Thinking holistically about agency employee compensation, benefits, and perks with Drew McLellan

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.

And then Agency Management Institute, all one word. Subscribe and search the existing video database for all sorts of actionable topics that you can implement in your shop today. Alright, let’s get to the show.

It doesn’t matter what kind of agency you run, traditional digital media buying, web dev, PRR brand, whatever your focus, you still need to run a profitable business. The Build, a Better, Agency Podcast, presented by a White Label IQ will expose you to the best practices that drive growth, client and employee retention and profitability, bringing his 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant. Please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Hey everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute, back with another episode of Build a Better Agency. Super grateful for you joining with us this time, and always really glad to spend the time with you today. So this is one of my solo casts. So if you’re familiar with the podcast, you know that every fifth episode I forgo having a guest. And instead it’s just you and me talking about something that either I’ve been talking to a lot of agency owners about, or Danielle and I are wrestling with, with a lot of agency owners in our coaching side of the business, or the m and a side, or a bunch of you have asked questions about it. And this episode is sort of a combination of all of those.

So I’ll tell you a little bit more about what we’re gonna talk about in a second. But also, if you are familiar with the show, you know that every time we do a solo cast, we do a drawing for a free seat at one of our workshops. Here’s how it works. An agency owner who is listening to the podcast goes to wherever they listen to the podcast and they leave a rating and review. They take a screenshot of that rating and review and they send it to me at [email protected]. Your name gets thrown into a hat and your name stays there in terms of the winning the drawing until you win.

So sometimes you might win in a month, sometimes people have waited a couple years to win, but our universe isn’t that great. So sooner or later odds are you’re gonna win. And what that means is when you win, you get a free seat. At any one of our workshops, you have to just show up in Denver and take the workshop. Once you cover your travel expenses, all of the workshop expenses are covered, we’re happy to have you. The value on that is around $2,200. So really taking three minutes to leave a rating and a review and then send it to me by email. Small task for a pretty big win. So please, please, please take the time to do that. I wanna tell you that we actually read every single rating and review and we take them to heart.

We look for clues on what we can do better. We look for things that we’re doing really well that you like. We always love feedback about the podcast. And so this is a great way for us to get that. So again, leave a rating and review, send us a screenshot. The reason why we need the screenshot is because for many of you, your username or your login name for wherever you get podcasts doesn’t tell us your actual name, nor does it tell us your agency or your contact information. So we have no way of getting a hold of you when you leave a rating and review unless you share that with us. So that’s why we’re asking you to send it our way. This month’s winner is Katie Doss. So Katie owns an agency called, Hey, Molly Girl, I’ll be reaching out to her.

Congratulations Katie. You are the latest winner of a workshop seat, so we’d be happy to have you join us soon. Alright, so with that said, let’s talk a little bit about the topic for today. So we’ve been having a lot of conversations. 2024 has been the year that many of you have said a couple things to us pretty consistently. Number one, biz dev is still hard. Number two, even though things are slow or not as, we’re not growing as fast as we want, super grateful for our team. We have the one of the best teams we’ve ever had. I don’t want to lose any of them. In some cases that means you’ve stayed a little overstaffed and made some other decisions.

But in many, many cases it just means that you’re really happy with the rock stars that you have on your team. And in an era where it’s very easy for our employees to get poached, they’re easy to find on LinkedIn and other places, it’s important to all of you that you are able to retain your employees. So a lot of you are asking us questions about how do I keep, how do I keep my good employees? How do I reward them? How do I recognize them? Things are a little lean. I don’t have as much money as I want to have. Maybe we haven’t given raises in a year. What’s sort of the protocol around that?

