How military lessons translate to agency leadership with Ryan Carey

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Agency Management Institute community, where you’ll learn how to grow and scale your business, attract and retain the best talent, make more money and keep more of what you make. The Build a Better Agency podcast presented by White Label IQ, is packed with insights on how small to mid-size agencies survive and thrive in today’s market. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey everybody, Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute. Welcome to another episode of Build a Better Agency. As always I am grateful that you carve out the time to hang out with me. I know how busy you are, and so for you to give up this time, I’m just really grateful. Thanks for coming back and thanks for being a great listener, and thank you for the feedback that you send me. I love your emails. I love to hear what you’re thinking. I love to hear which guests really resonated with you. Don’t hesitate to do that as well. Before I tell you about today’s guests, I want to give you a couple quick announcements. First one is, we have a killer workshop coming up in December. It’s called Money Matters. And for two days, all we talk about is, every aspect of money from an agency owners point of view. We talk about agency math. We talk about metrics that give you objective ways to run your shop, so that you know that you’re making good decisions.

We talk about taxes. We talk about proposals and pricing, and we talk about all kinds of different things, all around the idea of helping you make more money and keep more of the money you make. That is a workshop that I have taught, gosh, for over a decade. There has never been a time that I’ve taught that workshop, that somebody has not walked up to me and said, why did I not take this workshop 10 years ago? I wish I had known all of these things that long ago. Don’t be that person, just come hang out with us on December 9th and 10th in beautiful warm Orlando, Florida, again, December 9th and 10th, if you live anywhere north of the Mason Dixie, you know that that means you’re going to have dicey weather, so come on down to Florida with us for a couple of days, and learn all about how you can make more money and keep more of the money you make.

I promise it’s going to be awesome, as always our workshops always come with a money back guarantee. I’ve never had to give money back, but if you need it back, I’m happy to give it to you, if you feel like it wasn’t worth it. No risk, just come on down and learn with us. Second thing I want to remind you is that we give away a free workshop, so you could win the money matters workshop, absolutely free. See it at the workshop. All you have to do is leave us a rating and review on the podcast. Go wherever you download your podcasts, leave a rating and a review for us, and then take a screenshot of it, because I can’t tell from your username, bikermomma42, that you really are X, Y, Z agency owner, from X, Y, Z agency. Take a screenshot of it and email it to me, send it to [email protected]. And we will put you in the drawing for a free workshop.

If you’re out of the states or you don’t want to travel, you can also get a free seat in one of our on demand workshops as well. It’ll take you three minutes. It’s totally worth it. Each workshop is a couple of grand, so why not take advantage of that? All right? All right. Without further ado, let me tell you a little bit about our guest today. I have known this gentleman quite a while, have a great deal of admiration for him as a human being and as an agency leader. He and I were talking and he is, well, let me just tell you a little bit about him. His name is Ryan Carey and he is a ranger qualified army vet who served 10 years in the army before joining Huebner Integrated Marketing in 2018. That year they also launched White Label IQ, which as you know is the presenting sponsor here at the podcast.

Ryan now heads up that company or that division of the marketing agency. He’s just a great guy. While he was in the military, he got his undergrad and his master’s degree in information technology, and he’s an amazing leader. And so we got talking about how he became a great leader and it really became very apparent that he learned a lot of his leadership skills and has a lot of insight from his days in the army. I asked him if he would come on the show and talk about what he learned in the army translates to agency life and how he leads his team today. I think this is going to be fascinating and I’m excited for you to get to meet Ryan and hear his story and hear how he chooses to lead his team and some of the insights that he gained serving as a ranger in the army, and now that’s translating now to his business life.

All right, without further ado, let me introduce you to Ryan and let’s get going. Ryan, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Ryan Carey:

Thanks for having me.

Drew McLellan:

One of the things I find fascinating about you and you and I have known each other for a while now is, most people come to agency life, especially agency ownership because they worked in a bunch of agencies and a lot of people who work in agencies have never worked anywhere, but an agency. But one of the things that I think makes you unique as a leader inside an agency, is that you actually bring a lot of a very different experience to agency life than most of us who grew up in the business do. You’ve spent a lion’s share of your career so far until this stage in the military, right?

Ryan Carey:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes.

Drew McLellan:

As you and I have talked about before, there are all kinds of lessons that you when you are serving that you now bring into the business setting. And that was really the gist of when I said to you, hey, I want you to come on the podcast. I said, I want to talk about some of the lessons that you learned while you were serving our country and how do those apply to agency life, with the full acknowledgement that we’re talking apples and oranges here, right? We’re talking about life and death situations, and I know you’re going to get into some of that when you start talking about some of the specifics versus agency life, no one dies working at an agency and we don’t save lives. I just want to acknowledge right off the bat that I recognize that I’m asking you to extrapolate things you learned in a very dangerous, serious, you’re trying to keep people alive situation and apply it to a business.

