Weaving creative innovation into agency best practices with Carla Johnson

Speaker 1:

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

Drew McLellan:

Hey, everybody. Drew McClellan here with another episode of Build a Better Agency. Welcome back if you are a regular listener and welcome if this is one of your first podcasts. This week’s episode and topic is really a critical one. In fact, it is part of the core DNA of being an agency is our ability to innovate. And so I am super excited to have our guest, Carla Johnson on the show. Carla was on the show back in 2022 or late 2021, and we taught a workshop. Carla wrote a book called Rethink Innovation, and she studied really how do people generate a volume of really valuable ideas on demand, because at the end of the day, that’s actually what we do for a living. We ideate for a living, we help clients solve problems for a living. And what Carla observed is that over time we, as human beings, lose our ability or it gets dulled over time for just to be a big idea generator.

And so she actually did quite a bit of research to figure out, “Is there a framework or methodology that we could follow that would reinvigorate our ability to innovate and create?” And so sure enough, there is, and she wrote a whole book about it called Rethink Innovation. And in February of 2022, she taught a two-day work for our workshop for us down in Orlando that was out of the park. Awesome. So we’re bringing it back. We will be in Denver, July 11th and 12th, and Carla is going to teach that workshop again. So we’re going to talk today a little bit about the methodology, the framework, what are the steps, but also some of the ways agencies who attended that workshop the first time have applied what they’ve learned.

Carla is brilliant, she’s a great storyteller, but she’s also a prolific idea generator. And so I think all of us can agree that one of the things we have to bring to the party today is we have to be that outside observer with that inside knowledge that helps our clients see their world, their clients, their prospects, their products, their services in a fresh light. And that is really hard for them to do that. As we say here at AMI, it’s really hard to describe the label of a bottle when you’re inside the bottle. And so we are the outside observer and we have to be able to do that. And in most agencies, one or two of you are good at it and you are the bottleneck for idea generation because no one else in your shop knows how to do it and you don’t know how to articulate how you just naturally and natively do it.

That’s the beautiful thing about Carla and her book and the workshop is she makes it very simple for anyone and everyone to create a host, a big long list of viable ideas that are great fodder for your team to play with and explore as you try and solve problems for your clients. So super excited to bring her back on the podcast, super excited to offer the workshop again, and hopefully we’ll see a lot of you in Denver on July 11th and 12th. But in the meantime, let’s get to the conversation. Carla, welcome back. It’s good to have you back on the show.

Carla Johnson:

Drew, it’s great to be back here. I appreciate a return conversation.

Drew McLellan:

Well, it’s not just a return conversation, as I was saying in the intro, because the workshop that we did together, but two February ago, got such rave reviews that we knew we needed to do it again. And now I think we have a lot to talk about in terms of how some of the agencies have applied what they learned in that workshop. But before we do that, let’s go back for the audience and refresh their memory about the book and the work you did to get the book done. And then I want to talk a little bit about what we’ve seen since we last had you on the show and we last had the workshop.

Carla Johnson:

That would be great. And you and I have gone through this because I know you hear this a lot, is the whole spark that started me down the research path for this book is I was at an event and I was talking about a process from a previous book I wrote called Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing with Robert Rose, who I know you know. And it’s about how to create story driven experiences. And somebody came up to me after that speech and they said, “I love the framework, but what I still struggle with is ideas for to create the creative content that we’ll put into this framework.” And it just struck me because I, in my life, have never ever struggled for an idea. And in fact that’s probably one of my greatest struggles is having too many ideas and trying to execute on just a thimble full of them.

And I was talking to Andrew Davis who spoke at the summit last year, and he said, “It’s really not that hard. All you have to do is A, B, C.” And he said, “That right there is it. If you can figure that out and unpack what you just did like that in your head, that’s what people don’t understand.” So with his encouragement, I sat down that path to really look at where do people get inspiration for their ideas and then is that a process that can be codified and shared and learned and scaled, and the answer is, yes, which is what came out as my book Rethink Innovation. And it really is about where do people get inspiration from their ideas over consistently that turn into great outcomes and sustain that ability over a long period of time. And it breaks down into a five step process that anybody can learn and do.