So I wanna talk about recognizing and rewarding your employees and comp packages. And we’ve done a couple episodes on bits and pieces of this, but I kind of wanna pull it together in a conversation. As we are approaching the end of 2024, this is gonna run right before us Thanksgiving. So I kind of wanna, I, I wanna talk about this holistically and I wanna talk about it in a way that I think you should sort of gear your brain when it comes to how we compensate our employees. Okay? So we’re gonna come from a place of gratitude. We’re gonna come from a place of abundance, but we’re also gonna still run our businesses from a smart position.

And there are lots of ways to bake out compensation package that doesn’t put you in the poor house as the agency owner to compensate all your other people. So by the way, for those of you, I know some of you watch the video version of this, I know most of you are just listening to it audibly, but for those of you that are watching the video, I’m gonna tell you right now, the, the view behind me is a hot mess. We just moved the last couple months and we are still, and we bought a house that was not done construction wise. So we’re in the middle of a construction zone and my office isn’t ready. So I’m tucked in like a spare bedroom. And as you can see, there’s piles of things behind me.

There’s a always a dog behind me no matter what office I’m in, but there’s a dog behind me and it doesn’t look so awesome. So I wanna apologize for the background. However, I, I’m happy to be with you and even, even in the chaos that is our construction zone. So if you’re, if you’re watching, I just want you to know that I know it’s not pretty behind me. So feel free to just listen if you want to this episode. Alright, so let’s talk a little bit about compensation. First of all, compensation should be thought about in the broadest sense. How, what is all, everything that an employee gets from us as an employee, number one. Number two, I want you to approach compensation not as an obligation, not as something you do out of fear or because you are being bullied or pressured, but out of gratitude.

Like these are people who help you make a good living. These are people who help you build your business. These are people who have helped you grow your client base. These are people who help you train your other employees, and you’ve chosen to surround yourself with these folks. So hopefully you like them as human beings, as professionals. And so the question really is, how do you demonstrate that you are grateful to have them on the team and that you recognize their contributions? One of the things we hear loud and clear from your employees is that they want to be seen. They wanna know that you see them, you understand how hard they work, you understand the commitment they have to the agency and you understand that they are doing their best job on behalf of themselves, your clients, their team, and the agency.

I think for some agency owners that’s challenging given the way we work today. So if you are north of 40 and you put in your dues and you worked 60 or 70 hours a week, I think one of the things that’s challenging as an agency owner is when you look at employees today who have a different attitude about work, who are probably not working in an office five days a week, where you can see them at their desk, I think it’s harder to figure out exactly how hard they’re working and to trust that they’re doing their best work all of the time. But the reality is we very, very rarely, I’m not gonna say it doesn’t happen, but we very, very rarely run into agency.

Employees weren’t very committed to their work, to their professional development, to you, the owner, to the agency, and the clients. Now, do they work the way we did when we started our careers? They don’t. They really, they just don’t. They, it’s a generational shift and we sort of have to understand that that’s not one of them, it’s all of them. And by the way, it’s getting to be true about employees of all ages, that our society has shifted what work looks like. And for many people they would argue that that’s actually a good thing. It’s a healthy thing, it’s a more balanced thing. And that the sort of, you know, hospital intern hours that we put in, much like, you know, a resident does in a hospital today, wasn’t good for anybody, wasn’t good for us, it wasn’t good for our families.

Maybe it wasn’t even good for the agencies. But I think you have to sort of rejigger the way you think about your employees and their contributions, number one. So you can come at this from a place of gratitude that they are working hard, that they are contributing, and many of them are working north of 40 hours or they’re working a little bit from home if you work in the office or they’re working a little after dinner, if you are working remote, that they are finding ways to add value and that they are not just dialing it in. So let’s start with that. Let’s start with a, we’re gonna do this from a place of gratitude, and we also wanna do this in a way that we are recognized for being a good employer.

That it feels better to recognize and reward employees when they value what we do on their behalf. So there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s very human. I, I want to thank you when I give someone a bonus, I want, I want acknowledgement when we invest in their professional development by sending them to a workshop. You know, those kind of things are, that’s just human nature that we wanna be seen. Everybody wants to be seen. So our employees want to be be seen. And by the way, if you’re an employee listening, your boss wants to be seen, they are very generous as a general rule, once in a while you pausing and saying thank you goes a long way.