But nonetheless, I think, I know for a fact that you have brought a lot of these lessons back to your shop, and I think it influences the way you lead. I think it influences the way your team follows you. I think that some of the reasons why you’re successful is because you learned these leadership skills under extreme conditions where there was really no margin for error.

Ryan Carey:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s been really a blessing to be able to start, like you said, start with that and then be able to take that into other facets of my career, has been a huge blessing for me specifically. I’m excited to share.

Drew McLellan:

Well, and I have to think that, when things get tense at an agency and people freak out, you have to be like, seriously people, no one’s shooting at us. We’re not worried about landmines. We’re just working on a deadline. Relax.

Ryan Carey:

Yeah. Yeah. Even my wife will sometimes comment on how, for me, when I’m in stressful scenarios now, it’s always basic on, is anybody dying? Okay. Then we can just have fun with whatever we’re doing and get through it and move on. The risks are drastically different.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. That’s for sure. All right. I’m recalling some stories that you’ve told me, and then you sent me some other stories that we thought that would be good. I just wanted to jump in and explore this interesting dichotomy of lessons learned while serving the US versus how you brought them in. Let’s talk a little bit about the insight you had when you were in Afghanistan and you were trying to, if I recall, you were trying to stabilize the region, you’re trying to get consensus and cooperation from, I’m sure a vast number of people with vast different goals and probably motivations, not unlike we get with clients and employees and all of that. Let’s talk a little bit about the lesson that you took away from that setting.

Ryan Carey:

Well, one of the main campaigns, I was deployed in Afghanistan from 2012 and 2013. That’s toward the tail end of, well, is there really an end? That’s a whole nother discussion. But as far as our experience and where we’re at, we’re coming towards the tail end of our involvement, at least in a strategic, overall perspective and with boots on ground in the majority of the area. We were tasked with, the slogan and I can’t even remember if it’s a formal or informal at this point, but the common phrase was Afghan problem, Afghan solution. What that meant was, the Afghan people as they’re going through it, when we leave, we need to generate an environment and generate solutions that are specific to what are feasible to what they do can do.

That was one of the big things that we were responsible to do. There’s all sorts of different ways that I think this applies currently, because we’re going in there, even just trying to establish policing, just security for the people that are in the area. And as we’re going through, we’re working with militia, informally. We’re working with a formal developing a police department, and it looks nothing like I’m here in Fort Collins, it looks nothing like Fort Collins PD at all. They’re not going to be similar in that. And if we took those same concepts from our experiences and exposure in the US to over there, they would just fail. They wouldn’t work. There’s different things there. Nationalism is different because there’s a lot of more tribal people.

Just taking that over into the agency world, one of the things that I was actually, and I was thinking about a specific client and we came to them with PPC, right? We talked to them said, hey, we think this is a good solution. We want to talk about what you want from it, how it’s going to align with things that you’re doing in your business. They gave us some good feet back. We started working on it, and then it was a constant struggle every day, every month, trying to convince them that what we were doing was good, and that they were seeing success. We finally came back to him and said, okay, there’s something going on that you don’t want to do this. Some friction point, you’re not seeing the success that we’re seeing and we’re showing good numbers. Let’s dig into that and let’s figure out a little bit more about what’s going on.

And so out of that conversation, we realized that what they wanted, their success metrics and the thing that solution that they wanted at the end was for their clients to go into a dealership and ask for their brand, on the product that they had. That’s a big shift, PPC can accomplish that a little bit, but there’s other things like influencer marketing, you can just rattle off the list of all these things. Some of which we may be not providing for them or could provide, but we walk them through that to help define the specific success metric that worked for them. Even though PPC were like, okay, lead generation is what you want to do. That’s how we’re going to go forward. That was not in the end how they saw success. It started to fail and crack a little bit until we realigned with them.

Drew McLellan:

Do you think you didn’t have the right conversation on the front end? Again, in your Afghan situation, it was more of, you went in with some assumptions about what would work, because of what works in the US, and probably didn’t have the high level conversations, or maybe as many conversations with the people there to understand what mattered to them, what they were going to respond to, so that you could suggest a solution that they would actually be open to. I guess my question is trying to translate it back to the business, do you think you just didn’t do enough due diligence? I know everybody does some due diligence, but I think it’s so easy to stay on the surface and not really dig down deeper. Right?

Ryan Carey:

Well, even when it’s something that they’re not familiar with. That’s a direct comparison. You got the Afghan people that are not familiar with, one, a national government structured police force government, all those types of amenities down to the way local level. And the same thing with this client, they had not really been in the PPC world. We asked the questions, they answered to their best ability, but it was an education process as we went on, what is this doing? Where are we driving? What are the things, the actual tactics that are then driving that strategy? And then they came back. I think maybe partly, but I think it’s also, it’s a learning curve and as you develop that situation, you got to continue to make sure that it’s aligning with where they’re wanting to go, because they’re learning too in the whole process.

