on, I enjoy, even though in the moment it may be brutal, I still got satisfaction out of, out of doing that work.

There are a lot of people would be absolutely miserable.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. Sure.

Chip Griffin: You know, and, and I, I can’t say that I loved getting that call that, that told me I was going to have to stay up all night working on this, but I, I got a certain level of fun out of it.

Gini Dietrich: There is something to, to be said for the adrenaline push.

I, I will give you that.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, you don’t want to do that. Now, it would be very different if that happened every week. Right, right. Then my satisfaction would go down.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: And so things that are good in small quantities aren’t necessarily good in large quantities. And that, that’s an element of the satisfaction.

But I, I think, you know, to me, the key is to try to, to understand what that is for you, for your team, and then go after that rather than following the cookie cutter advice. Or rather than… I mean, I think the biggest problem is agency owners who are just chasing revenues. And at any time they see dollar signs, they chase it.

And I think too often they get themselves into a jam because they’re going after a client that they don’t really believe in. Or that they’ve got some concerns about or whatever. Or they, they accept a client that they, they’ve blown through all the red flags that were there during the prospecting phase.

Unrealistic expectations, poor treatment, summoning you to, to meetings during the pitch process without giving you the ability to weigh in on scheduling or advanced notice or whatever. And, and all of those things lead to dissatisfaction. So you need to pay attention to those, otherwise you will have short term revenue gains.

But long term structural problems for your business that you’ll be miserable running.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And I think that’s the big takeaway here is that you have to, and we’ve talked about this from the perspective of paying yourself and ensuring that you’re making a profit and ensuring you have the right clients on board, but you also have to think about it from the perspective of being satisfied with the work that you’re doing, the clients that you’re working with, the team that you’re working with.

Because you don’t want to have the Sunday scaries and you, you do want to, I mean, certainly you’re going to have some days where you’re just like, Oh, I can’t do this today. But the majority of your day should be, should be energetic and productive and you should be happy to be in the work that you’re doing.

Because you’ve built a business that brings you great pleasure. And I think that’s, once you kind of figure out all the other pieces, that’s the last piece of ensuring that you’ve got the agency, the business, really, that you want to be running.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. Now, all that said, I do think you have to understand the flip side.

Which is that the more perfect you want your satisfaction to be,

Gini Dietrich: Fair.

Chip Griffin: The more restrictions you’re putting on your ability to grow and thrive. And that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do that, but you do have to understand that the tighter, the more narrow your definition of satisfaction is, the harder it’s going to be to achieve it while also achieving all of your other goals. Can you do it? Yes. But if, if your definition of satisfaction is that you have to absolutely love and adore every client. That you have to think that, you know, every employee you have is going to be the one that’s going to be with you forever and you never want to lose them.

That, you know, you’re, you’re going to be changing the world every single day, right? The, the more lofty we define our satisfaction, the harder it’s going to be to ever get there. And the more we may constrain ourselves in our ability to win clients, service business, that sort of thing. So it is a balancing act.

I think you have to largely be satisfied, but you have to accept that, look, being an entrepreneur, being a business owner, being an executive, it’s not, it’s not all glorious satisfaction every day. There are going to be bumps in the road. And so you just have to figure out where the balance is for you so that on the whole you feel satisfied. And on the whole your team feels satisfied.

And, and that requires some tough decisions as you’re putting together your positioning, as you’re targeting your ideal clients, as you’re putting in policies for client service and avoiding scope creep and managing team morale and all these things. It all goes into the bucket and you just need to figure out how to balance all those things.

Not easy. I’m not saying this is the easiest thing in the world. But it is something you need to have squarely on your radar because otherwise you won’t get everything that you can out of the business.

Gini Dietrich: And I think going into that is, are things like having, having a list of things that you won’t do with clients. Or clients that you won’t work with and looking for those red flags.

And we’ve talked about from a business development perspective in the past, how to say no, if the client isn’t, if the prospect isn’t right for you. And that, that goes into it. It’s not being enamored with the, the retainer amount, but ensuring that the retainer amount is coupled with the fact that they are going to be good clients.

Like there are lots of opportunities for you probably that the retainer is great, but the client would be terrible. And so you have to be really good at figuring that out and then understanding where those boundaries are and when to say no. Because there’s nothing wrong with saying no. And I think many of us build our, myself included.

Build our businesses by saying yes to everything. And that’s where the, the lack of motivation and the Sunday scaries comes from.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And look, I mean, you know, what satisfies you is going to change over time, right? And when you’re first growing your business, you say yes, because two reasons. One is you don’t really know what’s going to give you satisfaction and what is, maybe you’ve got some general ideas, but.

Until you’ve actually had the clients and done the business, had the employee, you don’t really know for certain. You’ve got your preconceived notions, but part of it is that learning process that takes place. But part of it is because if you, if you don’t accept that early on, you may never get to the point where you can actually pick and choose.

And there are always, look, there’s always times where you’re going to have to make compromises. You’re going to go through a, a slow spell as an agency and you just need some revenue to cover it. And so, you know, I, I wouldn’t encourage you to take on business that dissatisfies you, but maybe it doesn’t satisfy you as much as another piece of business would. You know, and you’ve got to figure out, you know, where that balancing point is. And, and it may change over time.

And you know, depending on what motivates you, you may be willing to, to bend your level of satisfaction for different reasons, right? There may be a price point where this work wouldn’t satisfy me at this number, but if you triple that number, eh, I’m satisfied enough.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Right?

Chip Griffin: And that’s if you’re financially driven.

If you’re not financially driven, that doesn’t help you any. If you’re mission driven, well, you know, maybe you’re not satisfied because it’s, you know, the, the client isn’t the easiest to work with, the work isn’t the easiest to do, but you’re really, you really support their mission and that’s enough for you to get satisfaction.

So, and again, that, that balance, that ratio is going to be different for all of us. Because I mean, I know that I’ve bent many times because of the dollar signs. Well, that’s big enough. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I’ll suck it up. Okay, you know, you want to call me three o’clock in the morning? That’s fine.

You’re paying me enough for that. That’s cool

Gini Dietrich: I think you raise a really good point though. And that is that your definition will change. It will change as your career grows. It will change as your personal life changes. It’ll change, you know, when you have kids and when they leave the house. And like all of these things, when you have aging parents, like all of this stuff contributes to it.

And I think being self aware enough to be able to say, okay, that was okay with me in the past, but it’s no longer okay with me is, is really important to do. And do that assessment. Do that assessment every few months to understand why is this bothering me and how can I fix it?

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and remember the same is true of your team.

So when you’re having your weekly one on ones with them, when you’re doing your annual career reviews with them, make sure that you’re zeroing in on that because you need to understand how their own satisfaction drivers are changing.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. That’s a great point.

Chip Griffin: Because that impacts how you work with them and the decisions that you make.

And if you ignore that, you will have high staff turnover, you will have low performance from your existing team, and that does nobody any favor.

Gini Dietrich: That’s right. Everybody’s unhappy. Clients are unhappy. You’re unhappy. They’re unhappy. That’s not good.

Chip Griffin: Well, hopefully our listeners are not unhappy with the last 20 minutes or so that we’ve been sharing advice.

I know you were dissatisfied because I wouldn’t sing, but

Gini Dietrich: Well, maybe Jen will include the link. I will say that

Chip Griffin: I’m certain that Jen will include the link, as she always does.

Gini Dietrich: But she sent us the outtakes of the Pivot Friends episode that we mentioned last time. And it was so funny. I sat here and laughed so hard.

Very funny. So thank you, Jen. That was great.

Chip Griffin: And on that note, we will wrap up this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

In this episode, Chip and Gini address the topic of pivoting for small agencies in response to changing economic and political climates.

They discuss the importance of evaluating whether to switch niches, cautioning against overreacting to trends.

They highlight the risks of chasing ‘gold rush’ industries like cannabis and AI without true expertise. The conversation includes advice on gradual pivoting, focusing on adjacent industries, and the importance of long-term planning.

Key takeaways

• Chip Griffin: “No industry loses the need for marketing, communications, advertising, digital services, etc. And even back in 2020, even industries like hospitality had new needs that needed to be met. And so if you’re serving that industry, could you adapt to provide what they need today in the current environment?”
• Gini Dietrich: “If you are thinking about pivoting to a new industry, it’s not something that you will do and be successful in 2025. It’s going to take some time.”
• Chip Griffin: “There are lots of places to go and chase revenue. You need to chase profits.”
• Gini Dietrich: “You absolutely can be using AI inside your agency and you could be teaching your clients how to use it effectively. But going all in and saying, “I’m now an AI agency” is not a very smart idea.”

Resources

• “Pivot” scene from Friends
• “Pivot” outtake from Friends

Related

• Rebranding or repositioning your agency
• Evolve your agency to find market fit

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And we have a special guest today. If you’re watching on video,

Gini Dietrich: Say hi.

Chip Griffin: A very restless canine.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, she wants to play ball and I had to tell her it’s not time to play ball.

Chip Griffin: No, we will. And we’re not going to play ball here on the show either.

Gini Dietrich: No, no, we’re not.

Chip Griffin: No, but to quote Ross from Friends, Pivot!

Gini Dietrich: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Pivot!

Chip Griffin: So, for those of you who have not seen Friends, just go watch it, I mean.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, that one scene, you can Google it.

Chip Griffin: You can Google that one scene. I’m, I’m sure that, you know, Jen will include it in the show notes because she, anytime we make a reference to a movie scene or a TV scene, she likes to actually link it, but we’re going to talk about pivoting, not in the same way that Ross on Friends was, was talking about it.

We don’t have any difficulty moving a sofa around because we’re not going to move a sofa around.

Gini Dietrich: No, we’re not.

Chip Griffin: I will not even try anymore. If I did that, I would definitely hurt myself.

We don’t want to hurt ourselves. We do want to talk about pivoting because, look, the world continues to change day by day. We expect more change in the years ahead. One of the questions that I know you’ve gotten, and that I’ve gotten from some clients, is should their agency be thinking about focusing on different industries, pivoting to a different focus. Because perhaps the industry or industries that they’re serving today don’t have as bright an outlook based on economic conditions, political conditions, other things.

And so I guess, you know, the question is how do you figure out when to pivot and how do you go about it if you choose to do so?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, it’s a hard one because you mentioned that we have, we both have clients who are thinking about this. Yeah, we, we’ve always said like it’s a really good idea to have an expertise and to have a niche and to really focus in on industries and it is.

There also are cyclical events that happen that can affect certain industries. You know, during 2020, we saw hospitality, travel, tourism, all of those go down. And so if you didn’t have any other industries that you focused on, it was a really rough year for you. You know, that we always, we tend to talk about there are recession proof industries like healthcare, pet care, people always spend money on their pets, things like that, that you could think about.

But there are industries right now that I think are, are going to be struggling in 2025 and beyond, regulatory kinds of things like, environmental, cannabis, you know, there’s some, some industries that are having a tough time. And so thinking about Is that, how do I take that experience and translate it to a new industry, I think is a smart thing to do because you want to have it diversified enough that when one industry is down, your, your whole business isn’t sunk.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I think it’s, it’s certainly something worth considering. I do, generally speaking, urge caution because it’s very easy to overreact to positive or negative news. Sure. And it is, it is rare that even an industry that may not be as thriving, today as it was a year or two ago, doesn’t still have opportunities.

And in fact, for small agencies, sometimes your opportunities increase in an industry that’s, that’s struggling a bit. Not, not that’s completely down and out. I’m not talking about that, but, but someone that’s, that’s not as thriving because they may not have the budgets for the, the, the mid sized agency, the large agency.

And so someone who is willing to take on smaller projects, be more nimble, might be an option. So before you decide to, to cast your lot in a different direction, I would really take a hard look at the industry you serve and ask, can you just adapt your messaging or adapt the services that you’re providing or package things up a little bit differently in such a way to be competitive in the current environment?

Because no industry loses the need for marketing, communications, advertising, digital services, et cetera. And even back in 2020, even industries like hospitality, most of them had new needs that needed to be met. And so if you’re serving that industry, could you adapt to provide what they need today in the current environment?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. Because in 2020, some of the things that we adapted to were the need for CEOs to understand how to communicate values. Because, you know, for so long we’ve been told, CEOs have been told, don’t talk about your values, don’t talk about your beliefs because you’re going to alienate half of your customer base and then 2020 hit with a pandemic and social justice and all of a sudden they were told you have to, you have to do this now.

And oh, by the way, this is how Gen Z makes decisions and they’re coming into the workforce. So we were able to kind of shift toward. education and training of executives on how to do those kinds of things versus, you know, the very tactical stuff that we up to that point had done, like earned media and content marketing and social media.

Right. So there are ways, I think, to your point that you can find new opportunities within the industries that you service. And I would also caution that if you’re. If, if you are thinking about pivoting to a new industry, it’s not something that you will do and be successful in, in 2025, it’s going to take some time.

So if you’re going, if that is a strategy, it’s something that you should be thinking about longer term. And it’s just like your business develop, development plan, your pipeline, you have to keep that full all the time. It’s the same thing here. You have to, you know, be really strategic because it’s a longer term effect than saying, Oh, I think I’m going to go into healthcare now, even though I’ve been doing cannabis for 20 years.

So you have to think about it from that perspective too.

Chip Griffin: And I think it’s important to think of it as pivoting and not throwing in the towel and starting fresh. Are there times you may need to do that? Yes. But that’s a whole lot harder and that’s a much longer timeframe, typically speaking, to get back to where you are today.

And so if you’re, if you are thinking about this, if you have come to the conclusion that you really do need to move beyond the pool that you’re currently fishing in, the more closely adjacent you can remain to it. the more likely you are to be successful. First of all, you and your team have the knowledge that you need to succeed there.

You know the language and those kinds of things and you know how to produce the results for that kind of client. So, my encouragement is to, before you start thinking about a whole new industry, think about how can you maybe expand your definition of the current industry or industries that you serve.

How can you find something that’s immediately adjacent to it that you might be able to move into? Yep. And, and you’re much more likely to have success in the near term in that way than you are saying, okay, you know, I’m, I’ve, I’ve been, you know, in the oil industry. And so now all of a sudden I’m going to go into telecom or,

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: You know, something like that.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I actually, last year I did a panel for Notified and one of the, my fellow panelists talked about this a little bit. He said, you know, when, when he was building his agency, instead of going after a whole bunch of different industries, he took his really specific automotive experience and then looked at adjacent industries.

So he was able to go into, electric vehicles and then into tires, I guess, is, is pretty profitable who knew, and other manufacturing types thing, types of things that he had adjacent kinds of experience with. And I think that’s really smart advice. Because it’s not going, it’s not going from cannabis to healthcare, right?

Or hospitality to manufacturing. It’s, it’s creating the opportunity for you to use the experience that you have and help build businesses inside different industries that are affected in the same way.

Chip Griffin: And, and you really want to be thinking about, you know, who can, who can you solve similar problems for?

What industries do you and your team already have knowledge about and around? So that you’re not having to start from square one and understand all of the, the lingo that they’re using. And understand their, their, heir client base and things like that. You really, you want to stick with the things that you know, and you know, you can succeed with.

Because that’s easier to sell to a prospect, but it’s also easier for you to execute profitably. And we always talk about that, that it’s, it’s not just about chasing the revenue. There are lots of places to go and chase revenue. You need to chase profits.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: And if you have to relearn everything, it’s really hard to generate profits, at least in the near term.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And also clients don’t want to pay you to learn on their dime. They want to hire agencies that have the experience and the knowledge. Because typically they’re hiring you because you’re the expert. Really hard to be an expert if you’re going into an industry where you don’t have any knowledge.

Chip Griffin: And as you’re thinking about this too, I would also say, don’t chase the next gold rush.

It’s really easy to sit there and say, okay, well, this industry is really hot right now. Everybody’s talking about them. There’s a lot of buzz around it. Those are generally places you don’t want to go unless you already have specific knowledge, expertise, connections, those sorts of things. And this has happened a number of times over the years.

Where you have an agency that says, well, you know, I, I, I remember this very distinctly probably five, ten years ago, agencies left and right wanted to get into cannabis, because It was everybody’s talking about it. It’s starting to get legalized. There’s lots of opportunities. And so it sort of became a gold rush and you looked around and there’s like a million agencies that now claim expertise and focus on cannabis.

