Niching and thought leadership — the most critical components of biz dev with Susan Quinn

Hey, everybody. Drew here. You know, we are always looking for more ways to be helpful and meet you wherever you’re at to help you grow your agency. It’s one of the reasons why we’ve produced this podcast for so long, and I’m super grateful that you listen as often as you do. However, there are some topics that are better suited for quick hyper-focused answers in under 10 minutes. That’s where our YouTube channel really comes in. For quick doses of inspiration, best practices, tips and tricks, head over to youtube.com/the at sign Agency Management institute. Again, that’s youtube.com/the at sign or symbol.

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Running an agency can be a lonely proposition, but it doesn’t have to be. We can learn how to be better faster if we learn together. Welcome to Agency Management Institute’s Build, a Better Agency Podcast, presented by White Label IQ. Tune in every week for insights on how small to mid-size agencies are surviving and thriving in today’s market with 25 plus years of experience. As both an agency owner and agency consultant. Please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Hey everybody. Drew McLellan here with another episode of Build a Better Agency. We have never done this before, but we’re gonna try something new. So a few weeks ago I was interviewed by an agency owner named Susan Quinn, who owns Circle S Studios out in the East coast, and they have a podcast called Insights. And their whole sort of focus is helping good companies become great, and what is the difference between a good company and a great company. And so I had the opportunity to be a guest on their podcast talking about sort of how you design better experiences for your employees, for your clients.

And it was a really great conversation. And we talked about the importance of creating exceptional business experiences through strategic design. And we talked about sort of five core areas, whether it was what the owner does, building a team, biz dev systems and processes, and managing money. We also talked quite a bit about thought leadership and what that looks like and what authentic and consistent thought leadership looks like and how that impacts businesses today. So after, after having the conversation, which was a very robust and rich conversation, I asked Susan if she would mind if we shared it with you, our audience.

And so that’s what we’re gonna do today. We’re flipping the mic, if you will. You’re gonna hear me being interviewed by Susan Quinn from Insights her show at Circle S. And I think you’re gonna find it insightful and a little something different this time. So take a listen and let me know what you think.

Drew, welcome to the podcast. What an incredible honor to have you with us today.

Thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to the conversation

For our listeners, you’re in for a treat. In fact, you may wanna go grab something to take notes because you’re gonna hear a ton of ideas on a ton of subjects. Drew is not only a business owner, he’s a writer, he’s a keynote speaker, and I have to agree with the Wall Street Journal. You are one of the 10 bloggers every entrepreneur should read. I have learned so much from you. So please share with everyone what you do day to day.

No, thank you very much. So I’ve owned a business for so long, I can’t imagine or even remember what it was like to be an employee. And I spend most of my time coaching and consulting other business owners on how to run the business of their business better. So I don’t teach them how to do the craft of their work, but we teach them the business side of their business. So we focus on five core elements. What is the owner supposed to be doing every day? Where can they apply the greatest leverage and gift to the business? The team, how do you find them? How do you keep them? How do you encourage them, grow them so that they keep getting better? How do you put them front and center with the client so that the client doesn’t only want to talk to you?

We talk a lot about biz dev, how to grow your business, both how to grow your existing clients and find new right fit clients that are gonna be with you for a long time and be super profitable. We talk a lot about systems and processes. How do we get the work done and how do we do that in a way that’s efficient and effective and profitable and really great for our clients and delivers ROI so that they never wanna leave us? And last but not least, if you do all those things right, you’re gonna make money. What do you do with that money? How do you make more money? How do you keep more of the money you make? How do you look at all the financial metrics to make good objective decisions around things like, should I hire someone my team is screaming that we can’t possibly take on another client?

Is that true? So that’s where I spend my days, is coaching on things like that. And it’s a very blessed and lovely life that I get to do work that I love for people that I love. So I feel very fortunate.

Well, I feel fortunate to have been the beneficiary of the incredible thought leadership that you have done in your career. So let’s jump into starting with one of the books that I have read that you are co-author on Sell With Authority. It was a powerful book for me around this whole concept of thought leadership. And for us that’s part of our business development strategy. And within that, you talk about how you have cornerstone content and you slice it and dice it. Yeah. Can you share with us how thought leadership really is part of business development?