Drew McLellan:

That’s an interesting point, that discovery can’t just happen on the front end, but that it needs to happen throughout the client relationship, because every time we do something for them, everything evolves a little bit and we have to be able to shift with it. Right?

Ryan Carey:

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah 100%.

Drew McLellan:

And so I’m curious how, because part of this that makes it interesting for me, and when you and I talk is, it’s not only that you bring these skills and knowledge and this experience into the agency, but you’re an agency leader, which means that you’ve got to be teaching your team how to learn this Afghan problem, Afghan solution. How do you translate that as a leader? How do you translate that to your folks?

Ryan Carey:

That’s a great question. I think a little bit of it is giving everybody the runway and the ownership in it. So not only setting them up for success, and as far as just training them in professional development and making sure that they’re up to understanding on what the client’s goals are and things like that, but also then giving them an opportunity to grow into maybe where their weaknesses are. So having the ability to then stretch that a little bit beyond. I think, especially in leadership, you can very easily get into a micro-managing scenario, especially when it’s client facing, you want the client to get your A++ work. You don’t want to leave anything up to chance, because that might mean part of your livelihood. It could be your gorilla client and all of that.

I think it’s definitely a stretch. It definitely is uncomfortable. But giving them the opportunity to do that and setting them up with clear communication, that’s one thing that I think we probably over-communicate in the military, to the extent of red tape and things just being beat into people’s heads in a mundane way. But I’ve taken that and tried to take that for the good aspects of it and overly communicate. Here’s your limits and here’s where I need you to go. And then being able to check along the way too. There’s a great saying that I love, it’s trust, but verify, and I think that’s a great phrase for that.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Agreed. I think one of the other things that when I think about the military, I think about the rigidity and the rules and the boundaries, all of which I’m sure from the military perspective is all about predictability that there’s a reliability to, that everyone’s going to behave a certain way, that everyone is going to march to the same beat and all of that, which again, I totally get. But I have to think that that understanding about routine and ritual and consistency that you learned in the military has shown up at work as well.

Ryan Carey:

Yeah, absolutely. I think of it, because I came in to Huebner Marketing as a business intelligence analyst. It was partly Jim finding a good job for me to do, but it fed a lot into that, with that rigid, the process, the systems and those types of things. That’s what I’ve really focused on and where I’ve seen myself be a big value add, is helping not only just accomplish the things that we’re accomplishing, but doing it in a way that’s repeatable, and the way that if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, somebody could pick it up and do it to the extent that I could. That’s been definitely something, even doing a playbook with different things that we have lined up, things, tasks, projects, a website bill, any of those types of things so that we follow the same rhythm every time.

Drew McLellan:

I know too one of the risks of that is, that it becomes so routine that you become complacent, right?

Ryan Carey:

Yeah. Yeah. There’s one specific story that sticks out from my time in Afghanistan was, so you are constantly going on, we call it going on patrol. What that is, is just going outside of the base. It served a couple of different purposes. One purpose is to just engage with the people. It’s not like you’re just in this high castle and not talking to anyone. You know what’s going on. And then that also then indirectly and directly leads to understanding the different threats that are facing you. You know if a certain town is not feeling comfortable and they’re starting on edge and you notice that. You know that there’s maybe a new threat or something like that. We would go on patrols pretty much daily. And as we do this, we would do them walking or in vehicles and this one particular one we were doing in a vehicle. We would get out of our base and drive to this town and we could then set up and then walk or do whatever else we needed to do or talk to a specific person or whatever the case may be.

There weren’t a whole lot of options as far as to get out of the base. It was close enough to the base, this particular area that we’re like, okay, we’ve done it every day for the past three months, we got it. You can see this area from the base, so there’s high likelihood that everything’s fine. That complacency actually led to them placing, enemy placing an IED, which is an explosive device, a mine in the ground. One of our vehicles ran over it and blew up one of the vehicles. Thankfully no one was hurt in that scenario other than some concussions. A couple of concussions from the vehicle that ran over it. The vehicles are made, which is great, they’re made to withstand those types of blasts and they lose a wheel, lose an axle or whatever. But then it also hurt our pride a little bit, knowing that we got duped by just being complacent.

I think that that’s easily right there, where if you’re doing the same thing over and over again, it’s the, what is it? The definition of insanity, expecting different results [crosstalk 00:20:02]. My wife does a PPC with us and we were discussing this a little bit too. And I think a lot about PPC and reporting within the same mindset, because even if you have good results that you’re delivering to a client, if you’re telling them the same thing, month after month and expecting them to every time be like, oh, wow, that’s amazing, Ryan. I can’t believe we got the same numbers we got last month, then that’s not going to happen. That’s not realistic. And so in that, I think it’s really easy to do it, especially if they are good, you’re like, we’re doing great. You’re still getting 20% awesome leads that you’re closing on and business is good.

And if you’re not helping to be that growth accelerant, and you’re just doing a thing, I think it’s very easy to become a line item on an expense report and not a benefit to the agency or to the company and a growth accelerant. It’s just, maybe we can do without it.