Same thing happened a number of years ago with crypto. There’s a lot of these kinds of things. And as we sit here and we look at headlines here in 2025, there are going to be any number of things that you’re going to look at and say, Ooh, they’re going to be doing really well. I need to go chase that. You just need to remember everybody else is chasing it too.

And so now what you’re doing is you’re going into an area that maybe you don’t have a lot of expertise or connections and there’s going to be a lot of other people flooding that market. Is that really where you want to be? You’re creating an uphill battle for yourself in a number of different fashions that is not likely to be helpful.

Gini Dietrich: And I would say to that as well that when it’s not just industry that you should focus like that. You should, I mean, back in the day we had everybody say, Oh, Well, I’m going to be a social media agency now and look how well that’s turned out. And now everybody’s saying, well, I’m an AI, AI agency. You can bring social media into your agency, you can bring AI into your agency, but focusing solely on those things never, we’ve seen historically those, that doesn’t work out.

I remember having a conversation with a really good friend who ran a PR firm and she said, we’re going to go in on all social, go all in on social media and that’s what we’re going to be is a social media agency. And that agency no longer exists. Which sucks, but because she went all in on it, and I remember saying to her, I don’t think this is a good idea, and here’s why, and she thought that I was wrong. And I’m not, not saying it, like, it’s, it was really crappy, she did not pivot like she should have.

But same thing with AI, like you, you absolutely can be using AI inside your agency and you could be teaching your clients how to use it effectively. But going in all in and saying, I’m now an AI agency is not a very smart idea.

Chip Griffin: And look, I think that that one of the things you have to think about anytime you have that kind of a specialization is you first have to start with, is this really an expertise that I have?

Right. Right. So for, for folks like you and me, focusing on social media back in the day kind of made sense because we were sort of, you know, OG social media people, if you will. And, but I saw a lot of people who really knew nothing about social media. But they just, they heard about, and they’re like, so we need to focus on this.

You know, same thing with AI. If you actually understand AI and, and you’re, and you find innovative ways to bring it, it makes more sense to at least integrate it with your practice in a, in a more direct way. Yes. But if you’re just doing it because you heard the term. And you’re like, this is the, this is where to go.

You’re much less likely to have success. And I would also encourage you if you’re thinking about pivoting on your, the services that you offer or the focus from that standpoint, be really careful about hyper specialization. I think about the agencies just a couple of years ago who, we’re creating clubhouse practices and we’re going to focus on Clubhouse.

Oh, right. How’d that work out for you? Or back in the day, I love this one, Second Life. I mean, there were, there were media outlets that had Second Life bureaus. I think Reuters is one of them.

Gini Dietrich: Really? I don’t remember that.

Chip Griffin: Seriously? Yeah. How’d that work out for you? Right. Right. You’ve got to be careful about chasing these things because just because they have headlines for a few weeks or a few months doesn’t mean that it’s something you need to be leaning that heavily into. Yeah. Particularly if it’s not something that you really understand, that you’re passionate about, that you have a way of going about monetizing it.

Just saying it and, and including it in your, your marketing materials, because everybody’s using that term because everybody today claims AI. And they’ve been doing this for, I mean, even before, you know, we had chat GPT out there, you know, what, a year and a half ago or so people were still, they, they sprinkled AI into everything and software companies love to say, we use AI for this.

No, you don’t. Now, today people actually are using at least generative AI for a lot of things legitimately in their, their products and services and that kind of stuff, but even still. It’s a stretch. And so don’t stretch on these things. Lean into what you actually know, where your actual expertise is, where you can actually produce results.

Because if you just do it because of the marketing ability of it, you’re going to be caught out soon enough by your clients and prospects. And that’s not a comfortable place to be.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I mean, go back to what I said earlier, which is clients hire agencies because they’re experts at something and it’s going to make their lives easier.

So if you are an expert at it, then by all means, go all in. If it’s something that you’re interested in and want to become an expert, by all means, do that, but you have to do it on your own time, on your own dime. And I like to use our, my agency as the guinea pig, so figure out what works for us first. And then be able to say, you know, three or four years from now, we can help you do this.

And these are the kinds of results we’ve seen. And it, and it’s because we’ve been able to use it, us as a case, my own business as a case study. So by all means, become an expert, but you can’t say that you’re an expert in something if you’re just starting out.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. And, and, and so this is, this is a good place to also remind you that as you’re thinking about all of these things, you don’t need to go conquer the world all at once.

And so if you’re worried about your, your current focus, whether that’s the service set or the industry that you’re serving, also remind yourself, how many new clients do you really need over the next six or 12 months in order to be successful? And so as you think about that, what you might do is you might have a long term plan for a pivot, but you don’t necessarily need to, to do a dramatic pivot today.

That’s right. You can certainly look on the horizon and say, you know, we really need to be focused more on AI for the future. And so we’re going to, to test it on ourselves. We’re going to test, you know, we’re going to see how we can integrate it more. But for today, I don’t really need to have that pivot.

That’s my long term pivot. Near term, maybe there’s more minor modifications that I can make. In who I’m targeting or what I’m doing in order to achieve the results I’m looking for.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And I will, I will say this, leave you with this one piece of advice. They always say that it takes 10 years to have quote unquote overnight success.

And we launched the PESO model in 2014 in Spin Sucks the Book. And it has literally taken 10 years. So, you have to think about it from that perspective. If I’m going to be an expert in something, if I’m going to quote, have overnight success in a new industry, if I’m going to have overnight success with a, a new service, it’s going to take some time and you have to plan for that.

So, you’re not just going to go out and, you know, all of a sudden everybody goes, Oh my gosh, this is amazing. And where did you come from? Because that’s just not how it works. Plan for it. Start your pivot now because it could take a good decade before you get to where you want to be.

Chip Griffin: There’s, there’s no get rich quick scheme out there, no matter how many YouTube videos you watch or, or business books that you buy that tell you here’s the secret to making, you know, 10 million as an agency owner.

It’s, it’s slow, methodical, process driven work that brings you real success.

Gini Dietrich: That’s exactly right.

Chip Griffin: So with that, we’re going to pivot to the end of this show.

Gini Dietrich: Badump bump.

Chip Griffin: I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

In this episode, Chip and Gini dive into the topic of agencies doing subcontracted work for other agencies.

Both share their personal experiences of starting and growing their businesses through such work. They discuss the advantages, such as faster decision-making processes and the opportunity to work with big clients without direct procurement hassles.

However, they also highlight significant risks like delayed payments, the potential for relationship conflicts, and the importance of clear contractual agreements. The hosts stress the need for transparency, proper onboarding processes, and clear communication channels to mitigate these challenges.

Key takeaways

• Chip Griffin: “It can be a good way to get started and to continue to grow, but you do have to think about it because the things that make it easy to get in are also some of the things that can also create some pitfalls for you.”
• Gini Dietrich: “It used to be that you would hire a contractor and white label them and have them work under your umbrella. Clients don’t care anymore, they just want the work done and they want to know that it’s being done well.”
• Chip Griffin: “Treat a larger agency with the same scrutiny that you would with any other client. Make sure that it’s a good fit and that you understand what the terms are and that you don’t do work before there’s an agreement signed.”
• Gini Dietrich: “There are some things you can negotiate, especially at the beginning of the relationship when you have leverage.”

Related

• Payment terms for agency subcontractors

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, we’re recording this just after the start of the new year, and I just, I don’t have a cutesy, fun, entertaining, awful, whatever you want to call it, opening, no, no. So we’re just going to, we’re just going to dive right into the topic, which is the idea of agencies doing work for other agencies.

And this is something that, that I know you’ve done, I’ve done it as well. And a lot of agencies, particularly as they’re getting started as they’re growing, end up doing subcontracted work for larger agencies or sometimes even similarly sized agencies that just, you know, need some excess capacity or the skills that you have to offer.

And I think there are, there are certainly some upsides to this, but there are some risks that go along with it as well. And so I think this would be a good topic for us to use to kick off the year, even though it’s the second episode people will hear in the new year, it’s the first one we’re recording.

Gini Dietrich: This is the first one we’re recording of the new year. You know, it’s, it’s interesting to think about this because that’s like, this is actually how I started my business. I was freelancing. I had quit my agency job and I was freelancing just to get through my wedding and get my, my then fiance moved to Chicago, like all this life change.

 And so I was doing work for other agencies, through other agencies on some of the bigger clients that I was accustomed to working with. And that’s how I built the firm. Like it was. I, the big agencies here in Chicago, I’d built such great relationships with people that worked there that they would say, Oh, well, this half a million dollar business is too small for us.

You should go talk to Armand Dietrich. Or this 250, 000 potential client new business is too small for us. You should go talk to Armand Dietrich. And they would send business to us pretty consistently. And that’s how I built the firm. You know, that, that died down after the Great Recession a little bit.

And then when we started to get a little bit bigger and they started to go, Oh, wait a sec. Maybe, maybe you could be seen as competition in, in, in some cases. But I, I probably spent three or four years just working through other agencies, in that, that way so that they, they were sort of the lead agency, but we were doing all of the work.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, I, I have a similar story when I first got started. I would say at least 50 percent of my business was subcontract work for larger agencies. I, I had a bit more of a mix of, of direct work, at the time, but you know, it still was an important piece of the business. And frankly, even as I grew, it still was a piece of the business because there were always larger agencies out there that I had relationships with and I had specialized skill sets or team members who could do certain things that were beneficial.

So it can be a good way to get started and it can be a good way to continue to grow, but you do have to think about it because the things that make it easy to get in are also some of the things that can also create some pitfalls for you, right? It’s easier to get in because you know their world.

A lot of times it’s an agency that maybe you had a relationship with before. You kind of know how they work. They know you. And so it tends to be a quicker, decision making process than it is for an ultimate end client that you’re going to work for. Because the agency that’s hiring you usually has a specific need and it tends to be pretty urgent. Because we’re in the agency world ourselves and we know that we don’t often have the resources at hand.

And so when we need it, we need it yesterday. And so that’s really appealing if you’re a small agency and looking for additional work.

Yeah.

Gini Dietrich: And I also think there’s, you know, you, you think about it from the perspective of large companies, most large companies don’t typically hire contractors, freelancers, or boutique agencies.

And there’s the idea that nobody ever got fired for hiring a big PR firm or a big ad agency, right? But they would get fired if they took a risk on a smaller one. And so there’s something to be said for continuing to, to sort of learn the ropes of running your own agency and processes and onboarding and all those kinds of things that you have to learn, hiring, hiring the right people, making sure that they’re the right fit, all those kinds of things that you have to learn as you’re building your agency. But doing it in sort of a low risk way where you’re getting a really good consistent revenue from a larger agency and still being able to work with those big companies that you probably wouldn’t get to work with otherwise.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And it, I mean, it, it really makes that process a lot easier because you don’t have to go through procurement. You don’t have to deal with all of the headaches.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: That come along with working directly for a large company, who in most cases won’t hire you directly anyway. In part because they know all of that bureaucratic stuff is going to weigh you down.

So it does open those doors. I think, you know, one of the challenges when you are taking on this subcontract work, particularly if it’s for a large client at the end of the line there, the large clients tend to abuse their own agencies. They pay them slow and those kinds of things. And so that trickles down to you.

And so most of the agencies that subcontract with you, they’re going to want to wait to get paid by the client before they pay you. And so if the, the big client is taking 90 days to pay them or more. You’re then going to be probably at least 120 days before you start seeing money. So it is, it is something that you need to go into at the very least with your eyes open that this is something that may happen and you need to get clarification over what those payment terms are. Because I’ve seen many times a small agency goes in and they don’t realize that that, that the larger agency is going to sit on payment until they get paid.

And, you know, we’ve had episodes where we’ve talked about how other agencies shouldn’t do this to, to smaller agencies, but they do. Some of the absolute worst clients that I’ve ever worked with in my career were other agencies, large agencies who basically inherit the bad practices of their clients and then magnify them.

And that’s just wrong. But it’s reality. And so if you’re going to go down this path of doing subcontract work, you need to understand that risk and either plan for it or say no, because you’re not willing to accept that.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I think there are some things you can do in those instances, too, and I know that this is not what this episode is about, so I’ll just make this really quick note, but there are some things you can do, especially at the beginning of the relationship when you have leverage. And you can negotiate some of that stuff for sure.

You know, we have, we had a situation last year where the, a client, an agency that we’re working through for a really large client, wanted to pay us in six months. And I was like, no, no, no, like if you want to work with us, that’s absolutely not going to work. And so we figured out a way, it still ended up being 60 days, but 60 days is better than six months.

Still not my ideal, but. You know, if, if I had gone in, we’d still be working for free right now.

Chip Griffin: Right. Right.

Gini Dietrich: And it’s not happening. It’s, you can’t, you can’t run an agency like that. You can’t run a business like that.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And I, I think it’s important to make sure that you’re asking these questions up front so that you understand what the relationship is going to be, because it’s really easy when you’ve got, you know, the, that, you know, mid sized or larger agency calling you up and saying, Hey, we need help.

We need to start yesterday. And you get excited because you’re going to be doing work for a big logo client and it’s kind of fun and it’s more money in the door, which is good. And so you just kind of jump in and then you start asking questions after the fact, because maybe you don’t vet another agency in the same way that you would an end client.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, you absolutely need to.

Chip Griffin: You absolutely need to because they are your client. While there is someone downstream, your client is that agency. And so you need to treat it with the same scrutiny that you would with any other client and make sure that it’s a good fit and that you understand what the terms are and that you don’t do work before there’s an agreement signed.

Because this is another. Agencies are very abusive when it comes to this. They’ll say, well, we’ll take care of the paperwork. Let’s just, can you just hop on a couple of calls this week and we’ll get this squared away. Don’t do it.

Gini Dietrich: No, the answer is no.

Chip Griffin: You need to go through the same process because as exciting as it is, you can get yourself into a world of trouble. Because it becomes a lot harder to extract yourself after you’ve already been on a few calls.

Particularly if those calls are with the end client.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you have, you have to go, that’s a really great point. You have to go through the same onboarding, the same contracting, the same everything, you know, we, this, this one I mentioned before, they wanted to send us their contract and I was like, nope, nope.

We’re going to treat you just like we would our clients, even though the end client is your client and you are our client. So we, we did it. We did the same process and we were able to, like I said, at the beginning of the relationship is when you have the leverage. So you can’t do it, you know, two months from now or six months from now.

You have to do it at the very beginning of the relationship.

Chip Griffin: And I think it’s important to, you know, just as you’re trying to get expectations squared away on things like payment terms. You need to get expectations squared away on other important details, particularly communications. Because sometimes when you subcontract with another agency, they want to have you with a seat at the table communicating directly with the client.

It’s fully transparent. Other times they want you more behind the scenes so that they own the relationship. They’re protective of it. They don’t want you. I mean, if we think about agencies and their own small agencies and their own subcontractors, it’s the same thing. Sometimes you allow the contractor into the meeting.

Sometimes you want to keep them behind the scenes and, and own the relationship yourself. You need to understand what the expectations are here because it may change how you go about things. And I can tell you, it is really difficult to play that game of telephone where the client is talking to agency A that then talks to agency B.

If you’re agency B, you’re not hearing the complete message. You’re not able to convey the complete message back. It slows things down. It can lead to misunderstandings. It can lead to hurt feelings, all sorts of things. So you really, I would encourage you to try to avoid you know, being that hidden white label behind the scenes solution in most cases. Not every case, there’s there are instances where the work you’re doing is delineated enough that it’s fine. But a lot of times, if you don’t have that kind of direct contact with the client, it’s going to make your job a whole lot more difficult, and at a minimum, you need to figure out how to compensate yourself fairly for that, set the right goals and expectations with the agency so that you’re not, nobody is surprised six months down the line.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I also think there is some risk in that because, from your perspective, if you are white labeled under the agency and you have direct client contact, I have a client who’s going through this right now, the client might prefer you. Over the agency or some of the people they’re working with at the, the larger agency, and that can create some pretty big issues for you.