Yeah. So it is one of the most critical parts of our business. And frankly, most businesses do it completely wrong. We do it the old way and the old way doesn’t work anymore. So if you think about how we act as consumers, the reality is we go shopping long before we get in the car or go to the mall or call three accountants to hire one of them. We start shopping around the internet, we start looking for subject matter experts. We start looking for somebody who can answer our questions. And so the old way of selling was we would show up at events and we would demonstrate that we were interested in doing work with someone.

And the new way of selling is to be interesting and to be relevant for as long as it takes for that person to be interested in hiring. Because for most of us, and it doesn’t really matter what kind of a business we own, unless we are a retail store, we don’t have a holiday that encourages people to shop like Black Friday, we don’t have coupons or buy one get one free offers. Most of us, we hold out our wares, our services, and our products, and we have to wait until the prospect needs what we sell and then is ready to buy it. So our goal really is to be on their radar screen and to be relevant to them and important to them and to have already added value to them before they’re ready to buy.

So most businesses or most consumers are gonna consider three to four choices when they’re actually ready to buy. Our job is to be in that subset. And if we’re the best at being in that subset by being a thought leader, by teaching what we know, by helping that prospect learn how to be better at their job every day and giving that away freely and consistently and regularly, we’re gonna be in the subset of three or four. And if we’re really good at it, they can’t imagine hiring anybody but us. So on the day they’re ready to hire us, we’re the default choice, or we’re at least in this consideration set. That’s how you sell today. And it really is all around thought leadership and being an expert in your craft.

And then teaching and sharing your expertise. It’s like when we go to a great restaurant and we ask the waiter, can you get the recipe for the X, Y, Z from the chef? That doesn’t mean we’re not gonna go back to that restaurant. And in fact, odds are after we try it at home, we’re gonna go back to the restaurant more. ’cause we can’t quite do it like they do it, but they’re willing to give us the recipe, they’re willing to tell us how they did it, which makes us think we can do it. It makes us think we can be better. And that’s today. I think the way we have to sell is that we have to be a subject matter expert that freely and generously teaches our expertise, helps people be better at their job, and then be ready and available when they’re ready to add our expertise onto their roster.

That was well said. First we have to be interesting for others to be interested. What sort of thing should I be thinking about Drew as a client?

Yeah, such a great question. And it’s almost always the question somebody goes to, which is, well, if I tell them how I do all the things and the magic, they’ll do it themselves or they can do it themselves. And the truth is, yes they could and a subset of them will, and you have to be okay with that. But the reality for most of us is we can only grow our business in a sustained healthy way. 20 or 25% growth year over year is about as heavy a load as any small to mid-size business can endure. And maybe you double in size when you’re super small or you’re early on, or maybe every once in a while you have a new product or a new service offering that doubles you in size, but that’s not sustainable.

So when you start thinking about, all right, I only want clients that are, you know, about 10% of my A GI, so my gross billings minus my cost of goods, the money I actually get to keep to run the business. So if I only want to grow 20% and I don’t want to add 10 or 20 clients, I wanna add clients that are meaty enough and big enough that they add substance and value to my business. And we’re embedded deeply enough with them that we can add great value. For most of us, that’s 3, 4, 5 clients a year. So give away your stuff and tell it to hundreds and hundreds of people, and five of them have to raise their hand and say, I wanna give you money.

And you’re having an amazing win. So you do have to get over the idea that everybody’s gonna hire you, or if you withhold this one like the secret ingredient, by doing this, you’re also demonstrating what it’s gonna be like to work with you. And so if you’re the person that holds things back and you’re secretive and you are like, well, I’ll give you that. If you gimme some money, that is not somebody I wanna do business with. I want somebody who cares about my success as much as theirs and recognizes, the more they help me grow my business, the more I will gladly help them grow theirs. So what’s that old Zig Ziglar quote? The way for you to get everything you want is to help other people get everything they want. That’s the core of thought leadership, right?

Is that you just generously give it away.

