In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss what agency owners can do to weather the current climate of economic uncertainty and potential recession. They suggest preparing for different economic scenarios by creating best, neutral, and worst case plans, cutting unnecessary expenses, and keeping lines of communication open with team members.

Chip and Gini also touch on the idea of diversifying income streams and being flexible with the type of work taken on, while cautioning against overreacting to market changes. They share personal experiences and practical steps to help agency owners lead through economic downturns.

Key takeaways

• Chip Griffin: “One thing you see typically during periods of uncertainty is agencies doing wild pivots to different industries thinking there’s no way that they’re going to be hit by this. I would warn you to be really, really careful about that.”
• Gini Dietrich: “I do think one of the things, and this is just a good exercise every year, is to go through all of your expenses. Go through your credit card statements. Go through everything that you’re spending money on and really determine is this something you need.”
• Chip Griffin: “If you’re having a tough time, take on project work. Don’t sit there and say we only do retainer work.”
• Gini Dietrich: “Being flexible, understanding what your best, neutral, and worst case scenarios are, and cutting your expenses are probably the three smartest things you can do.”

Related

• Is business slowing down for agencies in 2023?
• Agencies and the possible Recession of 2022
• Let’s talk about the “R” word
• How agencies can prepare for the coming recession (part 1 of 2)
• How agencies can prepare for the coming recession (part 2 of 2)

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 don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a lot of economic uncertainty out there. In fact, some economists think that there’s a 50/50 chance or better of an actual recession.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, it’s, that has gone up from 20%.

Right before the inauguration to now 50%. So, also, there has been mumble from the White House that they, he, they believe that the only way to curb inflation is to have a recession.

Chip Griffin: That would be an interesting, and as far as I know, never before tested strategy. This is not an economic discussion or a political discussion. So we’ll, we’ll veer away from the causes of how we may or may not get to that place. But the reality is that a lot of owners are coming to us and they’re, they’re concerned.

They’re, they’re very worried about what might happen. And they are wanting to try to figure out what they can or should do in order to be better prepared for leading their business through any potential economic downturn that comes about. Either because of a large scale economic situation like a recession, or it may be more targeted if you are in an industry that is being particularly hit by some of the policy things that are taking place right now, which had a disproportionate impact on certain agencies that that work in sectors that have, you know, major impacts by the changes in government funding policies.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I have a really good friend who in January started to say, starting to bleed. And then, and then a couple weeks later, she’s like, Oh, bleeding’s getting heavier. And now she’s commenting that they’re hemorrhaging clients because the tariffs are affecting them because of all the work that she does.

She does like robotics and B2B really manufacturing kinds of things, and it’s affecting them. So. She is definitely hemorrhaging, hemorrhaging clients right now, and it’s, it’s bad. It’s not good for her.

Chip Griffin: And, and I mean, there are a lot of owners who are either in that same situation or concerned that they might be sooner rather than later.

And so I guess, you know, and we’ve talked a number of times over the years that we’ve been having this podcast about, you know, various circumstances that have, have come about that have caused owners to fret. And so we’ve talked about handling recessions and that kind of stuff, but I think it’s, it’s important to revisit it, particularly because a lot of what’s going on right now is, is more large scale uncertainty as opposed to, you know, hey, we, we know exactly what’s happening. We may not know when it ends, we may not know how it ends, but we, we know what’s happening. I think the, the uncertainty adds an additional component, just as it did in the very early stages of the pandemic, right?

Where, you know, everybody’s like, well, we’ve never seen this before. We don’t know how to even react. I think the, the difference is that there was at that time, more of a sense that everybody was coming together to deal with it. And now we have the added component of politics and society sort of pulling everyone apart rather than marching together.

And so I think that does complicate it. At a minimum for psychological reasons, if not for actual practical business reasons. So, you know, if you’re running an agency today as, as you are, and as many of my clients are, you know, how do you think about this? what do you do to set the table for the best possible outcome for your business in the year ahead.

Gini Dietrich: Okay. So here’s what I suggest. And I’m, during the Great Recession, I was very naive. I had just started my agency. We were growing gang, like gangbusters. We were doing really, really well. And everyone was talking about it. The economists were saying a recession is coming. You know, the housing market just plummeted.

I mean, it crashed big and bad. There were all these signs. I remember sitting in a Vistage meeting, which was, which is a CEO organization and my fellow members- this is a longer, different story for a different time, but very quickly they would come into meetings and exchange gold bars because they believed that their money was going to go away.

And so they were, they were trading their cash for gold. And I remember sitting in there, my little naive, like. Maybe 30 year old self going, what is happening here? Like, I was so naive to how it would affect the business that I was not prepared. And so here are some things I wish I had done.

Number one, I wish I had talked to my team about it and been really, really honest about, Hey, this is what everybody’s saying. I don’t know what to expect because I’ve never experienced this before, but if we were to quote unquote, read the tea leaves, it could require layoffs. It could mean we’re going to lose some clients.

So let’s talk about sort of what our plans are. That’s number one. I would have talked to my team.

Number two, I would have had plans for best, neutral, and worst case scenarios so that I knew exactly what needed to happen in win and what those triggers were. So if, you know, we lost one client, what I would do in that case, if we lost two, what I would do in this case, if we lost them all, what I would do in that case, right?

That’s the worst case scenario, which is actually what happened. I would have started cutting expenses immediately. You know, there are, I think all of us get flush with expenses and we don’t necessarily pay attention to what’s on our credit cards all the time. And we’re not super vigilant about it. And I think that that’s one of the things that I would have done differently as well.

But I think the biggest one really was the first thing, which is talking to my team, because I think we would have come up with some creative solutions. And I think you said this last week too, but there are opportunities for you to do things like where employees may have said

you know, I’m happy to go part time, as long as I don’t lose my benefits, or something like that. We could have come up with some creative solutions, and instead, we came back from Christmas break and I had to let everyone go, and it was terrible. It was horrible. So, I think just being open and honest, talking to your team about what’s coming, what they’re feeling, how they’re feeling about it.

And what those creative solutions might be, and then really think through, okay, this is best case scenario. This is like 50 percent case scenario, and this is worst case scenario.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I think, I think one of the things that you have to really assess on a case by case basis is at what point and how much do you talk with your employees, because You can easily err on the side, as you mentioned, of, of not raising the issue with your team and not giving them the chance to be helpful in, in a myriad of ways.

But you also run the risk of unnecessarily spooking them if you jump in too soon. And so you, you know, I think there’s… At the point where you have uncertainty, I think it’s fine to voice some degree of uncertainty. I think, in general, as the owner, you need to exude a certain level of confidence. It can’t be irrational, it can’t be like, you know, your employee’s looking at you like, what is this guy smoking?

How, how is he, I mean, he’s clearly not in tune with reality. But at the same time, you know, if, if you start sharing everything that keeps you awake at night, as far as potential things that might happen, you know, you can get them wound up in a way that’s not healthy. I would say certainly, as soon as you start to see an actual impact on your business, as opposed to a theoretical one, you absolutely need to be talking with your team then.

You know, if you are starting to have conversations with clients about potentially downsizing their relationships or leaving, and you can clearly see that this is not just something hypothetical, but this is turning into something that is, has real potential to impact the business. Now, you do need to be having some more conversations.

Again, you still need to be careful how you do it because you don’t want to scare everybody away and have everybody start looking for jobs and now it sort of becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Yeah. But, but in general, I would endorse talking with your team more rather than less, as long as you’re keeping in mind how you do it and how much you share.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I serve on the board of a couple of organizations and we just had a quarterly meeting for one and he shared, their CFO shared their best, neutral, and worst case scenarios from a financial perspective. And so they, and in that they had triggers built. So if this happens, then we’re going to do this.

If this happens, then we’re going to do this. If this happens, good. And I thought it was really smart, but they, Oh, it’s only the executive leadership team who’s in on that, which is the two, two owners and the two board members and then, and the CFO. But, and they haven’t had those conversations with their teams yet.

So the five of us know, right. But it hasn’t trickled down to their, their team yet. So there are things that you can do as the owner to start to prepare. And I know it’s not fun and I know it’s not, it’s scary. And I know you don’t really want to prioritize it, but I really, having made the mistakes that I did, I think it’s a really smart exercise to go through.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, I think anytime you can play a what if exercise for a lot of different aspects of the business, not just related to, you know, how the economy may impact you, but just playing what if scenarios out. You know, what happens if we were to lose our biggest client? What happens if we were to sign a new client?

What happens if this key employee leaves? Just thinking it through, it can help you, you know, when and if those things come about, you’ve at least started to give it some thought. And so it takes away at least a percentage of the panic that, that normally sets in. And so you can start acting in a more rational fashion to address the problem.

And I, and I do think that, that you do need to, to make sure that you are being careful not to overreact. To every little piece of information that you hear. And, and that’s true, whether you’re, we’re talking about, you know, what you see on the news, what you hear from an economist, what you hear from, you know, your cousin, who’s a stockbroker, what you hear from a client in passing. Take it all in, analyze it, but, but don’t go overreact because you can get yourself into just as much trouble, if not more, by overreacting, overreacting to things that might happen.

And, and I’ve seen plenty of agency owners who go make drastic changes to their business, thinking that it is going to prepare them for what’s coming. But then if what’s coming doesn’t show up, now they’ve got a dud on their hands. And so, you know, you want to be prepared, but you don’t necessarily want to implement all of these plans prematurely, because that, that could make things even worse.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I do think one of the things, and this is just a good exercise every year, regardless, is to go through your, all of your expenses. Go through your credit card statements. Go through everything that you’re spending money on and really determine is this something I need to, to spend money on and then start to cancel subscriptions and things like that.

You should do that annually anyway, but I think it’s especially smart right now.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, and, and, you know, these days where everything is a subscription, I mean, I know every time I, I go through that exercise and I try to do it more than once a year because I accumulate so many of them, you know, I’m going through, I’m like, what is this?

What is this? I got to like, you know, search through my inbox to try to find out what it was. And then I’m like, oh yeah, I’ve never used it. Oh, sometimes you go through and you’re like, Oh no, this is, I just know it by a different name because some of these tech companies like to bill things as one thing, but then the website is something totally different.