It’s nice. It’s a nice ego boost, but it can create some real issues for you with your client, which is the larger agency. And then on the agency side, like if I had a subcontractor or a freelancer that had a better relationship with the client than, than we did, that’s also a problem. So. There, you have to kind of look at all of this and understand, you know, the, the pros and cons, the risks and, and rewards, and it’s a great way to, to build your business for sure, but it doesn’t come without some risk.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and, and the one thing I’d be really careful of is the hybrid, where you’re half in, you’re half out, you’re sort of half pregnant. Doesn’t work. Don’t do it.

Right. If, if you can’t be in a situation where you’re having direct contact with the end client, but you’re pretending to be part of the agency that’s in the middle.

It gets really, really complicated, really fast to do it that way. If they want you to use, you know, one of the large agency email addresses or something like that, fine, but make sure that you’re, you’re still communicating to everybody that you’re doing this in partnership with them or something. We’re just such close partners.

We have an email address, but don’t try to be in a situation or don’t put yourself in a situation where you are being perceived as an employee of that agency when you’re not. Because that, I guarantee you at some point, there’s going to be a misunderstanding. There’s going to be something where the, the client feels like, well, they, they’ve asked an employee of this agency to do something and it didn’t.

Because your boundaries are different and that needs to be clear to everybody. So to be really, really careful, you can either be fully behind the scenes and only dealing with that agency in the middle, or you can be fully in contact with the client and they know that you are a partner agency or something like that, but that, that, that straddle, that’s, that is where you run the highest risk of problems.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And you know, I would think of, I would really think of this through because I think since the pandemic, we’ve been, we’ve, the, the business world has become more accommodating and more, what’s the word I want, like, accepting of contractors, of remote employees, of hybrid relationships, like, they, we’ve all become more accepting of that.

And it used to be that you would have to hire a contractor and white label them and have them work under your umbrella. So if you’re working with a larger agency, you would work under their umbrella. We haven’t, that’s not the case anymore. Like, I don’t think anybody cares anymore. Clients just want the work done and they want to know that it’s being done well.

They don’t care if it’s, you know, with a group of subcontractors or another agency, or, you know, like we don’t have any web experience. So I have a preferred web vendor that we bring into almost every client. They don’t care that it’s not our, agency, they just care that it’s, that’s it’s not our employees.

They just care that their websites are being built and on time and all of that. They don’t have to worry about it. Right. So I think it’s less today needed that you have to white label and more and so you have better, you have more leverage and a better opportunity to say, let’s go in as partners versus us working underneath your umbrella.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it, it, it’s as you say, nobody really cares, they don’t care where you work, they don’t care who you work for as long as you’re getting the work done for them that they’re paying for. And that is, that is generally speaking the benchmark that, I mean, everybody in or outside the agency world is using today.

And so you should leverage that to your advantage and try to structure it in such a way where you can have the direct transparent contact because that’s in most cases going to work out better for everyone involved.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely.

Chip Griffin: Now, one thing you had touched on earlier, though, when you do have that is that that does run the risk that the client may like you better.

And so one of the things that you absolutely need to do if you’re subcontracting with another agency is be really clear about what your obligations are. And what your restrictions are on that sort of thing. In other words, typically if, if another agency is subcontracting with you, they ought to be insisting upon language in the contract with you that says that you cannot work for them directly without their pre approval.

And if you were subcontracting, you would want the same sort of protection. So, so I wouldn’t, you know, look askance if, if they’re asking for that sort of protection, but you need to understand what are the rules that are in place. But even once you understand what the, the obligations are. You still need to also understand how is it going to be perceived?

So let’s say you don’t have that kind of restriction in place and the client comes to you and says, we want to work with you directly. Be aware that if you agree to do that, even if you are legally permitted to do it, you’re basically burning that bridge with the other agency.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely.

Chip Griffin: Do you really want to do that.

I would encourage you in most of those cases, you probably want to talk to the larger agency and say, Hey, look, I got this approach. Can we work something out? Can I pay a referral fee to you or something like that so that we keep you whole? Is there something we can do? But it’s not just the direct relationship with that client, too.

You need to, to understand, is this agency expecting that you’re not going to compete with them anywhere? Again, It may not be in the actual letter of the agreement that you have, but if you go out and you are now, you know, essentially bidding against this agency on another project with another client, it has nothing to do at all with the work that you’re doing with them, they’re probably not going to react positively to that if they find out.

Gini Dietrich: Probably not. Probably not.

Chip Griffin: You, you need to think those things through carefully as well, because they will perceive it very differently than an end client who’s really only going to compare care typically about direct competitors or, or things like that. Whereas the agency, they’re going to care about you touching anything that they either have a client in or that they’re touching on or that they’re bidding on or anything like that.

And so it does create particularly the, the closer the two of you are in the kinds of clients that you’re going after, it can be a problem. And so that’s, that happens more when you have small to mid sized agencies subcontracting. If they’re mid to large, you’re probably fishing in different ponds anyway.

So that’s probably not something that’s as big a deal. But you still need to be aware of it and understand again, what your legal obligations are, but also what the perception might be.

Gini Dietrich: And I think, you know, in the case of my, my clients specifically, they, they do something very different than what the agency does.

So it’s sort of like my web firm relationship, right? And a client has come to them and said to my client and said, Hey, we’d rather not pay you through the agency. We’d rather work with you directly. And my client’s like, Ayeee, which from the client’s perspective is probably the right thing to do because they’re probably going to save money by working with the two agencies.

Maybe. But then they’ll have to manage two agencies. So I think there is some, you know, definitely having the conversation with your direct client, which would be the agency in this case, and say, Hey, they’ve approached me on this. I know we don’t do the same kinds of work. What do you think is the right approach?

And in some cases, the agency owner may be like, Okay, That’s fine with me. That means I don’t have to manage you.

Chip Griffin: And look, I mean, at the end of the day, if there’s going to be an issue, I’d rather it be because I brought it up proactively and we can address it head on. I’m not, when it’s these kinds of relationships, I’m not a fan of ask forgiveness rather than permission.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: And there are times and places where ask forgiveness, not permission.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: When you’re doing subcontract work and you’re threatening that relationship, most of the time, that is not something that I would handle in that way. Particularly if you think there’s the possibility of doing future business with that agency. Because now you’ve not only put at risk your current work, but also potential future work and revenue.

So get it out of the way, come to them proactively, say, here’s, here’s the situation that’s developing. Just want to make sure you’re cool with that. Or at the very start of the relationship, say, Hey, you know, I, I typically do these kinds of projects. I know it may touch a little bit on what you, how do you want to handle those things in the future?

Or just tell them how you plan to handle it, but at least get it addressed up front and don’t wait for the issue to explode in your face. And then you’re like, what do I do now?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think it’s, there are, like I said, there are risks and rewards, there are pros and cons to this kind of relationship. It is definitely how I built my agency.

So I, I am a big fan of doing it that way, if you can find the right relationships. But understand that that is your client, they need, you need to go through the same process that you would if it was a, you know, a typical, I will put in quotes, typical client. But, and understand what the pros and cons are before you go into that relationship.

Chip Griffin: So lots of opportunities to work with other agencies, there’s plenty of upside, but you’d also need to make sure that you’re aware of the potential pitfalls and protect yourself against them.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely.

Chip Griffin: So with that, that will bring us to an end of this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

In this episode, Chip and Gini tackle the challenges of staffing, particularly in response to landing a large contract.

They discuss a Reddit user’s question about managing a $2 million account and emphasize the importance of involving key team members throughout the business development process, rather than afterward.

The hosts advocate for a tiered approach to staffing, employing a mix of high, medium, and low experience levels, and leveraging contractors to manage workload peaks. They also highlight the risks of rapid, large-scale hiring and suggest regular networking and preemptive interviewing to maintain a robust pipeline of candidates.

Key takeaways

• Chip Griffin: “I know it’s appealing, but you’re going to generally be in a better position if you are incrementally growing as opposed to doubling in revenue overnight off of one contract.”
• Gini Dietrich: “We hire contractors pretty consistently. And part of the reason I do that is to figure out if they’d be great full time employees.”
• Chip Griffin: “On these large projects, if you have very senior talent doing very low level work, it really upsets your margins. And frankly, it’s demoralizing to those team members because they probably don’t want to be doing those things.”
• Gini Dietrich: “You’re putting your team way behind by not bringing them through the process. So I would say on both the client and the agency side, it’s a really big disadvantage not to involve your team from the start.”

Related

• Planning for agency growth
• Should your agency hire contractors or employees?

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I think we got to figure out how we’re going to staff this show. I mean, you know, it’s just, I’m really struggling with how we should set it up appropriately.

Gini Dietrich: Sure. We have Jen. She’s awesome.

Chip Griffin: She is.

Gini Dietrich: She needs some help, maybe.

Chip Griffin: Not even going there.

Gini Dietrich: Let’s get her an assistant.

Chip Griffin: Oh, yeah, that, that would really help the economics of this show. Let’s see.

Zero revenue times one minus, no, no, still not a good idea. So, alas, we will be talking about staffing today and how to staff accounts appropriately, but not this account, not this podcast.

Gini Dietrich: No. So I was looking for content topic ideas and I went to Reddit. I would just like to say that I, Gini Dietrich, was on Reddit looking for ideas.

Chip Griffin: Voluntarily.

Gini Dietrich: Voluntarily.

Chip Griffin: You were not under duress. I did not say,

Gini Dietrich: Nobody had to force me.

Chip Griffin: You should go there and look. You did it on your own.

Nope.

Gini Dietrich: I did it all by myself. And I didn’t get scared. And I didn’t get worried, and I actually made it out alive. And I found a couple of good topic ideas. So one that I found was how to properly staff accounts. And this is actually really interesting because the person said they, she, they, I don’t know if it’s a he or she, sorry.

They are an account manager. And they said, too often we sell a contract and then scramble to allocate resources fast enough to meet the client’s expectations. Right, we’ve all experienced this. As an account director, I see this play out first hand with demanding clients and it’s exhausting. Yes. And they say, now we have a new opportunity to generate 2 million in annual revenue with one large company.

Awesome. Leadership has approached me to be the primary relationship manager for this account and while I’m confident I can handle it, it’s only possible with the right team in place. The work includes, and then they list all of the work that’s included, which is a lot. And they’re trying to figure out how to properly staff this, not only to do what’s best for the client, but to sell it into the leadership of the agency to say, I can do this, but this is the team I’m going to need to resource to be able to do it.

And so that is the question, is how do we properly staff for these things? If you win a big contract like this and you don’t have the current team to be able to resource it, what are you going to do? And so that is our topic for today. Thank you, Reddit.

Chip Griffin: Thank you, Reddit. And there is all sorts of things to chew on here.

Yeah. I think I’d like to start with this individual being approached to be the relationship manager, apparently after the business has been won. Right. And so to me, there’s where the agency has made its first mistake because whoever is going to be managing the relationship ought to be, and really must be, involved throughout the business development process.

Because you don’t want to be in a situation, no matter how big your agency is, and I suspect that from what I’m reading here, that this is, you know, not a small agency. At least if you’re taking on a 2 million contract, I would hope that you are not a very small agency, which we’ll, we’ll touch on as well.

So, if you’re going to be the relationship manager, you need to have been involved from the get go. And so my first advice is turn back the clock and make sure that whoever is running the account is involved so that they can understand they can be on the same page with the prospect. The expectations are aligned. But also that individual now has the time to start thinking in advance about how it might be staffed and what resources might be needed.

Because honestly, if you’re only trying to figure this out after the business has been won, it’s a much bigger challenge. And it doesn’t mean that we don’t have those problems, but you need to have at least a notebook sketch of what your plan is before you sign the contract.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I, you know, one of the things that I’ve learned over the years is that when, I always saw it as my job to be the rainmaker and the closer and all that kind of stuff.

So I would go to the meetings and we would have the conversations and we, I would get all of the input, and I would build the relationship. And then I would say, okay, well, so and so is going to be your day to day. Well, a couple of things. Number one, on the client side, they’re expecting me at this point because I’ve been the one through the whole process.

Right. And so then they’re disappointed, or maybe even will say, well, no, we’re not going to do this if it’s not you. So I didn’t have the opportunity to say, this is what it costs to have me. And this is what it costs to have my team that you’ve met. Right. So I can up, price up my services. And then on the agency side, the person that you’re putting in charge or the team that you’re putting in charge is already behind the eight ball because they don’t, they don’t know what you’re doing.

They don’t know what conversations have been had. They don’t know what you’ve promised. I had a boss back in my agency days when I was working for somebody, who was so smart. But we would sit in new business meetings and he would promise the earth, the moon, the stars, rainbows and everything. And I would literally kick him under the table when he would say things because he was promising things we knew we couldn’t, I knew we couldn’t deliver.

Or that we couldn’t do it in the amount of time or for what he was, the cost, right? So, not to say that I do that or that other agency owners do that, but you’re missing the opportunity for your team to go, well, wait a second, what about this? And how do we handle this? And how are we going to resource this?

So you’re get, you’re putting them way behind by not bringing them through the process. So I would say on both sides, it’s a really big disadvantage.

Chip Griffin: Well, you’re putting them way behind and you’re also, it’s one of the reasons why agencies end up pricing incorrectly. Because you haven’t involved the members of your team who are going to be executing on the work.

So you’re sitting there using your own estimates on the amount of time it’s going to take and the amount of people. Yes. And if you start involving your team, who is actually going to be involved early on, they can tell you this is going to take this much time. They can help you with deadlines and say, well, no, that’s not realistic.

And look, you can push back because it’s absolutely true that employees will typically overestimate the amount of time that something’s going to take and overestimate the deadlines to protect themselves, right? That, it’s just, it’s human nature. So, so I’ve got no problem with you pushing back, but it should be an internal dialogue that you’re having with them before the deal is done, before the price is set, so that you can figure those things out and hash out those differences then.

Because that also helps them have buy in to the final solution. And if you are then in a position where you’re coming in, they’ve never heard anything about this client until you meet with them and you say, okay, here’s what we’re doing. Here’s what we’ve promised. Here’s the deadline. They’re going to push back immediately.

So you now have a problem with the client. You’ve got a problem internally. You’re, you’re creating so many problems by not involving people early on in the process.

Gini Dietrich: And when they’re sitting in the meetings with you and going through the process, they’re hearing the same things that you do. So you don’t have to take the time to educate them and digitize your notes and ensure that they’re, they are on the same page, like all of that stuff.

All that stuff happens naturally because they’ve been in the meetings too. So it saves you time and angst and frustration as well by having them in the meetings.

Chip Griffin: And, and I think, you know, one of the things that, I mean, let’s assume that you have involved your team. So we, you know, we’ve now cleared that hurdle and, and unlike in this situation, you’re not actually getting it dumped on you after the contract is signed, you’ve actually been thinking about it, you do need to, particularly on these large projects, you need to be thinking about how you’re going to staff it appropriately.

When you’re very small and you’ve only got one person on an account, you kind of, you, you’re stuck with what you’ve got, but when you start dealing with these larger projects where there are multiple team members, you need to have a blend of high, medium, and low experience levels, cost levels, all that kind of thing.

Because on these large projects, if you have very senior talent doing very low level work, it really upsets your margins. And frankly, it’s demoralizing to those team members because they probably don’t want to be doing those things. That’s not, that’s not what they expect after 10, 20 years of experience or more.

And so you want to be thinking about how do you blend these things correctly and not just throw bodies at it. Not say, well, you know, in order to maintain this level, we always need to have our top people in the room. Cause I’ve been on large client accounts where you put like 15 people in the room for every client meeting. And it can get really, and if you look around the room and you say, Here’s what the cost is of this meeting.

It can blow your mind at times. And so you really need to think about how you’re staffing it appropriately to get the client what they expect, but also doing it within your budget. And you’ve got to keep track of that over time so that you don’t just keep throwing these really senior bodies into a really low level.

Gini Dietrich: Which goes to something that we talk about all the time, which is track your time, so that you know exactly how much it costs. And to your point earlier, as agency owners, we tend to underestimate how much time something will take and how much it will cost. And our team tends to overestimate how much time it will take.

So if you track your time, you, you solve all of those issues. You know exactly how much time it takes. You know exactly how much it costs. You know exactly how much it costs to have all those people in the room. And so I think when we’re saying, you know, don’t just, just dump a new client on a relationship manager or account director, it doesn’t mean you have to have 10 people in the room that are going to service the account, but you do have to have the main point of contact.

