Rethinking Agency Differentiation with Robin Bonn

Drew McLellan [00:00:37]: 

Hey everybody, Drew McLellan here with another episode of Build a Better Agency. And you are going to love this conversation. Before I tell you about our guest, I want to remind you that every month Danielle and I host Live a Q and A. So for an hour we’re on Zoom. You can get the link in the newsletter, you can get the link in the Facebook group, you can email us and ask for the link. But every month we are live for an hour to answer any question that you have. So it might be about financial ratios, it might be about new business, it might be about what other agencies are doing about a problem that you’re having. You might want to talk about an employee, but we have plenty of time for you to come in, give us a download on your question and for us to be able to respond to that question. Most of the time we can answer it on the fly, but sometimes we have to send you something afterwards. But we are happy to be there, happy to be a resource and we would love for you to join us. So watch the newsletter because every month it moves around a little bit because of our travel schedule. But watch the newsletter and keep an eye out for it and please come join us. We have lots of time and energy that we would love to share with you once a month. Absolutely. For free. So come, come check it out and come spend some time with us. All right, let me tell you a little bit about our guest today. So Robin Bond is an agency guy. He’s been in agencies for most his career, now runs a company that helps agencies think about how they are perceived in the marketplace. How do they, how do they position themselves? How do they differentiate themselves? And what does differentiation really mean today for agencies? So he’s written a great book that I highly recommend. But before I tell you any more about the book, I just want you to meet him, hear how smart he is, and learn from him over the course of the next hour. So let’s welcome him to the show. Robin, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us. 

Robin Bonn [00:02:32]: 

It’s my pleasure. Thank you so much, Drew. I’m delighted to be Here. 

Drew McLellan [00:02:35]: 

So give folks a little sense of your background, why you decided the book needed to be written now and where you think we are headed. 

Robin Bonn [00:02:46]: 

Oh wow, that’s a big question straight off the bat. So let me do my best. So yeah, my business is called Codefinery. I’m the CEO and founder of that. We’re a specialist consulting and coaching practice specifically for agencies. We’re probably best known for repositioning maybe 150 agencies over the years. That’s all sizes and disciplines and geographies and ownership models. And I think right now the focus has been in recent times it’s all about helping agency leaders and owners, I suppose, just rethink not just how differentiation works, but just how to grow an agency business in a world that’s being turned upside down by AI. And that was really, you know, the sort of guiding principle behind the book. So the book is called Market of one, how your agency can rewrite the rules and create a lasting competitive advantage. And it’s not a book about, I want to sort of hasten to add that, but it is a book about really just creating an agency business that, you know, creating the business that you’ve always wanted to run rather than an agency that you’re really desperately trying to make thrive. It’s really about enjoying the business of running an agency that is seen as different by your audience. And it is something that, you know, makes good money and also something that allows you to, you know, not have to think about it 24, 7 over the weekend and you know, allows you to have some headspace to, you know, have hobbies and all those other crazy, you know, out there things that we. 

Drew McLellan [00:04:10]: 

Never thought possible when running family time vacations are. 

Robin Bonn [00:04:13]: 

I know, right? Yeah, crazy time. Crazy. 

Drew McLellan [00:04:17]: 

So I, I have pondered this question for many hours. I’m curious your thoughts. It seems like if there is a business that should understand the importance and power of differentiation and how to do it, it would be agencies. So why is this so hard for people who do this for a living to do it for themselves? 

Robin Bonn [00:04:38]: 

Again, it’s a big question. I think a lot of it comes down to conditioning. We, I mean, I’m an agency guy, I’ve been in this space for almost all my career. So that’s 25 years plus in agencies. You know, 10 years running the consultancy and coaching practice and sort of 15 plus years before that in agencies. And I think we just have not particularly adapted over the years as the industry has changed. We weren’t particularly well served by the introduction of time and materials in the 80s, we weren’t particularly well prepared when procurement started looking at the marketing supply chain. We haven’t particularly adapted commercially to the sort of atomization of media as sort of everything has become digital. And we’re kind of making the same mistake now with AI, where yes, it’s great for efficiency and it’s important that we’re talking about efficiency, but that’s barely scratching the surface of what AI is going to do in terms of creating unmet client needs. Transformation of business models, most fundamentally, just simply, we can’t use time and materials as the dominant mode of recompense when we are primarily pushing buttons instead of using people to do stuff. I don’t think we’re particularly good at change. I think that’s one part of it. And because of that we’re lagging behind. Clients are much stronger commercially than we are as agencies. But to your point about the skill set, I think the other thing is that when agencies think they can do this themselves, and some can, don’t get me wrong, it’s not quite so blinkered to my own worldview, but I think oftentimes they get it wrong is because they treat the agency like a consumer brand. They imagine that there is a degree of consistent recognition on behalf of the client audience. They make the mistake of thinking they’re a mass market proposition, when in fact they’re quite a narrow business to business proposition. I think for most of this it tracks back and this is a harsh truth. And for anyone that’s read the book, they’ll know I’m not there to pull any punches. Although the whole thing is written with a lot of love and affection. The truth is that a lot of agencies don’t have a particularly robust business strategy. A lot of it is let’s be the best creative shop in the world. And it’s like, well, that’s great, but a lot of people might want to be the best heavyweight boxer in the world and only very few people get there. So as long as you can make money and sort of sustain yourself, you know, with joy and with finance and with headspace and mental well being along the way, then that’s okay. But it’s, it’s not, you know, being the best is not much of a strategy. 