I love that you mentioned Zig Ziglar. I used to listen to him, gosh, 20 years ago. And what I love is the stuff that I was intrigued about was so relevant then it’s still relevant today. And I remember too, whether it came from you or from him, this whole notion of there are riches and niches. I remember as a business owner, it was hard for me to think about narrowing my focus. I really didn’t want to have one or two things to concentrate on. Yeah, I think you have guided a lot of us to think in terms of fewer things that you offer on the professional services side versus offering any and everything.

Why do you think it’s important to narrow your focus?

Yeah, so you know, that’s such a, a fear-based concern, which is understandable. If 10 people have bags of money, why would I only want to take two people’s bags of money? And we’re looking at it in a two dimensional way rather than a three dimensional way. So I will say, while I say it all the time, I cannot claim ownership of there’s riches in the niches. I can claim ownership in the fact that when you niche, you attract the right clients and you propel the wrong clients. And all of us have had clients that had big bags of money, and we have this little nagging notion in the back of our head that maybe it wasn’t a great fit, but it was a lot of money. We have mouth to feed, we have employees that have mortgages, whatever.

For whatever reason, we thought we could do the work. Or you know, for some of us we’re like, well, I’ve never done that before, but I can figure it out how, whatever that is. But when you are a subject matter expert and you have a deep expertise, it’s not two dimensional. So really what we’re saying is why would I not want to be a mile wide? But really, when you’re a mile wide and you’re trying to learn all the nuances of all these different kinds of businesses or customers or clients, you can only go an inch or two deep because you only have so much bandwidth to learn so much about their business. But when you go two inches wide and two miles deep, now you can have the kind of conversations with your clients, with the CEO, the president of those companies where you are demonstrating that you know as much about the industry they’re in or the audience they serve as they do.

And now you’re a thinking partner. Now you’re not a vendor just executing stuff, but now you’re a thinking partner, you’re a business strategist partner. And guess what? Number one, that’s a much stickier position to be in. Number two, if you’re tired of talking to a middle manager and you wanna get to the C-suite strategy and talking about their business is the way you get to the C-suite. And number three, you can charge a lot more. We pay a lot more to a brain surgeon than we do a general practitioner who gives us a flu shot. And so for all of those reasons, this idea of having a depth of expertise and understanding that it’s your job to be as well researched and well educated in their business or some aspect of their business as they are so that you can stand toe to toe with them and really have the kind of strategic conversations that they’re hungry to have, that’s the value of the niche.

And when we go back to sell with authority and the thought leadership. So imagine if you wanna profess to the world your expertise, and you know, one of the reasons why this is the new way of selling is because we all have tools to publish. We have blogs, we have podcasts, we can step on a keynote stage, we can do research, we can write books, we can do a lot of things that back in the fifties when they had their brushes in their briefcase and they were knocking on the doors, they didn’t have another way to sell their wares. We now do, which is a much easier, better way. But if you’re gonna write a book, let’s say, that’s gonna demonstrate your expertise and attract clients to you, what’s the subject of your book if you work with the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker?

But if I only work with candlestick makers, my book can be about the kinds of wax that you can use and the different colors you can infuse and how you can use flowers to make a natural wax and the heat that you heat the wax up to for the mold. And I don’t know anything about candle making, so that’s as far as I can go with the analogy. But my point is now you can give them something meaty and meaningful as opposed to something on the surface. So if you really wanna be a subject matter expert, I don’t know any experts who are an expert in everything. I know some people who think they’re experts in everything, but real experts have a narrow focus of expertise and they kind of stay in their lane because that’s where they can be the most helpful.

In your experience, how wide can that expertise be? I mean, do you think there should be a three legged stool? And this may be an unfair question, but I’m thinking about our clients where they say, don’t make me narrow it so much. How would you respond to that?

So the conversations I have are actually, you cannot be too narrow. So it’s not about can I widen it, can I widen it, can I widen it? The smart question is, how can I get even more narrow? So for example, we are a business that works with pharma companies. That’s not a niche. When you think about all the pharmaceuticals out there, we are a company that works with pharmaceutical companies that serve women, not a niche that’s 50% of the population. We are a pharmaceutical company that works with products for women over 50. Okay, now I have a niche. Now I can talk specifically about the audience and the product and the buying cycle and the psychology.