Drew McLellan:

I also think that in the good old days, marketing and advertising was very much more set it and forget it, right? You’d place a TV spot for 13 weeks and it just would run. I think in today’s world that complacency. We have to be predictable in terms of we’re going to deliver results and we’re going to do these things. But part of the predictability has to be that we’re going to keep trying new things and experiment and do that because otherwise we’re complacent and we’re going to deliver either the same or the same but declining results over time. Right?

Ryan Carey:

Yeah. I think even too, with the wide variety of in-house marketing teams and things like that, that feel like they know how to do certain things. If it’s the same, same old, same old, they just start going, yeah, this is nothing. Ryan’s not doing a whole lot for us. I can do exactly what they’re doing. You lose that value.

Drew McLellan:

And again, my guess is that in the military there isn’t a happy medium, you just do what you’re supposed to do. But I think in our world, the understanding that the predictability also means that you’re going to predictably keep elevating the effort and keep finding new ways to solve the problem for clients as opposed to phoning it in.

Ryan Carey:

Yeah. 100%.

Drew McLellan:

I want to ask you about leadership inside the military and the idea of absolute leadership versus what I would call participatory leadership. But first I want to take a quick break, then we’ll come back and we’ll talk about that. I promise I won’t keep you long, but I want to tell you about a workshop that we have coming up. The AE bootcamp is for entry-level folks, anywhere from starting out in their career to maybe four or five years of experience at agencies. It’s going to be September 14th and 15th in Chicago. We talk a lot about the unique role of an AE and how they serve many masters. They serve the agency and the agency owner, they serve the clients and they also have to develop a great relationship with their internal team.

We talk about all of those things. We talk about time management. We talk about growing clients and teach them agency math, so they understand how you do or don’t make money. I promise you, they’re going to come back fired up. They’re going to come back with all kinds of new ideas and tools, and they’re going to come back ready to help you grow the agency. If you want to learn more about the workshop, head over to agencymanagementinstitute.com, and under the, how we help tab, you will find the workshops all listed right there. All right? All right. Let’s get back to the show.

All right. We are back and Ryan and I are talking about how some of his experiences in the military have translated into the way that he runs the organization that he works at now. My impression of the military is when someone of a higher rank tells you to do something, you reply, yes sir, and you do whatever it is that they ask you to do. I’m sure there are exceptions and I’m sure in your training, they’re like if you think that person’s going to kill a bunch of people or do something bad, you’re probably supposed to speak up. But I’m also guessing that when you’re supposed to do that is a very defined and a small box of circumstances that would get you permission or not get in trouble for defining an order from a senior ranking officer.

Ryan Carey:

Yeah. They call it an unlawful order. Meaning that it’s breaking the law, the order is breaking the law. That’s pretty high standard for that. There’s a lot of gray in there.

Drew McLellan:

In an agency, we ask our people to speak up. We ask them to express their opinion. We ask them to, even if it’s not their job, we ask them to pay attention and care enough that they would raise their hand and say, you know what? I don’t think that’s quite right. Talk to me about how you transitioned from a world where leadership and command was pretty sacred, to an organization where we’re actually asking them to sometimes buck the system.

Ryan Carey:

Yeah. Push back and challenge us a little bit. I think it was a pretty hard transition for me, and it was granted when I came into the business, like I said, I was recruited as business intelligence analyst. When I came into the agency world, I was not necessarily directly in leadership or anything like that. And then my roles have progressed as I’ve gained experience and exposure. Starting off too, there was a lot of times where I would have a really hard time. Well, maybe it was, it’s on both sides of the coin. One, sometimes speaking up and challenging those types of things. And on the same side, watching some peers at that level challenge authority, and I’m going, oh man, they’re being so insubordinate, they need to get disciplined or something. That’s just not the agency world.

Drew McLellan:

We’re not supposed to discipline employees, right? No, we’re not. That’s frowned upon.

Ryan Carey:

Yeah, yeah, no latrine duties.

Drew McLellan:

That’s right. Great. That’s a good one. We should think about that.

Ryan Carey:

Yeah. They need to be cleaned. Right?

Drew McLellan:

That’s right.

Ryan Carey:

Who’s got to do it? It was definitely a fine line between that. There’s a few different instances that I can think in my military experience where those lines, I might regret different things. It’s always, you’re looking back on it with hindsight.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Of course. Of course. Right.

Ryan Carey:

There’s different things that you could see and say, I totally was standing up for that, and in reality, you didn’t really say anything or whatever. I think what I really tried to do is find a good balance of that and I think it goes a lot into respect, and so respect and trust. Within our organization as we have confrontation and I watch our owner handle that and handle that with grace and openness, I watched then the results of that too. So then you start giving people other additional ownership in it. They know that you trust them and that you respect them. Like we talked about with the client, the client is in your hands, and it’s our livelihood. You need to really step it up. On the same side, come back to them and go, this is just a really not a great idea, and the client’s not going to be happy with this, or it’s not the best thing for the client.

