Build a Better Agency Podcast

I have repeatedly said that many agency owners have earned an MBA in emotional leadership over the last year and a half. It’s been exhausting, frightening, paralyzing, motivating, inspiring, and, at times, you’re simply doing whatever it takes to survive. The question becomes, how can we best manage and communicate our emotions for the good of our agency, team, and personal well-being?

You’ve heard me say it a million times. Most agency owners are accidental business owners. Most of us can remember the moment when we looked around and realized, “this is so much harder than I thought it would be and if I’m being honest – I am winging this.” We’re nervous about admitting our uncertainty but at some point, most agency owners are hungry to learn and willing to admit don’t always have the answer. But what if embracing the doubts we all have is actually a sign of great leadership?

The last year has been an insane one for the human resources side of owning a business. We’ve faced the pandemic, working from home, layoffs, furloughs, understanding what (if any) employee assistance was available in our cities, states, and countries, as well as issues around diversity, equality, and inclusion. All of this has forced many of us to have uncomfortable conversations with our employees. HR consultant Molly Eyerman is here to help us try to figure out how to navigate all of these challenges.

Every agency is going to have a vaccine policy. You have three choices – you can mandate the covid 19 vaccine, you can encourage it or you can take a “don't ask, don’t tell” policy and in essence, ignore it. But each of those choices is in essence a declaration of how you’re going to handle the question of vaccine in your shop. It will become your policy.

We talk about influencer marketing like it’s a hot new trend. That’s not quite right. Celebrity endorsements have been around forever. The difference is that celebrity is defined very differently today. It’s a bit of the wild west and we’ve all heard the horror stories. That’s why many agencies and brands have shied away from influencer marketing. What if you could sidestep the risks while maximizing the credibility and trust that the right influencer can bring to our clients?

Trust. It’s always been at the core of running and leading your agency. If our teams don’t trust us, they don’t follow us. If our prospects don’t trust us, they don’t hire us. And if our clients lose trust in us, we lose them. The challenge is how do you know if you’re trusted? You can’t just point blank ask. If an employee doesn’t trust you, they sure as heck aren’t going to say so. And even if you are trusted – how do you level up to an even deeper degree of trust with your team, cli

In the agency space, we have to constantly be reinventing the wheel because everything keeps changing. By the nature of our business, we are always doing something for the first time which, lends itself to having a nagging doubt now and then. In a world where it’s impossible to have all the answers, but also being a leader in an industry where you’re supposed to understand everything, it’s easy to fall victim to imposter syndrome. Fortunately, you are not alone and there are some fixes you can deploy.

Every week I get an email or three from an agency owner asking me if I have a contract template or some other legal document that they can just copy and use. For a few hundred or thousand dollars – do not put your entire agency at risk. It’s dangerous and short-sighted for an agency to use someone else’s agreement as a template. They need to be built for your agency, your clients and your particulars. The good news is that you can spend a little now to avoid paying a lot down the road.

It’s lonely at the top. While that’s a cliché, as agency owners we all know it to be very true. On those days when you’d sell your agency for a nickel, who do you have to confide in? On the flip side – when you land the biggest account in your agency’s history, who can you call who will be as excited as you are?

At AMI we preach the idea of building your wealth outside your agency, while you still own your agency. Sadly, many owners leave too much in retained earnings inside the agency and over time, they piddle that money away. Agency owners often ask me about how other agency owners are building a nest egg outside of the shop. Most will consider real estate but rarely do they think about passive real estate investments. I want to make sure we change that!

In this episode of Build a Better Agency, RJ and I discuss the many ways AI insights are quickly becoming a necessity for agencies of all sizes. We look at the specific data it can provide, as well as how an agency can begin to experiment while convincing even the most dubious of clients of its importance. We also talk about the way the creative life cycle is changing, how agencies approach AI wrong, and what is coming next in the world of artificial intelligence.

Back in the good old days (pre great recession) agencies used research to make their work smarter and more effective. But it became a luxury we trimmed out as we had to squeeze budgets. As we emerged from the recession, we dismissed research as expensive and didn’t build it into our recommendations as often as we should. But what if we could benefit from the insights research provides without busting the budget?

One of the biggest bottlenecks in many agencies is that the agency owner is the only person who can develop strategies for clients or new business pitches. As you know, this causes a host of problems, not the least of which is then the agency owner can’t focus on doing his/her job. Most owners feel stuck – believing that strategic thinking is not something you can teach. But what if you could?

Many agencies have started reaping the benefits of embedding an account executive in a client’s office. By that I mean someone from the agency team literally has a desk or office in a client’s business for a set amount of time every week. Now that more agencies and clients have returned to the office, this becomes a very viable option again. In this episode, I want to talk about what this means, how to do it well, and both the risks and value of doing it.

I believe there are four quadrants that build agency success: leadership, business development, delivering quality, and financial health. Ben Aston is here to share his insights on a plethora of project management areas, which include defining the skills for an ideal project manager, injecting flexibility into planning, reframing time tracking, and solving the problem of the dreaded “scope creep.”