Drew McLellan [00:07:03]: 

Well, and, and I think part of the truth of it is one of the reasons why I think agencies aren’t good at it is you can’t. It’s the same reason they tell their clients they can’t build their own brand is because it’s pretty hard to read the outside of a label when you’re inside the bottle accurately, right. There’s. There’s bias and there’s distortion because you’re inside of it. And so you do need that outside perspective, which I know is part of what you provide your clients. So when agencies think about differentiation. So a lot of agencies will say to me, oh, no, we. We have a strong brand. We’re. We’re very different. And as you and I were talking, you know, before we hit the record button, a lot of it is about, they have better people or they’re more creative or whatever it is. When you look at the landscape of agencies, for the agencies that have tried to differentiate themselves, how do they get it wrong? 

Robin Bonn [00:07:56]: 

How do they get it wrong? Wow. I mean, for the most part, they all say the same stuff. You know, the. The oft quoted sea of sameness. It’s. It’s a, you know, a lovely alliteration which perfectly describes what we see here. I think just on that. I think it’s really interesting how many agencies sort of drink their own Kool Aid on this stuff, you know, on sort of. You catch them on one day of the week and they’ll be like, well, you know, we’re different because we do, you know, we do creative and media. Like, we’re fully integrated. 

Drew McLellan [00:08:23]: 

We’re a full service, integrated marketing agency. 

Robin Bonn [00:08:26]: 

Exactly right. Exactly. And. And then they, you know, all you have to do is hold their gaze for half a second longer than feels natural, and they’ll say, well, yeah, I mean, I know that that’s not like, particularly different, but, you know, that’s what we do. I think there’s a real habit for kind of conflating services with differentiation, what we do rather than what we. Cause I think that’s one source of kind of chronic lack of differentiation. I mean, there’s plenty here. I mean, another one I see a lot is people sort of trying to find a new form of words for things that don’t need a new form of words. They’re very good at. I have a section in the book called Symptoms of Meh. The sort of indifference that you would get from a sort of, you know, withering frustrated teenager when you told them something. Oh, dad, really? That kind of thing. But yeah, so, you know, coming up with stuff like, oh, with a. With a pop culture agency. And it kind of sounds interesting, vaguely, but no one knows what that means. And if you find yourself immediately having to follow your elevator pitch by saying, oh, well. And what I mean by that is. And the other Thing we see a lot of is really just playing back category norms as if they’re different. So we’re different. Obviously, classically, where people are our differentiator is the most hackneyed one. But we do bold work for ambitious clients. Or even more developed propositional statements I think can still be category generics. Like, well, we’re different. We put your brand into culture. It’s phrases like that where we give our clients an unfair share of attention. You know, they’re all starting to get more outcome led. They’re starting to get a little bit more client centric, which is really, really positive. But I keep a little list of agencies that use these same phrases because there are lots of them. 

Drew McLellan [00:10:08]: 

I was gonna say it’s probably a pretty big list. 

Robin Bonn [00:10:10]: 

It’s a pretty big list because, again, it’s just a rearticulation of what generally creative agencies do. And we’re not just talking about creative agencies. The same tropes are just as true as other disciplines. But it’s easy to pick on the creative agencies because they’re often most visible. But, yeah, if you can ask yourself, well, could the opposite ever be true, or could you take the logo off that phrase and put another competitor logo on it and it would still work, then you have to ask your question as to whether it’s really representative of anything tangible in terms of differentiation. And again, a lot of people talk about differentiation as if it’s the packaging of the business. It’s really not. There’s a big distinction for me between sort of superficial distinctiveness. We look and sound a bit different than the next agency that does what we do versus deep tangible differentiation, which I think really, it’s a representation of a different business model or a different business strategy at least. And I think if you don’t have that, then you probably are just trying to find a new form of words to describe something everyone else is doing. 

Drew McLellan [00:11:07]: 

So give us an example. Help us see what you think true differentiation looks like. So whether it’s a client that you’ve helped or somebody out in the marketplace that you think really does it. Right. Help us see the difference. 

Robin Bonn [00:11:23]: 

Yeah, and again, I. I get asked this a lot, and there’s. There’s a really important sort of disclaimer to insert in the front of this because I. I think we’re all. It’s all very easy for us to look at any given agency and decide whether we think that they are, you know, differentiated, whether we think they are, you know, aspirational, whether we presume that they’re making Good profit margins. Whether we presume that they’re having a good time and their people are, you know, getting home on time and seeing their family, there’s loads of considerations for a healthy business which we just don’t see. So this sort of venturing into this speculation and it’s like judging a house by looking through the letterbox is the way I always think about it. But having said that, I think if we look at some of the sort of headline agencies of the day, I would argue that an agency like Uncommon, obviously huge in the uk, sort of starting to make waves elsewhere in the world, not least in New York, obviously, has done this incredible deal with Havas, like whatever it was, six or seven years into, you know, into existence. I think what they’ve done is very interesting because rather than just sort of make a claim about being the best or being highly creative or whatever, they’ve really propositionalized what they do. So they talk about building brands that people in the real world wished existed. Now, I think, you know, I’ve sort of gone on record with them and with other people about. I think there is. There’s a way that could be finessed. But again, that’s my personal bias coming into it. Clearly, it hasn’t held up the progress of the business, so. 

Drew McLellan [00:12:41]: 

That’s right. 

Robin Bonn [00:12:42]: 

They’re doing no right saying that, really. But I think what’s interesting about it is that with a proposition like that, you’re really giving yourself permission to do work which has real meaning and has real depth of impact. So it could be transformative, it could drive real reappraisal of that brand, but it’s certainly not going to be ignorable. Now, I think the impact of that and sort of baking it into the strategy of the business, so that everything they say and do substantiates their ability to deliver on that kind of work. It means that when they go and see a client, the client is holding them to account to do something genuinely groundbreaking, so that if they ever did work that was like, yeah, it was all right, then the client would be annoyed with them. Now, I think that’s very different to an aspirational stance of we do, you know, we work with ambitious clients to do work that works, but literally any client could say, yeah, I’ll have some of that. Whereas I think having a strong proposition that allows you to, you know, effectively polarize the target audience and have the people that really are ready to do that kind of work, that’s a pretty bold position. It’s a clear strategic position to Take on what the market needs. And I think they’ve done well to back that up and consistently not just be invited to, but then deliver against that kind of brief. I think that’s a great example of an agency that really has propositionalized well. 