And that’s true for us as employers as well. So let’s talk about sort of the three big buckets of compensation. Actually we’re gonna talk about four. We’re gonna talk about salary and raises tied to salary. We’re gonna talk about benefits, we’re gonna talk about bonuses and profit sharing. And some of you call it profit sharing. Some of you call it a bonus. And we’re gonna talk about perks and all of those have a place in the structure of compensation. So let’s start with salary and raises. Salary and raises are recognition for someone bringing their expertise and their effort to the agency and contributing to the agency’s success.

So number one, of course, you should pay your people a fair wage. There are lots of salary surveys out there. Ours is out there. We just launched the 24 25 salary survey. You’re a member. It’s a free, it’s a free benefit of membership. I emailed it out to all of you. If you didn’t get it, send us an email, we’ll send you another one. If you’re not a member, you can buy it for $99 on the website. There are lots of other salary surveys out there, so make sure you’re paying them fairly, but paying them fairly doesn’t mean that they are automatically do a raise just because they stuck around for a while. A year or two years, I’ll have a lot of people say, I haven’t given so and so a raise in a year and a half or two years or three years.

And I’ll say, well, help me understand the value they’re adding to the agency today in comparison to what they added when you hired them. Are they better at their job? Are they faster? Are they more efficient? Have they taken on new responsibilities? Have they taken on more clients? What are they doing that’s different that would’ve earned them? The raise raises are earned. Raises are earned because I learned something new. I got a promotion, I’m adding more value. Raises should not be given for longevity. That is not, that is not what a raise is for raise says what I was paying you yesterday isn’t a fair wage anymore because you are worth more today and you’re not worth more just because you stuck around.

There are other ways to compensate per someone for longevity and we’ll get to those. But a raise should be tied to an improvement in performance. One of the best ways to do that is to build a career path with your employee. You’re a junior woodchuck today, and here are your skills. If you wanna be a woodchuck, you have to be good at these three soft skills and these three hard skills. And when you’re good at those things, and when we have an opening for a woodchuck, you’ll be eligible to get a raise to a woodchuck. When you get a raise to a woodchuck, when you get a promotion to a woodchuck, you’re also gonna get a raise. Here’s the salary band for junior woodchucks, which is what you are now.

And here’s the salary band for woodchucks, which you aspire to be once you become a woodchuck. If you wanna be a senior woodchuck, here are the three soft skills. And it doesn’t have to be three, it could be four, it could be two, whatever. But here are the soft skills and here are the hard skills that you have to be good at, competent at. Not just that you on occasion do them, but you have to be skilled at them to be elevated or promoted to a senior woodchuck. And with this promotion to senior woodchuck, there are, here’s the salary band for that. And you can do that for every role in your organization. This is why the one-on-ones and the quarterly growth goals get so important because you could help your employees decide, is this a job or a profession?

It’s a job. I’m gonna just phone it in and I’m going to just do the same thing year after year and help. I just keep making more money. If it’s profession, it’s a career, I wanna get better at it. I do aspire to go from junior woodchuck to woodchuck, and yep, I want the raise that goes with that. I wanna earn that raise. So raises are about improved performance, added value. Then we have bonuses or profit sharing, bonuses and profit sharing. And you can call them either you know that a MI has a bonus program, we’ve talked about it in the podcast before. We’ll put a link to the show in the show notes so you can hear about our bonus program.

But the bonus program that we’ve developed and we’ve used for many, many years in our own organization and hundreds of a MI agencies have used them, is tied to agency performance. It’s usually tied to two key metrics, hitting a GI goals and hitting a minimum profitability goal for the month and for the quarter. And then you pay out a bonus, you can call that profit sharing, you can call it a bonus, comes outta the same pool, comes outta your profits, and you’re going to educate your employees on what they need to do, the choices they need to make, the extra effort they need to put in to help you achieve those a GI and minimum profit goals so they can earn that bonus or profit share.