You do have to have their day to day contact. So it doesn’t cost you as much to have that person in the room and yourself in the room as it would to have eight or 10 people in the room. So think about it from those perspectives as well.

Chip Griffin: Right. And I, I think whoever you are designating as that day to day manager, you have to empower them.

Yes. And so you need to be, you need to, you know, give them some general bounds and you need to talk with them about what the budget for the project is, but you need to rely on them to tell you what resources they need. Absolutely have a discussion around it and make sure that you’re on board with it, but you can’t be in a position where you’re telling them exactly what they’re going to get and how it’s going to be done.

Because that makes it harder for them to do their jobs. And frankly, it makes them less likely to go along with the decisions because they’ll feel like it’s just being dictated to them from above. You really want to have that kind of collaborative work with your team members and really let them feel like they have a say in what’s going to happen with their own day to day.

Gini Dietrich: Which I think in this, this Reddit example is a good example of that. So first they, it sounds like they didn’t do the right thing in inviting this person to the pitch and going through that process, but they have done the right thing in letting this person dictate this is what we need. These are the resources.

This is the team I’m going to to build. Now whether or not they said to this person, tell us what you need, or this person is just saying, I’m gonna go meet with them and this is what we’re what I’m gonna do. That’s it. I don’t know. But this person is at least taking the step to say, okay, I’m gonna think this through.

If I’m gonna be this, the relationship manager on this huge account. Here are the things I think I need, and going to leadership to sell that in.

Chip Griffin: Well, and that’s a good indicator that this individual may be actually well positioned to do this kind of work because whether they’ve been asked to or not, they’re thinking about these questions and, and, you know, these issues that need to be tackled.

And so if you’re in a position where you’re being asked to do these things, maybe you’re an employee listening to us. Or maybe you’re just, you’re the agency owner, but you’re thinking about the project work that you’re doing on behalf of a client. Coming to the table with clear questions and clear ideas is really helpful in demonstrating that you’re ready for the task ahead of you.

And it also helps you to make sure that you are more likely to succeed because you’re not going into that just, you know, kind of wandering around aimless saying, Oh my God, what’s going to happen next? I mean, Reddit may or may not be the best place to come and get this advice, but at least they’re looking for advice from somewhere.

Gini Dietrich: Right. Although I will say some of the advice they got is actually not bad. You know, sometimes we read these and we’re like, Oh no! But some, some of the advice that they got was, is not too, too bad. In fact, some, one person even said, so here’s what you should think about if leadership pushes back. Because, you know, as agency leaders, we may say, Oh, you, we need, you say you need to hire 10 people to resource this.

Good luck, Friend. So the person, I think, has to be prepared for that. And as an agency leader, you have to be, be prepared to listen and to understand, you know, honestly, truly, if, if somebody came to you and said, we’re going to need eight to 10 people to, to service this account for 2 million bucks, that’s probably accurate.

But are you prepared to hire eight to 10 more people and onboard them quickly? And right. So there, I think you have to think about those things too. Do you have a pipeline full of candidates that you could rely on? Do you have a bench full of contractors that you could rely on? Like, those are things that you have to think about as you grow your business, no matter what.

You know, I think one of the things my husband does really, really well is he’s constantly interviewing people. Constantly. And, and he’s really honest with them to say, hey, we don’t have a position right now, but I like to keep my pipeline full of really smart candidates. And he does this, I bet he interviews five to ten people a week.

And he’s just constantly, you know, and then he’ll say, okay, this person would be great for this. I don’t, we didn’t really like that person, but he like has a pipeline full of candidates. That when something happens big, they’re ready to go. And I think that’s a really good lesson for all of us. You don’t have to interview just when you’re hiring.

You can, you know, find contractors that you have on the bench that you can pull in when you need something. You can find candidates who… and you may lose out on them because they found another job, but you still have built that relationship and started to say, okay, these are the types of strengths and weaknesses that I’m looking for.

And this person fit that really well. So keep those pipelines full, both contractors and potential employees, because that’s going to help you in situations like this as well.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, that’s, it’s helpful if you, if you’re at a size that you’re happy with and you’re not really looking to grow dramatically, you’re just looking to, to try to keep it, you know, stable.

Yep. But it’s even more important if you are looking to grow. You absolutely have to be in there and, and trying to find these candidates for potential jobs that you don’t have yet. One thing I will say in this particular case is, you know, when, when you’re looking at a 2 million contract, that’s very different depending on what your current size is.

So if it’s a 2 million contract and you’re a three to 5 million agency versus a 2 million contract and you’re a 200 million agency. And obviously we don’t have that information from this particular question, but if it is something where it is the largest contract your agency has ever had, or it is substantially larger than anything you currently have, first of all, you need to be very careful about taking on that kind of business because it looks really attractive.

It can be really exciting, but if you don’t have the experience in managing it, and if it’s going to cause you to have to do a lot of hiring all at once, that can be a real problem and you can damage your reputation by taking on business that looks really good because of all the commas in it. But it’s, it’s not very good at the end of the day because you’re not able to deliver on the expectations that the client has.

So make sure that you’re right sizing those things. And if it is a big lift for you, make sure in that case that you have a much clearer plan about how you’re going to get things done. And it’s probably a tiered plan. It’s probably, I’m going to use contractors in the short term. They’ll help with X, Y, and Z, and that’ll kind of get us over the first 90 days.

And then we can start bringing people on from that point. Because you’re not going to be able to, I mean, even if you’ve got a good pipeline, you’re not bringing people on tomorrow. You know, if employees take, even if you’ve got a great pipeline, like your husband does that, that hire is, is almost certainly not going to be able to start work tomorrow.

And so you, you need to have that kind of a lead time. And even if they could start tomorrow, you’re not going to throw them or you shouldn’t throw them right into, you know, your largest client account right off the bat.

Gini Dietrich: No, absolutely not.

Chip Griffin: You need to have an opportunity to work with them and get them up to speed and acclimated and all that kind of thing.

So you’re talking at a minimum weeks and more likely months before someone is really a contributor to a project. And so you need to be thinking about those things. And triaging as best you can the work that needs to be done today versus what you can accomplish three months from now.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I really like that tiered approach because I think you can think about it instead of saying, okay, well, it’s a 2 million account.

I’m going to divide that by 12, and we’re going to do that amount of work every month. Like, you don’t have to think about it that way. A few weeks ago, we talked about VIP breakout sessions where you might charge, let’s say you charge 30, 000 for something like that. So you do that piece of it first and get that income in the door, but you can do it with your existing team.

And then you, that gives you, you know, 30 or 45 days to find the right people because now you’re building the actual plan. You know, what kind of skillsets you’re going to need, what kind of skillset you have already. that you can bring in and you, you can, it gives you time to sort of move things around and figure out.

So I really like the tiered plan approach of you saying, okay, here’s phase one and this is what the deliverable is. Phase two is this, phase three is this and so on so that you can start to build the team appropriately and onboard appropriately so that you have the time to get the, your new people to the point that they can go on to your largest account.

Chip Griffin: And I think you always want to be careful about rapid hiring of a large number of people. And the smaller you are, the smaller that number needs to be in order to define it as large.

Gini Dietrich: Sounds terrible.

Chip Griffin: In general. I don’t like you hiring more than one person at a time.

Gini Dietrich: At a time, right.

Chip Griffin: Because as, as I always say, as soon as you add that new person, it changes the dynamic of the entire team.

Yep. And so if you’re in a position where you’re bringing on two or three new people at once, or six or seven or eight people all at once. Then you, you’ve got a weird dynamic here, the odds of success for all of them goes down. You almost certainly will have some real flame outs in that group just because they don’t mesh with each other or you staffed wrong. Because I mean, look, we’re hiring people off of, you know, what, maybe two hours worth of conversations and a little bit of email.

We’re not hiring off of absolute knowledge over how they work with people, what their real skill set is. How long does it take them to execute on tasks? And so you could end up easily where you’re in a position where you’re, you’re overstaffed in one area and understaffed in another, because you guessed wrong about what their, their ability to bring talent to the table would be.

You don’t want to be there. You want to do this at a reasonable, rational pace, which again, is an argument for not trying to get these contracts that are wildly disproportionate to your current size. I know it’s appealing, but you’re going to generally be in a better position if you are incrementally growing as opposed to doubling in revenue overnight off of one contract.

Gini Dietrich: And one of the things I really like to do at that point is we hire contractors pretty consistently. And part of the reason I do that is to figure out if they’d be great full time employees. So, you know, we may hire somebody because we need expertise in content development. And I’ll bring in three or four freelancers to do that work just to see what their strengths are, how they work, how they communicate, whether or not they get along with the rest of the team.

It’s a good sort of runway for me to understand is this person, would this person be a great full time hire or not? And in some cases the answer is no. Some cases they’re going to be a great freelancer forever. And in some cases it’s like, yeah, let’s snap, snap this person up as fast as we can because they’re a great fit.

They’re a great culture fit. They do all the things that we need them to do without having to train them and let’s, let’s snatch them up as, as fast as we can. In some cases, they may want to continue freelancing. And so that’s a different conversation, right? But I do like to keep my contractor base full from, from that perspective, because you can try people out and say, okay, does this fit our culture?

Does this fit our team? And it doesn’t cost you the same as it would if they, if you hire them and they don’t work out.

Chip Griffin: I think that’s a great way to end this episode. We’ve solved all of your staffing problems, our staffing problems. It’s also

Gini Dietrich: I still have stabbing problems, but

Chip Griffin: Well, we’re not going to solve that on this episode, so maybe next episode, who knows?

Gini Dietrich: Who knows?

Chip Griffin: With that, that will draw to an end this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast.

I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the findings from the SAGA quarterly survey of small agency owners. They cover insights on optimism in business outlook despite recent challenges, with a focus on talent-related issues such as compensation, retention, and recruiting.

They delve into some surprising statistics, such as one in five agency owners not paying themselves regularly and over 30% having reduced headcount in the past year.

The conversation highlights the importance of agency owners paying themselves a fair salary, balancing employee compensation, and maintaining efficient business practices without overworking staff.

They also discuss the significance of flexible work arrangements and employee benefits in improving retention.

Key takeaways

• Chip Griffin: “I think just about every agency owner out there could go and get a six figure job. So why are you taking on all the risk and stress if you’re not compensating yourself for that risk and stress?”
• Gini Dietrich: “You should be paying yourself a living wage. And an employee should not be making more money than you do.”
• Chip Griffin: “Working overtime should be because something legitimately came up that was out of the ordinary, an emergency of some kind. It shouldn’t be the only way we can do this work profitably.”
• Gini Dietrich: “Reducing your pay as an owner while giving raises to your team is hurting you. It’s hurting your business. It’s hurting any ability to be able to sell in the next three to five years.”

Resources

• SAGA’s Q4 Small Agency Owner Survey finds continued optimism, reveals talent trends
• Richard Dawson on Family Feud “Survey says”

Related

• An honest conversation about agency owner compensation
• Ways you can compensate yourself as an agency owner
• The difference between agency owner compensation and profits
• When owners do work below their pay grade

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, as they say on Family Feud, survey says.

Gini Dietrich: Is that show still on? I think it is.

Chip Griffin: I believe it is. I believe it is because I see little reels that pop up in my Facebook and Instagram occasionally with funny moments, from it.

Gini Dietrich: Survey says.

Chip Griffin: Survey says. I don’t, I don’t know that they say survey says anymore, but.

Gini Dietrich: We just showed our age.

Chip Griffin: Yes. Okay. It is what it is. I mean, there’s probably been three or four hosts since.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: I don’t remember who that was, who did that, but anyway, very distinctive. In any case, we will stop making ourselves look and sound old.

And instead we will talk about the SAGA quarterly survey, because once again, we have talked with small agency owners to see what they’re thinking and what their outlook is for the next 12 months. And on top of that, we took a deep dive on talent questions. So compensation, retention, recruiting, those kinds of things, so that we have a little bit of an understanding of, of how they’re approaching the, the labor side of the equation in their businesses.

Because the more we learn about each other, the more useful that we can be, or the more productive we can be.

Gini Dietrich: And it’s super interesting. There’s a couple of things in here that are a little bit mind blowing that I think we need to talk about.

Chip Griffin: Yes, there are certainly some things in here. I mean, the overall outlook seems to be positive, although once again, very similar numbers to what we saw in Q3 in terms of overall satisfaction with their business and anticipation of revenue and profit increases in the coming 12 months.

Just as it was in Q3, I’m not entirely sure of why there is this optimism and this satisfaction.

It is certainly something that, I mean, look, there’s, I think there are potentially good things on the horizon. So there is, I’m not saying it’s an irrational optimism. At the same time, I suspect, and as we dig into some of these, the talent questions, we’ll see, that a lot of agencies cut back their head count over the last 12 months.

So in part, some of the optimism might be, we can’t get any worse, right? So it’s got to be better. It’s got to improve. And so that may be driving some of that optimism. But the overall satisfaction, the score was 6. 94 out of a, on a 10 point scale. So that’s, that’s not terrible. I mean, it’s not, it’s not overall excited, satisfaction with their businesses, but it’s not dissatisfaction either.

Gini Dietrich: But as you also point out that about 20 percent rate their satisfaction at five or below, which is some real concerns. But I thought it was really interesting because, only 1 percent expected to reduce their team size, which is a drop from 11 percent in quarter three. So that’s, that’s a good indication that maybe things are starting to stabilize a little bit.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I think, I think from a, from that perspective, I think that’s probably the, the, the best piece of data, that we saw there was that there was, there was no longer, because what we, what we commented on in Q3 was, you know, there’s optimism that, that revenue and profits are going to increase, but people are talking about holding steady on their headcount or even reducing.

And so, you know, that sort of, that was concerning because that suggests that they’re going to try to balance the books on the backs of the employees. The fact that, that there’s no longer an inclination to reduce at least, I mean, we’re not seeing people, you know, saying we expect to increase either, but the fact that they’ve moved off of decreasing headcount is certainly a good sign, I think, and something worth noting.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I totally agree. It, it is, there is some optimism. It is tempered by the fact that, while we’re not, we’re not going to reduce our staff size, we’re not necessarily going to increase it either. So there’s some optimism to increase revenue and profits a little bit. There’s some optimism in terms of not having to let people go, but there’s also, it’s tempered, I think, a little bit by saying, yeah, but we’re probably not going to be adding people either.

Chip Griffin: But I think the really interesting stuff comes when we start digging into some of these talent questions. Yes. And so, and, and, and the talent by the way, includes the owner. So we’ve got some things about owner comp that we, that we need to talk about here as, as well. But you know, one of the things that I think feeds into what we were talking about as far as the overall outlook is that one in three of small agencies have reduced their headcount in the past 12 months.

So. You know, when you, when you start to see they, you know, they’ve already been cutting numbers in substantial percentages, that suggests one of the potential reasons why they may not plan on reducing any further. And so, you know, that they may have weeded out the issues that, that they had from a cost perspective.

Maybe they’re improving their, their profit numbers, and so that’s, that’s causing them to feel like they’re in a better position. For the year ahead. So certainly it’s, it’s been a tough 12 months. There’s, there’s no doubt about it and longer than that really, but the, the survey looks particularly at the last 12 months.

And as, as we look at that, that I think informs some of what’s, what else is going on that’s even more troubling, particularly when we look at, at owner comp. Because one in five small agency owners doesn’t pay themselves regularly at all. They just take money out of profits as and when they can. And, what is it I think about, 39 percent, are, are paying themselves under a hundred thousand dollars a year.

Gini Dietrich: 39 percent are paying themselves less than a hundred grand. That’s not okay.

Chip Griffin: No, in, in fact, more agencies, I, I think I’m correct in saying this, or saying it correctly, more than half of agencies have at least one employee who’s making over a hundred thousand. Nope. Less than half pay themselves over a hundred thousand on a consistent basis.

Now that doesn’t mean that they may not be harvesting that out of profits, you know, by doing a big dump here or there, but you’ve got to be paying yourself consistently. And, and really, I think just about every agency owner out there could go and get a six figure job.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: I won’t say easily, but without a huge amount of difficulty.

And so why are you taking on all the risk and stress if you’re not compensating yourself for that risk and stress?