Drew McLellan [00:13:59]: 

Do you think it’s easier for agencies that focus on consumer brands? Do you think it’s easier for agencies like that to differentiate themselves than a B2B agency that works in a local or regional market or serves a less sexy, if you will, client base? 

Robin Bonn [00:14:22]: 

Absolutely not. Absolutely not. So one of my kind of core beliefs, and this has been borne out in the, you know, the 10 years that we’ve been doing what we’ve been doing, have yet to meet an agency that doesn’t have it in them. It’s not to say they’ll do it, but they don’t have it in them the potential to create their own market of one. And remember, this is just a, you know, it’s creating a business like inventing a category of which you are, you know, it’s defined by your uniqueness, so you become the default leader in it. So whether that is an enormous market of, you know, a small market of global holding company businesses at the very high end of the business, you know, of the industry, or, or whether it’s a very small unsexy corner of the B2B market where you’re servicing, I don’t know IFAs in the suburbs of Portland, for example, I don’t see why there’s any reason why those two businesses either end of the scale, should have any less ability to define an audience, figure out how they super serve them to articulate that really clearly, and then back it up in terms of how they operate, how they sell, how they price, how they onboard clients, all those other proof points to deepen that differentiation beyond that superficial stuff that I talked about earlier. 

Drew McLellan [00:15:33]: 

So do you think that agencies just stop short of asking themselves the right questions to begin to dig past the, if you will, the superficial answer to the question, how are you different than everyone else? Is it a lack of depth? Is it we’re headed in the wrong direction? Where do we get it wrong? 

Robin Bonn [00:15:54]: 

I think it’s a lack of depth, which is caused by a pretty endemic fear. There’s an enormous amount of herd behavior in this industry. I think a lot of the sort of habits, you know, the sort of the more unhelpful commercial habits of some of the largest agencies of the world, those agencies still tend to be quite aspirational to some of the smaller agencies of the world. A lot of that behavior kind of just trickles down naturally. You know, even if the shop you run of 12 people in the suburbs of Portland is know whether you’ve never worked in a holding company agency, it doesn’t really matter. Honestly. I think culturally I, I’ve said this in the book that I think Mad Men has got a lot to answer for, particularly in recent years. Sort of created this, you know, rose tinted, you know, cultural reference point for the sort of halcyon days of advertising, ignoring a lot of the unsavory crap that went on, you know, back in that time anyway, that we still haven’t solved. But, you know, we’ve sort of got this image of what it means to be, you know, the sort of incredible persuaders and the sort of showmanship of converting clients in pitches. And I think the reality, based on that little history lesson we talked about earlier, where we’ve just been very unprepared for change in the industry and we continue to do that, we keep doing what we’re doing because there’s a lot of people that are very focused on making good work as opposed to not enough people that are focused on running good businesses. And again, that’s a massive generalization and there are many, many people that are running good businesses. But if you take that macro view, frankly, I saw this at a conference I was at recently where an awful lot of independent agencies were very much in it together. Huge community, lovely, lovely people, really committed to the quality of the work. And of course, you ask any section of 10 of them out of a room of a few hundred, kind of what makes their business different, and you’re going to get seven and a half at least of the same answers again and again. And I think that kind of proves the point. So we’re just not good at recognizing that there is a commerciality that’s lacking and there’s a herd mentality which stops us slowing down and asking those kinds of questions. In my opinion, do you think an. 

Drew McLellan [00:17:52]: 

Agency’S positioning should always be about outcomes as opposed to outputs? 

Robin Bonn [00:17:58]: 

So again, we confuse this. I think in our industry when we start talking about pricing, we get very confused very quickly. And I’m sure we’ll come on to that in a minute. But we get tied up in language as well a lot. The difference between a positioning and a proposition and vision and mission and values and all this stuff, we use it all quite interchangeably. We sort of just toss it around like confetti. I think if your agency is very, very good at Creating an output and that output is something that an ownable target audience is willing to pay for, then there’s nothing wrong with that being your proposition. Whereas if it’s an outcome that you’re really, really good at and there is value for and you can make a good profit and deliver happy clients by giving them that outcome, then give them that outcome. I think the latter is probably easier, particularly these days. I kind of alluded to AI earlier in the conversation where we’re talking a lot about efficiency and I think we’re a relatively short lived period in history here where all these efficiency tools that the most forward thinking agencies are coming up with, like that clever custom GPT that will analyze all of the campaigns in a market or it will produce your proposal in five seconds instead of five days, they’re going to become hygiene factors very, very quickly. So I think once we come out the other side of that, we’re going to have an almost unrecognizable marketing environment where there’s going to be a lot of clients that don’t know what to do. And that’s what we’re really good at is coming in and solving those kind of emergent problems and coming at them with all sorts of different levels of lateral thinking and innovation and creativity in all of its senses. So building a business around the outcome of solving a problem that arises in that new world I think is going to be far more salable than rocking up and saying here is an output that we can do better or cheaper. I think the market will effectively polarize where the clients. We’re already seeing this. Let’s be honest, there’s no great insight here. There’s a lot of demand for clients for doing an awful lot of content which will produce just good enough using AI as AI continues to get better and there’s going to be a shed load of that required. And that’s a business model for agencies to deliver that. There will also be the high end stuff which might not be quite so frequent but who knows where you can and should be able to command a premium. And the one thing I’d say on that is that you can make money in both of those markets, either or both of those markets, but not if you’re stuck in the middle. You’ll be too expensive to be high end. Sorry, too expensive to be, you know, to compete against your automation and you know, you’ll be too indiscreet or, you know, kind of vague if you like to appeal at the top of the market. 