’cause now I’ve narrowed enough. So I very, very rarely run into anyone who, in fact, I can honestly say I have never met someone who when they told me what their niche was, I was like, Ooh, that seems too narrow. The truth of the matter is, again, we need four or five clients a year. Most businesses, now, again, you might be different, you might need a bigger volume. So you’d have to sort of do the extrapolation, but let’s say you get 10% of the market year over year and you keep half of the clients and you lose half. So you’re always adding five to seven new clients, and there’s always new businesses coming in. A subset of 500, which by the way, there’s no niche small S 500 businesses on the globe, but a subset of 500 would sustain you for a long time because there’s always gonna be new businesses coming into the niche.

So if you can find a list of companies that do that thing that you’re talking about, if you can find out where they gather, is there a conference or a trade show, even if it’s a regional trade show, if you could identify who they are, that’s a pretty narrow niche. That’s all you really need to be able to talk to them. But I would challenge you, whatever you think your niche is, I would challenge you just as an exercise to say, how many more layers could I go down in the niche if I kept narrowing? And I’ll guarantee you, you’re probably three or four layers away from when you kind of tap out of what you could do.

And I’m gonna argue you will make more money and you will be more profitable with fewer clients, the deeper down you drill.

All right, powerful message there.

Hey everybody, thanks for listening today. Before I get back to the interview, I just wanna remind you that we are always offering some really amazing workshops. And you can see the whole [email protected], on the navigation head to how we help scroll down and you’ll see workshops, and you can see the whole list there with descriptions of each workshop. They are all in Denver and we’ve got them throughout the year for agency owners, account execs, agency leaders, CFOs. We have a little something for everybody no matter what it is that you’re struggling with, people, new business, money, all of those things we’ve got covered. So check ’em out and come join us.

All right, let’s get back to the show.

I’m gonna go back to what I’ve learned as an entrepreneur, as a business owner. I have done exactly what you have said, and I would agree with you. The more that we have niched, the more success we have had. And it’s counterintuitive.

It is, yeah.

Because if you do narrow, you think, oh my gosh, I’m gonna miss out over there. Whoops, there’s more fish over there. And I would say it may be fewer fish, but they tend to be bigger, they tend to stay longer because we have that expertise. That’s what’s so powerful.

The other part of that, Susan, is what we don’t talk about very often, and I know you’ve experienced this, not only are we more successful, but the more narrow we niche, the more help we can actually be to our client, the more meaningful we can be to them and their business. And so for most of us, we didn’t go into business just to make money. We went into business to help in some way to be of service. And the deeper your niches, the deeper your knowledge, the smarter and better you are at what you do, the more meaning and value your work has. So we could have a whole different conversation about how that trickles into retaining employees and attracting employees and all those other things.

But as a business owner, I like shutting down every day knowing that I actually had impact, that I really genuinely helped someone. I didn’t just sell them something, but I was helpful in them being successful. And the more I stay in my lane, the more helpful I can be and the more meaningful my work is, the more meaningful my relationship is with clients. And we could again, do another show on how that turns into referrals and all the other things. But let’s just stay selfishly on us for a minute. It gives my work and life meaning.

Well, you love what you do. In fact, your bio on LinkedIn, at least back in the day, was around wanting clients to love you. You know, it’s like a another way of saying you’re creating raving fans, as Jim Collins says, in Good to great Drew. In your work with other business owners, what do you think are some of the biggest mistakes that we make at the C-suite in terms of the marketing that we do on behalf of our firm? What are some things we should think about differently?

Yeah, so the biggest one is that we believe the myth that the best way to grow our business is through referrals. And the problem with referrals are we have no control over them. Not only do we have no control over how often we get them, we have no control over who gets referred to us and if they’re a right fit ’cause it’s not like we’ve sat down with our clients and our peers and said, here’s the checklist of things that make a good client for us. So they’re just talking about us in general and referring in general. And I’m not saying referrals are bad, of course referrals are awesome, everybody loves them. But when you are clearly defined in your niche and people understand who is a good fit for you, referrals are better, but it’s not enough.