Gini Dietrich: Why, exactly, like, why are you doing this? I say this to, to my clients all the time. If you were to go get a job with your level of expertise, your number of years of experience, and what you, your skill that you offer to an organization, how much money do you think you could command?

And there’s usually some hemming and hawing, and I really push this, like, really and truly. What do you think? And if they can’t give me an answer, I do a screen share and we pull up job descriptions and we look to see if you took this job, here’s the range. And it’s always six figures, always. And the person’s paying themselves like 50 grand a year or 45 grand a year.

Why are you doing this? Because you have all the risk. You have, you’re putting everything into it. You should be paying yourself a living wage. And an employee should not be making more money than you do. Now, is it honorable that you want to make sure that your employees are paid? Absolutely. But they should not be making more money than you make.

So you’ve got to figure that piece out. You have to.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, because look, even, even if you’re doing it because you’re like, Well, I got a talented team. I need to keep them around. It’s tough times and all of that. The reality is that if you’re not making measurably more than your highest paid employee, you will end up resenting them.

It may not be in those first three months. But over time, you will come to realize, it’s human nature, you can’t sit there and think, I own this business, I’m, I’m, you know, I’m struggling to meet payroll, and yet I’m paying you more than I’m paying myself. It is not a healthy place to be, you’re unlikely to make good business decisions when you’re in that position.

And particularly because, the owners in the survey, they’re, they’re not paying themselves well, and, and about 40 percent of them are paying themselves less now than they did a year ago.

Gini Dietrich: No.

Chip Griffin: So, so, so they’re not paying themselves enough to begin with, they’re cutting their pay and yet most of them are reporting that they gave raises comparable to what they’ve been giving in the past to their teams.

Again, admirable. I, you know, I, I love that you feel that way about your teams and you’re trying to be helpful to them, but, but ultimately that’s not a healthy business choice. Because it’s not like you’re making 10 million a year and you took a pay cut to 8 million, right? Right. I mean, if you’re the CEO of a giant company and you take that kind of pay cut to, you know, to be symbolic or whatever, fine.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: But, but when you’re making 80, 000 and you start paying yourself 60, 000 because that’s how you can come up with the money to give raises or bonuses or to keep an employee around, that’s not healthy.

Gini Dietrich: No.

Chip Griffin: And so you really need to be thinking about these things as you go into the next 12 months and thinking about, how do I make sure I’m paying myself a fair salary for the work that I’m doing. And remember, we always talk about this. You need to have two revenue streams from your business personally. One is your compensation for the work you’re doing because you are an employee of the business. And you also need to have a profit stream separate and apart from that.

And that’s for your risk taking as an entrepreneur. And if you don’t have those two revenue streams, you’re not building a healthy business and you’re not ultimately building something that I think you will be satisfied with five or ten years down the road.

Gini Dietrich: And you aren’t building something that if your goal is to sell it eventually, you won’t be able to because it won’t be there.

The numbers won’t be accurate and you won’t have been paying yourself. And so there’s all of those things that go into it as well. So you, I, I love the idea of thinking about it from the perspective of a salary as an employee and then profit as the risk taker. And so the salary as an employee is a non negotiable, just like it’s a non negotiable for any other employee that you have.

The profit sharing. Now that, that piece is, you know, up to you, whether or not you’re, you’re bidding projects or retainers appropriately, whether or not you’re actually making a profit. All of those things come, come into play. So you can start to work on, gosh, I’d really like to have more profits come into my bank account.

Then you can start working on the things that you need to, to increase that. But the salary is a non negotiable. You have to pay yourself at least what you would be able to make somewhere else.

Chip Griffin: Right. And, and

Gini Dietrich: Or that if you had somebody come to you and buy, to buy the company, they would say, are you making enough money?

Like if we replaced you, how much would we have to pay a CEO of this business to replace you? That’s what you should be paying yourself.

Chip Griffin: And that’s one of the big, the big gotchas that a lot of agency owners have when they start thinking about selling the business and something that, that is always tough to explain to an owner, particularly if they’re in the position of, I want to sell now.

And they haven’t been thinking about this because, you know, they think that they’ve got, you know, 200, 000 in profit because that’s what they put in their own pocket. And the reality is that no acquirer is going to look at it that way. They’re going to assign part of that 200, 000 to salary and part of that to profit.

And all of a sudden your profit is now in the toilet. And so what you thought you were worth, you are not. And before anybody starts emailing and commenting and ranting, well, my accountant told me not to pay myself a salary for tax purposes, not talking about that. When I say salary, it’s just fixed compensation.

However, your accountant tells you to do that. It could be a, you know, a guaranteed income. It could be salary. It could be just regular draws that you take on clockwork and, and you’ve got allocated on paper and in your mind as compensation for the work you do versus profits. I don’t care how you do it.

Absolutely do it in the most tax efficient way possible, and that will be different based on how your business is structured and where you’re located. Even two very similarly structured agencies in two different states, they have to pay it differently, right? You can be an S corp in one state and an S corp in another state, and your accountants will tell you that you need to either pay yourself a generous salary or not.

Yep. Whatever. Do what they tell you to do. Yep. But you still need to have in your mind and on paper a proper salary for the work that you’re doing, however you account for it.

Gini Dietrich: I, like I said, it’s a non negotiable and it’s, it’s shocking that one in five in the survey, one in five don’t pay themselves a regular salary opting to instead to draw from profits.

Okay. If you don’t have profit, then that means you make zero, which sucks. Among those who do pay themselves fewer than half reported earning six figure salaries and 39 percent acknowledged reducing their pay over the past year. The, the thing about it is that they’ve, to your point, it’s admirable because they’ve reflected a commitment to rewarding their teams, but it’s in, it’s, it’s hurting you.

It’s hurting you. It’s hurting your business. It’s hurting your future ability to be able to do the right things. It’s hurting any ability to be able to sell in the next three to five years. If that’s a goal, like you have to really think about these things. And it’s not just In the here and now, it’s, and listen, it’s been a crappy year.

It’s been a crappy two years. I get it, but you have to figure out how you can, how you can pay yourself first and then build your business around that.

Chip Griffin: Right. And I, I think there’s, there’s other data in the survey that, that points to small agencies perhaps not structuring themselves appropriately. Either because they’re not pricing correctly, they don’t, they don’t have efficient processes in place, those sorts of things.

Because you know, when we look at the data, one out of three small agencies are having their employees work overtime at least monthly. And so if, if at least one out of every four weeks your team is being asked to work overtime, that’s a problem. So that really suggests that you have a problem in terms of how you’re resourcing for the work that you’re doing. Which usually is because you’re not pricing it enough.

And so you have to find a way to squeeze out as much labor as you can. And, and at first blush, you sit there and say, well, it’s, it’s, it’s only once a month, right? And that doesn’t sound like that much, but that’s 25 percent of the time, right? Just four weeks in most months. And if at least one out of four, they’re working more than 40 hours a week, typically.

That’s a problem. And, and you know, I, I know that most of us grew up in a world where we worked more than 40 hours a week every week . When I started out in agency world that’s, that’s what everybody did. Sure. And that’s why agencies have such a bad reputation. Yes. And you, you can’t build your business expecting that that’s going to be the way that you do things.

It doesn’t mean that it won’t happen from time to time. Like, I’m not saying that you should never have employees work more than 40 hours a week. Right. There’s always, but it ought to be rare. It shouldn’t be part of your usual regular practice. Because that makes it harder to retain your employees, particularly today. Particularly where people are valuing, you know, work life balance much more and and they’ve seen the way things can be and they want it that way.

And we can sit here and say, well, that’s not the way we did it. We don’t, we don’t think it’s right. You, you know, you just need to buckle down and do it and pay your dues and all. You can say that all you want. Good luck in, in being able to staff consistently at a high level if that’s your approach.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

And I will say, I will tell you that the younger generation, Gen Z, will not have it. They’re like, yeah, no, I’m not doing it. So figure it out because this is not the way of the world anymore. And yes, you and I are of the generation that we did, and 100 hour work weeks were not uncommon, but that, that’s not how things work anymore.

And the fact that if you think that you’re going to build a business, to use a phrase that you use all the time, on the backs of your employees, you’ve got another think coming. You’ve got to figure this out because that’s, that’s not anybody that’s younger than, that’s probably 35 or younger is not going to work that way.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, working overtime should be because something legitimately came up that was out of the ordinary, an emergency of some kind. It shouldn’t be that’s the only way we can do this work profitably or even minimally profitably. You’ve got to be thinking about those kinds of things. And we see that, I mean, the small agencies in the survey.

Every single one of them is either remote or hybrid. There wasn’t a single respondent that said that they had gone to, to fully in office work again. And, and so that it surprised me a little bit that, that not one was an all in office agency. Cause, cause they are out there. There aren’t very many anymore, but, but they are out there and we are certainly seeing bigger businesses who are trying to force their employees back into the office, usually with a lot of resistance.

But the, the fact that employees are now mostly remote entirely or hybrid and, and the survey also showed that you’re also giving them a lot of flexibility to define what their hours are, when they come into the office and when they don’t. Most agencies are not saying this is our set schedule in the office or out of the office.

Even when you’re remote, not saying it’s got to be exactly nine to five so that you’re aligned with the rest of the team. Most are giving flexibility. And that’s great, but just because you’re giving that flexibility doesn’t mean that you can also say, Oh, and by the way, you’ve also got to work 45, 50 hours a week on a regular basis.

So be consistent in trusting your employees, be consistent in finding ways to help them. And frankly, with most agencies giving raises and, and, and doing them at, at or near previous levels. Frankly, a lot of employees would be maybe not just as happy, but they would be very happy if they were not being asked to work overtime.

Right. Yep. Well, we, we consistently hear from employees that they’re more interested in that work life balance than they are in how much is going into their bank account every two weeks. Doesn’t mean they don’t care about it, but if you ask them to rate the relative significance, oftentimes it’s the amount of time spent and

 not the actual compensation.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. That and the flexibility. Giving them flexibility. Like, don’t say they have to be sitting at their desk for 10 hours a day and, and making sure that they are. Like, giving them the flexibility to be able to go to the doctor’s, a doctor’s appointment in the middle of the day or running to the DMV to renew their driver’s license, whatever it happens to be.

But that, I think those two things are really, really important. And so if you’re thinking about how do I make sure that I’m going to have a consistent paycheck for myself, or how am I going to give raises and bonuses? Perhaps the quote unquote raise or bonus is not monetary, it’s not financial, but it’s in more flexibility or the ability to do things that they’re not able to do right now.

I mean, there are lots of things that we do for, for my team that, you know, we don’t necessarily pay for. We close the last two weeks of the year, every year. Nobody has to take their PTO for that. And, people love that. They love that. We have the whole week of Thanksgiving closed. We’re closed. They love that.

They don’t have to take their PTO. You know how much money that cost me? Nothing. Nothing. And people are willing to give up a bonus, a year end bonus, because they get three extra weeks off. So there are things that you can do to ensure that you’re getting yourself paid and being able to keep your employees happy too.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and, and I think if you take a look at, at some of the other, data in the survey there, there’s also, I mean, we’ve only really skimmed the surface of, of what it covers, when it comes to talent, but I, I think if you start looking into it, there are a lot of things that you can do in terms of, of, helping your employees with, benefits, helping your employees, with, improving their skill sets. A lot of things that you can do that don’t cost necessarily a lot of money. Even things like, you know, the, the survey showed that, that only about 80 percent of, of agencies with full time employees are providing health insurance as a benefit. That was a little surprising to me that it wasn’t higher, and I get that health insurance is expensive, but, but you can provide health insurance even if you’re not subsidizing it at all.

Yep. And I, and I would encourage you to, at a minimum, make it available to your employees if you can. Even if you’re not offering even if they have to pay 100 percent of it, because it’s a way to access something that is different from what they can get in the public exchanges, which, depending on where someone lives, may have some good choices, may not.

And so, you know, I think that there are creative ways that you can go about these things, even when you’re afraid of the cost of things, to do them creatively in such a way that it helps your team. And, and all of those things will help with retention and if you dig into the data, it shows what percentage of employees are leaving to go to agencies versus other places, who’s going to work for clients, you know, what percentage of agencies have had to do layoffs or have had to terminate employees for cause, all sorts of stuff in there that I think will help you to gain some additional perspective on your own teams and your own policies and practices.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, for sure. I mean, it’s, I think the one non negotiable is you have to pay yourself a salary, and the rest of it is there to help you figure out what you should be thinking about for next year, especially the first quarter. And it does seem like things are starting to stabilize a little bit, so that is good news, but approach it with some cautious optimism.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, it will be interesting to see how the first quarter of next year develops and, and where things go from there because in the first quarter we’ll be looking back at, at overall performance of the agency in the past calendar year and, and look at some bigger trends like that. Really looking forward to that as well. But, I would encourage you to, to download a copy of the results.

They’re available for free at smallagencygrowth.com and, you can dig into them and see what you might find in there that would be useful to your own business and, and give you some ideas for what you might do with your own teams.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. Go study it.

Chip Griffin: So with that, that will draw to a close this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast.

I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

In this episode, Chip and Gini delve into the importance of empathy in agency management. They emphasize the need for agency owners to put themselves in the shoes of clients, prospects, and employees to improve communication and relationships.

Key points discussed include handling difficult client conversations, managing scope creep, billing practices that avoid perceptions of nickel-and-diming, and providing constructive feedback to employees without micromanaging.

They also advocate for regular, honest communications with clients and creative solutions to financial challenges faced by both agencies and their clients.

Key takeaways

• Gini Dietrich: “It’s putting yourself in the shoes of the other person, and it’s ensuring that you understand your financials and how to make a profit and how to scope and you’re tracking your time so you know how much things cost.”
• Chip Griffin: “The pressure on agencies is immense right now. There’s a lot of financial challenges that all agencies are facing. At the same time, we need to remember that most of our prospects and clients are feeling those same challenges.”
• Gini Dietrich: “It’s leadership. And that’s what you should be aiming toward. Not management, but leading. Not managing, not micromanaging, not telling them unintentionally that you don’t trust them, but leading them the way that you want them to go.”
• Chip Griffin: “You need to find ways to understand what the client needs and is looking for and how you can solve it rather than simply saying no.”

Related

• How to make conversations with your agency employees less difficult (featuring Allyns Melendez)
• Building trust and letting your team shine
• Raising Prices for Your Agency’s Clients

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I’d like to put on a pair of your shoes today.

Gini Dietrich: I don’t think they will fit.

Chip Griffin: I think it’s incredibly unlikely, that they will fit.

Gini Dietrich: They don’t even fit my kid.

Chip Griffin: I confess when we’ve met in person, I haven’t really looked at your feet that closely, but just based on our relative statures, I would be shocked if my feet fit into your shoes.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I don’t think they’ll fit.

Chip Griffin: No, no. I think that would, I’m not sure it’s my style either, really.

Gini Dietrich: Probably not. Probably not.

Chip Griffin: I’m such a fashionista. Yeah.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I mean, right now I’m wearing my UGG slippers. It’s so, but look at how small they are. That’s a size five. They’re not going to fit you.

Chip Griffin: Definitely not.

Definitely not. Well. We veered off the rails even before we started. You’re showing footwear to the audience. So, that was not where I thought this was going.

Gini Dietrich: Would you like to see my oranges and apples? Would you like to see my, I’m growing oranges and apples in my corner. Would you like to see that?

Chip Griffin: You’re, you’re growing citrus fruits in Chicago in the winter.

Gini Dietrich: Correct.

Chip Griffin: Makes total sense.

Gini Dietrich: Quite, quite pleased with myself.

Chip Griffin: I’m, I don’t even know what to say about that, so. It’s,

Gini Dietrich: it’s impressive.

Chip Griffin: How about we move on to the actual topic today. Before we really.

Gini Dietrich: Alright, fine. Fine, fine.

Chip Griffin: Crash into the ravine and end this show. So we are going to talk about shoes, but not in the way that we’ve done so far.

We’re going to talk about the importance of, as you’re an agency owner, putting yourself in the shoes of the other party in all of the conversations and activities that you’re engaged in. So putting yourself in the shoes of the client when you’re having a difficult conversation with them, or when you’re thinking about asking for something, putting yourself in the shoes of the prospect, as they look at what you’re proposing. Putting yourself in the shoes of your employees, as you’re offering them feedback or making decisions about different things.