You’re like, Oh no, I use that every day. That’s fine. But you know, you particularly want to shed, ums that you’re not using. And, and the larger your team is, the more likelihood there is that you have either entire subscriptions or at least seats that are going unused. And you ought to be trying to, to pare back on that. No matter what the circumstances are.

I, the next thing I’d like to talk about in this context is something that –

Gini Dietrich: I’m taking notes myself.

Chip Griffin: I, I know you and I get asked this a lot and I think we’ve done a dedicated episode on this, but I, we would be remiss if we didn’t bring it up here, which is the, the idea that you can recession proof your agency.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: And this is, this is sort of the Holy grail that I get periodically from people. Not so much right now because, you know, it’s, it feels like we’re more in the muck in the mire, as opposed to, you know, someone who is asking this, you know, maybe a year ago. You know, and it’s more theoretical, but, but plenty of agency owners have this idea that they can somehow build something that is completely recession proof by targeting certain industries.

And, and one thing you see typically during periods like this of uncertainty and the potential for economic downturns is agencies doing wild pivots to different industries thinking, well, if I’m serving, there’s no way that they’re going to be hit by this. And so therefore I’m going to be fine. I would warn you to be really, really careful about A, believing that that’s possible and B, pivoting so much that you go somewhere where you don’t know enough to produce good results.

Right. Because that’s going to be really hard to generate business. And even if you do, it’s going to be really hard to produce results that help lead to further business. And, and you could end up damaging your reputation just because you thought, Hey, if I chase this, I’ll be safe.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I mean, everybody knows I’m a big fan of diversifying your income.

And instead of doing a wild pivot to a new industry, I think it’s things like creating passive income, or as somebody on my team calls it, the mailbox money, the check that just shows up, right? Because you’ve created something that people continue to buy. It’s servicing clients in different industries, for sure.

But it’s having different ways that you make money that are diversified enough that if one piece of the business goes down, like if your, your retainer clients go away or reduce their scope or their budgets because of a recession, you have all these other buckets of income that will, that will keep you, your doors open.

So I’m a big proponent of that versus trying to pivot. And certainly you can’t do all of that right now. Like that’s the big lesson I learned during the Great Recession is to diversify income. And I’ve spent all of that time between 2010 and now creating new sources of income. And we have several buckets of income in the business that help us, but it’s, you know, it’s taken all of this time to do it.

I didn’t do it just overnight. So think about the things that you can add right now. Do you have some intellectual property? Do you have a process that you can, you can teach others how to do? So can you do some coaching or consulting? Can you do project work instead of retainer work? There’s lots of different opportunities for you to have different buckets of income so that you’re not recession proofing your, your agency, so to speak, but you are allowing it to have different levels of income so that you can keep the doors open.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and, and like you, I’m a huge proponent of diversification. At the same time, I will sort of build upon what you said to say it is a lot easier to diversify from success and strength than from weakness.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And so in general the best time to diversify is when things are going well, not when they’re already going bad. And so it doesn’t mean you can’t add new revenue streams at that point in time. But it becomes a lot more challenging to do it and to do it well. And as you know it it is a long term strategy, it is not generally something that has an immediate payoff.

There are exceptions to every rule, but in general, revenue diversification for your agency is going to take time before it has a meaningful impact. So, certainly be thinking about it, but if you already are feeling the pinch, that’s probably not where I would go first in order to try to, to achieve something.

Also, if you’re going to diversify, make sure you diversify one thing at a time. Right. Don’t, don’t say, well, I’ve got these seven great ideas. Let me try to implement all of them. Let me throw them all out there. Let me see what, what actually works. Yes. Pick one. Yes. Lean into the one. Yes. And see what happens.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely.

Chip Griffin: You’re more likely to be successful.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, it’s taken us, you know, it probably took us a decade to get all of the buckets right. And understand what makes money and what needs to evolve and what needs to be tweaked and all that stuff. And we add new things every year.

So, you know, it, we’re, what, 14 years in now, so almost 15, geez. So it, those are the kinds of things that we’re thinking about. I always say the best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago. The second best is today. So start now, but you, you’re right, Chip, that you can’t come at it from a place of desperation.

Like, you have to be able to, to kind of think it through and be strategic about it.

Chip Griffin: You had also mentioned, you know, thinking about doing more project work, things like that as, as an additional revenue stream. What I would say overall is that I think, I think you need to be prepared to bend more than you usually do on the kinds of work that you take on.

That doesn’t mean that you should take on unprofitable work, or totally miserable clients, or go completely in a different direction just because someone asks you to. However, you should really look at each opportunity that comes across your desk and ask, Could I adapt to be able to do this, and would it be a stretch to do it?

Again, make sure that it’s profitable. So you, your bending shouldn’t be, I’ll just take on anything that produces revenue. Because if it’s not profitable revenue, you’re actually putting yourself behind. So it, it still needs to generate a profit. But if you’ve been targeting a 30 percent profit on projects, could you work at 15 to 20 percent and still be okay?

I would encourage you, particularly if you are worried, that, that lower profit margin as long as it’s still clearly profitable is probably a good thing. I’ve been ranting about agencies refusing to do project work and only wanting to do retainer work for a long time. That’s true in good times, but it’s doubly true in tough times.

If you’re having a tough time, take on project work. Don’t sit there and say, well, we only do retainer work. Also, consider your minimums. Do they need to be as high as they are? A lot of agencies aren’t charging enough, but there are some who, who charge a fair bit. And could you take on more clients at a lower number?

I’m not, again, telling you that’s the right answer for every agency, but you should at least ask yourself these questions, rather than sitting there and saying, Well, I can’t find anybody who will do 10, 000 a month retainer work with me. Okay. Could you get someone to do 5 or 6000 dollar a month retainer work with you?

Could you get them to do a 10 or 15, 000 project that maybe, you know, tides you over for a little bit and gives them an opportunity? I mean, there are, there are a lot of things that you can say yes to that might help you in the short term without taking you so far off track that you put yourself in a bad position.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. I think being able, being flexible, understanding what your best neutral and worst case scenarios are. And cutting your expenses are probably the three smartest things you can do.

Chip Griffin: So with all that smartness, I think we probably should wrap up before we start saying unsmart things.

Gini Dietrich: Oh, good. Okay.

Chip Griffin: We will draw this episode to a close. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

In this episode, Chip and Gini explore strategies for agency owners contemplating an exit plan. They discuss the importance of planning and the different options available, depending on the agency’s size and structure.

They talk about the limited choices for solopreneurs, as well as a wider variety of possibilities for larger agencies, including mergers, transferring ownership to employees, or simply stepping back from daily operations.

They emphasize the need for a solid timeline and a leadership team to ensure a smooth transition and successful exit. Additionally, they caution about potential pitfalls and unrealistic expectations, sharing insights from their own experiences and those of others in the industry.

Key takeaways

• Chip Griffin: “It’s helpful for any agency owner to be giving at least some degree of thought to how they might want to exit the business someday, with the understanding that a lot of it is not fully within your control.”
• Gini Dietrich: “I think you have to give yourself a pretty good runway of five to eight years. So if you want to sell in eight years, start thinking about it now so that you can prepare and plan for what that eventual exit would look like.”
• Chip Griffin: “Anytime that you are thinking about selling your agency, you have to think about the reaction of clients because that does matter.”
• Gini Dietrich: “If you can structure it by building a leadership team, or a core group of people who might either buy it or go with the sell, that’s a really good way to be able to do it.”

Related

• Things to know before you consider selling your agency
• Are you thinking about selling your agency?
• The reality of selling your PR or marketing agency
• What to do when you are preparing to sell your agency
• How to get ready to sell your agency
• Is it time to sell your agency?
• Sharing ownership in 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: Gini, I’m getting out. I’m done.

Gini Dietrich: Finally.

Chip Griffin: Finally. It’s all over. Maybe we can have a click bait headline or something like that on this episode. I quit.

Gini Dietrich: I quit. Chip quits in a fury.

Chip Griffin: You know, I really hate all those YouTube videos where that’s, you know, they use that as the thumbnail or something like that.

And it’s just like, you know, I’m not going to, I’m going to, you know, stop drinking coffee or something like that. Okay, great. Like, what does that have to do with anything?

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: No, we won’t do that. We’re not, we’re not that clickbaity. We’d like you to listen. We’d like you to click over but not at the expense of our ability to have a straight face and pretend that we’re serious.

Gini Dietrich: Right. Be somewhat intelligent.

Chip Griffin: But we are gonna talk about exiting because it’s been a while since we’ve talked about the different ways that, that agency owners can leave their businesses. And this is something that continues to come up on a regular basis. I talk with, with plenty of agency owners who are thinking towards the future and trying to figure out what is their exit strategy for the business. Either because they’re burned out, fed up and, and want it sooner rather than later, or because they’re just trying to think somewhere down the road, you know, what is, what is my objective here?

What is the point of all of this? And so I think it is helpful for anyone who owns an agency to be giving at least some degree of thought to how they might want to exit the business someday, with the understanding that a lot of it is not really fully within your control. So you have to be flexible and adapt as things come up and as your life changes or as the business changes and that kind of stuff.

But you should be thinking about the different ways that you can exit the business.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And I think you have to think about a few things too. Like, if you have, if you’re a solopreneur or a micro agency, or you have a lifestyle business, then I think you have to think about what kind of workout you’ll have with a buyer. Which means how long are you willing to work for a new owner as you work out and get your, your equity that way?

Is it two years? Is it five years? Is it, you don’t want to do it at all? Those are considerations. I think you also have to think about, is there, who, what is the, what would the buyer be buying? Are they buying you and your talent? Are they buying you, your talent, your clients, and your team’s talent? Like you have to think about all those kinds of things too.

And I think you have to give yourself a pretty good runway of five to eight years. So if you want to sell in eight years, you got to start thinking about that stuff now so that you can start to prepare and plan for what that eventual exit would look like.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And I think, I mean, let’s, let’s break these, the exit possibilities down a little bit because what’s possible does depend in part on what kind of business that you’ve got.