Drew McLellan [00:20:36]: 

Yeah, we, we use an analogy where we talk about, you know, agencies have to decide, you want to be the wonder bread factory or do you want to be the artisanal bakery? 

Robin Bonn [00:20:44]: 

Right. 

Drew McLellan [00:20:44]: 

And it’s pretty tough to sit in the middle of that. Right. You’ve got, you have to make a commitment. Yeah. 

Robin Bonn [00:20:50]: 

Yeah, I love that. It’s a great way of putting it. Much more succinct than my way of putting it. 

Drew McLellan [00:20:54]: 

Well, I have met plenty of words after it, so I’m sure. So I want to talk more about the idea of pricing as part of differentiation. But let’s take a quick break and then we’ll come back and we’ll talk about sort of your, your view on that. Are you tired of juggling multiple tools to manage your agency? Meet Dell Tech Workbook the all in one solution for marketing and communications agencies. Streamline your projects, resources and finances all in one place. With real time dashboards and reporting, you’ll have full project visibility. You can plan team capacity weeks ahead to avoid bottlenecks and keep your budgets on track to maximize profitability. It’s perfect for both agencies and in house marketing teams looking to work more efficiently. PCI is a certified Deltec partner offering expert implementation and support to ensure your success. If you’re ready to transform your operations, visit PCI US Podcast for a free consultation today. Hey everybody, thanks for listening today. Before I get back to the interview, I just want to 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 them out and come join us. All right, let’s get back to the show. All right, we are back and we are talking about agency differentiation. So you alluded to before the break that pricing is one of the things that we need to be thoughtful about. And I know you believe that a lot of agencies sort of under leverage how pricing can differentiate them. Can you talk more about that? 

Robin Bonn [00:22:58]: 

Yeah, I think pricing is a, it’s probably agency’s most under leveraged differentiator. You know, I mean just look how much on our daily lives we look at what things Cost and we ascribe value to them accordingly. There’s a huge amount of subjectivity in that. And I think agencies are sort of drawn into a debate about imagining that there is no subjectivity. A day rate of one creative director being equal to the day rate of another creative director. So they should cost the same. It’s clearly nonsense. I think if your agency is able to make a point about being expensive or cheap and being able to kind of back that up, then you’ve got far more authority, if you like, to make that part of the narrative and part of the proof points of the proposition that you’re bringing to market. I mean, there’s that famous old Stella Artois line about being reassuringly expensive. And I think, you know, if you had a mid market, you know, family sedan and you could drive it off the forecourt at the car dealership for, you know, $5,000, you’d be thinking, what’s wrong with it? Right. And likewise, you probably wouldn’t pay $15 for, you know, a tub of margarine. It’s just we know what these things cost and we’ll pay a little bit more, a little bit less, depending on, you know, the value that we ascribe to it. So I think agencies miss that proof point, if you like. And one of the kind of symptoms of that is you can have extremely successful hot shops that are known for being brilliantly creative, but they don’t make any more money than anybody else. And sometimes they make less because they’re just not particularly commercially aware and they’re not very good at monetizing their thinking. But they should have a competitive advantage. And as I think it’s a Peter Drucker quote, if you can’t charge a premium, then you don’t have a brand. I think agencies forget that quite a lot of the time. 

Drew McLellan [00:24:45]: 

So do you think most agencies underprice their work? 

Robin Bonn [00:24:49]: 

Underpriced. But I think they undermine their work. So one of the issues we see a lot is that, I mean, the biggest issue, I think with pricing is that agencies, they don’t recognize that they have more options than they think because of that sort of fear based mentality. They don’t want to rock the boat. What if the client says no? That kind of pervades most things. Agencies do not least lack of risk. 

Drew McLellan [00:25:10]: 

Very fear based. 

Robin Bonn [00:25:11]: 

Yeah, 100%. Which is really one reason why the business. The book rather is a sort of the heart of it, if you like, is really a journey from scarcity to abundance. I think that mindset shift is Pretty essential to everything we’re talking about. But yeah, if you go into a pricing conversation with a client and you know, they haul you over the coals because there’s, you know, you’re selling time, your overhead recovery and your profit margins and you know, you have to give them transparency because you think you’ll, you’ll lose otherwise. And agency people get all shirty and blame procurement and it’s all their fault and they’re terrible people and it’s nonsense. You’re just sort of passing the responsibility over to another party to save taking responsibility for yourself. And I think that’s a problem. But as soon as we believe as an industry that the only alternative to selling time is performance related pay, which is what a lot of people, I think mistakenly believe value based pricing means, then of course performance related pay is tricky to set up. It involves risk on both sides. Clients, traditionally, particularly if they’re large corporations, are not particularly excited by the prospect of not knowing how much they’ll pay you. So it’s a hard conversation and you know, you have to work through it and you have to have competent consultative salespeople that are able to have that, you know, that commercial conversation. It’s hard to do payment by results, but if you think they’re the only two choices and one of the choices is really hard, then you’re more likely to stick to time and materials. And that’s crazy when you look at all of the different pricing mechanisms which we all use on a daily basis. When people ask me about what’s going to be the dominant pricing mechanism in agencies once AI continues to decimate the billable hour, I don’t know the answer to that, but it will be something you’re already very familiar with. The question is how you then bake it into your business. And you help build the capability of talking about it, making arguments for and against it, and presenting a set of commercial options to commercial people on the other side of the table and having a grown up conversation about what works for both parties. So I think the second thing I said there was two things. The second thing is I think a lot of the time agencies will try and change the pricing conversation at the point of purchase as opposed at the point of introduction. And that makes it way, way harder again to use an everyday parallel. You walk into, I don’t know, a BMW dealership and the salesperson takes you through the, you know, you could take you for a test drive and they show you all the bells and whistles and all the things you can scope in and you design the car that you want. And at the end, they say, oh, yeah, we’ve just changed our pricing. And the car is, you pay us now, it costs you ten grand a month to have this car, and that’s it. There’s no other pricing. He’s like, whoa, that was a bait and switch I didn’t need. Of course you’re going to walk out and not buy. And I think if agencies set themselves up with a proposition that supports the notion of a different method or set of methodologies for charging, this is what we do. This is why you believe that we’re good at it. It’s something that you need. It’s a problem that we solve that you’re good at. And as part of that, that’s why we price in the way we do. It’s why we sell in the way we do the why that we onboard clients in the way we do the whole, what we call the whole agency customer experience supports the expectation that there’s going to be difference in the way that we show up. And lastly, none of that is really possible without showing up with a clear commitment that you are not trying to persuade the client to go with you. You’re trying to discover whether there is a fit with that client. And I think that, again, that’s one of the big tropes in the industry. And again, blame Don Draper or Bain, whatever. But we are. We believe we’re in the task of persuader. We’re not. We’re not trying to force ourselves into, you know, as a square peg, into a round hole. Our only job is to figure out whether we’re right or not, and then we can move forward if we are. 