And so I think all too often as owners, we hear this advice from folks like us, who tell you, you need to maximize profits. You need to manage scope creep. You need to make sure that you’re getting results for your clients and you need to press your team for them. You need to make sure that you’re telling your team what you need and what you expect and all of that, but we’re often leaving out the part of thinking about how does the other party perceive it?

What are they hearing when we’re saying these things? And I think that’s a really important thing to consider so that you can actually make sure that you’re getting what you need, but you’re also understanding what the other party needs that you can reach something that works for both of you.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s just like any other relationship, right?

You have to put yourself in the other person’s shoes in all your other relationships or your marriage, your friendships, all of those. So I think even with your kids, I think it’s really important to remember that. And you’re right. There are. Tend to be some challenging conversations we have to have sometimes with clients partly because we’re not doing the things that we should be to scope correctly and manage profitability and ensure that we’re doing the things that we need to, to make sure that we are making money.

And because we’re not doing that up on the upfront side, it makes it more challenging on the back end to have to have those conversations. So I think it’s, it’s a combination of both. It’s for sure putting yourself in the shoes of the other person, and it’s ensuring that you understand your financials and you understand how to make a profit and you understand how to scope and you’re tracking your time so you know how much things cost.

It’s a combination of all of those things.

Chip Griffin: And look, I mean, we know that the, the pressure on agencies is immense right now. There’s a lot of financial challenges that all agencies are facing. At the same time, we need to remember that most of our prospects and clients are feeling those same challenges.

Right. And it’s one of the reasons why we are in the agency community. But we need to think about those things, particularly because we’ve talked, we talk all the time about the need to raise prices, for example, as an agency and how if an agency owner starts to ask us a question, if they, if they’re charging enough, the default answer is no before we even hear any facts, because that’s just how it is.

At the same time, if you go to your, you know, and we know that inflation is hitting you right now as an agency. If you go to your clients and say, you know, we need 10 percent more next year for the same level of work, that may be correct for us and making sure that we’re balancing our books, but we need to think about how the client is hearing that. And what the client is hearing is, I have to find a way to come up with more money to pay you as an agency, even though my own budget hasn’t increased and is probably shrinking also.

And so, so now I have to give you a, an even larger piece of the pie just to keep going with what we’re doing. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be raising prices, but you need to be sensitive to the way that they’re looking at it and figure out how you can come up with messaging to help sell what you’re doing, but also are there other alternatives you can come up with?

Can you reduce your scope while keeping the fee the same so that you’re not taking a bigger piece of the pie or at least not any bigger?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think, I think that’s exactly right is finding creative ways to work around it, because we actually have an agency client that in September wanted to send an email saying they were raising prices and the email they wrote was interesting.

And I was like, um, I don’t think you should send this email. Let’s maybe think about other ways to, to handle this. Because they’re in, they’re in a commodities, commodity business. And so they do need to raise prices and it happens across the industry. So it wouldn’t be a big surprise, but it’s in the messaging and how they were delivering it.

And I think that’s the same, same thing we have to think about is, you know, are there things that we can do? And I, I personally love the idea of reducing the scope and saying to them, listen, things just like they do for you, things cost more. It sucks. Here’s what we’ve been thinking about. We’ve been doing this, this and this all year.

And this one isn’t quite as effective as we thought. We’d like to remove that from the scope so that we can continue working on these two things that are doing extraordinarily well and put more power behind them. That’s a different conversation than saying, we’re going to raise your prices by 10 percent for the same amount of work.

Completely different conversation.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. And it doesn’t mean that they’ll accept it, but it means that you’re starting from a better position and you’re demonstrating to them that you’re thinking about them and their budget at the same time. And it’s not just all about me, me, me.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: I think you need to think about this in terms of scope creep too.

We always tell you if something’s out of scope, you need to draw the line sooner rather than later because the more scope creep you allow, the, the tougher it gets to fix it later. At the same time, if you keep saying to your client, no, that’s out of scope, no, this is out of scope, this is going to cost more, this is going to cost more.

Put yourself in the client’s shoes. That sounds awfully damn annoying to hear every single week. And so what I hear is someone who is being an obstacle rather than a solution. And so my suggestion to you on things like that is. Maybe if you can say, well, that’s not within scope, but what if we took this thing away, that’s not as effective and we swap this in instead.

So try to come up with those same creative solutions, even when it comes to scope creep, so that it doesn’t just become that constant stream of no’s or you need to pay more. Or those kinds of things. You need to find ways to understand what the client needs and is looking for and how you can solve it rather than simply saying no.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I think this is a really easy one for you to put yourself in the other person’s shoes because it’s probably happened to you before. A really good example of this is we, a couple of years ago, inherited a web firm with a new client. They were a brand new client at the time. And about two months into the relationship over Thanksgiving week, the web firm updated all the plugins and everything, and it completely took the website down because of some thing that they had used, that the web firm had used, it was no longer being supported, completely took the website down.

And so I’m, preparing – my team’s all off right, because we closed the the office between for the week of Thanksgiving and it was the night before Thanksgiving. i have 30 people coming to my house I’m preparing you know my in laws are here, like I have a whole house full of people And the web firm is saying to me, well, we need 1, 500 to fix it.

And I was like, but you broke it. Right. And so then I’m having to field calls from the client, the CEO of the client’s office, and the president then calls me and like, we were having this conversation between the three of us trying to figure out what to do with this web firm who keeps saying, sorry, it’s 1500 bucks just to, just to have a conversation to fix it.

I was so frustrated because I felt like the client was being nickled and dimed. They were the ones who broke it and maybe it would have cost 1, 500 to fix it. That’s fine, but they wouldn’t even get on the phone without a credit card and paying the 1, 500 first. So I think you have to think about that, about it from all of those perspectives. Completely different conversation if they had said, Oh my gosh, we totally broke this. We’re so sorry. The theme is outdated. Whatever happens to be, we’re going to fix it. And then come back a couple hours later and say, we have to do this, this, and this, so it’s probably going to be 1, 500. Okay, we would have paid it. But instead, it was like, it’s a completely different conversation.

So you just think about it from that perspective. And I’m sure you’ve had experiences where you’ve been nickel and dimed like that. Maybe not in the professional life, but in your personal life. You have a plumber there, or at your house, or an electrician at your house, and it’s, it’s just like, oh my gosh.

So, when you, when you can understand that kind of frustration, I think it’s really easy for you to understand how the client might feel, even if you’re right. Even if it is out of scope, and they are asking for things that you shouldn’t be doing, or they’re not paying for, fine, but let’s find a different way to communicate that.

Chip Griffin: And, and billing is a perfect place to put yourself in the shoes of a client, because it is easy for someone to feel nickel and dimed, even if maybe they’re not. And I think back to my very earliest days in the agency world, and we’ve talked about this before, where it was very common for agencies to charge you by the page for a fax or a copy.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Right.

Chip Griffin: You know, those kinds of things. And, and I got to tell you that when I was hiring agencies in the nineties, it drove me nuts to get these invoices that would have the, and every time I saw the fax machine in my office come on and start spitting out pages, I’m sitting there thinking, this agency is charging me a dollar per page for all of the junk coming through.

And so instead of looking at it as they’re providing me good information, I need this. I looked at it as, Oh my God, the cost is being run up there. And, and, and recently I was reading a LinkedIn post where someone was talking about a lawyer and their first bill from this lawyer. And it included time spent for writing the engagement agreement, preparing the initial invoice, those kinds of things.

And people were saying, well, of course he needs to get paid for that. Sure. Roll it into the rest of your stuff. Don’t itemize it. Don’t put down on the invoice that you’re being charged for the invoice. I know a lot of agencies like to put in a specific project management fee because, and they’ll say things like project management is such an important part of the engagement.

We’re going to charge you for it directly. No. Wrap it into others. Because if I sit there and I see project management, I think, Oh my God. This is just, you’re just eating up my time on silly stuff. Not true. You need project management. It absolutely makes for a more successful relationship. Roll it into other things.

Don’t draw my eye to it. Think about all of these things and how the recipient is perceiving it because it will make a big difference for very little effort on your part.

Gini Dietrich: We actually used to do it very, very early in my agency life. So early. And partly because I came from a big agency where we charged a dollar per page for faxes.

But we did a 10 percent expense fee, which, which covered things like phone calls and at that time your cell phone bill and things like that. And, and GE was one of our clients and finally they said to us, can you just roll that into your fee? And I was like, what?

Chip Griffin: Right.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Because same thing. It drove them crazy.

And I didn’t realize that that was driving them crazy because that’s what we did at Fleishman Hillard. You charged for all that stuff. You charged for going out to dinner with them. You, you, like, you charged for all of it. If you even thought about the client, you charged for it. So it’s just really important to understand that and to say to yourself, if I received this, how would, how would I perceive it?

What would be my reaction?

Chip Griffin: And sometimes the, the client’s perception may not be because of something that you do, but of something that you don’t do. We all know that as agency client relationships go on. We sort of get into that mode where we just want to be protective of the relationship. We want to make sure that they stick around.

We don’t want to do anything that might rock the boat. So, yeah, we want to be careful. We’re mindful that they don’t want to hear no to scope creep. So we, and we’re mindful that they don’t want to spend more money. So what do we do? We turtle. And we, we try to just have the minimum amount of contact with the client in order to keep things moving because we don’t want to be in a situation where we have to say no to that request because it’s scope creep.

We don’t want to be throwing out new ideas because we know they’re going to get shot down or they’re simply going to try to get us to do it within the existing fee. And so we’re afraid to suggest new stuff. From the client’s perspective though, when we start to do that, we start to look non responsive.

We start to, that one of the biggest reasons that clients give when they leave an agency is they, they stopped being creative. They stopped coming to me with ideas. Well, the reason why is because they were being shot down most of the time on those things. But you need to understand that once you turtle, it turns into something where the client is now perceiving you as not a real partner in things.

So while you’re, you may be not rocking the boat and you may buy a little bit more time in the relationship, you’re definitely souring it much more so than by having an honest conversation with the client.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I think there’s opportunity for you as well to sort of meet in the middle.

And, you know, there have been times where we’ve been completely over, over scope, and we’ve spent way more budget than we should have, and I’ve paid my team way more than they should have gotten for, for certain things. And I haven’t said anything. And there have been times where we’ve been way over scope and we’ve, we’re way over budget.

And I have said something. And both of those, in both of those instances, it has not ended well for us. So you have to find a way to meet in the middle as well. And say, hey listen, we’re over budget and we’re over scope because of this, this and this. So let’s take a look at what we have planned for the rest of the year and really think through what we need to do.

And I will tell you, a few years ago, probably right around the pandemic, we started doing something that has been incredibly successful. We do, you and I have talked about, you don’t really have annual contracts, you’re month to month or maybe 60 days depending on what your termination clause is. We never, no longer have annual plans.

We do them by quarter. And we do, we, we set OKRs, objectives and keys, key results for our clients, just like we do for our own business. And every quarter we review them with the senior leadership at our clients’ businesses. And we say, we do a SWOT analysis. We say, this is, this worked really well. We have some big opportunities here.

This sucked and here’s why. And because this sucked, we’d like to not continue doing this and probably bring in something else. And every time we have that quarterly conversation, not only do we get a budget increase, but we get a scope increase as well, every quarter without fail. And it’s because we’re willing to have that really hard conversation and even be honest to say, you know, we tried this and it didn’t really work and here’s why.

Right. And it becomes a partnership so that now you’re having conversations instead of when something big happens and you’re over budget or you’re over scope and you have to have this hard, hard conversation. Because it’s been a year or it’s been eight months and you haven’t done anything about it. Now you’re having those conversations consistently and it’s part of your partnership and it doesn’t become this big conflict conversation that you have to have, which is, I think, why we turtle because we don’t, we don’t, we want to avoid the conflict and we don’t want to have the conversation.

Chip Griffin: Right. And the reality is, as you’re saying, the more frequent and regular your communication is, the better it is. And if you can do that, you can deal with the stuff that comes up, but the longer you let things fester on either side, the worse it gets. And the harder it is to resolve it.

But I also want to talk about not just clients. I think this is important to put yourself in the shoes of your employees.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: Because, you know, these days, most agencies are trying to get by with fewer staff than before, because it’s been tough the last couple of years financially for most agencies, whether they’ve seen a decrease or just kind of holding steady.

Most agencies are not growing like gangbusters. So they’re not adding a lot of team members. We’ve seen in the SAGA owner surveys that people are not planning to add employees anytime soon. So we’re asking for more from our teams. And so we need to think about how the things that we’re doing and saying to them is being perceived by the teams that we have in place.

I think some, some little things are, can get magnified really easily. I think back to my dad who owned a law firm, when I was a kid. And he would always have the employees at his firm have to pick between the day after Thanksgiving or the day after Christmas to take off.

Gini Dietrich: Oh, geez.

Are you serious?

Chip Griffin: Yes. And, and in fairness, the courthouses were open those days. So there was, there was a rationale for it because

Gini Dietrich: Okay.

Chip Griffin: Potentially they were doing more, and, and things honestly were different in the 70s and 80s. Fair. Fair. And how things like that were perceived. But, but even then, that just struck me as silly.

And, and I think today, if you were to, to offer your employees that same choice, it would be really negatively received. And most agencies aren’t doing that specific thing today, but there are plenty of things like that, that you might be doing where you feel like you’re giving the employee a choice, but they may not be looking at it that way.

They may be looking at it as sort of like, you know, which kid do I have to sacrifice? And, and so you don’t want people to perceive things in that way. But I think the most important thing with employees is how you’re giving feedback. And I think this is an area where most small agency owners, or at least a lot of them, are falling down on the job because we have a certain expectation for how things should be done.

And we really want to impress upon our team that we want it done that way. And so what that comes across to as the employee, though, typically is that we’re micromanaging them. That we don’t trust them. And so, so we really need to think about whether we’re editing a document or an email or providing feedback on a conversation.

Think about what’s absolutely necessary to convey. And think about how the employee is perceiving all of the other stuff that you’re communicating along the way. Because you may be making things worse rather than better. Or at the very least, you may be diminishing morale, even if you’re increasing performance in the short term.

Gini Dietrich: I think that’s such a good lesson because I had a situation where I was working inside an agency a few years ago to help their owner. And she treated me that way. She edited everything I did. She questioned every recommendation I made. And I was like, I’m sorry, I have more experience than you do. Like what?

But it was, it wasn’t me. It was the way that she did it with everyone. And I finally had to say to her, you’re making me feel like shit. And if you make me feel like this, imagine what your team feels like. You can’t figure out why you’re losing people as fast as you are. Her turnover rate was every six months.

And she couldn’t figure it out. This is why. This is why it’s because you are micromanaging. It makes me feel terrible. It makes me feel like you don’t trust me. It makes me feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. And those things are not true. I actually do know what I’m doing. And if I feel this way, your people do for sure.

And it was a really good lesson because I think you have to really understand that. That, If somebody’s questioning your work and editing everything that you turn in and, and saying, Oh, I don’t know about this idea, or shooting down your ideas. How does that make you feel? Cause I guarantee your employees feel that times 10.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, absolutely. And I do, I hear owners all the time complaining about, you know, clients who micromanage and rewriting everything and all that. And, and, and yet they’re doing the same with their teams. And look, this is a lesson that I’ve had to learn and relearn over the years myself. Because I, you know,

I have a way I want things done. I completely fess up to that. And, and I have a tendency to say, okay, this is exactly, and so I’ll just sit there and I’ll rewrite something rather than providing feedback. When I had developers working for them, I said, well, I’ll just code it or do it exactly this way. Not well received.

I’m sure not. It’s possible that the way that I’m doing it was absolutely that much better. Honestly though, probably not. It was probably incrementally better. And so what I have, have learned over the years and have tried to do more of is to provide general feedback and guidance as opposed to actually getting in there and editing directly, et cetera.

And even with the general guidance, thinking through what’s really going to make a difference here? And, and not, not a 0. 1 percent difference, but you know, a meaningful difference. And, and so I try to control myself now so that if I’m providing feedback, it’s really only for those substantial things.

And I think if owners did that more, they would be being perceived better by their teams. And, and so we really need to think about how everything that comes out of our mouth, every email that we send, every policy decision that we have about what our hours are, what flexibility we’re going to give to our team.