And so. Sure. If you are a solo, your options, frankly, are pretty limited. I mean, if you, if you are a solo, your main options for your agency are likely to go the acquihire route, where you basically just decide, I, I don’t want to do this on my own anymore. And so you go work for some larger agency.

It doesn’t have to be large. It could be a two person agency or, you know, a one person agency that’s becoming a two person agency or something like that. But, but the exit is that, that you go effectively work somewhere and maybe you get paid some value. Sort of a signing bonus, if you will, and that’s typically called an acquihire.

The second possibility is that you simply try to sell off your book of business and essentially get referral fees from whoever decides to take on those clients. I mean, those are pretty much your only options if you’re a solo. You’re not going to sell in a traditional way because you don’t really have anything other than your talent and your client roster to sell.

You haven’t built, in all likelihood, any degree of appreciable intellectual property. You don’t have a team that you put together. You don’t have a whole system of business development or any of that kind of stuff. You’ve got a relatively narrow book of business. You can still exit as a solo and it doesn’t have to be just shutting down the business, but those are your two likely routes.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I think you have to think about too, if that’s the case that you and you are going to work with/for someone else, how do you, I think one of the big, biggest risks in that is the clients that you service now may or may not want to go along. So if, typically, if you’re going to continue servicing them and they’re just going to make their checks out to somebody, a new company, then typically that’s okay. But if they’re having to work with, you know, your, your new business partner or their team, it’s a little bit more risky. So I think you have to think about that from the perspective of, okay, in year one, this is what we’re going to do.

I’m going to sell my, my business or get us, get, do an acquihire. And, and then in year two, I’m going to start transitioning some of my clients to their team, but still be involved. So that by maybe year three, you’re finished. So it’s still a, you know, three to five year deal. It’s not just, you’re going to be sell and be done.

So you have to think about those kinds of things too, because the biggest risk and having… having made an acquihire in the past in my agency life, clients don’t really like that so much. Even if you’re super talented and my, my team and I are super talented, but the, the acquihire that I made, their clients wanted nothing to do with it.

And so I made a really big investment in something that didn’t work out. So you have to think about it from that perspective too.

Chip Griffin: And if you’re watching this on video. Another cameo appearance from the dog.

Gini Dietrich: Oh my gosh, this puppy. She wants her ball. No ball right now.

Chip Griffin: Oh well you know, I think and I think this there’s a couple of good things that you pointed out here. First of all anytime that you are thinking about selling your agency, you have to think about the reaction of clients because that does matter. Because the reality is you’re unlikely, whether it’s an acquihire or it’s a larger agency and there’s a larger deal in place, you are likely not going to get paid as much if you have clients that don’t stick around.

And so if because of the acquisition they decide to move along more rapidly than expected, well then that is likely going to impact the amount of money that goes into your pocket as the seller. Because these days, if you get, you know, a third of the total deal value up front, you’re doing well and most of it’s going to come through an earn out.

The second key point that comes along with that and that you also made is you have to think about the idea that you’re, whether it’s an acquihire or not, you are in all likelihood working for that buyer. And, and that is a huge shift. We’ve said this many times before, it is a huge shift to go from owning your own business, particularly if it’s been for 5, 10, 20 years.

And now all of a sudden becoming a, an employee of someone else, particularly doing the exact, it’s not even just becoming an employee of someone else. That’s hard enough. But doing it with the business that you made all the decisions on in the past.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: I mean, that is jarring. Yeah. I can tell you, I’ve done it.

Yeah. It is, it is not an easy experience.

Gini Dietrich: So if that’s the case, if you’re a solopreneur or micro agency, what, let’s talk about what it looks like if you’re like boutique to small, so less than 20 million, I would say.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, so, and which is the vast majority of agencies, right? I mean, the, the vast majority of agencies are somewhere in that general ballpark.

And, and if you’re, you know, if you’re a seven figure agency, but not larger than, than 20 million, you have a lot of different options that you can explore. Certainly you can sell. But selling is not, when we talk about exiting, most people instantly think of selling. But the reality is there are a lot of ways that you can exit your agency.

In a good way for you that don’t involve actually selling. You could merge. You could simply step back. You can, you can arrange it so that someone else is running the business on a day to day basis and, and you are, you effectively become the, the chair of the board. And, and show up for important stuff and, and maybe some key strategy meetings with clients and that kind of stuff.

It’s, it can be a very good way for you to downshift while continuing to have an ownership interest in the business. You can transfer the business to employees who pay you off over time. You can transfer it to family members if you’ve got someone who wants to come in and run the business. There’s a lot of different things that you can do along the way to exit that don’t involve having to go through a formal sale.

And the larger you are, the more options you have.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely. I really like the ESOP, the employee stock one because

Chip Griffin: No.

Gini Dietrich: Yes. I love it.

Chip Griffin: ESOPs are awful.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, no, they’re not. No, they’re not. They give, they give your employees ownership. They give them an ability to, to, you’re just shaking your head at me.

I, I think they’re good. I, I’ve seen them.

Chip Griffin: I’m just glad that, that finally after doing this for like seven years with you,

Gini Dietrich: we finally disagree on something

Chip Griffin: have something that, that I can very, very strongly disagree with you on.

Gini Dietrich: No, I, I think they’re good. I think that they’re great for morale. I think they’re great for loyalty.

And I think they give you an opportunity to, to, to your point, to let the employees pay you off over time so that you can still stay involved, but you’re not doing all the day to day management.

Chip Griffin: So look, I, I am a believer in selling the agency to a core key group of employees. Let’s see if I can say that without stumbling over it.

That is, and allowing them to buy you out over time. That is different from a formal ESOP. An ESOP is an ugly, ugly contraption that can help the selling owner put money in their own pocket, but it is generally a disaster for the business because it’s, it is an end point for the business. Once you have converted to an ESOP, It is insanely difficult to sell that to anyone else later on down the road.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. Sure.

Chip Griffin: So you’ve now, you’ve now effectively saddled. So if you had sold it out in pieces to key employees, they would have all the flexibility that you do to figure out what to do with the business. But once you make it an ESOP under the law, it is now something that becomes virtually toxic to most acquirers.

They will not touch it. It also comes with incredible paperwork and accounting burdens for the entity going forward. And so unless you are of a certain size and can absorb that, it can be really problematic. And it becomes really difficult for you to exit employees who have an ownership stake in the business.

And so you then have to add in cashflow planning for how to buy these people out so you don’t have ex-employees who still own part of the business. It is really, really complicated. I think the vast majority of agencies shouldn’t give a moment’s thought to ESOPs. Again, there are other ways to transfer equity to your team that can make sense, but ESOPs just I, I, you will not talk me down from this one.

Gini Dietrich: Okay, that’s fine. I don’t, I don’t need to talk you down. I think it’s great that we have differing opinions. One of the things that, you know, I, I serve on boards of businesses, and one of the things that I’ve seen work incredibly well is it in selling when the, the owner goes to sell is building a leadership team around that, the owner that allows the buyer to say, ah, okay, this business can survive without the owner and we have proof.

So I was on the board of an organization that sold in 2019. I mean, his timing was, it was December of 2019. His timing was perfect, but he started about eight years out. And the first thing he did is he put three core leaders in place. And then he spent several years with those core leaders, training, coaching, mentoring.

Making sure that they could run their different parts of the business. And then about three years out, so 2016 ish, he hired a president and then spent three years with him, like ensuring that he was the one that the clients called, that he was the one setting the strategy. And then he sort of just sat in the back and made sure that everything was working.

So that when the buyer came, they, they were buying the company, its assets, the president and the three leaders. And not the owner. And the owner did have a little bit of a workout. I think it was two years, but he did it as a chair, as a board member, not as an employee. So the way he worked it, and I’ve always, I’ve always thought that, that was really smart of him on how to, how to do that.

And so if you have a business where you can structure it in that way, where you’re building a leadership team, or to your point, a core group of people who might, you know, either buy it or go with, with the sell. That, that’s a really good way to be able to do it too.

Chip Griffin: And, and that, you’ve pointed out two key things here.

One is, is having a team around you, which means that again, generally the, the larger you are, the more options that you create for yourself. The other thing is the, the preparation. In that case, it was eight years. Look, the more time that you have, the more options that you have, the more value you can extract.

There’s no, there’s no minimum time frame. I mean, if you tell me you got to be out of your business in three weeks, I can get you out of your business in three weeks. You’re probably going to get zero dollars for it. It’s probably going to be that you shut it down. And if you’re lucky, you don’t have any accumulated debt that you have to tag along with you.

But if you have three years, if you have five years, if you have 10 years, the more runway that you have, the more flexibility and options you put in place. The larger you have, you are, the more that you have that core team around you, again, the more options that it gives you. And there are, it doesn’t mean that every option is a good one.

You know, a lot of times I’ll see folks who want to try to exit the business as quickly as possible. Maybe they’ve got a leadership team that allows that, but you have to balance that against the risk that you’re likely having an earn out. And if you take yourself out of the day to day operation, you’re now putting a lot of your compensation for the deal out of your control.

So I always caution owners who are thinking about that, even if the buyer is willing to say, yeah, you don’t have to play a particular role, other than maybe, you know, tell us what the passwords are and that kind of stuff. Maybe a maintenance type consulting agreement. That, that sounds good. But if there are earn out targets to be hit and you’re taking yourself out of the day to day, you’re putting that at higher risk.

So, you need to think those things through, but all of that, all of those options increase the larger you are and the longer your timeline horizon is.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think that there’s, there are a lot of great opportunities. I mean, you’ve built something that has, you know, it is an asset. It has some equity in it.

That you should be able to find some way to exit in a way that makes sense for you. But I think it does depend on what stage the agency is, how, you know, if you’re a solopreneur versus an agency owner, like all of those things have to be taken into account. And also from a lifestyle perspective, what is it that you want to be able to do?

Is it, you know, I have a really good friend who’s selling their business, her business. And she said to me, it’s not FU money, but it’s a nice little nest egg. So, you know, isn’t a nice little nest egg enough? Then there, you have some options, right? I mean, we’d all like FU money, but I don’t think any of us are going to get it.

Chip Griffin: It is incredibly rare for an agency seller to get that. I mean, it’s, that is really catching lightning in a bottle, to achieve something like that. The vast majority of agencies that, that sell, you know, may sell for a nice piece of change, but nothing life changing in that way.