It’s too passive to sit back and do that. We don’t have any control over that. So number one is that we should sit around and wait for the phone to ring literally or figuratively. That’s number one. Number two, the mistake we make is that we get into this feast or famine mode of biz dev, which is when things are soft or slow or we get a weird spidey sense that a big client might go away. We roll into full on biz dev mode. We’re posting blogs and we’re signing up to go to conferences and we’re doing all the things. It works. Sooner or later, we land a couple clients and then we’re so busy onboarding those clients that all of that effort goes away. And so there’s no building of tactic or strategy on top of each other.

We’re not planting seeds and watering those seeds every day. We’re planting them. We water ’em for a while, and then we walk away from the garden, the seeds die, and then we have to start all over and plant the seeds. And then we do the same thing. As opposed to saying, look, this is as important as any other operational perfection or operational excellence we have in the business. We have to plant the seeds every day. We have to water the garden every day. So one, we have to be realistic and reasonable about what we can do on a consistent basis. So consistency wins over volume every day. And number two, every day we plant the seed and we water the garden. And so when you do that, your pipeline always has activity in it because you just build up this reputation and this interest that is ongoing.

And what’s beautiful is when you keep planting seeds and watering the garden, after a while, the garden gets very lush. And so some of the things you planted three or five years ago, again, remember back to what I said, we have to be interesting until they’re interested. We have no control. So we often say, look, your prospect could be ready to give you money in a day or a decade, and you have no control over when that is. So you wanna be ready for that whenever that is. And that’s about consistent marketing, which by the way, will also earn referrals. People will drive people to learn from you as a subject matter expert. And they will self-select that again, that attract versus repel. They’re gonna decide if you are someone that they want to do work with.

So you mentioned one, our core value at my company is we lead with love. So if you’re a business owner that’s like, I don’t like that warm and fuzzy crap, I don’t, you know, whatever, you’re gonna very quickly go, drew and his company are not for me because we talk about that kind of stuff all the time. But if that is something that resonates with you and you learn from us, you’re gonna come in closer and closer until you’re ready to buy. And so it really is just about the consistency and being really authentic about what it’s like to work with you and be with you and who you are as a human being and as a company. And I know one of the things you teach your clients is not only do they have to have values, but they need to wear those values on their sleeve. And those values need to be woven into their business practices.

That’s another mistake we make. We either don’t have them or we hide them under a bushel, or worst of all, we have ’em. ’cause we had some committee put them together, but we don’t actually live by them. That’s the worst marketing of all.

I think you’re exactly right. There are foundational components about being authentic. Gosh, I certainly preach that maybe too much. But I think you would agree time and time again, people can spot, if you’re not in a nanosecond, I’d like to go back to referrals or one thing you said, you can’t depend on it, but if you do, then they’re the ones deciding who is your right fit client, right? What are some things that can guide us on what does a right fit client even look like?

Yeah. So there’s a whole science around that. But the reality is, the better you understand your business, and again, I hate to sound like a broken record, but the more niched you are, the easier it is to define who’s the right fit for you. Because it starts with they do this thing that is the only kind of business we work with, number one. Number two, you start thinking about the clients where you have been most successful for them and that in return that has been successful for you. And it might be client size, it might be that they have a leader that you align with. It might be that they have worked with a lot of companies like yours before versus you’re the first one they’ve ever worked with before. Some people like to be the first one.

Other people are like, oh no, somebody else has to break that seal and get them used to working with a professional. In my industry, I don’t wanna be the one that teaches them how to do that. It might be that maybe they’re growth oriented or they are in a succession mode. So we work with a business that only works with financial institutions that are five years or less away from a merger of some kind. Talk about being niched, right? So financial institutions, and they have to be at a certain point of their growth cycle. And they have to publicly have already said, we are growing to so that we are an attractive merger partner and here’s what we’re looking for. And so they are very clear about who they work with and the moment in time in that business.