Or how we’re going to push them to get a project done by a certain time. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do what’s right for the business, but we need to think about how it’s being perceived before we move forward and either accept that we’re okay with the potential negative consequences or change so that we don’t get them.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think it’s really, really good advice to always put yourself in the other person’s shoes. One lesson I had to learn early on was I couldn’t take negative feedback from a client and then email it to my team in the middle of the night. So you have to really, really think about those things. And if you aren’t sure, like there are tons of leadership resources on the web.

There are tons of really great leadership books. It’s leadership. It’s leadership of your team. It’s leadership of your clients, it’s leadership of your agency. And that’s what you should be aiming toward. Not management, but leading. Not, not managing, not micromanaging, not telling them unintentionally that you don’t trust them, but leading them the way that you want them to go.

Chip Griffin: And, and what you’ve addressed there, particularly feedback from clients and not sending them in the middle of the night, you also need to remember you’re, you should be a buffer as the owner. You don’t need to pass every bit of the feedback onto the employees. Pass on what’s useful, pass on what’s necessary. You don’t need to, if the client gives you a really raw feedback, you know, I really hate what Sally did on this thing.

It was just awful. We can’t do that again. You don’t need to go to Sally and tell Sally that. No, you don’t. You can come up with a more constructive way, which the client should have done in the first place. Correct. But if the client doesn’t do it, doesn’t do it, you should do it as you pass it along, because you need to think about how it’s perceived and what it means.

Gini Dietrich: And don’t do it in writing. Have a conversation.

Chip Griffin: Oh, so, so much shouldn’t be done in writing that, that gets done in writing. I…

Gini Dietrich: I know.

Chip Griffin: I, yeah, that’s a topic for another day, I suppose, but maybe that, maybe that’s the former investigator in me who, you know, loved having things in writing because it was…

Gini Dietrich: Never put anything in writing.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. All right. Well, this, this is not in writing. Well, I guess we’re going to have a transcript. So it is kind of in writing at the end of the day and we do have a video of it. So it’s hard for us to say we didn’t say any of these things, but in the end that will bring to a, to an end this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast.

I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the complexities of pricing strategies for agency engagements.

They explore whether agencies should charge more upfront for initial work, the importance of consistent revenue, and creative approaches to managing client expectations and financials.

The conversation emphasizes understanding client perceptions and the necessity of knowing one’s financials to ensure profitability.

Key takeaways

• Chip Griffin: “Certainly think about those upfront costs, but I would try to amortize it over the course of the engagement. I think that’s a much better approach for ultimately winning the business.”
• Gini Dietrich: “The first thing you have to do is understand your financials and if you don’t have the mind to be able to do it or you avoid it or you don’t want to do it, hire somebody to help you because if you don’t know those numbers intimately, you will not know how long it’s going to take before you are break even.”
• Chip Griffin: “There are so many creative approaches that you can take to solving this problem of overwork at the front end of an engagement that you’re not able to recoup otherwise.”
• Gini Dietrich: “Put yourself in the prospect’s shoes and say, Okay, if I were being pitched this program, how would it make me feel? Would I be able to do it? Really think about it from their perspective so that you can start to figure out if it makes sense.”

Related

• Using paid discovery to get better clients
• Adapting your agency for risk-averse clients
• 9 ways to price your agency’s services

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I think, I think we’re gonna need to charge a little bit more for the first few minutes of this show.

Gini Dietrich: Great. Let’s do it.

Chip Griffin: So let’s see. How about we do 50 percent more than what we usually charge people to listen to the, to the show?

Gini Dietrich: So like the first 10 minutes?

Chip Griffin: Sure. So let’s see. So,

Gini Dietrich: so right now we charge 0 per minute.

50 percent more.

Chip Griffin: And if we add 50 percent to that. Let’s see.

I don’t have a calculator here, but I’m pretty sure that’s still zero.

Gini Dietrich: I think you’re right. Yeah. I think it’s still zero.

Chip Griffin: Well, so what? You still get to listen to this for free.

Good news, everybody.

Gini Dietrich: Woohoo!

Chip Griffin: So, no, but we are going to talk about a question that was asked. This is, this came up in the Solo PR Pros Facebook group, of which I am part. And so someone posted recently about whether or not they should charge more for the early stages of an engagement. For all of the work that comes along with starting to work for a client, right? Because when you start working for a client, there, there’s typically a burst of work that takes place that, that tends to most of the time, slow down over time as you get established and you’ve got all the basic tools in place. The question is, whether you’re a solo or an agency or whatever, should you be charging more?

Should you be charging a setup fee or something like that in order to get started with an engagement?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think like anything else, it depends and there are pros and cons to both. It’s an interesting idea. Personally, I prefer to have consistent revenue that I can count on every month. And so I tend to just pace it out over 12 months.

So that I have that, the same amount of revenue in every month. But I can also see the argument being made for doing some upfront or set up fee or something like that to get started. Clients may like that they have, you know, that there’s a burst of activity and then, and then the retainer goes down a little bit.

They may like that and they may not. So I think, but I think there is an argument to be made for it for sure. Just, I would just from my own perspective, I like to have the consistent same amount every month that I can count on.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I think the… I would agree with everything you said. And in general, I think over the course of my own agency career, I don’t, I can’t really recall too many instances where I did charge more upfront, unless there was some specific project that was taking place separate and, and distinct from the monthly retainer that would be paid going forward.

And I don’t mean just, you know, work on, on my part or my team’s part, but… you know, that, that was noticeably different to the client. And, and I often talk about, you know, how there is sort of, a bell curve of profitability for engagements with clients for agencies. And so your profitability tends to be very low upfront for this very reason that this question gets to, which is there is work upfront with almost every engagement that you have.

And then over time you become more efficient. And you can produce good results in less time, you start to know the client, so it’s just, it’s so much more efficient, you start to become profitable. And then at some point you start to get afraid of losing that client, and so you start over servicing, and you’ve accumulated a lot of, just, what if we just did a little of this and a little of that, and all of those things stick around, and so your profitability then wanes towards the end of the relationship.

So, so this would, charging up front would be one way to adjust that front end of the bell curve. I think to me, the biggest problem with this is that it makes the decision more difficult for the prospect. And we talk about if you want to try to close more business as an agency, you want to de risk the engagement as much as possible.

Telling them they have to make essentially a balloon payment up front is going to be more challenging in order to close the deal. Because if you’re say, talking about a 2, 500 or 5, 000 a month retainer, And all of a sudden you say, but the first month is going to be 7, 500.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: It starts to become more challenging to close the deal because now in their minds, instead of looking at 2, 500 a month, they’re looking at 7, 500

Gini Dietrich: right

Chip Griffin: up front.

And so you’ve now made it a riskier decision. So I would prefer to, to certainly think about those upfront costs, but I would try to amortize it over the course of the engagement. And I think that’s a much better approach for ultimately winning the business.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I mean, and that’s what I personally prefer to do as well.

I also think there’s an opportunity when you do that for budget growth, because you, you haven’t used the budget, the client doesn’t feel like they’ve used all their budget up front. Right. So you have the opportunity to say, okay, after the first quarter, here’s everything that we did. Here are the results.

 I like to use AI to, to help with the analysis now. So I throw the data into AI and I say, point out strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. What can we focus on? What should we not be focusing on? Where, what should we do away with? And it’s not perfect, but it gives you some really good ideas and you can go back to the client and say, okay, here’s our quarterly report.

Here are our results. Here’s what we did really well. Here’s some things we think we should change. And, oh, by the way, here’s some things that we think we should add on. And it gives the client the opportunity to say, yeah, actually, that’s a really good idea. I can find some money for that. Or I’m not quite ready for that, or I like that instead of this.

And since this isn’t working, can we replace that work with this new idea? So it gives you the opportunity to sort of have that converse or that partnership conversation with your clients. In a really interesting way versus saying, okay, well, we’ve used all your money up front because we had these upfront costs and now we don’t have anything less.

It gives you the opportunity to sort of make them feel like you’re more of a partner.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. And I think it also, I think there are other alternatives that you can think of. So if you do have really substantial upfront costs, more so than what one might normally think, then there are two different approaches that I personally like and would urge you to consider.

The first one is something we talk about here a lot, which is paid discovery. So instead of going directly into a retainer engagement, pitch some sort of a discovery type project, strategic engagement, planning process, something like that, where it’s a very defined work product that you’re putting together, and there’s a very defined price for it, and it may be higher than what your monthly engagement would be going forward, but you’re also giving them a very concrete deliverable that they can see and is tangible to them, and you’re still de risking it for them because they could simply say, No, we don’t want to proceed after this.

And so I would prefer that over saying it’s a 12 month engagement, but month one or month two is going to be, you know, a higher number. So consider that because now you’re, you’re getting the best of both worlds. You’re getting paid for all of that upfront work. But you’re also doing a discovery project that, to your point, allows you to identify other things that they might want to hire you to do.

You’re able to figure out, does your pricing for that monthly engagement need to change? Because you’ve seen how they operate, and we talk about this all the time. It’s as much for you to feel them out as it is for, for them to understand you. And so I, so that would be the first option that I would suggest that you consider.

Instead of some sort of a setup fee on top of moving directly into the monthly engagement.

Gini Dietrich: To that end, I have a client who does VIP sessions every month. And so when she’s working with a prospect, she will say, I have four dates available this month for a VIP session. And they get to choose one of the dates and it makes them feel special.

And the, the VIP session is the, a day that she just focuses on that new client and does exactly that. Like some discovery, she does some research, she does competitive analysis, she does all of this stuff. She probably meets with them for two or three hours of that day. They’ve reserved that day to help her with marketing and PR questions and making sure she has everything she needs, getting her the reports, getting her access, all that kind of stuff.

 And she charges a good sum of money for it and the client feels really special. It’s like, Oh, this is, I’m a VIP and this is like, it just goes to that human psychology piece of it. And it gives her everything she needs so she doesn’t have to say, okay, well we need access to this, this, this, and this, and then wait a week.

And then we need this, this, this, and this and wait another week. And like, so it gives her the opportunity to get everything that she needs done in one day. She blocks off her calendar. She, she and her team focus just on that one client. To get everything done and the client does the same. And, and she, she tries a good, good sum for it.

So it allows her to do it and they get it all done in one day too, where they don’t have to like drag it out over months and months and months or weeks and weeks and weeks. And the client feels like, wow. And then the client says, okay, well now that you have this and you’re making these recommendations, let’s go for this.

So almost always they sign on with her.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, no, that’s, that’s a great idea. And, and it just goes to show you that there are so many creative approaches that you can take to solving this problem of overwork at the front end of an engagement that you’re not able to recoup otherwise.

The other option that I would encourage you to consider, and this is, this is really if you take my approach, which is, I know one that you don’t agree with, Gini, but my approach of just doing month to month engagements.

I, I, I have been doing that for 25 years, with all of my businesses. I love it. I’m committed to it. I know that you think I probably should be committed for it, but it is what it is.

Gini Dietrich: I do.

Chip Griffin: And, and it has worked for me for 25 years, so why would I give it up? But if you are in that same mindset where you have really a 30 day out for anybody who is with you, and frankly, many of you, we’ve talked about this before, many of you who have annual contracts still have 30 day outs.

Yep. So you don’t really have annual contracts. Yep. So. Some of you may. Some of you may require that people pay for the full year. But if you have any kind of 30, 60, 90 day out, that’s the length of your actual contract. So, put that in your head first. The other option in those cases, if you are operating that way, where you do have a 30 day, 60 day out, or you’re doing month to month explicitly, or however you’re handling it, is to require a minimum engagement to make sure that you recoup the cost.

And so with some of the, the project work that I’ve, or some of the retainer work rather that I’ve done over the years where it required a substantial amount of upfront stuff. And I think of this in terms of particularly, clients who hired my agency for reporting and analysis type work. There’s a huge amount of upfront work to do all the configuration of the reports that collect data and putting all the pieces together and doing whatever subscriptions you need and all of those kinds of things.

And so in those cases, what I would do is I would have a minimum engagement of three, four, six months, whatever it took, I did the math to make sure that at the least I come out break even. Right. And so you need to figure out where do you at least make sure you’re not losing money. Now, the reality is most clients stay beyond it.

So you actually start making money, but by putting a minimum length of the engagement in there that they can’t just break out of, that can be another way to solve this problem so that you make sure that you’re, you’re not really putting your, your own business at risk during that setup stage.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. It’s, I mean, the reason I don’t agree with it is because I think that too many clients say, Oh, well, you have a 30 day out and I’m just going to give you two weeks notice. And then you’re screwed. Like you don’t have the income and, and I, I prefer to have, to know that I have consistent income and it usually takes me 60 days to replace a client.

So if I have 60 days, we can make sure that transition is done correctly and that, you know, they get everything that they need. And on my side of the thing of the business, I can ensure that that client is replaced. So I keep the pipeline nice and full. But, like, you do have a point that if you have a 30 day out, it’s month to month.

So, I do like the idea of saying this, you have to, it’s a minimum agreement of three months or four months or six months or whatever it happens to be so that you don’t lose money on the deal. But I think that’s a nice compromise to where we both are.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, well, one of the reasons why I like it too, is it allows you to have the conversation with the prospect to explain to them.

Normally I don’t have that, but because of all of the upfront work that’s involved, that’s why this is required for this particular project. And so it helps, it helps them to understand that you’re really going to be putting in a lot of extra upfront effort, but you’re not making them pay for it. So, yeah, at least not explicitly, right?

And so, you know, it can be a selling point as well as part of the conversation because you’re trying to make it look like you’re trying to help them in the process when the reality is you’re helping yourself and making sure that you don’t end up upside down on the deal.

Gini Dietrich: I think that that requires something that a lot of agency owners struggle with, which is understanding how to charge for things, understanding how to price for things, understanding what your profitability is.

You have to understand your financials so intimately to be able to do this that you can’t screw it up. So that like nowhere should you, that is the first thing you have to do is understand those financials and if you don’t have the mind to be able to do it or you avoid it or you don’t want to do it, hire somebody to help you because if you don’t know those numbers intimately, you will not know how long it’s going to take before you are break even.

You won’t know.

Chip Griffin: You’ve got to know your numbers. Have to know them. You absolutely have to. So all these people out there were like, Oh, time sheets are silly. You don’t need to do that. You just stop, stop. You need to know. You need to know what your work is costing you to do. I don’t care how profitable you are.

You can be a wildly profitable firm. And, and so your instinct may be, well, I don’t care then what… you care because you, you still need, if you want to keep growing, you need to figure out which projects you should be taking on or which projects you shouldn’t. And it often surprises people when they actually dig into the data what it actually costs to complete work.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, yeah.

Chip Griffin: But now that I’ve, I’ve completely spent the last, you know, 15 minutes dumping on the idea of charging more upfront. I do wanna, to carve out one circumstance in which you may want to consider that approach. Okay. Because, because it, to me, there is one time when it does make sense for just ongoing retainer work to charge more for the first month, two, three, whatever it is.

And that is if the perception from the client is that you are doing a lot more work in that window.

Gini Dietrich: Oh, sure.

Chip Griffin: In other words, if you are spending a lot more time with them or providing them with a lot more deliverables, in that case, you should carve it out and either do it as a discovery project or charge more for those months.

Because otherwise, it becomes very difficult for the client to see you pull back two or three months down the road. And so if they’re used to hearing from you every single day during those first couple of months, and all of a sudden, they only hear from you once a week. That’s a problem if they’re paying the same amount.

And so it helps them to understand, we were doing a lot more work, you paid for it. Now you’re paying less, and so we’re pulling back. And so, that is the one exception for me, to my overall guidance of not charging more. If it’s mostly behind the scenes work, because you’re doing all of the, the learning, and the setup, and the building of the list, and all, and most of it is, is not something that the client is actually seeing, that’s when you shouldn’t charge.

If it is that you’re spending time with the client, they’re seeing you, they’re hearing from you, they’re getting things delivered to them. That’s the one time where you may want to consider that higher up front so that they can see as their money goes down so does your work product?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, that’s a really good point.

So behind the scenes you’re okay. If you’re in front of them, maybe you should think about it But again, you have to know your numbers and you’re gonna have to know your process really really well And they will be able to be able to do this.