And so I think the other thing to remember here is that selling is, is not the only way to extract that value. You can, you can run a lifestyle business that does a nice job of giving you flexibility and, and, and the lifestyle that you want. And you can also reap the rewards out of that and, and bank all of that profit that you take out of it and invest it, frankly, elsewhere.

You can invest in real estate or stocks or cryptocurrency or, you know, playing the ponies, I don’t know, whatever.

Gini Dietrich: Playing the ponies. Please don’t do that.

Chip Griffin: No, please don’t do that. But the reality is that there’s a lot of ways to extract value from that business. And so you shouldn’t be of the mindset that the only way to do that is by building up this core value and then selling it.

Because in many ways, that is the riskiest strategy. It could pay off the best. But if you build the business and you’re reinvesting all the profits into it in, in the hopes or expectation that one day you will be able to sell it, if not for FU money, at least for, you know, a really nice chunk of change, if that doesn’t come to pass, you’re out of luck.

Yes. And so, so your safer strategy is to, to continue to reap the profits from it, reinvest it in other vehicles and retirement accounts, whatever. And, put yourself in a position that the business has provided for you. And then if you happen to sell someday, that’s gravy. Because I, I think that if you’re counting on that sale, that is, it is really tough to do.

And I can just tell you that the vast majority of agency owners are not selling for anything that is that impressive at the end.

It doesn’t mean you won’t be the one who does, but the odds are stacked against you.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I mean, in all of my years doing this, I know of one, one agency owner who has sold for FU money.

That’s it.

Chip Griffin: I know a couple of who have sold for very good money. I wouldn’t necessarily call it FU money, but you know, very good money that allowed them to do what they wanted to do. But I also know that, that at least in a couple of those cases, they didn’t really like the way it turned out. So even though the terms were good and they made good money, they didn’t end up making as much as they could.

Because it was too painful.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yeah, you’re right. The one that I’m thinking of, the exact same thing happened. He finally was like, I can’t do this anymore and, and took a loss, not a huge loss, but a loss based on what he could have made because he couldn’t do it.

Chip Griffin: And, and that is more common than people realize. That sellers, regardless of how big the money is, a lot of sellers walk away before the end of their deal because it’s just too hard to be an employee.

It’s too hard to, to give up that level of control. It wasn’t what they expected. All sorts of different reasons, but it is very, very common for the seller to walk away from the deal and just say, you know what? I don’t need 100 percent of that because it’s just not worth it.

Gini Dietrich: Not worth it. Yeah, absolutely.

Chip Griffin: So, you know, be, think about your different exit options. Think about what you really want. Have as much time to prepare for it as possible. Be realistic about what is actually possible. Talk to people who have sold their businesses. Talk to people who, like us, have talked to a lot of other people and know a lot of people who have sold.

Try to figure out what direction that you want to go. Absolutely have a plan for it. But at the same time be flexible. Because your life is going to change, your business is going to change. And as I always say you need to put your business to work for you.

If it’s not achieving the goals that you want at any point in time, you need to look at making a course correction

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and this is your business. So you get to do what you want to do.

Chip Griffin: You get to try to do what you want to do. There’s no guarantees in the outcome, but there’s, there, there, you have the ability to make choices.

Gini Dietrich: Totally fair.

Chip Griffin: With that, we will make the choice to exit this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast, with that great segue to the end.

Gini Dietrich: That was amazing. I know. That was, that was good.

Chip Griffin: I’ve been working on that one for a while now. That last five, ten minutes. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the ongoing challenge of managing remote workers in the PR and marketing agency world.

Five years after most agencies leaned in to remote or hybrid work models, many owners and managers continue to struggle with finding the right approach to managing employees that they don’t see in person every day.

Chip and Gini address misconceptions about remote work, emphasize the importance of clear communication and trust, and highlight the need for detailed expectations and accountability. They advocate for flexibility and open dialogue between employers and employees.

Using real-world examples and personal experiences, they present a balanced view of remote work’s benefits and challenges.

Key takeaways

• Chip Griffin: “The same people who complain about remote workers today complained about in office workers 10 years ago.”
• Gini Dietrich: “I don’t think that you have to see people in the office to be able to do your work, but it does take a different set of skills to lead those remote employees.”
• Chip Griffin: “There’s no system or practices that you can put in place if you don’t have trust.”
• Gini Dietrich: “Are they getting their job done? That’s all you need to worry about.”

Related

• Micromanage your way to agency failure
• Building trust and letting your team shine
• Do you trust your agency team members?

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, you know, I think that we shouldn’t do this remotely anymore. We need to do this podcast in person every week.

Gini Dietrich: Can we do it with drinks?

Chip Griffin: Well, I mean, I, I, if we were doing this in person, given our distance, I think it would be necessary to, because that would be a lot of travel.

Gini Dietrich: I think so too, it would be a lot of travel.

Chip Griffin: Either that or one of us would have to move permanently, and I don’t think that would work too well.

Gini Dietrich: No, I’m not moving. Sorry.

Chip Griffin: No, and I have no desire to live in Chicago. Sorry. I don’t mind some of the sausage there. It’s, you know, you got some good food there. Oh, well, sure.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, we do have good food here.

No, I don’t blame you.

Chip Griffin: So, but we are going to talk about remote work because we seem to be in a period where there’s this itch that a lot of businesses, I wouldn’t say there’s much in the agency world, but a lot of businesses, and so therefore you assume that there are probably agencies thinking along these lines too, itching to have people back in person.

And I think it’s largely because despite five years now of being largely remote in the agency world, agency leaders haven’t really figured out how to appropriately manage remote workers. And so I think that it’s, it’s the, it’s the safety blanket of, of old people like me who are like, you know, just in the olden days, it worked so well when we were in the office, which is frankly misremembering the past.

Gini Dietrich: Right. Yes. By a lot. Yes.

Chip Griffin: Because the same people who complain about remote workers complained about in office workers 10 years ago. Correct. But so let’s, let’s spend a little bit of time today talking about the effective management of remote workers. And also, frankly, let’s debunk some of the myths because there’s a lot of sentiment that people who work remotely, even again, after a five year experiment in this.

It’s just not as productive.

Gini Dietrich: At all. And yes, so I am a big believer of being able to work remotely. I don’t think that you have to see people in the office to be able to do your work, but it does take a different set of skills to lead those remote employees. And I think that that’s the biggest challenge that we see right now is like Jamie Dimon last week released a statement essentially saying.

It was profanity laden and it was not nice, but essentially he was saying, I don’t care what you, what employees want. I want everybody back in the office. And when you read between the lines, really what he’s saying, which of course is not what he, he, he said, but really what he’s saying is I’m not going to take the time to learn how to manage remote employees. It was much easier for me to have them in the office. And it, you know, we have, we have a mortgage and we have, or we have a lease or whatever happens to be, we have all this office space. It makes more business sense for us to be back in the office, whether or not that works for the employees. And I think that that’s largely what’s going on.

is people don’t want to take the time to learn new skills to be able to manage and to lead employees that are remote.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and I think if I recall correctly, one of the things he specifically said was that he didn’t like the fact that if he called someone on a Friday afternoon, he could never get them on the phone immediately.

Okay. Whenever he wanted to. Well, nobody can get me on the phone anytime because I don’t answer it. Right. And I haven’t in many years. Right. And to me. I just, I think we’re in an age where you don’t just randomly call people anymore. I mean, first of all, there’s a lot of indication that you should, at least from an etiquette standpoint, text before you call.

But regardless, you need to manage your teams more effectively than I’m just going to sit here and go randomly dialing people to talk because that’s incredibly disruptive and not particularly effective. But we’ll, we’ll set that aside for the moment because he’s, I mean, I think he’s representative of a lot of business leaders.

Gini Dietrich: For sure. Yep.

Chip Griffin: But I think that, you know, as we think specifically about our audience and, and agencies. You know, the vast majority of our folks are not going to be wanting to bring people back in because they don’t have offices, by and large, today, anyway. Most have shed them, if they had them back in, in 2020. Some still have a small presence, but I, I think that it’s, it really comes down to figuring out how you manage effectively a workforce that you don’t see physically every single day. And it is, we’ve talked about this many times on this show, it is absolutely a challenge, particularly for those of us who grew up in an office environment.

For a lot of the younger workers who have never experienced an office, it may be different. But, but if, if that’s what you grew up with, if that, if those, if the mentors you had were, you know, in office managers, it certainly is different. And as someone who has worked largely remote since 19… August of 1998, I think was the last time that I had an in office job full time.

So what, 27 years now almost?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, that’s a long time.

It’s a long time.

And, and I know it’s, I mean, it is because I, I did it before it was a thing and it was challenging on the remote side of it, let alone the management side. And so you do have to think about these things, but I think it really comes down to good practices that we should have had in office, and we just need to apply them now.

Because even when someone was in the office, you weren’t sitting there looking over their shoulder all the time. And you shouldn’t. Right. But we sort of feel like we have to now that they’re remote. Again, after a five year, I mean, we are just about at the five year mark.

Gini Dietrich: Five years, yes, five years. One of the things that I’m hearing from friends who have been required to go back to work at big companies, is that they go into the office, they sit down at their desk, they open Zoom or Teams and they get on a call, on a call that way, a video call, like what’s the point?

And that’s, I think the frustration is there’s no point to that because you can be sitting here at your desk at home and doing the same thing. And have far more flexibility, be more productive, save commute time, like all of the benefits that you have when being remote that lead to better employee engagement, more product, productivity on their part, more loyalty, at least all of these greater benefits when you give them that kind of flexibility. And guess what, treat them like the grownups they are, instead of saying, you have to sit here for eight hours a day and make sure that I can see you.

Chip Griffin: Right. And I think treating them like grownups that that’s really the starting point is you have to, you have to treat your team, like they are adults, not children, even though I often say you have to sometimes, you know, treat employees or think of employees and clients as if they’re toddlers, you know, they, they need some, some, some coaching, shall we say, to get the behavior, the desired behavior. But, but you do need to start with that, treating them like adults, or is something I wrote about in, in my SAGA newsletter recently, you need to have trust.