So in other words, hey you guys, when we do good things together, when the boat rises, everybody benefits. Everybody shares in the spoils of us having a good month or a good quarter. And there’s a whole program and you can create your own program if you want, but they should always be tied to agency performance. Otherwise, if you just do a holiday or a fourth quarter bonus every year, guess what? The first year that you don’t have the money for it, A, you’re gonna feel guilty that you didn’t do it, and B, your people think it’s an entitlement and they’re gonna be mad that they didn’t get it. But when your employees understand that their bonus or profit sharing is tied to performance and you’re educating them about how they can help you with performance and every month you’re talking about the company’s performance, then guess what?

When they earn a bonus or they don’t enter a bonus, no one is surprised because they understand what it takes to earn it and they’ve seen the numbers, they know you didn’t hit your a GI goal or your minimum profitability goal. So they know there’s no bonus or they know there’s gonna be a big bonus when you have a great month or a great quarter. So that’s compensation number two. Next one is perks. Right now actually, you know what? Let’s talk about benefits next, but first, let’s take a quick break. Hey everybody, just wanna remind you before we get back to the show that we have a very engaged Facebook group. It’s a private group just for podcast listeners and agency owners that are in the AAMI community.

And to find it, if you’re not a member, head over to facebook.com/groups/ BABA podcast. So again, facebook.com/groups/baab podcast. All you have to do is answer a few questions to make sure that you are an actual agency owner or leader, and we will let you write in and you can join over 1700 other agency owners and leaders. And I’m telling you, there’s probably 10 or 15 conversations that are started every day that are gonna be of value to you. So come join us. Alright, we’re back. And we’re talking about how do you think about an employee’s compensation in a holistic way. So, and again, from a place of gratitude and recognizing that they help you make the success that the agency is, you can’t do it without them.

And so you need to, you need to value and appreciate them, you need to demonstrate that you value and appreciate them, but you need to do it in a way that’s smart for the business too. So we’ve talked about salary and the raises that go with salary and what’s appropriate, how one earns that. And we’ve talked a little bit about bonuses slash profit sharing and that that too should be tied to company performance. So the next bucket, if you will, is benefits. So for most of you, benefits are about two things. Number one, taking good care of your people and providing them with an array of benefits that are reasonable for the industry that we are in the size of your business.

And also it’s a competitive advantage that you wanna make sure you have good benefits because you’re competing for great employees. And so for most of you, healthcare, and that’s gonna be medical, dental, probably vision, maybe mental health built into the healthcare, maybe an employee assistance program where if somebody’s struggling, they have someone to call and talk to. Short-term, long-term, disability, life insurance, that sort of thing. Many of you have very generous bonus or vacation programs. A lot of you are using flexible or unlimited PTO vacation policies to let your people take more time off. Some of you have sabbaticals that every so often, your every so many years, your people actually earn a longer vacation period of time so they can take a deeper, longer vacation that you call a sabbatical.

So most of you, we see this in the salary and benefits survey. Most of you have the benefit package that is very generous for businesses your size. You are very competitive with each other and with other businesses and other industries tied to the kind of professionals we hire. So you do that really well. And I don’t know that for most of you, there’s much more you can do. You have, you give lots of time off, you have lots of vacation days, you have lots of holidays, many of you give your folks the week between Christmas and New Year’s off. But I would say that for in general, most of you are very generous with your benefit package.

And my guess is if your employees have a complaint, it’s probably they don’t get a 401k match if you don’t do that. So if that’s something you haven’t done, you might wanna think about adding that this. Most agencies add a safe harbor plan, the 3% across the board, whether people contribute or not, that also benefits you. It allows you to put some extra money into the 401k for yourself and other highly compensated employees. So there’s some benefit to all of that. But I would say on the benefits package, you’ve got that pretty well covered. So the fourth bucket is, I think one of the more interesting buckets to talk about and that the fourth bucket is what I might call irks and personal thank yous.