I think there’s also layers too, as an agency owner, you’re not the one doing all the things, you don’t know all the, maybe there’s some out there that do, but you don’t know all of the things that are going on on the base level to help support and service a client. There’s things that you might not be able to do, and you have to give ownership up to them to be able to do that.

Drew McLellan:

On the military side, what does that look like? If you’re going to buck the system, it’s only when you think, what they’re asking you to do is unlawful. And so even if it’s a bad idea, you just do it because you were told to do it.

Ryan Carey:

There’s a lot of red tape, political aspects of it. But the system works. There’s definitely times where we’re not the most successful in certain areas, but I think in the end, it’s all about really when it comes down to it, doing your part and maybe that’s going above and beyond what you’re asked to do to help support. If it’s a bad scenario, then you’re going through and trying to figure out all the ways that you can still support that decision, but do it in the best way possible, put checks and balances, put extra precautions in and do that. There was a lot of different opportunities like that, and I think that carries over pretty well too. That if the boss comes down and tells you, hey, we’re going to do PPC for this client, and you go, this is not a good idea.

Well, then there’s also a bunch of other opportunities that you can start maybe researching, come up with other good ideas, and rather than just being the naysayer, you’re the problem solver and you’re helping support that, even if you don’t agree with it 100%.

Drew McLellan:

How do you bring that sense of, because you’re right, it’s about balance, right? It’s about respect. It’s about, I’m the leader, I’m the owner, I’m the boss, I’m the department head, all of that. But I also want you rank and file to raise your hand, right? How have you as a leader encourage that, but also this is also commanded or demanded the respect, that there is a way to object or have a different opinion, but there is a way to do that, that people are open to hearing as opposed to feeling they’re just being disrespected?

Ryan Carey:

Yeah. And disrespected as from the agency perspective you’re saying, or that’s the agency owners communicating down?

Drew McLellan:

Well, I’m saying, for you as a leader, in the military, I’m sure there were people who are ranked higher than you. I’m sure there were people that were below you and everyone understood A, when they could and couldn’t object, but B, how to do that in a way that still showed respect. In an agency, I don’t think that’s as clearly defined. What I’m asking you is, when you went into an agency and said, now I’m in a leadership role and I have people reporting to me and I want to encourage them to voice their opinion, to raise a red flag, to let me know if they think something that we’re doing is not the smartest choice or whatever it is. How do you teach that inside that nebulous environment? Right?

Ryan Carey:

Sure. I think it goes back a lot to what we were talking about earlier, as far as, so it’s respect and trust, and that’s what you need to build. I think within the trust department, it’s one of those things that you have to earn it as you go forward. And as an agency owner, you give them enough leash to be able to do the things, and then you’re verifying that things are being. There’s a little bit of a check and balance as you grow. And then I just think the more that you give them the opportunity and they excel at it and that trust is built up, it was the same in the military. If a private in my unit came up to me, that was fresh out of basic training and came and told me, hey sir, you’re a complete idiot for doing this and going this way and we should go the other way.

I’m going to tell him to shut, maybe some explicitives up and get back in line and let’s do this thing. And I’m not going to necessarily listen to that. But if my right-hand man then comes and tells me, hey sir, this is a bad idea. There’s even a scenario which I’ll, and not to take us to many tangents from this, because I’m answering that, but where we, and this is a pretty serious insensitive, I don’t make me to make light of it as you alluded to earlier. We were on a mission and we actually, my boss, my company commander was shot and killed during one of our missions. And in that we were separated from him. It was a large company-wide mission that we were doing. We were separated from him. We knew something bad happened. We didn’t know all the details.

I finally got an update from it. I understood that he had been killed and we had to continue going on with our mission. My thought, my decision at the time, being a young leader was, okay, I’m going to tell the guys, I’ll tell them when we get back, let’s keep our heads in the game and move forward. That’s when my right hand man, our first class lineman at the time, pulled me aside and said, hey, we are telling these guys right now, we’re letting them know what’s going to happen and they will step up. It’s hard for them to hear it, but it’s better than waiting and not knowing what’s going on. That was 100% the right decision. I would’ve made a bad call had I just been arrogant and said, no, I know what to do. I got this.

But I did that because, and I listened to him because that trust was there. I think that’s really, as hard and as nebulous as that is, I think the more that you build trust with the people, the more that they’re going to be able to say something when it matters.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Well, I think trust is a two-way street, right? It’s not only having them trust you, but it’s also you demonstrating that you trust them and that you value their opinion.

Ryan Carey:

Another slight tangent from that, but I was thinking about this too, of just overall ownership. I think I come at it with a higher view, I think than some other people of people, because I’ve seen people in their worst and in their best. There’s a couple of times that I think of, and I have two soldiers that I’m thinking of and their specific experiences. One was, he was our automatic grenade launcher, gunner. And so we had these armored vehicles, a gun was mounted on the top and then you operate it from robotics inside the vehicle. We were in the middle of a firefight and the significance of it is, there are people out and about on foot and then he’s in the vehicle trying to find the highest threats and eliminate those and keep those guys on the ground safe.