So again, back to the niche conversation, the more you can drill down to like your ideal client size, attitude, goals, how they work, you know, do they work collaboratively? Do they want to put you on a retainer? Do they want project work? And they’re gonna kind of come in and out, you know, a couple times a year. All of those things are success signals to us when we slow down enough to think about who are the clients that if I could clone a client, I would love to have 10 of that client. And you start dissecting what it is about those, you know, everybody can probably think of two or three clients that are like, if I could clone those people, I’d work with them all day long every day.

And when you do and you start at dissecting, what about them are common traits? You can build a pretty good profile of who your ideal client is.

That’s well said, drew. I could literally spend hours talking to you. But let’s, with the time we have remaining, I’d love to talk about strategy. You know, part of the strategic work that I know, certainly we all have strengths, we have weaknesses, opportunities, threats. I’ve been doing SWOT analysis for many, many years. Today we do the double T, the not only threats, but also trends. And I’m going to even add on that zeroing in on what are the potential disruptors. I don’t know about you, but gosh, I feel like sometimes I’m drinking from a fire hose every day. And of course the latest thing, chat, GPT, holy moly, if I read too much, I feel like it’s gonna get rid of all of us.

Like artificial intelligence, can it replace us? I hope and pray not, but I’d love your perspective. I know everyone is talking about chat, GBT, are they gonna replace all of the riders? How would you guide us on how to look at that?

There’s no doubt that machine learning and AI are disruptors. There’s no doubt about that. Much like Uber was a disruptor to the taxi industry. But you know what? You and I can’t blink our eye and just end up somewhere. We still have to get into a vehicle and be taken there. So the tool we use to get places often now is different with Uber and Lyft and some of those other things, but the human part of it in some ways really hasn’t changed. And so I think there are absolutely gonna be things that humans do today, particularly around sort of really sophisticated number crunching and some of that data analyst kind of thing that a machine can do better and faster because it’s pretty error free and it is faster than our human brain can work.

But the reality is that just like any other tool, you and I have been around long enough that we remember when not every business had a website and now we can’t imagine everybody not having a website. It changes things, but it really just says, okay, we’re gonna level up. And so I think AI is gonna do for us is it’s gonna level us up, it’s gonna allow us to do complicated, but in some ways simple tasks faster and better so that we have more time to do the complex things that only the human brain can do, which is looking for weird threads of connection and looking for trends and looking for opportunities to put things together that normally would never be put together.

We’re still the driver of business strategy and innovation. We’re just gonna use yet another tool. Just like computers, just like word processing. You know, we used to type on typewriters. We don’t do that anymore, but it’s still us with the input. It is still us creating the final product. So I will argue all day long if you said to me, drew, I want you to write a paragraph on what it means to be the father of a daughter, which I happen to be. And you said to Chad, GPT, write a paragraph on what it means to be a father of a daughter. If we showed anybody those paragraphs, and this has nothing to do with my writing skill, by the way. This is just human to machine.

There are elements of what a human will infuse into work that a machine simply can’t. It’s intuition, it’s emotion. It is far beyond numbers and intelligence. It is the essence of what we are as humans and that can’t be replaced. And so I think for businesses today, do we need to be paying attention to ai? Absolutely. Is it gonna help us be more efficient and effective in our business? Absolutely. Will it change the way we work? Absolutely. Will it change the value of what we do? I don’t think so, other than I think it may take some of the mundane tasks off of our plate and give us more room to add even more value in a very humanistic way.

So I don’t think it’s something to be afraid of. I think it’s a tool like any other tool. And it’s our job to figure out how to infuse that tool into our business. And I will say, I think one of the mistakes a lot of business owners are making is a lot of people are approaching AI in terms of how can I use AI to do the work that we do for clients? Which is a fine question to ask, but what we’re not asking enough is how can I use AI to do the operational things in my business that right now I am paying a person to do that. I could actually have that person do something more meaningful if they weren’t inputting data or crunching numbers or doing things that a machine can do better.