Drew McLellan:

And when I say we, I’m in the back of the room heckling. And what is taught in the workshop is this framework. And when we did the workshop a couple years ago-

Carla Johnson:

I think it was February of 2022.

Drew McLellan:

I think so. I think that’s right.

Carla Johnson:

Yep.

Drew McLellan:

Yep. We had a lot of agencies grab what they learned and do some amazing things with it. And I think it’s important, and we’ll dig into this in a little more detail, but I think, as agency folks, we always think big idea is a big creative idea. And I think we have some examples of how agencies have done it, used it in some different ways. But the truth of the matter is our clients hire us for our outside perspective and big ideas, that’s what they want from us. It’s we’re finding more and more that on the execution side, if all they need is execution, they can do it a lot cheaper than hiring a great smart strategic agency. They can hire a bunch of freelancers or do it themselves or whatever, but what they really want is they want that outside perspective, that fresh perspective, and the ideas that are generated from that.

And I think in many agencies there’s a person or two who just natively is like, you’re like the microwave popcorn of ideas. You just pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. But I think for a lot of people, they get really stuck. They get stuck in their own head, they get stuck in their own doubt, and they don’t know how to unpack it in a way that they can replicate and, more important, that they can teach their entire team how to do. And I think that’s really the beauty of the book in the workshop is that you help them with a methodology that anyone can follow and use to the agency’s advantage.

Carla Johnson:

And I think one of the things about creativity and innovation that we hear over and over again is Steve Jobs talking about, you can connect the dots in hindsight, but when you’re right there in front of them, you can’t always do that. And I don’t necessarily agree with that 100%. I definitely agree that when you look back, it’s easy to see how the dots connected. But I think we have a greater ability to connect the dots going forward than we realize. And I think that that was a beautiful learning from this process is to see that it is something that we can actively be a part of. And I don’t want to say the word control because I think part of just allowing the dots to connect in organic or inorganic ways or whatever is part of the beauty that leads to the fluency and the volume of ideas that people end up with.

But I think I wanted to take the curtain away from the man behind the curtain like in The Wizard of Oz about what it means to connect the dots. Because we hear that and you say, “Yeah. Okay. We’ll just connect the dots.” And when you were a kid and had the book and the dots were all laid out and all you had to do was go from A, B, C, D, E or one to a hundred to make the shape of the clown or whatever, it was easy. But as adults there, it is a learnable process to learn how to connect those dots.

Drew McLellan:

I think one of the problems in a lot of agencies is they have one or two people who just natively know how to do it and they become the bottleneck in the agency and all the ideas have to come from them. And so, A, just in terms of volume and focus, that’s really challenging. But, B, what it means is everybody else is an order taker and that’s just not a healthy place for us to be as agencies today.

Carla Johnson:

I think it’s also really boring for the employees, to be honest, to just sit and to be passive, that kind of passive about the creativity that you put into your work. And I think everybody is born as idea people. If you go back to your childhood, there was always something that we were make believing or creating in our imaginary world. And just through the process of education and work and reward systems, it’s kind of taught and rewarded out of us. But I think as you and I go back through this process a little bit and then talk how we’ve seen agencies apply it from both the workshop from February of last year and then the summit and some other people that I’ve had feedback from in other speaking engagements, I think that it’s easier to see that this is something that really does happen naturally and it doesn’t take a huge investment of time. I think that’s always a concern for agency folks is how much time is this going to take because I ain’t got any.

Drew McLellan:

Right. That’s right. Or I got to make it billable or I have to-

Carla Johnson:

Yeah. Exactly.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Right. So let’s talk about some examples. So let’s talk about Kurt first. So Kurt was one of the folks who attended the workshop, and I know all these folks have stayed in touch with you and reported back on their successes. So tell us a little bit about his story.