Drew McLellan [00:28:43]: 

Yeah, I think just that attitude shift of I’m deciding if this is a good fit as opposed to I’m trying to convince you that it’s a good fit is a huge shift that a lot of agencies need to make. You know, it’s interesting. I see. I see people swing on that pendulum. So if when things are good and agent and work is plentiful and agencies are doing well, whether that’s industry wide or it’s for that particular agency, then of course they get that swagger in their step and they are more choosy about who they work with. But, you know, I do feel, especially in the independents, there’s so much pressure to make sure that you can make payroll and everybody can pay their mortgage, that there is sometimes I worry that we give off this sort of smell of desperation to prospects that they know that they can take advantage of, and I think they do take advantage of on a regular basis. 

Robin Bonn [00:29:37]: 

I think you’re absolutely right. I don’t think it’s necessarily that they smell it. I think they’re absolutely trained to recognize it, you know, through sight, through sound, through body language, through, you know, kind of corporate behavior and all the things we do. I mean, Blair Enz has been talking about this for years. You know, this idea that we give our power away. And those professional buyers on the other side of the boardroom table are, you know, it’s. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel for them. They get no professional satisfaction out of it. But if we were on their side of the table, we do the same thing, so. 

Drew McLellan [00:30:07]: 

Right. 

Robin Bonn [00:30:07]: 

I think being much more mindful of our behaviors and, you know, giving a discount when it wasn’t asked for or, you know, saying yes to doing four, you know, four weeks of work in two weeks because the client said that that was their deadline. Not pushing back on this stuff. I think it’s crucial. But again, this is something that has changed in my 25 years. This idea of, if you and I were to make this argument to an agency, and I’m sure we both have done this many, many times, the agency will often turn around and say, oh, yeah, we say no to clients all the time. And it’s become almost sort of no has become the poster child of a sort of very mild enlightenment where no, no, no. We say no all the time. You dig a little bit deeper and it’s like, do you. Right, Yeah. I mean, yes. We say no. We say no all the time. We say no all the time when it’s an obvious hospital pass. We say no when it’s, you know, I don’t know, an ethical thing. We don’t work with tobacco anymore. Fine, easy. We say no when, you know, the client wants us to work over the holidays, and we know that we need to look after our people, so we say no. That’s great. That’s really good. None of these are bad things. But more often than not, these no’s are pretty obvious no’s. And they’re only no’s in new business, and they’re only no’s at the very front end of a selection process. I think when agencies are really embodying that swagger and they really know their own worth, then they can say no at different points. So they can say no after a tissue meeting, you know, two thirds of the way through a pitch process, when the clients just, you realize you’re just you know, classically creative differences. You can say no when you’re at the negotiation stage, when the marketeer is saying, you know what, I really want to hire you guys, and procurement is saying, it’s got to cost this much and you’re able to say no at that point, or you’re able to say no to the client that you won six months ago and they’re not really delivering the access to information or data or whatever it was that you counted on to do good work. Can you say no then? Can you fire clients that are being unpleasant to your staff? Those, I think, are the much less common examples of where agencies have got enough confidence to be able to say, maybe this is going to hit us in the short term, but in the long term it’s going to serve as well. I always, I’ve said this so many times, and I’m sorry for repeating myself, but I think it will for all agencies. It will cost you more to win the wrong client than it will to lose the right one. 

Drew McLellan [00:32:14]: 

No, no doubt, no doubt. And again, that that sounds great in the black and white of a conversation like this. And I will quickly acknowledge it’s very different when you’re feeling the pressure of making payroll and all those things. I was just talking to somebody the other day and I just said, you know, you have to be really mindful of what the short term decision costs you in the long run. And I think that this is a great example of that. Right in the moment it feels like I’ve got to have that bag of money because I have to make payroll or whatever it may be. But what is the cost of that decision six months or a year from now, internally and externally? And we have to be more mindful, I think, of that lagging tail. 

Robin Bonn [00:33:00]: 

Yeah. I think something really interesting here is where if you are in the weeds of a flawed business model, where you’re in a hyper competitive situation and you are effectively one of many commodity offerings, and let’s be honest, that’s where many agencies are. We’re different, we’re creative, we’re different, we start with the audience, all of this stuff. Our differentiator is our people. When you’re in that commodity space and you are trying to make payroll, it’s your baby, that business, it’s your future, it’s your sense of self worth, it’s your ego, it’s how you’re going to eat and put bread on the table. It’s all of those things. And that stuff is very, very real. However, if we are trying to thrive in that context. And we’re trying to, you know, well, we’ll just say yes to this client and we’ll just kind of take this one at cost because, you know, we need the win or whatever else. Unless you really sort of zoom out and ask yourself why are we in this situation? Then you’re going to keep having those conversations again and again and again and that’s just not fun. And it’s also not going to help you put food and it’s not profitable. 