So this is silly things you do like bringing lunch in for everybody. This is when you invest in individuals for their professional development, you send them to workshops or conferences. This is stuff that everybody doesn’t get the same amount, right? This is, this is a way for you to personalize the compensation package. And many of you do this in some ways already. For example, you might invest more in some employees in terms of their professional development because they raise their hand and ask for it or they really bring it back and apply it to the agency. You may have some employees who go above and beyond and you might bend the rules of vacation and let them take a little extra vacation or some time off because they worked all weekend at a trade show or something like that.

But this is where you can really customize your compensation and really make that employee feel seen and appreciated and feel that gratitude come from you because it’s more personal. So professional development is a great way to invest in your people and to really elevate not only their experience with your agency, but the value that your agency gets from them. They go away, they get smarter, they bring that back, they teach it inside your organization. That’s a win for everybody, right? Number two, it might be perks like bending the rules. Some of you have extended your maternity or paternity policy for some best fit employees.

Some of you have gone outta your way to be generous with employees when they’ve run into a family situation where a family member is sick and you’ve sort of allowed them extra time off to deal with that family situation. So you’re super generous in lots of ways, but I think there are other ways you can be generous that really have huge impact, particularly compared to the spend on your employees. So you can do this with cash, you can do this with airline points, you can do it with Amex points. But think about when your employees go above and beyond. How do you thank them? Do you say thank you, number one, which would be great.

A lot of you may not even do that. Do you even know when they go above and beyond? Have you asked your team members? Your department leads to let you know when somebody’s gone above and beyond when they’ve stayed late or they’ve gone the extra mile for a client or they’ve done whatever it is that has added value to the business. Maybe they stayed late to help a coworker get something done, or they stuck around at a conference longer than they needed to to help a client take down a booth. Whatever it is they’ve done something that puts the agency in a good light. So number one, do you even know about it? Number two, do you verbally say thank you? Number three, handwritten thank you. Notes are an amazing tool for letting someone know that you really value them.

We don’t get them very often. We don’t see them very often. So they are a lovely, lovely gesture to say, I really appreciate you. It doesn’t cost you a dime. Maybe it costs you a card, but that’s it, right? A handwritten thank you note. Or you go beyond that and you start looking for ways to compensate people or thank people or reward people in ways that are very personal to them. So for example, if you have an employee who has a child who is at an age where they love going to the zoo, they love animals, why not? If they go above and beyond, why not buy their family an annual pass to the zoo rather than just saying thank you or giving them something generic like a gift card to a dinner.

Why not do something that says, I, I not only appreciate you, but I know you well enough to know that you would really love this and your family would really love this. Or why not say to an employee, Hey, you know what? You have been spending so much extra time a new business. I know that it is taken away from your family time and I know you’ve really sacrificed a lot. Why don’t you take a couple extra days and I will use some American Express points to get your family a hotel room at a great resort with a great outdoor pool. And you guys can have a great mini vacation right here in town, or a drive away that you guys could have some extra family time.

’cause I know you’ve sacrificed that for the agency lately. Or you know what? I know that you have been busting a hump training your department to get them ready for this X, Y, Z thing that we’re doing. And I know that you had that it was your dad’s birthday a month ago and you didn’t get to go because he lives across the country and you were super busy. I would love to give you and your husband a plane ticket so you can go see your folks for a long weekend. Those kind of out of the box extras, those kind of efforts, those kinds of things that say, this is personal for me and I wanna make it personal for you.