That’s his job and his role, and he’s relatively safe in that environment. The grenade launchers are known for jamming. And so in the middle of the firefight, he’s covering a lot of people and their lives are at stake and he immediately hops out of his vehicle. There is rockets, automatic machine gunfire, gets up on top of the vehicle and removes, fixes the jam and gets it back operational. And in the time even got a purple heart for that time, because he got some shrapnel from some exploding rockets and other things, and maybe from a machine gunfire that’s disrupting off the vehicle and got his hand. Just that. And then I also think of another story of my RTO, which is a radio telephone operator, basically your IT communications guy in the field. He’s responsible all of that.

When we’re outside, if something goes down, we’re looking at him to fix it. He’s also always right next to me, so that I can immediately contact my boss and talk if we need to get support or anything like that. I was just always impressed by how he would go. He would figure out every little bit and every little detail or configuration of the IT equipment and the radio communication that we had. Anything that was out there, he would do it. And one time we had the outgoing unit leave us a bunch of really nice equipment, we’d never been trained on. We got pretty much a handshake and a toss of a bag over and say, here you go, and we didn’t really know how to use it.

It was a lot better than the equipment that we had. He spent his off hours, anytime we had any personal, quote unquote, personal or free time, where most of us would rest and sleep and shower and doing all that. He was sitting there figuring out how to get that equipment working and to use it the best of our ability in the platoon. Just those two stories alone, I just go and I go, people can do amazing things, and when you give them the leeway and the trust, they can take that very far. Now that’s not everybody. I’ve had some bad experiences, but it’s all about that progression. Neither one of those, was it just like, okay, go. There’s training, there’s lead up there, the relationships were built, and I think you can do the same within the agency.

Drew McLellan:

But again, it is a 360 trust, so those guys also knew that they weren’t going to get in trouble for making those choices. Right? I also think, and this is a little off tangent too, but I also think in both cases, those men did what they did because they cared about the people that they served with. And those were their brothers in arms, belonging to that team mattered to them. I think we can create that. I think we have to create that inside our agencies. One of the reasons why people don’t leave early when everybody else is staying late and working, but they go, hey, you know what, I’ve got hands. I can stuff envelopes, or I can run and get you food while you’re doing this other thing. We do that when we have not only a passion for the work, but a passion for the people that we do the work with. And so I think creating that a culture where everyone really does understand it’s a team sport and that you have a responsibility and the privilege of playing on this team.

Ryan Carey:

Yeah. And you touched on one thing too, that I’m thinking of, that’s also in that, is communication, right? You said I’m trusting them and I know what they’re going to do because they know what I would do. I think that’s another big thing, and something that I try to emphasize a lot is, you have to be communicative to everybody. There’s a lot of times agency owners, you’ve got a plenty of things on your plate, that the last thing you’re thinking about is that junior salesperson or AE that’s-

Drew McLellan:

Struggling.

Ryan Carey:

… that’s struggling, that maybe doesn’t even realize the vision of what we’re all doing. We’re a great group of people that are doing stuff, but what’s our goal? What’s our mission? What’s our relevancy in what we’re doing?

Drew McLellan:

Right. Right. Yeah. You’re spot on. I know we could talk for days. I want one more topic. This idea of my impression is that when you’re in the military and you’re given orders to do something, it’s pretty singular in its focus. We have a thing to do, and we’re going to go do that until it’s done, and then we’re going to either come back to base or then we know once that’s done, then we know phase two, is this other thing. In agency that’s not our luxury, right? We never get to think about just one thing and we never even get to think about just one client or client versus agency. I think focus is one of those things, of course we need to focus in our work. Right? I’m a huge advocate of telling people, you know what, if you have to get away and go to a Starbucks to focus, you got to be able to focus and do your thing. But we also have, we have to have bandwidth in our brain to split our focus as well.

How did you transition from, and maybe I’m wrong, maybe in the military you did have to split your focus, but it seems to me that that’s rather singulatory versus, what we have to deal with in an agency today?

Ryan Carey:

Yeah. Well, I would say, specifically when we were in, actually that soldier that I told you about, one of those firefights, that firefight that we were in, where he got that. One of our mission was to secure a small little outpost or a little base outside of our main primary base, so that we could be closer to, there was a school in the area, we want to try to get that school opened back up so that kids could go back to school. We wanted to help parts of the market that was in the area, because that was the economic livelihood of the area. There was a lot of things that we were needing to do. If you’re starting from the same point all the time, you can’t get that much further out. We wanted to establish something a little bit further out so that we could be out there, we can go patrolling around those areas.