Drew McLellan [00:33:59]: 

Right. I mean not only is it not fun, but you are barely keeping your head above water at all times. 

Robin Bonn [00:34:04]: 

Yeah, it’s, it’s the, you know, the classic treadmill, you know, or you know, the hamster wheel. And in the book we describe it and the reasons for it as the big grind. I think, you know, a lot of agency owners particularly right now are feeling it and there’s a lot of great people coming out of the holding company agents as well, you know, being shed as is going to happen given the nature of AI. But this is one of my issues I have with the new business community in as much as, and I say this as a fully paid up member of that community. I’ve spent a lot of my career going out there doing the new business thing. And so much of the advice in that space hasn’t changed in my 25 years. There was obviously great exceptions to that, but generally speaking, a lot of the advice you hear in those new business circles is really designed to address the symptoms of a lack of differentiation. You know, like the reality that the client say look, all your agencies look the same. I can get it from three more agencies for 20% less. So do you want the work or do not? And we’re sustaining a situation where that exists by continuing to carve out these marginal gains in a new business context. Here’s how to make a lead gen campaign, improve your click through rate by 0.1% or here’s how to increase your pitch conversion rate from a pretty average 25% to an industry acceptable 33%. One in three is not bad. These marginal gains are, you’re just moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic. And I think that’s, it’s such an important distinction which I think more owners particularly are recognizing now because it just, it’s got to a stage now where it sucks so much. People are like, I don’t want to do this anymore. And they’re like keeping on, keeping on and just working that bit harder and having that bit less sleep and you know, your Hair going greyer that bit sooner. Just a lot of people are saying, nah, no, I’m not doing it and more power to them. 

Drew McLellan [00:35:47]: 

Yeah, it’s interesting. We’re seeing sort of a polarization amongst agency owners. So you’ve got group A who is behaving a little like right when we came out of COVID like I’m exhausted, I don’t know where to take the business next. I’m fill in the blank, whatever my age and it could be anything from 30 to 70 and I don’t know, I don’t know that I have enough gas in the tank to do what is going to take to transform my business. Then on the other side we see the people who are like, oh my God, I get to reinvent the whole thing. And this is exciting and I’m looking at every aspect of the business through fresh eyes and saying, is this how it should still be? So I’m curious if you’re seeing that dichotomy of agency owner as well. 

Robin Bonn [00:36:37]: 

Yeah, it’s an interesting one because I think I’m, I’m a good person to ask that and I’m also a terrible person to ask that question because obviously, you know, given what we do, I talk to a lot of agency leaders, you know, in all sorts of disciplines, all sorts of geographies, all sorts of, you know, holding company owned, you know, private equity backed agencies, you know, independent small agencies, but large independents, whatever. But we do tend, those conversations do tend to skew towards the more optimistic, the more kind of ready to change because inevitably that’s why they’re talking to us. So I think when you go and talk to people that run, you know, like the networks of independent agencies, for example, where, you know, they’re there almost as a safe, safe harbor if you like, and it’s a safe place where they can go and say, oh, wow, it’s hard out there. I think anecdotally there are more people. It feels like more people now are kind of, their resilience is worn a bit low and you know, it doesn’t feel like a wow, that was tough, let’s get back to it, let’s recharge and go again. I think there is more of a sense that wow, this really isn’t getting any better. And honestly I don’t think it’s going to get any better for those businesses unless they really embrace change. Because we are like it or not. And I have to say this is one of the frustrating things I see at conferences. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but you go to a conference and there’ll be some panel or something and at the end of the panel someone will say, and we managed to do the whole panel without mentioning AI. And it’s like, what do you want, a medal? This isn’t going to go away. And if people are bored by talking about it, then fine, be bored. But it doesn’t mean it’s not a thing. So as I say, I think it. 

Drew McLellan [00:38:14]: 

Doesn’T mean we’re not at the beginning of the thing, like, right, we have to be talking about it. It’s going to change everything. 

Robin Bonn [00:38:21]: 

Exactly, exactly. And I think with great disruption brings great opportunity, as we talked about earlier in the conversation. So, you know, if you, you’ve got to go where the puck is headed in a moment like this. We’re at an inflection point. You’ve got to take a position. I’m not saying that if you sort of wait and sort of, you know, place your chips on the sort of second mover advantage that you’re going to fail. I don’t know that I don’t have a crystal ball, but you can certainly see that dynamic playing out at holding company level. You know, there’s a lot of, I think overly done doom and gloom written around WPP and I’ll be right or I’ll be wrong. I don’t know. I also don’t think Publicis is so far ahead that everyone else is in their dust because the reality behind closed doors will be very different. The delta between the winners and the losers is probably less obvious than it’s easy to argue. But either way, I think it seems crazy to me to argue anything other than AI will bring cataclysmic change, if only to the agency business model. Let’s imagine we’ve got it completely overstated in terms of what will happen in the personalization of the customer journey or search behavior. Are those things already changing? Well, let’s say we’ve got that wrong. It seems unfathomable to me that we are going to not lose at least a significant chunk of time and materials related revenue from the agency income. And if you’re not ready for that, then you’re going to have a problem. So you don’t really have an option, I suppose. And as I say, that doesn’t mean plow on regardless. It means have a good long look at are you enjoying it? Are you happy? Are your relationships around you solid? You know, this industry doesn’t need another, you know, sort of to be responsible for another Million divorces and another set of kids that don’t see their mums and dads. That sucks. That’s not, you know, this should be joyful. We get to, you know, I had Michael Lebowitz from Spaceship on, who’ve just been bought by MSQ in the uk, one of our clients, and we had him on our podcast recently, and he just talked so passionately and so persuasively about just the joy of getting to use your imagination to make a living. 