Right. For your employees. Yes. And, and so if you, if you start from a position where you’re not trusting them to do the right thing and to put in a full work week and those kinds of things, you need to address that first. There’s no system and, and practices that you can put in place if you don’t have trust.

So ask yourself if you trust them. If you don’t trust them, deal with that. If you do trust them, okay, now show that trust and allow them to do the job essentially how and when they want. I mean, employees have become a lot more like contractors and that’s not a bad thing. We just need to understand, we need to have open conversations with them to understand what they are accomplishing, but that doesn’t mean we need to know exactly when they did every little thing.

As long as they’re meeting their deadlines and completing the assignments that they’re given and doing a good job at it. That should be enough.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think it, it comes down to that. It’s, it’s detailing exactly what your expectations are. It’s detailing exactly what their job entails. It’s saying, okay, these are the things that we need to accomplish this week, and them getting it done.

And it’s, like, it does, it does for sure take an extra step of detail and organization to make sure that everybody’s on the same page and that your expectations are aligned. It does require that. But once you do that, you can, like, I don’t care. Do I want you to show up at client meetings? Yes. Do I want you to meet your deadlines?

For sure. Do I want a client to have to wait for you for 24 or 48 hours if you’re supposed to be working? No. So those are my expectations, right? And if you follow that, I don’t care if you leave at 2:30 in the afternoon to go pick up your kids, or you go to the gym at lunchtime, or you like to take your dog for an extra long walk.

Like, I, like, I don’t care. If you’re doing your job. And I think that’s the difference is if you’re in the, in an office, you can’t do those things. And I think generally people don’t appreciate being told you have to sit in this seat for eight hours, no matter what. I mean, there are funny memes and there are videos on TikTok where it shows people are just sitting at their desk playing Solitaire because they’re sitting at their desks, right?

And they got all their work done already. That’s ridiculous. That’s dumb.

Chip Griffin: I, I mean, I think that, that the communicating expectations is essential. And again, that’s, I think, part of the challenge that, that managers have is that they’re not clearly communicating what their expectations are. They’re expecting the, you know, instead the employee to intuit what those are.

And so you need to have clear and open communication about what your expectations are. You need to make sure that the employee is free to push back against those expectations if they believe that they are unrealistic so that you can resolve them, right? You don’t want to, to set out expectations that are unreasonable and have the employees stew that they can’t…

You’ve got to come together and there’s got to be a meeting of the minds on those expectations. Just like if a client says to you, we expect this, that, or the other thing, you don’t just sit there silently if you know it’s not possible. You got to push back. You got to have that conversation and you need to invite your employees to do the same.

Because if you have a meeting of the minds on expectations, then you can be disappointed. You can work with them to resolve those expectations, but it’s, it’s very difficult to do that if you never communicated what you wanted in the first place. Right. And, and if those expectations are being met, great.

If they’re not, deal with it. Right. And, and it doesn’t mean that you need to know every little detail of how they’re doing it. Which is, you know, I think that that’s, a lot of larger companies have you know, come up with these ridiculous things to do keystroke tracking and things like that just to make sure that somebody’s logged in.

You know, and, and I’ve had agency owners say to me, you know, I, I don’t really know what so and so is doing. Well, then talk to them. Ask them.

Gini Dietrich: Are they getting their job done? That’s all you need to worry about.

Chip Griffin: Well, no, you do, you do need to have some understanding. And that’s one of the reasons why timesheets are important.

You do need to understand how long it’s taking them to do things. So you know what their capacity is.

Gini Dietrich: For sure. Yes.

Chip Griffin: And I will tell you, and I think I’ve said this on the show before, but this was a challenge I had when I first started managing remote workers 20 years ago. I didn’t make sure that I was doing enough to understand how much of their capacity they were actually using.

So I had at least one individual who was really untapped and it went for a long period of time because I was assuming that certain tasks were taking a lot longer than they actually did. And so as I learned that, I was able to address that. And, and so this employee suddenly became much more productive.

And you can’t really expect employees to voluntarily come to you all the time and say, you know, I’m only working about 20 percent effort. Some will, most won’t. That’s where timesheets come in. That’s where weekly one on ones come in. That’s where open communications come in. That’s how you figure out if you’ve got capacity issues in either way, that you’re overloading them or that you’re underloading them.

Have those conversations. Deal with it.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Same as if they’re in the office.

Gini Dietrich: I think that’s exactly right. I think it’s, it’s understanding. It’s, it’s on the owner’s side it’s understanding what you want and expect out of the job. It’s ensuring that timesheets, even if you don’t bill by the hour, that those are created and kept up to date so that you can track effectively both from a prospecting standpoint and a capacity standpoint.

And it’s really, it’s, to your point, it’s, it’s having open communication so that everybody understands this is what is expected. We went remote in 2011 and in the beginning I was brand new at it, so I was trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t. And we had a daily stand up, and in that stand up everybody went around the room and said I’m not available during these times.

I have a doctor’s appointment, I’m doing kid pick up work. And I found, for me personally, that that pissed me off. Like, I didn’t want to know that you weren’t working three hours a day. I didn’t want to know it. It’s it was better for me to say, Okay, I’m not gonna be available between this time and this time.

I don’t need to know it’s because you’re walking the dog, or going to the gym, or running to the grocery store, or whatever happens to be. Like, if you do that, that’s fine, as long as your work gets done. So I, I stopped that practice. I was like, no, we’re not doing this anymore. I don’t want to know the nitty gritty details because that it, it actually really made me mad.

So I had to kind of figure out how to meet in the middle on that one where let, let me be clear about what my expectations are in terms of you getting the job done and you don’t have to tell me where you are every minute.

Chip Griffin: Right. And that’s a great point. I mean, there are some things where it’s, it may be better off not knowing rather than allowing yourself to get annoyed.

And so, you know, one of the places to think about this is to the extent that you have a shared calendar access. Do you really need to have shared calendar access that shows details versus just for your busy? And I’ll tell you that my policy over the years has always been, you know, if I have a shared calendar, it will show free/busy.

It will not show.

Gini Dietrich: Mine too.

Chip Griffin: What those things are.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yep.

Chip Griffin: Unless you are my executive assistant or my wife. Yep. Those are the only two people who have read access to, to what’s on my calendar. And people, and, and I, I know a lot of owners who make their calendar available to their employees. I think that’s a really bad idea.

And I’ve, I’ve told a number of owners that. I, I think that it’s very risky because inevitably at some point you’re going to have a confidential meeting. And you’re going to forget, and someone’s going to accidentally see it. Correct. I mean, it’s like, an old boss of mine, 30 years ago, he had, he decided that he was going to quit, and he wrote his resignation letter on a, and saved it on a shared drive.

So the entire office knew that he planned to do it. Because it was right there in the shared drive.

Gini Dietrich: What a dummy.

Chip Griffin: It wasn’t that he was a dummy. He just, it was the early days, you know, of shared drives and didn’t understand how they, I mean, it was whatever. It, you know, but those things will happen if you are over sharing and, and certainly free/busy is useful for the team to know, but that’s all that’s useful to know.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I totally agree with that. I don’t think that anybody needs to have the actual details of what you’re doing. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, and to, I mean. You know, as an employer, I wouldn’t, honestly, I would not want that if, particularly if someone were putting personal items on the calendar, because then I potentially start getting knowledge that can put me into dangerous territory from an HR perspective. You know, that if I accidentally know that someone’s got a medical appointment or something like that, you know, now it could be construed that some decision I made is because of that knowledge.

So you have to be really cautious about some of those things for reasons other than just good management practices.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I totally agree. I, I think that it, to the point earlier, it’s a different set of skills that you need to be able to manage remote employees. But if you do it and you do it effectively, you can run that business with remote employees just as well, if even not more productively than you did with, with them in the office.

Chip Griffin: I mean it, you know, unless those remote employees have, you know, dogs, of course, in which case, you know, that, that can interrupt productivity. But.

Gini Dietrich: She can’t find her ball. So she’s barking because she can’t, she’s like, I can’t get my ball. I need you to get it.

Chip Griffin: I’m sure we’ll get rid of some of the barking in post, but so if we’re that good and you haven’t heard any barking, then you just think we’re crazy.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: But my guess is some of those barks are going to get through. So it is what it is. But yeah, but look, that that’s the, it’s the world that we live in. And, you know, the little things like that, you can’t allow them to annoy you in 2025, whatever year this is.

You need to figure out how to work with them.

And so as a manager, you need to, to give your employees the space to perform in the way that they can perform best. And you need to measure their performance, but you shouldn’t be obsessing with how and when they’re doing it. And get yourself all wrapped around an axle and decide that you need to change policies. Or worse, that you need to let someone go because you just you don’t understand what they do all day.

If you don’t, have that conversation. And, and if you ever find yourself not trusting that someone is doing the right thing, call it out and say that, I mean, don’t necessarily say I don’t trust you. That’s not a good thing in general, but say, hey, you know, I just need to understand where your capacity is at right now.

I need to understand, you know, why we’re not hitting this expectation or that expectation, have an open dialogue, be always open to what you hear back. Don’t go into it with the mindset that you’re just going to force, you know, through a particular lane, you’ve got to listen and make adjustments to your own expectations if necessary.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And I think that that goes back to what Jamie Dimon has said is essentially what he’s telling employees is I don’t care what you want. I’m not listening to you. This is what I want and this is what we’re doing. And I think the big difference in ensuring that you have employee engagement and employee loyalty and massive amounts of productivity is listening to what they want, where they are and how you can meet them in order to get things done. Whether they’re remote or in office.

But if you’re working remote, you have to take that extra step to be able to ensure that your expectations are met.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And can I also just say. If you’re listening to this, you are not Jamie Dimon,

Gini Dietrich: No, none of us are. 

Chip Griffin: And so Jamie, Jamie Dimon has a lot more freedom and flexibility to say and do things that, that don’t make a lot of sense in the rest of the world.

And it’s more likely that, that there are people who work for him because of the size of their paychecks, they’re more willing to go along with it. Sure. And, and so, you know, if, if you reach a Jamie Dimon place in your life, and if you are paying your employees at your small agency those kinds of, of salaries and benefits, well then, you know, maybe you can revisit how you do things.