It means a lot when you go above and beyond at the agency. I wanna thank you for that and I want to thank you in a way that I think is gonna be really meaningful for you. Those are the things that your employees tell their families about. Those are the things your employees tell their friends about. Those are the things that make your employee, when someone reaches out to them on LinkedIn and says, Hey, are you looking for a job? Makes them go, no, thank you. I am really happy where I am. When we think about compensation, not just as the salary we pay them and not just as the benefit package, but also the ways that we show our gratitude and that we shout how proud we are that they’re a part of our team and that they are important to us, not just as an agency, but to us as people.

They’re important to us that they are part of the agency team that brings great value to our clients and to each other. That’s when I think compensation gets personal. That’s when I think it gets meaningful. That’s when I think it gets very clear that you’re the kind of leader and boss that really does value the team that you’ve built and the effort that they put into the work. And that’s when we can really sort of level up the relationship we have with clients or with our employees, and which then will give them the juice to level up the relationship they have with our clients.

Another thing that I highly suggest you do is that you spend some time getting to know your employees. When we ask employees what do they want? You know what the number one thing they want is more time with you. They wanna learn from you, they want you to mentor them, they want you. They wanna be like you. They want to know how you do what you do so effortlessly and so brilliantly. They watch you and they covet being as good as you are at your job, and they’re really anxious for more time with you. But what would be even more meaningful than that is more time with you learning about them, right where you are investing your time to learn about them.

There’s a great book, it’s been around forever, called The Dream Manager. And the premise of the book is this, that when an employer helps the employees that matter to them achieve their dreams. So first of all, you have to get to know them well enough to know what their dreams are. Do they want to adopt a baby? Do they wanna buy a house? Do they wanna be go on their first cruise? Do they want to have more time to donate to a charity that’s important to them? Do they wanna save puppies? Whatever it is, whatever’s important to them. Are there ways you could help them accomplish those dreams? I’m not talking about giving them money for a down payment, but I am talking about maybe they need some financial education.

Maybe they need to sit down with a banker or someone who will teach them what it, what it need, what they need to do to have the credit rating that will allow them to qualify for a mortgage. Maybe all your young employees need that. Maybe bring someone in to teach your employees about investing in the stock market or how to, how to think about their 401k. Or again, maybe, maybe you know someone who has successfully adopted several children and you make a connection between that employee that wants to adopt and someone you know personally who has successfully accomplished that goal. Understanding what your employee’s dreams are and making their dreams. Something that you care about, that you lean into, that you wanna help them accomplish, not with money, but with other things that you can do easily that will be significant to them.

And honestly, just caring about it, asking about it, remembering it, even all of that is part of the compensation packages, part of the relationship I that’s like, I guess that’s what I want you to think about when you think about the compensation package. I want you to think about it being what? What is it that this relationship means to me and how do I take care of and intend to that relationship? And some of that is monetary for sure, but in many other ways you can compensate your employees and make them feel valued and appreciated. So all of this rolls up to a question that I want you to ask yourself.

As you think about this episode and you think about your employees, what is your compensation philosophy? What do you believe about raises? What do you believe about bonuses and profit sharing? What do you believe about benefits or perks or thank you gifts? What do you believe about relationships with your employees? Like how much should you know about their personal life? How much should you know about their dreams? This is not a one size fits all sort of thing. You as the agency owner or as an agency leader, get to decide or set the course for what co your compensation strategy or philosophy looks like.

Do you believe in overpaying salaries so that your people are absolutely not poachable, but you don’t give out a lot of raises and bonuses? Or do you believe that benefits are a shared responsibility and you should only be responsible for a certain amount of their healthcare or something like that? So I want you to pause, and I actually would love for you to write down what your compensation philosophy is around those buckets. So around salaries and raises, around profit sharing slash bonuses tied to company performance, around benefits, around perks, and thank you gifts and recognition and around the relationship that you have with your employees.