Drew McLellan [00:40:26]: 

Right? 

Robin Bonn [00:40:26]: 

This part of my French, like, this shit is supposed to be fun. And if it isn’t, either make it fun or find something fun. And that’s where I get quite hard line about personal responsibility. So, you know, we can talk about making payroll, we can talk about the pressures of running a business, and they are very real. But ultimately, there’s, I think, a doctrine of, you know, physician, heal thyself. Here. It has to be, because no one’s going to fix it for you. 

Drew McLellan [00:40:50]: 

So someone’s listening and they’re like, yes, I recognize the business is changing. I recognize that we have not drilled as deeply into differentiation. We are still mostly charging whether. Whether we say it’s time and materials. That’s how we begin the conversation internally before we present the price to a client externally. And they’re like, I. I acknowledge I need to change, but I’m not sure how. What would you prescribe for them? 

Robin Bonn [00:41:24]: 

Well, it’s very easy for this to turn into a kind of unfettered sales pitch for what we do. People will be able to seek us out if they would like our point of view on this. But I think to try and zoom out and give a, you know, a more nuanced answer to that, I think you have to think long and hard about where you’re trying to get to. And I think, again, this is one of those things that’s really underexpressed in agency businesses. We’ve talked about this sort of absence of strategy. We’ve talked about being the best as being some kind of destination. Whether you call it destination or vision or endpoint, some kind of future state that you want. I think a lot of the time that’s wrapped up in numbers. We want to double in size. We want to triple our headcount. We want to open in New York, we want to open in Brazil, whatever it’s going to be. And a lot of it is, it’s quite aspirational. It’s quite arbitrary. You want to double in size. Why don’t you want to 2.5 times your business, we want a 10x business. All of this quite tiring, masculine energy stuff, and there’s nothing wrong with it. There’s nothing wrong with money, there’s nothing wrong with capitalism in that sense. There’s nothing wrong with aspiring to grow. But I think coming out of COVID and I think probably now at the inflection point we’re at, I think taking a more nuanced view about, you know, what it is that you’re trying to get to. Not least, you know, the sort of being the biggest or the best or the leading or to be really known for great work. It’s very difficult to pin those things down. How will you know when to pop the champagne corks and say, yeah, we nailed it? I think just getting clear on what the commercial and the emotional success criteria for that business are, then you’ve got a destination. And once you’ve got a destination, then you can create a strategy to get there. Just a route, you know, call it. We can aggrandize it all we like. But you’re just talking about how you’re going to get from where you are to where you want to be. If you don’t know where you want to be, you’re just going to keep flailing around trying to, you know, win, work for money. And so I would say figure out where you’re going. That’s a great starting point. 

Drew McLellan [00:43:14]: 

Yeah. Is it an interesting and big question for sure, for, I think, agency owners. I know one of the tenets of the book is really around the idea of leaning into strategy more. And so talk a little bit about. There’s no doubt AI is changing the deliverables of agencies, for sure, but one of the places that, where I think we still do have a differentiation that we can lean into is our ability to sort of use our imagination, use innovation, think strategically, connect dots in a way that they’ve never been connected before. So how do you see agencies thinking about strategy, right or wrong, in terms of their positioning and deliverables? 

Robin Bonn [00:44:02]: 

So I think it’s a really interesting question. And as we’ve kind of talked already, you don’t have to look very far before someone will say, oh, well, you know, our age, for us, you know, creativity is our superpower and, you know, it’s our special source or it’s what makes us really unique. And I think what I find most painful is that those same agencies will then, you know, be on podiums talking about the industry as a whole, saying our creativity is our industry’s secret source and our superpower it can’t be everybody’s differentiator. That literally is a. Is a contradiction in terms. So I think I would. I would urge just a little bit of perspective and a bit of pragmatism. So what I mean by that is, like, from a perspective point of view, you go to a surgeon, you know, a spinal surgeon, let’s say they are very good at fixing whatever problem it is with your fourth lumbar vertebrae, that that’s their particular part of the spine that they, you know, that they specialize in. But also in amongst doing that and creating that outcome for you, a healthy spine, they’re also really, really good at keeping you alive while you’re on the operating table. And I would say that’s kind of the role of creativity in our industry in the broadest sense. It’s kind of a given. It’s really, really important. There’s no point fixing a spine if you’re not good at that adjacent skill. But for an agency to say that that’s what they do, I am a surgeon and I keep people alive when I operate on them, that’s a terrible value proposition. It really comes with a territory. I think we’ve got to get away from this very sort of preaching to the choir, insular view, reinventing the wheel, claiming the same stuff. I think that’s so important to get past that. Once we get past that, when we start talking about the what’s the killer application of our creativity or our data science or our ability to join dots and be innovative, what kind of dots do we like to join? What kind of outcomes are we most proficient at creating? Where do we get paid most? Where do we get most joy and satisfaction? Where are the greatest learning opportunities for us as a business? And I think that’s where, again, language gets in the way for me. And again, a lot of people will disagree with this. And I’m not trying to say this is the one true faith and you’re all wrong, but in our business, we find this distinction helpful. For me, your positioning is really just the kind of business that you’re in. So I’m an advertising agency, I’m a podcast host, I’m a doctor, I’m a lawyer, I’m an artist, I’m a librarian. We get what that means. But I think once you take away the sort of ballpark from the proposition, it frees you up to talk about the outcome that you deliver for that audience. And I think that distinction helps get a little bit more clarity into those proposition statements. You know, I’m a Earlier, like a spinal surgeon. I’m a spinal surgeon. Great positioning. I don’t need to reinvent the wheel or find new words to describe what spinal surgeons do. Spinal surgeon. But, you know, what we’re really good at is helping, I don’t know, elite level athletes get back to global competition. Okay, great. There’s an audience that we can super serve. There’s an outcome that that audience wants and we haven’t kind of, you know, got all mixed up with trying to say nice things about what surgeons do and don’t do because everyone knows that already. So I know it’s yet another long, ranty answer to what was a very good question, but I think when we think about strategy and there’s more to it in the way that we do it, but that’s a really good starting point. You’ve got that destination by virtue of the vision and they start thinking about positioning and proposition in a. That helped you get to that outcome, then I think that’s a really great place to start. 