I wouldn’t advise it, but, but you probably have a whole lot more runway to work with than most of us who are in small agency world and trying to, you know, balance everything and, and, and do our best with, with the teams that we have. You, you’ve got to be a lot more mindful of that, and you have to, to err in the employee’s favor a lot more frequently than at a Wall Street bank.

Gini Dietrich: And trust me, from an owner’s perspective, it’s so much nicer for you not to have to be in an office every day, too. Like, you get that benefit as well.

Chip Griffin: I mean, look, I, I think there are pros and cons to offices. I’ll, I’ll be the first to say that. But, having flexibility is the main thing.

Absolutely. Yes.

Almost everybody values flexibility. I’d be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t.

Gini Dietrich: That’s right.

Chip Griffin: All right. Well, we don’t have a lot of flexibility in this show.

We try to keep this show to right around 20 minutes or so, because we figure that’s about all you can tolerate of our banter and we generally exhaust anything useful we have to say sometime around the 12 minute mark. So, you know,

Gini Dietrich: Eight minutes of nonsense.

Chip Griffin: Eight minutes of nonsense.

And we start, we start with two minutes of nonsense, then we get into about 10 minutes of substance, then eight minutes of nonsense.

With that, we will wind 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 discuss the practical uses and pitfalls of AI in agency lead generation and business development.

They criticize the common misuse of AI for impersonal, high-volume outreach, which often results in off-putting and ineffective communication. Instead, they advocate for leveraging AI as a tool to enhance efficiency in tasks such as creating brand personas, drafting messages, and organizing proposals, while emphasizing the importance of maintaining a human touch in business development.

The episode also highlights various AI tools and strategies to support agency growth without compromising personal relationships and quality.

Key takeaways

• Chip Griffin: “Business development in the agency world is not about volume. It’s about quality.”
• Gini Dietrich: “AI can help with your brand personas. It can help with your ideal client profile. It can help you figure out how and what pain you solve for your clients.”
• Chip Griffin: “AI assists, AI does not replace, and AI is not something that’s going to get you magic overnight 10x success, which is unhealthy anyway.”
• Gini Dietrich: “You still have to add the human element. You still have to create the relationship. You still have to find ways to sort of get in amongst all the noise, versus just adding to the noise.”

Resources

• How to Create an AI Marketing Persona: 8 Prompts For Deep Insights (Blog post by Andy Crestodina)

Related

• Using LinkedIn effectively to grow your agency
• Is AI writing an agency’s friend or foe?
• 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: And Gini, I think we can agree, we are not artificially intelligent.

Gini Dietrich: No, no, we’re not.

Chip Griffin: I mean, some would argue we’re not even intelligent.

Gini Dietrich: That’s where I was going, but filter, filter, filter. Took me a few seconds to filter.

Chip Griffin: You know, it is what it is.

Gini Dietrich: That’s not true. We’re intelligent most of the time.

Chip Griffin: And artificial some of the time. But. You know, I think it is fair to say that, that AI is, is a topic that is discussed just a little bit.

Gini Dietrich: Just a tad. Just a tad. People are, yes, yes.

Chip Griffin: And we’ve talked about it on the show before.

Gini Dietrich: We have.

Chip Griffin: But we’re going to come at it from a slightly different angle today, which is the use of AI for agency lead generation and business development, because there are a lot of people out there peddling all sorts of things that you can do with AI to help grow your agency.

Yes.

A lot of it is horse hooey at best.

Gini Dietrich: Horse hooey is a great term. Yes.

Chip Griffin: However, there are ways that you can leverage AI

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely.

Chip Griffin: To help you on the lead gen side, just as you can use AI for client service and other things.

So let’s start with some of the bad uses of AI, and then we’ll talk about what we think are good uses of AI for agency business development.

Gini Dietrich: Wow. How many emails do you receive in a week that says, Dear Chip, I’m really excited about what you’re doing at the Small Agency Growth Alliance. I think we can generate 12 to 15 meetings for you per week and help you close 50 percent of those.

I mean, I probably get a handful, if not more, of those emails every day. Every single day. Yes. And they all say the same thing, which means they’re all generated by AI. And all the AI did was go in to see what the business name is and maybe it pulls from something you recently wrote or recorded and it says really like how what you’re talking about or, you know, mine always say really like what you’ve done with the PESO model.

Well, thanks.

Chip Griffin: Right.

Gini Dietrich: Right. And then it offers to

Chip Griffin: At least they know the PESO model is yours. That’s fair. That’s helpful. So

Gini Dietrich: we’re getting there. It’s like pushing a boulder up a mountain, but we’re getting there. The, actually the AI, the AI is really great at that because it checks the right sources where human beings don’t check at all.

So the AI is great at that. But, you know, you have the, the emails are being written by AI and it’s offering. They all say the exact same thing. I just delete them, but like, first of all, I can’t handle 12 to 15 meetings a week. If you, if you close six new clients for me every week, we would die. We would die.

It’s just not, it’s not, I don’t even think the big agencies can do that kind of volume.

Chip Griffin: No, I mean, it’s insane. I mean that the AI helps them bring in, you know usually there’s some sort of a reference that tries to make it look like they actually did something. So we reference some piece

Gini Dietrich: Yep

Chip Griffin: that you wrote. Oftentimes not really even a meaningful piece like sometimes I see it, you know saw what you wrote about I’m like That’s the piece you picked, like You might as well just roll the dice and randomly brought up a page.

I also love the ones that, that managed to refer to my business as the original name of the business, Agency Leadership Advisors, which I haven’t used in five years when I rebranded. So clearly it’s, it’s accessing some archive of information in order to auto write the content. It makes no sense.

None whatsoever. None. And, and I think that, you know, when people, when I hear people talking about using AI for lead generation in the agency environment, it always is, seems to be around how can we do more volume, more quickly.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: And we’ve said it before. We’ll say it again, right here. Business development in the agency world is not about volume.

It’s about quality. Yes. And AI can help you in some ways to move the ball forward. But it shouldn’t be used as a tool to help you spray and pray even broader. It really needs to be a tool that helps you as a human, not something that tries to replace you as a human.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I think if you think about it from this per, from, from the perspective of when you receive those emails, it feels kind of myecchh.

So if your prospects receive those emails from you because you’ve hired one of these agencies to, to generate, use AI to generate the leads for you, how does that make your prospects feel? Like, myecchh. And, and maybe there’s an agency business model or a world where that might work because it is about quantity and not quality.

But for most of us, our businesses are built on relationships and on long term client contracts and year over year over year growth with those clients, organic growth and all those kinds of things. So having AI send you, send an email to a mass number to, like, to your point to spray and pray and spray and pray.

It’s, it’s icky. It just doesn’t feel right. And so if you feel like those don’t feel right, imagine how your prospect feels receiving one from you.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and I think the worst these days are the folks who are using some of these services or tools or those kinds of things to use AI to try to figure out who you should reach out to on LinkedIn.

And so every day I’m just getting bombarded with LinkedIn requests and inevitably as soon as you click accept, even though it looks like it’s something legit, you just get whacked in the face with some sales pitch. And it’s just ridiculous. That is not how you build relationships and find the right people to work with as an agency.

And so instead of using AI as quick fix, a magic elixir, those kinds of things, you need to think about how can AI help you to be more efficient or more effective in what you’re already doing.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely.

Chip Griffin: And so let’s talk about some of the ways that you might leverage AI so that it actually is a benefit to your business development and doesn’t just look make you look like a smarmy used car salesman.

Gini Dietrich: I think there are a few ways. Number one, it can help you with your brand personas. And Andy Crestodina, maybe a year and a half ago or so, wrote a really good article on how to use AI to help you create your brand personas based on the information you have. On orbitmedia.com, so you can go search for that. It’s really good. There’s a new company called YouBots that you upload all of your information, your business information. So who your customer is, who your, who your prospects are, who your client, current clients are, all of this sort of demographic and psychographic information about your, your current clients.

And then it’ll help you determine who you might be adding. So it can help with your brand personas. It can help with your ideal client profile. It can help you figure out how, what, what pain you solve for your clients. It can help you figure out if you have a process that’s worth looking at copywriting.

So there are all these things that it can help you do. It can help you draft messaging. It can help you say, okay, if, if you’re, if you’re approaching a Fortune 10 company and at the chief marketing officer, and these are the pains that you solve for them, then here’s an outline of what you might discuss with them.

But that’s as far as it should go. Like, you still have to add the human element. You still have to, to create the relationship. You still have to find ways to sort of get in amongst all the noise, versus just adding to the noise.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and I mean, I think that those are all great examples. We’ve also talked about how on the client service side, you can use AI to help with content development, either outlines or proofreading.

Do those with your own content too, as an agency. There’s no reason why you can’t use it to help refine the content that you’re creating or produce outlines that you can look and make sure that you’re not missing anything. Sometimes I’ll just send a draft article, you know, to chat GPT and say, Hey, what, what did I leave out?

What else should I add here? Sometimes I’ll take, you know, a couple of different articles, throw it in there and say, Hey, can you consolidate this into one piece? And it gives you a starting point to work off of. There’s a lot of things you can do like that. If you’re putting together a proposal for a client, for example, which now I don’t like proposals, but if you’re going to do a proposal, you can certainly throw it in there and it can help you organize it better or point out things maybe that you’re missing.

Chat GPT and the like are all great for asking to do brainstorming with.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely.

Chip Griffin: And you can say, Hey, I’m doing these three or four tactics. What else should I be thinking of? Or, you know, I’ve had success with this. What else should, you know, should I be considering? And sometimes it serves as that, that extra advisor who can, you know, put out some ideas for you to think about.

It’s not that it should run with it automatically. It’s that it gives you things to think about further.

Gini Dietrich: We have a client, that their, most of their business is government work. And so they are, they spend a lot of time responding to RFPs. And so we took two years of RFP responses and uploaded them into chat, chat GPT, created a custom GPT for them, and then started prompting it to give, to consolidate the answers that every RFP, every RFP that asked the same question.