How do you want your agency to be seen? What matters to you in terms of being a good employer? What do you think is more than reasonable and fair? You don’t have to do all these things and you don’t have to do all of them in the same volume, but I do think it’s important that you have a philosophy or a belief about how to handle compensation so that when your employees come to you and ask for a raise, you have an answer for them about why you’re not giving them one or why you are giving them one. When your employees ask why they don’t give bonuses or why you give holiday bonuses or however you handle profit sharing and bonuses, you need to have an answer.

When your employees ask why there’s not a 401k match or why there’s not a 401k at all, or they are grateful for all the bonuses and they talk to you about it, you wanna be able to talk about the decision of why you’re doing that. When you have a philosophy, a belief about compensation, a couple things happen. Number one, it’s very easy to write the rules about how you’re going to share compensation with your employees, how you talk about it. When you hire someone, when they ask for a change in their compensation, you have a rule book of here’s why we do the things that we do. And when you have a compensation philosophy or a rule book, you also treat everyone fairly and equitably.

It helps you make sure that you’re not playing favorites or that you’re not leaning into one department more than another because of a bias that you have. Whether you’re not paying a certain age group of people more than another age group, or that you’re not paying a rockstar who’s amazing at their job, but terrible culture wise differently than you’re paying somebody who is a great fit, culture wise, all of those things should be part of your compensation philosophy, and I think they should live inside your employee handbook. You should be so clear about it that it’s written in the handbook. So if I work there, I know exactly what I have to do to get a raise, and when I’m, when I should expect a raise.

And if I never am gonna get a raise, unless I get a promotion, or unless I achieve four quarters of growth goals or whatever your compensation is, I’m not gonna come and ask you for one because you’ve told me what the rules are. So as you think about this going into 2025 as we enter into here in the States, this season of gratitude around Thanksgiving, as you think about your budget for 2025 and how you want to compensate your people as you approach the end of the year, which for many of you triggers, I should give a bonus, all of those reasons are the perfect time for you to think about your compensation philosophy and how do you record it, how do you communicate it, and then how do you live by it?

All right? Hopefully that was super helpful and you can apply it right away. Before I let you go, you know that I wanna do two things. Number one, I really, really, really want to thank you for being with us. I wanna thank you for joining the podcast family. I’m hoping you’re in the podcast Facebook group because we have over 2000 agency owners and leaders in there talking every day about topics that are important to you. And you can go jump in there and ask a question. You can jump in there and be a part of a conversation. You can share your point of view. We try and jump in and share our point of view. So it’s a very robust community and we hope you join that. But whether you join that or not, I am really grateful that you keep coming back and listening to the podcast.

I love having you here. I love talking with you. I love bringing guests to educate you and me along the way. So super grateful that you’re here for all of that to happen. And of course, you know, I wanna thank our friends at White Label IQ. They’re the presenting sponsor of this podcast, and they have been a generous sponsor of a MI for a very long time. We’ve known them for 20 some years. They’re good people. They do white label design, dev and PPC, and they’ve structured their entire compensation model to work with agencies to come alongside you, whether you have an in-house team or not, and to do the work in a way that you get some profit, your client gets exactly what they need.

It’s on time, it’s on budget. They are good people, super smart people, but they understand your business model because it’s their business model. So they know how to work with agencies every day to try and help you delight your clients and feed your bottom line. So check them out at White Label IQ dot com slash aami. Right? Alright, that’s what I have for you today. Hopefully that was thought provoking to perfect time of year to be thinking about your compensation philosophy. Get it in writing, get it in the handbook, put it in front of your people, and there’s gonna be some to-dos that come out of that, whether it’s career pathing or salary banding or some of the other things we talked about.

But you have ample ways to be generous with your time, with your connections, with your resources, like points with your dollars with time off. You have lots of tools in your toolbox to be generous with your employees. So take full advantage of all of them so that you can continue to attract and retain amazing talent. Okay? Alright. See you next week. Thanks for listening.

Come back next week for another episode, designed to help you build a stronger, more stable and sustainable agency. Check out our workshops, coaching and consulting packages, and other professional development [email protected].