Drew McLellan [00:47:28]: 

Yeah. A long answer to a very complicated question, though. I mean, I think it. I think that’s the problem. Right. If we give the short answer, that’s how agency positioning all sounds the same. We’re a full service integrated marketing agency and our people are better than everyone else’s people. 

Robin Bonn [00:47:43]: 

Right? Right. Yeah, you’re so right. You’re so right. 

Drew McLellan [00:47:46]: 

This has been really a great conversation and the book is fantastic. If people want to learn more about your work, if they want to get a copy of the book, if they want to follow you and your thought, thought leadership on the interwebs, what are the best ways for folks to track you down? 

Robin Bonn [00:48:01]: 

Well, I think we. I think I’ve got a book. I might have mentioned the book once or twice. 

Drew McLellan [00:48:05]: 

I think you have. I do think you have a book. 

Robin Bonn [00:48:06]: 

Yes. That’s good. So, yes, the book market of 1. How to. You can tell I’m tired. I can’t remember the name of their own book. How your agency can rewrite the rules and create a lasting competitive advantage is its full, pithy title that’s available on Amazon and obviously all good bookshops and probably some rope ones as well. So that’s that. Another good way of staying in touch is our podcast where it’s called the immortal life of agencies. That is where we interview, you know, the biggest and brightest minds in the industry to talk about stuff they’re optimistic about. So hopefully a good counterpoint to some of the, you know, the big grind stuff that we’ve. We’ve talked about today. By all means, connect with me on LinkedIn. Robin Bonn. That’s an easy one. And yeah, you should be able to find our website, which is code refinery.com so that’s probably enough links for one. 

Drew McLellan [00:48:52]: 

We’ll include all of those links. Links in the show notes. Robin, this has been a great conversation. Thanks for, thanks for coming on the show. And the book is fantastic. It is thought provoking. It is a kick in the ass and optimistic at the same time, which is an interesting combination. I think it will give a lot of agency owners homework and some hope, which is a lovely combination, I think. So. Thanks for being on the show. 

Robin Bonn [00:49:18]: 

That’s wonderful. Thank you. I love homework and hope. I wish I’d got you to. You should have written the back blurb on the back of the book. That’s wonderful. Thank you. 

Drew McLellan [00:49:24]: 

For your next book, I would be happy to do that. 

Robin Bonn [00:49:27]: 

You’re a superstar. I thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure to be on the show. And it’s, it’s been, yeah, I hope I haven’t ranted too much, but this, this stuff matters to me, you know, and, and hopefully that’s come across. But yeah, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you. 

Drew McLellan [00:49:38]: 

You bet. All right, guys. Lots of homework out of this episode, which, you know, is one of my favorite things. So if nothing else, just starting to look in the mirror and seeing how you talk about yourself and is it, is it meaningful and is it rich and is it, you know, the conversation you and I are always having is, is that really how you differentiate yourself? And as Robin said, if I can swap another agency’s logo for your tagline or your positioning, then guess what, you have work to do. And the book would be a great start to doing that work. But we are at an opportunity moment where you get to reinvent yourself. You get to really think about how you show up for your clients, what kind of people you want to have on the team and the kind of work that you want to do. And so I think it’s exciting and it’s a chance for you to refresh at the very least and reinvent on the other side of that equation who and how you are and the value proposition that you put into the marketplace. And for a lot of you, this is going to be a very rich environment if you are willing to take the risks and take the time to think about how you want to do this. And I think how you want to do it matters. It’s not just about what you can do, but it’s really about what you want to do and what, you know, what, what fills you up with joy and feels meaningful to you and to your team. So lots of, lots of good fodder for discussion, for thought, for you as the owner, for you and your leadership team. This is, this is great, you know, over a single malt scotch, discussion time. And I think, I think you should make the time for it. So before I let you go, you know, I want to thank our friends at White Label iq. They’re the presenting sponsor of the podcast. Super grateful for them. They come alongside agencies and they’re an extra set of hands and some really deep thinkers around web dev design and ppc. And whether you just need some extra help temporarily or you want to outsource all of that to somebody who really understands the agency space, they’re good partners. So head over to whitelabeliq.com ami and as I have told you before, they have some free hours there for you if you are a new client and a podcast listener. So if nothing else, go over there and in the contact Us section, send them a note and tell them you like the podcast and you’re grateful for their sponsorship. So let’s, let’s shower them with a little gratitude and love so that they know that it is worthwhile for them to continue to make sure we can bring you the show. So I will be back next week with another guest like Robin who’s going to get you thinking a little differently about the business. I hope you will be back as well. We’ll talk then. Thanks for listening. 

Drew McLellan [00:52:17]: 

That’s all for this episode of AMI’s Build a Better Agency podcast. Be sure to visit agencymanagementinstitute.com to learn more about our workshops, online courses and other ways we serve small to mid sized agencies. Don’t forget to subscribe today so you don’t miss an episode.