So we had a client who used chat, GPT, they took a job description and said, here’s the job description, write the want ad for this job chat. GPT wrote the want ad. And then they said, okay, great. Make a matrix for the ideal client. How would we measure how applicants against the job description and the want A? And it said and ranked them in this order. And so Chatt PT made a matrix and explained why it ranked the order based on the job description, which then the person read and went, oh, that’s not actually the most important thing. I have to fix the job description and the want ad ’cause this is actually more important. And then when they fixed it and they published it out, then they took the resumes in and now they had an objective tool to look at these people.

And now they had an objective tool to ask questions in the interviews, but it still took the human intuition to a first recognize, nope, the machine got that wrong, and B, to apply what the machine gave them to make a better buying decision when it came to an employee. That’s how we have to be thinking about ai. That’s how we have to be looking at it. It’s like, how does it make me be better and smarter at the stuff that is really important to my business?

That is powerful. Yeah. It’s just another tool that can help us all find ways to keep bettering our best. So I’m gonna ask this question to someone who is always out there seeking ways to be interesting. What do you do Drew McLellan, to keep bettering your best?

A couple things. Number one, I think the best way to get smarter is to teach, which is another reason why being a thought leader is so awesome because you get smarter. So like you, I have a podcast, so I’m creating thought leadership content, but I show up just like you showed up today. And I just try and ask really good questions. I try and imagine what my audience would want me to ask if they were in the room with me. And through the process of providing value for my audience, I learn something every freaking day that I can use in coaching and helping other people. I also read a lot, I consume a lot of content and I experiment a lot. I will try things that are colossal failures, but even in that colossal failure I learn, okay, I’m not gonna do that, but if I tweak it and try it this way, maybe that’ll work.

And so I think it’s a desire to always get a little smarter so you can be a little better for the people that you serve. And when you go at it with that attitude, it’s fun, it’s not threatening, it’s not scary, it’s not overwhelming because even if I learn one little thing a day that I can then bring back into my business to be of service, that’s a pretty good day.

Drew, thank you. As we’re wrapping up, can you let our listeners know how they can find all the different ways that you’re providing your thought leadership?

Yeah, I’m pretty easy to find on the web. So I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. So it’s Drew McLellan, M-C-L-E-L-L-A-N. I’ve got a podcast called Build a Better Agency, which again, my area of expertise is focused on marketing and advertising agencies. But the business council of how do you run your business better is applicable to any service industry for the most part. So you could just swap out agency and it’s gonna work for an architectural firm or an accounting firm or someone like that. And then you can go to agency management institute.com as well. But I’m pretty easy to find. And Susan, if you wanna share my email with folks, I’m also happy to just take an email and answer a question.

Well, I can tell you this, you are interesting and you keep me interested. Doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, there is really great information that he is sharing. And some of it is just basic, but it’s the everyday things that actually work.

I think most of ’em are basic everyday things. Absolutely.

Thank you so much, drew.

It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Take care.

All right, that wraps up a very unusual, a new experience for all of us, kind of turning the mic and sharing an interview that I did on another show. Hopefully you found it to be insightful, helpful. And by the way, you should subscribe to Insights, which you can find on anywhere you get your podcast downloads from, great shows, they have great guests, super good experiences about employee experience, marketing strategy, all kinds of different video marketing strategies. A lot of talk about really being thoughtful and designing the experiences you want to have either inside your organization or with clients.

And so I highly recommend the podcast, take a listen, but I’m glad that you got to have a sample of it today on our show. As always, I am super grateful that you hang out with me every week, so thanks for doing that. I’ll be back with a more conventional episode next week, I promise. But I appreciate you going along with me on the experiment and of course a huge shout out and thank you to our friends at White Label IQ. They’re the presenting sponsor of the podcast, so they come alongside agencies just like yours and help them with white label design Dev and PPC. They are born out of an agency so they understand how to work with agencies, how to share profits of jobs, and how to make sure that they deliver exceptional work on time and on budget.

So check them out at White Label IQ dot com slash aami and you can find a special offer there just for you. All right, I’ll be back next week. I hope you will too. Thanks for listening.

That’s all for this episode of Am I’s Build a Better Agency Podcast. Be sure to visit agency management institute.com to learn more about our workshops, online courses, and other ways we serve small to mid-size agencies. Don’t forget to subscribe today so you don’t miss an episode.