Chip Griffin: Right? Yeah And it’s really it’s because you need to think about this from your perspective as well as the client’s. And I think that’s, that would sort of sum up the overall advice I have here, which is, you know, think about not just how are you making your books correct, but think about how the client is perceiving it.

And so if you’re charging more but they’re not seeing additional work, well then that’s increasing the risk from their perspective. If, you know, if you want to protect against over servicing over time because they’ve come to expect that they hear from you every day and that you’re sending them tons and tons of stuff, Well, then, then you do need to charge so they can see that.

So make sure you look at it, not just from your perspective, but how the client perceives it as well.

Gini Dietrich: And the last thing I will say is that I always like to put myself in the shoes of the buyer. So if I’m hiring somebody and they want to charge me three times more, two times more than they would get in the first three months than they would the last nine months.

I need to understand why and what makes me comfortable. And if I can’t get there, if I’m in the buyer’s shoes, then I probably shouldn’t do it. So if you can put yourself in their shoes and say, Okay, if I were being pitched this program, how would it make me feel? Would I be able to do it? What questions would I have?

And really think about it from their perspective so that you can start to figure out what makes sense and what doesn’t.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. I think that’s a good place to wrap up this episode because we’ve given all the advice we have on this and we didn’t charge you any extra for it.

Gini Dietrich: We did not.

You still paid us zero dollars.

Chip Griffin: Zero dollars. Zero

Gini Dietrich: dollars. Completely free.

Chip Griffin: Some people might say that they’re getting what they pay for here, but others feel like they’re getting a good deal. Hopefully if you’ve listened all the way through to this point, you’re one of those folks who think it’s a great deal. So with that, that draws to an end this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast.

I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss PR professionals wanting a seat at the table when it comes to business decision-making.

They explore the need for PR professionals to build relationships across departments, understand business dynamics, and communicate openly with other stakeholders.

The conversation emphasizes the value of collaboration, learning from each other, and navigating interdepartmental challenges to drive business growth and improve client relationships.

Key takeaways

• Gini Dietrich: “You should have relationships with people from different departments, and you should not bristle when they want to give you input on things because they look at things through a different lens and all it’s going to do is help you.”
• Chip Griffin: “The vast majority of PR folks, in house or agency side, don’t know enough about business to be true business strategists.”
• Gini Dietrich: “If you can have an open enough mind to invite them to your table, to be able to have those conversations and to listen, I think you’re going to have the opportunity to grow budgets, grow relationships, grow trust, grow all of the things that you need to do to be able to maintain clients for a really long time.”
• Chip Griffin: “You can have an opinion as a consumer, as a user, as a general member of the target audience. But that is different from professional advice based on expertise.”

Related

• Handling clients who disagree with your agency’s advice
• 7 reasons clients ignore advice from your agency

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I’d like a seat at the table.

Gini Dietrich: Okay, no problem.

Chip Griffin: Actually, I guess I’m already sitting at a desk here. And so I guess we have a seat at the table with each other at least.

Gini Dietrich: You’d have to move the puppy, but you could sit at this, in this chair at this table.

Chip Griffin: Well, I’d also have to travel like a thousand miles, so. Little things.

Gini Dietrich: Well, fair, yeah. You can have a seat at this table.

Chip Griffin: Well, thank you. You’re welcome. I appreciate that. But no, we are going to be talking about a seat at the table because that is something that PR pros, not just in the agency world, but in house and all of that, are almost always advocating for.

I hear over and over again, you know, we, you need to give the PR folks, the communicators, a seat at the table for big business decisions so that they can be in on the advice. And at the same time, I’ve observed that most PR folks bristle when non PR people want to offer their input on PR activities, right?

So if the CFO or the accounting team or the product team or the sales team wants to weigh in with the in house communicators or with the PR agency, they’re like, Hey, we’re the experts. Leave us alone. So I thought it would be worth exploring this a little bit, both from the perspective of how do you, and should you be involved in business decisions?

And also, how should you react when others want to participate in your decision making and your activities?

Gini Dietrich: You know, it’s funny because Muckrack just released their state of measurement report and I’m doing some content on it right now that hasn’t, that’ll be published in a couple of weeks. But one of the findings was that they are, that most communicators are and marketers to some, a certain extent, are creating a measurement reports in silos.

And they’re not talking to the executives. So they’re not talking to the finance team and they’re not talking to the sales team. And communicators aren’t talking to the marketing team and vice versa. And so. You’re, you’re doing this and you’re reporting metrics in this silo that doesn’t make sense for the business.

So extrapolate that out. If you’re doing that, why would you expect to have a seat at the table if you’re not willing to have relationships with sales and with finance and with HR and with the executive team to be able to do even that, let alone strategy, right? So these are the kinds of things that I think we have to be thinking about is… first of all, you should have relationships with those people and you should not bristle when they want to give you input on things because they have a different, they look at things through a different lens and all it’s going to do is help you.

Are there going to be times where you sort of roll your eyes inside your head and, and because they, what they’re telling you is not going to work? Sure. Yeah, like for sure. But you should have relationships with people from those teams. If you want a seat at the table, and you want to measure the right kinds of things, and you want to be taken seriously.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I think you really have to start with being open to dialogue and encouraging those other departments or stakeholders to be open to dialogue with you. And so that means you both have to be in a mode of listening and understanding. And that will absolutely help you in the work that you’re doing in PR.

I think we also need to understand, frankly, what our own limits are. Because one of the other things that I’ve observed is that a lot of PR folks feel like they ought to be giving business advice. And the number of agencies that I’ve encountered in the last couple of years who have said to me, Well, you know, we’re really not just PR strategists, we’re really business strategists.

And really, we take a much broader view, and that’s why we get hired. Let me just say that the vast majority of PR folks, in house or agency side, don’t know enough about business to be a true business strategist.

Gini Dietrich: Correct.

Chip Griffin: And that, that’s just a cold, hard truth.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: And so if you’re going to be offering that advice, you need to be doing it from a position where you actually understand what you’re doing and what the implications of it are. Because you may see it one way, but you don’t have the same knowledge that’s on the other side of the table.

The same is true for you. So when someone comes to you and says, you ought to pitch this to the Wall Street Journal, they’ll, they’ll love it. They’ll take it for tomorrow’s paper. And you say, well, I hear what you’re saying, but… So you need to be ready for that same reaction when you come in, particularly if you’re someone who, you know, you don’t necessarily think in business and financial terms on a day to day basis. Which frankly, most agency owners, not just small agency owners, but most even mid sized agency owners are not really thinking about P& Ls and business tactics and all of those things in the, in the same way that their clients are. And so you need to be really careful about understanding what is the limit of your expertise so that you’re not, you’re not going so far outside your lane that you lose credibility.

Gini Dietrich: It’s kind of like the 25 year old life coaches. I’m sorry, you’re a life coach? You’re 25 years old. What, what are you gonna coach on? Right? You haven’t lived yet. See, it’s the same kind of thing, and I know I’ve told this story before, but for about 10 years I sat on the, on the board of an organization here in, in Chicago that was very financial oriented.

And so the other members, the other board members were accountants, CPAs, there was an HR person and me. And for, we would, we’d have quarterly half day meetings and for three hours of the meeting, it was all, because it was a, of an accounting firm, it was all financials. And I used to sit in those meetings with just like deer in the headlights kind of look because I was like, I have no idea what’s happening here. And then they always reserve the last hour for, for me, but you know, those first three hours I had to sort of endure. And in the beginning, I would take notes furiously on terms that I didn’t understand, or things that they were talking about that I didn’t understand.

And then I would come back to my desk, and I would Google, and I would research, and I would learn. And then I’d go to the next quarterly meeting, and there’d be something else new. But after about two years, I started to really understand what it was that they were talking about, and I understood business growth and business development in a different way, because I was surrounded by these finance people.

And I, I always encourage people to do the same sort of thing. You don’t necessarily need to be on the board of an organization, but perhaps you have, you have a mentor who’s in accounting. Or you have a mentor who’s a leader at a different organization. Like, find people that you can surround yourself with so that you begin to understand how businesses grow, what kinds of things, like I I’m sitting on a board of another organization right now.

And it’s really fun to watch the CEO because he has it perfected, this formula perfected on how they grow. And he knows exactly if we do this, this and this, we’re going to reach X in revenue. He knows exactly. And he also knows what hurdles they’re going to have to get over. And so those kinds of key learnings, especially for a professional services firm that can’t be that exacting, it’s really, it’s, it opens up your eyes and it teaches you things that you wouldn’t necessarily get running your own business.

So find people that you can surround yourself with that will give you that kind of education so that you can sit at the table and understand what they’re talking about and provide counsel from your lens to help the organization grow.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, there’s absolutely huge value in improving your own knowledge and understanding of business concepts.

It’ll help you in your business. It helps you in the advice that you’re able to give clients. It helps you in refining your own communications strategies, frankly, because you understand how it all interacts in a better way. It’s also one of the best arguments for specialization as an agency. Because if you are working with similar types of businesses or organizations on an ongoing basis, you start to understand the vocabulary, the challenges, the opportunities.

You understand the mechanics of how the businesses and organizations work. And all of that helps you. So there’s, there’s a huge value to that. And I want to be clear. I am not in any way suggesting that you don’t have anything to contribute to the conversation when it comes to business decisions. I think PR absolutely has things to contribute.

But you need to contribute from your area of expertise and not go in and tell people, this is how the product should be changed. Right? Because, ultimately, that’s not advice, that’s an opinion. Right. And there is an important difference. You can have an opinion as a consumer, as a user, as a general member of the, the target audience.

But that is different from professional advice based on expertise. Both have value, but there is a big difference in both how you would communicate that and how it will be received. Yep. And so if you are focusing on how you can convey your perspective, understand the difference between those two.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think that’s really smart.

And you know, one of the things that to, to the start of this recording, which is, you know, we say we want a seat at the table, we want a seat at the table, we want a seat at the table, but we’re not willing to do the extra work to be able to get there. So figure out what it is that your organization, your client’s organizations do to grow.

One of the things that I do is I have at least a twice a month phone call or Zoom meeting with the VP of sales for all of our clients. And the reason I do that is because I can get an insight into what they’re working with, what they’re struggling with, what their prospects are saying, and how we might be able to help, right?

So, those conversations are invaluable and my team will always be like, I don’t understand why you’re having these conversations. And I’m, and I explained that it gives us the insight that we need to be able to help them grow further. And it also provides opportunities for me to say, Oh, you know what? Why don’t we do X, Y, and Z and, and then we can, we grow budget because when I can go back to the CEO and say, Hey, The VP of sales and I were having this conversation and we think we might be able to do this or we’d like to test this.

You almost always get extra budget to try that kind of stuff. So it gives you an opportunity to be able to, to grow the client as well. So it’s just, it’s not a bad practice. Yes, it takes some time. Yes, you have to learn all of the things, right. And we all are all meeting’ed out, but I do it twice a month.

I don’t do it every week. And it provides me the opportunity to just look at, at things in a new way that I wouldn’t necessarily see because I don’t have a sales lens.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I know that there’s huge value in those kinds of conversations and, and the more that you open yourself up to that, the more that you’re willing to give a seat at your table to some of these other folks, the more willing they will be to not only give you that seat, but to listen to you.

And so that means we have to be willing to listen even to things that we think are kind of crazy. We need to control our impulse to roll our eyes at least right in their face. You know, after we hang up from the zoom call, we can be like, Oh my God, I really cannot believe…

Gini Dietrich: Cannot get this in the Wall Street Journal tomorrow.

Chip Griffin: No. But you need to, to treat it respectfully and you need to help educate them, not in a condescending you don’t know anything about what I do kind of way, which is often the immediate impulse when someone asks for something, because we know people ask for crazy stuff when it comes to PR and marketing. We know that they just don’t have a grasp for how long it takes to do things or, or any of that. And that’s fine. We need to help educate them, but we need to do it in a way that is respectful of them.

Because they bring expertise to the table too. They bring valid advice and opinions to the table too. And it does, what we do matters to that. And, and if we’re, if we’re doing what we think is great from a PR perspective, that’s fantastic. But we’re not going to succeed if it’s not driving other things in the business.

So we need to have that strong relationship. And so I, I love that you, you’re talking to folks outside of the communications team at your own clients, right? That is a perfect example of what agencies should be looking for more ways to do. Even if occasionally you hear things that you don’t want to hear. Because it’s, it’s useful to know that that’s what they’re saying, right?

It does me no good to know that, you know, the sales team is having a whisper campaign after I’ve already been fired, right? If the sales team is agitating about how bad we’re doing our jobs, if we’re doing marketing and creating leads, or if we’re in, earned media and, and they don’t feel like what we’re doing is helping them.

I want to know that as soon as possible. Yep. Because I can counter that. Or adjust my strategies, or adjust my reporting, or do something. If I only find out after my contract’s ended, what good has that done me?

Gini Dietrich: That’s right. Yeah. I think one of the things, too, that you start to learn is how, what’s the word I want?

Protective? Different departments are of their own fiefdom, because we’re human beings, right? And it, I think it gives you some valuable insight into how, exactly what you just said, you can report results. Because, we had a situation a couple of years ago where the VP of sales and I were working really well together and we were generating a ton of qualified leads. But the sales team wasn’t, wasn’t converting them.

And so I was reporting on all of these leads that we were generating, qualified leads that we were generating. And then there was this huge drop off when the, at the conversion point. And sales felt like we were blaming them and in my reporting, which I wasn’t, I was just showing the, the data, right? And what I discovered is that while they were qualified, they were too small, the VP of sales felt it was too small for them, for those, for his team to follow up on. And so instead of what, what we came to eventually, it was hard, but what we came to eventually is creating a DIY kind of process for those kinds of leads so that we could continue to generate those kinds of leads, but they would create their own, they would go through their own process.

And then the sales team could focus on higher level, bigger types of clients. Had we not, had I not had such a good relationship with the VP of sales where we had, I mean, we had some down and dirty drag out fights where I was like, you’re not converting and he’s like, these are not the right leads. And we like, we were both banging heads and we were really stubborn, but we finally came to this conclusion that there was an opportunity for us to create a whole new path for sales.

Through some of the content that we were creating and the, the journey that we had created. So we wouldn’t have gotten to that and we probably would have been fired had I not worked through that frustration with that VP of sales.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And I mean, it’s a normal dynamic in any business organization that sales blames the product or service delivery people or the marketers for producing leads, you know, it’s always someone else.

Nobody ever jumps up, the PR agencies included, and said, Oh, I’m Yeah. I kind of sucked at what I did last quarter. That’s, that’s why things are where they are. Everybody always says that they’re doing the best that they can. And everybody, by and large, is doing the best that they can. It’s those conversations you have with those other stakeholders where you can figure out, to your point, how you can make those little adjustments

that don’t even, a lot of times they don’t even require a lot of effort that can improve the overall outcome. But if both sides aren’t willing to come and have an open conversation and both sides aren’t willing to make change based on those conversations, you’ll never get there. And so I don’t care if the organization that you’re working with, they all think PR is stupid.

They think you’re doing a horrible job. Treat them with respect. Treat them as if what everything they’re saying is credible. It will help you in the long run and you will get better results if you are the bigger person and you walk into those conversations and try to have them openly and honestly. And yeah, you take whatever arrows come.

I mean, it’s going to happen.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I really like what you said about inviting them to our table. So if you can, if you can have an open enough mind to invite them to your table, to be able to have those conversations and to listen, I think you’re going to have the opportunity to grow budgets, grow relationships, grow trust, grow all of the things that you need to do to be able to maintain clients for a really long time.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, look, I, I always say this: Clients, they’re like kids. You’ve got to lead by example. And so, you know, if you want your kids to start sharing food, you have to offer to share your food with them first. Share your food with your clients. It’s awesome. Share your food with the sales team, with the product team, with whomever it is who would like to offer, the CFO, whoever would like to offer their opinion and perspective, Listen openly, share your food.

Gini Dietrich: I love it. I think that’s really good advice. Let them have a seat at your table first.

Chip Griffin: So with that, I’m now hungry, so I’m gonna have to go have some lunch. Me too. So that will bring to an end this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And that’s Olivia Benson, and I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the common challenges agencies face in obtaining timely feedback and necessary information from clients.