So you have one template, so you don’t have to keep going in and copying, pasting from previous RFP documents. You just have it in one spot. And then we also uploaded competitor information, so websites and content and things like that. And now we can say to it, okay, please answer the questions that are common, and then please answer the questions that are not, but compare it to the competition.

And so it will, it will help them kind of figure out how to answer questions, you know, with their unique differentiation, especially compared to competition. So I, I say that so that if you are an agency that responds to a lot of RFPs because you work in government or nonprofit or wherever it happens to be, that’s a great way to use AI too, because you can create a custom GPT and it’s so easy to do it.

It’s so easy. That just helps you automatically get through the, the sort of nitty gritty that you always have to do in your RFPs and then helps you customize the answers that are not sort of the templated ones.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean it, and, and these are all great ways for it to leverage what you’re already doing, what you already know about.

And it’s not, it’s not trying to be a substitute. Right. You know, the other thing to do is to think about AI as we’ve talked about before, as your intern. And so think about the things you might ask an intern to do. Yes. You might say. Hey, go put together a list of all of the events that target the automotive industry because maybe that’s part of your ideal client profile.

You might say, Hey, let’s build a list of job titles that, that fit within the ideal client profile that we have here. And you can give them a starting point and then see what else it might come back to you with that might be helpful. Maybe you want to use that for some sort of targeting effort or searches within LinkedIn Sales Navigator or that kind of thing.

It can give you a lot of ideas. And it can really do the same kind of research that you would hand off to an intern that might help you to grow the business and it’s, it’s so much faster and probably more accurate in most cases. Sometimes you need to prod a little bit because sometimes, you know, my experience is it’s not, it’s not always one for one the first time you ask.

Sometimes you have to hone it a little bit, but it often gives you a starting point and you’ll say, Oh, I never thought of that. And then that causes you to ask another question of the chat GPT or again, whatever platform you like best.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I really like the intern idea because I, I, I do treat it like an intern where I’m training it.

Where I’ll say, I don’t really like that and here’s why. Can you try again? Or, you know, we usually, when we do work like this, we usually do A, B, and C. Can you incorporate that in? Or, you didn’t get the voice right this time. Let me give you an example and then have it do it again. So, I treat it just like I do an intern, where I’m constantly coaching and giving them advice on how to increase their skills.

I do the same thing with the, with the AI, which is, it’s, it’s, It also works a lot faster than an intern, but.

Chip Griffin: There’s that. And you don’t have any job classification issues or that kind of thing with it, at least not yet. I mean, you know. Right. You know, I, I think the common thread for a lot of these things is, is these are all things that you and your team can do with AI and, and we, none of what we’ve suggested has been to go out and hire that, that company that says they’re using AI to make magic and generate leads for you.

Now, certainly you can work with outside partners who can leverage AI to do some of these things with you.

Gini Dietrich: Mm hmm.

Chip Griffin: But I, I think it is a mistake to think that someone who claims to have AI on the outside can take over a lot of these functions from you. The reality is, as we’ve talked about before, in a small agency, you, the owner, need to be deeply, personally involved in all business development.

You can get help from your team. You can get help from AI. You can get help from other agencies. But you cannot take yourself out of it entirely. And I know a lot of you would love to do that. I know a lot of you would love it if you could just hand things off to AI, and AI came back to you with contracts signed and said, here you go, here’s some money coming to the door, go serve them.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: That it, that doesn’t work. And even if it did, even if it could get you contracts, they’re not likely ones that would be successful because there’s no personal relationship being built. And so AI needs to assist in those things. It cannot replace it.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I think you touched on this, but I’ll elaborate a little bit more.

The number one job of an agency owner is to do business development and make rain. That’s your job. And I know all of us, myself included, get sucked into the day to day client work and it gets put on the back burner. You have to make time for it. It has to be your number one job. And then the client stuff and things like that, either you have, you delegate appropriately to your team or it becomes secondary.

And for me, I always do things that I know if it’s the end of the day, I look at my list and I go, okay, if it’s the end of the day and I haven’t been able to accomplish everything I need to today, what are the things that are going to force me to get it done? So that means I might do my business development work in the morning because I know the client stuff has to get done. Where the business development stuff, if it’s six o’clock at night, I’d kind of be like, okay, well I’ll just push it to tomorrow.

So I always do it first. And then the client stuff, because I know I have a strict deadline or whatever it happens to be. And so I will, I will work later to get it done essentially is what I’m saying. Then that’s, that’s how I plan my day and because it works for me, so I still get the business development stuff done.

I’m not postponing it to the next day or to the next week or to the next month. It’s the very first thing I do.

Chip Griffin: And, and like everything else, you need to figure out what works for you. I mean, if the business development is what you like to do, you know, maybe you need to put that off till later in the day so that you can do the client service first to make sure you’re not losing business or vice versa, you know, you all need to figure out what works for you and you know, the AI can help you to be more efficient in all of those things.

It can help you. I mean, it’s, it’s not going to do the outreach for you, but it can certainly help you build the lists. I mean, there’s no, there’s, that can be direct or indirect outreach. So, you know, we advocate the value of podcasts, shockingly. And so if you’re looking to be a guest on podcasts, why not ask AI, you know, what are some podcasts that would be appropriate for my expertise?

Maybe seed it with, Hey, some people like me are A, B, and C. You know, share with me a list of podcasts that these folks have been on. That can be a great way to figure out where to reach out, in order to be a guest. Or vice versa, if you’re looking for guests for your own show, say, here are three similar shows.

You know, who are some guests that I should think about inviting onto mine? So there’s a lot of things that you can use. The tool, the AI tools that exist to help you out, whether it’s doing outreach, whether it’s creating content, whether it’s building lists, whether it’s writing proposals, all of these things can be made more efficient by AI, but it’s not magic.

There’s, there’s nothing that’s going to generate all of these easy contacts and calls. Even if it did, as, as you pointed out, Gini, it’s not going to be something that you’re going to enjoy.

Gini Dietrich: No.

Chip Griffin: If you had to talk to 10 prospects a week, you’d go out of your mind.

Gini Dietrich: It’d be terrible.

Chip Griffin: I mean, it, it would just be nuts.

And I, I don’t know very many agency owners who could handle doing that number of calls, let alone actually closing deals. Right. Out of that. Nor would it be good for the business. And so, again, AI assists, AI does not replace, and AI is not something that’s going to get you magic overnight 10x success, which is unhealthy anyway.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yes. So, use AI to your advantage, do not be smarmy or gross, just like in anything else that you do. Don’t spray and pray, don’t be schmarmy, use it to your advantage.

Chip Griffin: And with that, we will draw this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast to a close without any smarm, maybe with a little bit of actual intelligence.

Well.

Gini Dietrich: Well, maybe at the beginning. Eh.

Chip Griffin: All right, I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the transition from being a freelancer to an agency owner. They delve into the common fears and challenges associated with hiring employees and emphasize the importance of having structured processes and systems.

The episode also explores topics such as the strategic direction of a business, handling pricing models, and the significance of building a team that you trust if your goal is to eventually sell the agency. Chip and Gini highlight the need to evolve business plans based on life phases and market demands, enabling freelancers to effectively scale their operations.

Key takeaways

• Gini Dietrich: “Your job as an agency owner is to put repeatable processes in place to be able to create consistency in the work.”
• Chip Griffin: “My advice is deal mostly in terms of the next one or two steps. Don’t think too far out and put yourself in a position where you freeze up on evolving because you feel so committed to that path.”
• Gini Dietrich: “There may be times where being a solopreneur is the right thing for you and you scale way back and then you build again.”
• Chip Griffin: “Most agency owners started out as freelancers. So just know that you are in a position that everybody else, in all likelihood, has been before you.”

Related

• ALP 11: Going from being a small team to an agency
• How to scale your agency and avoid common obstacles
• Get over your fear of hiring 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 first, as we record this, happy birthday, Gini.

Gini Dietrich: Thank you.

Chip Griffin: You do this to me on my birthday, so I’ll do it. You, you like celebrating your birthday more than I do, though.

Gini Dietrich: I do, I do. I love it.

Chip Griffin: You believe in holidays and fun and happiness.

Gini Dietrich: I’ve got, I’ve got 117 text messages today that I have not been able to get to yet, because I’ve been in back to back to back to back to back to back to back meetings.

Chip Griffin: Well, I held off because I knew we’d be talking anyway, so.

Gini Dietrich: Thank you.

Chip Griffin: I helped your inbox there, just, it was intentional on my part.

Actually, if I knew it was going to be difficult, I probably would have done it, just to have some extra. Alas, I will not sing to you. That is my birthday present to you and to our listeners.

Gini Dietrich: I was really hoping you would. I’m so sad.

Chip Griffin: No, you were not, but that’s okay. Alright, so why don’t we jump into our actual topic today, which is to dive into Reddit, your favorite place.

Gini Dietrich: I know! I’m really proud of myself. I have to say.

Chip Griffin: You have been thoroughly researching things on Reddit lately. You’ve taken one for the team and you have come up with a bunch of topics for Reddit posts that we’ll be having in coming episodes. But today we’re going to talk about one, about going from freelancer to agency owner and, and what you wish you had known when you started out that would have helped you in making that transition.

Gini Dietrich: Employees are hard.

Chip Griffin: Employees are absolutely hard. But I, but I, but I mean, I will say, I think that, that people get way too scared of having employees.

Gini Dietrich: Oh yeah, for sure. Yes.

Chip Griffin: And it holds people back substantially from where they could be because they are, they have this, I won’t say it’s an unfounded fear, but it’s an excessive fear of employees.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think so too. And I think there’s you know, I, I think because of the remote environment that we’re in, and especially since the pandemic, there’s been this big shift to hiring contractors, 1099 employees, instead of hiring employees, and it seems less scary. And there are certainly risks to it as well, you know, but I like to use contractors when the job is, the job to be done is not full time, or I don’t have the skill set internally to do it.

And I think a lot of people rely on contractors to build their business because they’re scared of hiring employees. And there are some things to be scared of, for sure. But just like anything else, there are pros and cons. And, you know, I think the pros far outweigh the cons. But, and I say that in jest a little bit that employees are hard because they are, I mean, you’re working with people and you’re putting a bunch of personalities together that may or may not mesh.