And so in that we were charged with taking on that mission, to build up that outpost and secure it while also we didn’t get to stop doing our patrols daily. The moment you stop going out there, the threats to you in the different types of environment will start to change. You won’t be able to have your fingers on the pulse. We had to do both things at the same time. And in doing so, it’s a split focus. You can’t give up one, you have to work hard at both. You can’t just stop and say, okay, well, we’re going to go on patrol now, we got to stop securing this area, or we’re going to stay in here and get this next insecure, and then we’ll go out and do that. You’re just losing out on opportunities. I see that all the time in the agency world, I think of building the outpost is the same as building your business.

You got to be focused on building your business and finding ways to improve it and grow it. And on the same side, the client is going to come knocking, especially when you’re right in the middle of doing something important. You building out that process, checklist, you’re doing whatever it is, the onboarding checklist for your internal teams, whatever it is, there’s something that’s going to pop up that you’re going to have to go out and handle. And that’s one of the things I think we’ve really benefited recently, is we even hired a marketing director. That’s focused internally. A marketing director that’s then able to push things forward because as an agency owner, there’s so many pet projects or just being in leadership, there’s so many pet projects that you have that you’re like, this is a great idea. I’m going to do this.

You start working on it, and then, this client needs all these reports or this, this, this, this, and you lose focus on it. And then that just becomes a little pet project that you never completed. I think it’s 100% like that.

Drew McLellan:

It’s interesting, really in the military you were better at splitting your focus because you didn’t have the luxury of saying, well, we’re going to leave the agency internal stuff aside because we’re super busy with clients. So forget that we’re going to get our website done or whatever, because for you, none of them were optional. You didn’t get to vote on whether or not you help get the school open. That was just one of the things on your list to do and you had to get it done.

Ryan Carey:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Yeah. And on the same level though, I think you’ve even as an agency owner, if you decide, well, I’m not going to do that, I think you’re still going to feel the effects of it.

Drew McLellan:

No doubt. No doubt.

Ryan Carey:

Whether it’s a decision or not, you still feel the effects of that and the pain.

Drew McLellan:

But in the agency world, you either have the luxury or the burden, depending on how you look at it, of having that ability to decide, where probably in the military, not as much.

Ryan Carey:

Yeah. I agree with that.

Drew McLellan:

Overall, when you look at your experience, because you served for how long? You served for quite a while.

Ryan Carey:

Yeah, 10 years.

Drew McLellan:

Over the 10 years, and you’re growing in the ranks and serving as a leader and commanding groups of people, what are the three or four things that you have brought over into your agency role that make you the kind of leader that you are today?

Ryan Carey:

That’s a great question. Man, you going to make me get introspective over here. One, I think the biggest thing is people. I’m 100% a people person. I love people. I love learning about personality types and the way people function and operate and finding ways in which we can work with that, whether it’s in a professional environment and integrate that strength or that difference or just enjoying different types of people. In the military, I got exposed to a lot of different types of people. It’s something that opened my eyes. Even just culturally, right? I got exposed to people all over the world operate in different ways, and I think it really challenged me to, I think when we’re in this bubble we can focus on, here’s my perspective. I’m an expert. I know things, and I’m going to do these things in the way I know best.

I’ve really rely more on people than anything else. I think there’s agency owners that are visionaries and integrators, I’m definitely more of an integrator. It’s all because I love to see how we can work as a team and build up a team to do those things. Communication is another thing that I think I don’t always do well, you can just ask my wife, but I love to learn and love to be challenged and love to think in different ways that I can come out a scenario. One thing I think of is, I’ll be brief in this. I started off as an infantry officer. So this time in Afghanistan, I was in the infantry, I can go on to explain that, but that’s your regular typical army soldier, right? I transitioned halfway through my career and became a signal officer, which is a communication IT person.

And in that I found so many great opportunities because I came from that world. Once I was trained in this new field, I came back to the infantry world and I was with infantry units. And so you have an infantry guy, turned IT nerd that comes back and gets to communicate and advise the infantry on how to best use the IT resources that we have at hand and what capabilities, what limitations. And in that I found, there’s so many times where I started some conversations and throwing out my technical jargon at them, and you just see the eyes gloss over and they just start looking around the room, ready to kick you out of the office or whatever, or out of the meeting. And then I started to say, okay, I need to figure out, what would I want to hear if I were in that position?

And that shaped me a ton. I know that’s a simple thing, but even just coming up with analogies, I love to talk in analogies, and I love to just try to communicate in that way, so that then it’s more relatable and it’s understandable and you can have some common ground.

Drew McLellan:

Yup. All right. What else did you take? What else did you bring over?

Ryan Carey:

Let’s see.

Drew McLellan:

I’m making you earn your keep.

Ryan Carey:

You are, you really are. The other thing that I think in that whole ownership discussion, setting people up for success, because I think I often came into scenarios and there’ll be something where no one’s happy with this certain person’s performance or this certain aspect of something. And then I start asking questions and I realized, well, have you really told that person and set very clear guidelines on, hey, you’re screwing up? I think that’s sometimes hard for us to do, especially in a creative world, where they pour themselves into a design or something like that and it’s just not meaning it. It’s a little bit of them that’s in that. It’s hard to just come back and say, no, that sucked, you need to do it again. But there are times too when people are just not living up to what they signed on for and what they agreed to from the beginning.