But, there’s a lot of satisfaction and growth opportunities that you just can’t do with contractors.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean absolutely and look I mean, contractors absolutely do have a place because as you say, they’re really good if it’s for a skill set that you simply don’t have and don’t need all the time.

It’s great if you don’t have you know, enough for a full time employee, or even a substantial part time employee. It’s great for short term projects. There, there’s a lot of times where it makes sense to have contractors. But I think as, as you think about making the move from being solely a freelancer into building an actual agency, there are things beyond hiring employees that you need to be thinking about because the mindset of building a, a real, quote unquote, real business as opposed to being a freelancer.

Not that being a freelancer isn’t a business technically, but the way you run it is very different. You really are functioning typically more as a part time employee, sometimes at a premium rate, but you’re not having to look at things in the same way that you do if you start thinking about whether it’s adding employees or contractors or other things.

You start to put more structure around it that you just don’t think about oftentimes as a freelancer.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I mean it’s there is certainly a lot of things to think about. We, just before this recording, I had a meeting with my senior leadership team and we were talking about, you know, strategic, the strategic direction of the business, and we’re certainly looking at the global climate and the U S environment and crafting plans for, for each, for different scenarios.

Like if, if everything goes according to plan, this is what it looks like. If everything goes to hell in a hand basket, this was what it looks like. And here’s sort of the middle. And those are the kinds of things that you’re doing when, when you have, when you’re growing a business, growing an agency versus being a solopreneur.

Because as a solopreneur to your point, you can have two or three really good clients who pay, pay you a premium, and that’s all you need. And you’re servicing two clients versus, you know, lots of clients and lots of employees and, and all those kind of things. So putting in the structure. And the process is really important.

And I am not a process person at all. Like I always feel like when process is put on me, I’m put inside a box and I can’t be creative. And so when I started my business, I thought everybody worked like that. And it turns out they don’t. And so you need process. You need that process in place to be able to make your service consistent, make your deliverables consistent.

You know, it’s sort of like, I always think about it from a McDonald’s perspective. If you go to McDonald’s and you order chicken McNuggets, they’re the same no matter where you are in the country or in the world. They taste exactly the same. French fries taste the same. They have the same process. And that’s the same thing that you want to think about from your business perspective is if somebody is working with an account executive or they’re working with your VP, the deliverables and the client service and everything is consistent.

And that, that’s your job is to put those processes in place to be able to create, to create that consistency.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And it’s absolutely critical that you do that because otherwise it is so difficult to, to become more than just yourself. And, you know, I love the McDonald’s example. I, I’m a pretty good home cook and people in the past said to me, well, you should really start a restaurant or something like that.

And I said, well, the problem for me is. I wouldn’t want to do it exactly the same way every day, but you have to, right? Because if someone orders your dish on Tuesday, they want to be able to come back on Friday and have it the exact same way. And so that means you have to write down a recipe and actually follow it.

And I don’t like to do that. It’s why I don’t bake. And instead I cook because I can kind of just go with whatever ingredients I have and wherever the mood takes me. As a freelancer, you can do that too. If you’re building an agency business, you can’t do that because you need to build systems and processes that allow other people to do it your way.

And it’s not your way or the highway. It’s your way so that you have a real brand reputation to build. And that people can expect that consistency, whether they’re working with you or with Sally or with Jane or whomever on your team, whether it’s a contractor or an employee, all of that matters to provide them with that experience that will help you to then continue to sell to new clients and retain the ones that you have.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And one of the other things I’ve learned over the years is, and, and I learned this one, especially sitting on the boards of a couple of companies that have sold, is that you, when you’re building a business, unless you’re, you’re building, unless you have a lifestyle business that’s, that’s supporting you so that you can live the lifestyle that you want, which is great.

And for many years, I’ve had a lifestyle business as well. If you’re building something that you want to sell, for instance. Not, no, not only are the processes important, but you have to build a team behind you that somebody would want to buy. Because there almost no one’s going to buy a quote unquote agency that’s reliant on you.

If, if that’s the case, they’re, they’re hiring, they’re buying an employee, right? They’re not buying, they’re not buying a business. So you also, in, on top of the processes, you have to think about who’s the leadership team that’s behind you that someone would want to buy and are they delivering the same things that you can as, as the owner?

And in some cases, are they better than you, which is also really hard when you’re building a business to hire people who are smarter and better than you at some of the things that you do, but it’s really important if your end goal is to sell.

Chip Griffin: Well, I think that also points to one of the other key skills that you need to refine if you’re going to go from freelancer to agency owner, which is you need to have the ability to let go. Yes. You need to have the ability to say, It needs to be done my way, but not down to the last T and I. Like, I mean, you really got to have the ability to say, I trust my team.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: They’re going to achieve results. And again, as a freelancer where you’re doing everything yourself,

it’s fine if you want to take the time to get it exactly right and do it exactly the way you want to do it. I mean, you still need to be careful because, you know, you’re selling your time at that point. Sure. You still want to make money, but, and you want to have perhaps a real life outside of work. Yeah.

 But you need to think about it even more in terms of that letting go, because whether you want to just have a lifestyle business that you keep in and use for as long as you can, or whether you want to build something to sell, you need to have something where you are not so in the weeds on everything that it’s impossible to grow.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And I think that’s a really good point too, in that you have to really think about, first of all, what kind of business are you growing? Are you building? And what are the things that are going to help you get there? So if it’s, if it’s a lifestyle business, and like I said, I think that’s great because there, there are certain points in your life where you may need that kind of business because you need flexibility or whatever it happens to be.

Maybe you have, you’re raising kids and your parents are, are, you’re taking care of your parents. Or, you know, there could be lots of reasons that you want a business that supports the lifestyle that you have in the moment. And that’s fantastic. But knowing what that is, I think is the difference.

And then saying, okay, well, I want to shift from the lifestyle business, for instance, and build something that I’m going to sell. Because my kids will be out of, out of college in 10 years and I’ll be ready to go on to the next phase of my life and so I want to start building toward that. So understand where you are in your phase of life and what kind of business is going to support that at the time.

And also what that looks like strategically down the road, right? You don’t have to build a 5,000 person firm. You don’t have to be the biggest and the best. You don’t even have to build a 10 person firm and, and if you think that you want to sell something. It just has to be something that people want.

And like with us, we’ve built this PESO model framework that everybody wants, right? So we’ve taken our intellectual property and built a business around it, which we’re going to continue to grow and to scale and hopefully sell at some point. So that has shifted. You know, when I started my business, we did media relations.

That’s what we did. And it’s completely evolved with my phase in, in my life and also what we’ve been able to accomplish for clients. So I guess the point is it’s going to evolve, it’s going to change and you may decide right now on something and three years from now, you’re like, this is not what I wanted. And that’s okay too. But have the ability to plan and to think it through and understand that right now, this is what I think I want.

And so I’m going to build that. And understand that it might change. My life circumstances might change. And so my business will too.

Chip Griffin: Well, I think that’s, that’s important to remember. That the evolution process of a business is so much different from being a freelancer. As a freelancer you may need to hone some new skills and those kinds of things, but, but typically most freelancers, their evolution is much,

much more slow, much less dramatic. If you are running an agency business, the likelihood that you are going to need to evolve, to pivot, as we talked about a few episodes ago, those things are all going to, to require a bit more. And I think you need to, to have the flexibility to keep yourself open to that evolution.

You need to, you know, not be changing on a whim every day, but you also can’t get so set on something that you, that you thought you wanted that, that you have no way of evolving into what is now needed for you or for the marketplace or whatever. And I, I see too many times where people get hung up because they said two or three years ago, I don’t ever want to have employees. Or, you know, I want to be a 50 person firm or a 500 person firm.

My advice is deal mostly in terms of the next one or two steps. Don’t think too far out and put yourself in a position where you freeze up on evolving because you feel so committed to that path. And I think the two biggest ones are wanting to be a certain large size. Or wanting to remain super small and not have employees.

I think those two extremes are the most dangerous and the most likely to hold you back or cause you to make bad decisions.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And it’s, it’s really I think it’s really important for you to remember to give yourself some grace, you know. And, and there may be times where being a solopreneur is the right thing for you and you scale way back and then you build again and then you scale back and then you build again.

Like there, and that’s okay too. So just understand that the type of business that you’re growing for the phase of life that you’re in is what’s the most important.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. I think one of the other areas that you need to be thinking about if you are making this transition from freelancer to agency owner is pricing. And we talk a lot about pricing here and how much difficulty agencies generally have with it. But the pricing models that you use, if you even want to call it that when you’re a freelancer, is very, very different from the way that you need to be thinking about pricing as an agency business.

You need to be thinking about how do you support additional people working on the same things that you are. You need to think about how do you grow in such a way that you are not pricing yourself out of things because you’re pricing it all as if you are the one doing it personally. And it is a real balance that you need to strike there.

So it appears as we’ve been going along here that Gini’s power has suddenly gone out. So I’m going to do my best to wrap up this episode as we move forward here. And so I, I think that you need to be thinking about pricing as I was talking about, you need to be considering how to, to, to position yourself so that you are pricing so that the work that needs to be done can be done by other people.

And that means really thinking through things in a different way than that you would as a freelancer. And so, as you’re thinking about potentially making this transition from being an independent freelancer to running a full fledged agency business, you want to be thinking about all of these things that we’ve been talking about. How to put in processes and systems in place. How to judge your own decision making and be ready to evolve. How to manage pricing and expectations. How to handle some of those challenges that come up with the, the mental obstacle, or the psychological obstacle of hiring employees and balancing employees and contractors.

There are a lot of things to think about. But most people who have been agency owners started out as freelancers. So just know that you are in a position that everybody else, in all likelihood, has been before you. And so while it may be scary in the moment, while it may be difficult in the moment, it is absolutely manageable.

And there are lots of places, including Reddit, where you can go and get advice. Just be careful with some of that Reddit advice. We’d like to think that we offer some of that better here. So, with that, I will sign off for, Gini, and I’m, of course, Chip, and that wraps up this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast.

Thanks for joining us, and, remember, it depends.

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.

Chip and Gini discuss a Reddit user's question about managing a $2 million account.