I felt that there was some times that there was too much of, and it’s a fine line too. I can come in and be a stickler through it and just be rude and just a bunch of people off. Or I can come in and say, okay, here’s the way we’re going to do this. This is not up to the standard and I know you can do better and I have expectations for you, and I trust that you can do better. And so it’s that giving of the ownership, but also giving them the limits too, and being able to correct that. And then you have, when you come down to, hey, I got to let you go, it’s very clear. It’s not a surprise. They saw it coming.

Drew McLellan:

I was just thinking, as you were talking, I was thinking that your military background, so many agency owners struggle with clear communication, especially with their employees. We weasel word our way around it, or we’re passive aggressive, because we don’t really want to have that hard conversation. I suspect hard agency conversations are a piece of cake.

Ryan Carey:

Yeah. I would say so. Maybe too easy sometimes. My empathy sometimes might be a little bit lower, but yeah, it is easier for me to be more direct in and do that. Again, nobody’s dying, we’re not getting shot at, so yeah, it sucks that this didn’t go over well, but let’s correct. Let’s give you the room to improve it. I don’t want to come back and just surprise you out of the blue that I’m going to let you go because all these things are poor and then it’d be a surprise to them, that just puts a pit in my stomach. I’d rather them have an uncomfortable conversation early and potentially save the relationship, especially if they’re a great asset to it, and just struck life happens.

Drew McLellan:

Life happens. That is the period at the end of this conversation, life happens. Ryan, this has been a great conversation. I think we all bring our past experiences to the way we lead our organizations. I think it’s interesting, we probably don’t think about it as often as we could or should about what did we bring from our past into our current situation and is it serving us and how is it serving us? I think in your case, you’ve identified several things, it’s like, this serves me really well. And others is like, well, maybe I could be a little more empathetic or maybe I need to recognize that I’m not in the military anymore and I could be gentler with my messaging, however, right? This has been fascinating. I’m grateful that you took the time and that you were able to, I know there are a lot of stories that you can’t tell, so I’m glad you found some that you could tell.

Ryan Carey:

Yeah, well, I appreciate the opportunity. This is great. It’s great to talk about this.

Drew McLellan:

If folks want to chat with you, if they want to connect with you, we haven’t really talked about the fact that everybody who listens to this podcast is actually familiar with the work that you do, because White Label IQ has been the presenting sponsor for the last two or three years. If folks want to connect with you or they want to connect with you about White Label IQ, what’s the best way for them to track you down?

Ryan Carey:

My email’s the best way. And it’s RyanC, as in Charlie, at whitelabeliq.com. Throw some army phonetics in there for you.

Drew McLellan:

I figured that was-

Ryan Carey:

Fitting with the theme.

Drew McLellan:

I was waiting for Zulu something, somewhere. Right?

Ryan Carey:

Roger. No, that would be great. Send me an email. I’d love to connect. You’re in the Fort Collins area, you can hit me up, but yeah, I would love to connect further. If there’s any needs, we’re always here to help support as much as we can.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Awesome. By the way guys, I’m going to preface what I would normally do, which is at the very end, tell you about White Label IQ. Since Ryan just gave you his email address, also just know that if you want to read more about them, find out what they do, again, I’m super grateful that they are on board as our presenting sponsor. Head over to whitelabeliq.com/ami, because they have a special deal there for you, some free hours on a project. Don’t miss out on that opportunity. Now that I’ve said that, which I’m flipping my normal close, here’s the deal, here’s the takeaway I think from today’s conversation. Number one, I think some really interesting leadership lessons that we all can look at ourselves in the mirror and say, am I really good at that or have I mastered that? And if not, perhaps now is a good time to do that.

But also the idea of, what I just poked Ryan to do, is look at his past to see what he brings to his present. I think that’s probably a good exercise for all of us to think about, well, I had a really lousy boss and he did this, so I never do that. Well, that was 25 years ago, maybe you need to rethink how you handle a certain situation. I guess what I’m asking you to do as homework, if you will, is to reflect on your own leadership journey and what influenced it, good and bad. And are you the leader that you want to be? And if not, are there things that you could do to tweak your leadership? I’m sure, I know that you’re great leaders because I hang out with all of you all the time, but I also know that for all of us there’s room for improvement. Maybe being a little introspective as Ryan suggested wouldn’t be an all bad thing.

All right. That wraps up this episode of Build a Better Agency. I’ll be back next week with another guest. In the meantime, you know how to reach me [email protected]. I will talk to you guys next week. Thanks for listening. That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of Build a Better Agency. Visit agencymanagementinstitute.com to check out our workshops, coaching packages, and all the other ways we serve agencies just like yours. Thanks for listening.