Carla Johnson:

So Kurt was working with a client and he said it was one that they had started to build a relationship and more of the work that they were doing for this client, you would say is tactical. And I think one of Kurt’s superpowers is he’s a very strategic thoughtful thinker, but understanding that it was part of building that relationship over time. And so it’s one of those wonderful days when you get that call from the client who said, “We’re going to do some rebranding work, and I was wondering if you could help start us down that path with the strategy session and how we look at it.” And so he took the process from Rethink Innovation, the five step process, and he and his team used it in a half-day workshop with his client. And he said it was such a wonderful experience because it wasn’t just a matter of putting some Post-it notes up on the wall and reorganizing them.

And then he and his team going back to the office and having a couple of days to rehash, retalk, rework through all of this, they were able to take the five step process and complete all of the work that needed to be done, share it, which we would normally say, pitch it with a client there in that strategy session and get the okay to move forward. Now you think about all of that in total, including the number of… We’re always talking about billable hours, right?

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Carla Johnson:

And if you can encompass everything in a half-day strategy session and then get the client to give it the thumbs up right there and not have to go back to the office and do things and that gap between what you work through with a client until you re-present to them and ask them for a yes, a lot can happen in that gap these days. So if you can go through the work and get the approval in the room right there, that’s really golden.

Drew McLellan:

Well, and I think always when we can co-create with a client, they’re much more likely to the like idea when they’re part of the process and they-

Carla Johnson:

Absolutely.

Drew McLellan:

… didn’t see the step by step of how we got to the finish line we got to. Then, of course, they’re bought into the idea because they were part of its creation.

Carla Johnson:

And I think they’re part of that little bit of magic. They understand that secret secret process and they associate that great feeling and experience emotionally with your agency. And so when you call, you show up, you email, they have that little bit of a positive emotional halo effect with you. And I think it’s also the trust factor. They understand how you got to that and just like you said, they were a part of that. And anytime you can educate your client on how things are done, I think they respect it more, they appreciate it more.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely. Yep.

Carla Johnson:

You become better buyers of it.

Drew McLellan:

And I think too, the beauty of it is in all of these examples, the agency owner was the one who attended the workshop and then they were able to take it back and weave it through the organization. So Erik Martinez from Blue Tangerine, he was rabid about the process when he left the workshop, and I know he was super fired up to take it back and teach his team. And they’ve spent a year just weaving it into every part of the work they do and every kind of idea they generate. So it’s not just new business pitches and it’s not just going back to existing clients, but it’s also internal challenges and opportunities for them.

Carla Johnson:

I’ve talked to him numerous times since that first workshop and sat down with him and a couple of people have on his team when he was here in Denver actually for an AAMI training as well, and talking about how that works and works really infuses throughout the agency. And I think one area that we don’t always think of where we need ideas is the operations side of business. We just get caught up in, “This is how we do the thing,” and the ideas are for the client side or for the creative side. And I think he and his team have done such a great job of rethinking how they approach a lot of these things and it’s efficiency, but it’s also that experience that you deliver to your client across the entire relationship. And I think what he’s done and how he’s done that at Blue Tangerine has really been amazing with the results that they’ve seen. Yeah.

Drew McLellan:

Well, and I think for agencies today, there’s a lot of operational and systemized processing things that we are reinventing post-COVID. So we may have done something a certain way for the first 20 years of our agency when we were in a brick and mortar space and all the employees were under one roof. And today, our world has been turned upside down. So even if you’re a seasoned agency, you are reinventing. And if you’re growing, we know that there are certain sizes, 12 to 15 people, 25 to 30 people, 50 or so people, 75 people. And in every one of those growth moments, the weight of the growth crushes the systems and processes that got you to that growth. And so if you can’t innovate new processes and systems that really serve you at your new size, then your growth gets stunted. So the need to be able to do that efficiently and effectively is really critical more today, I think, than ever before for agencies.

Carla Johnson:

And I think one of the things that can help take some of that weight off of there is that you don’t have to create everything from scratch yourself. I mean, of course, you have the AMI community and everything that you learned there, but what about if you started to observe in your own world, what’s an operation of process that you experience, as a customer, that you love? And what is it about that you can take as inspiration back to your agency? And I think that’s often a disconnect is that when we think about those creative ideas, that’s not where we start to think about being creative because maybe part of the answer is you don’t need that process at all, maybe, you need to reinvent the thing. And that process that takes an hour, 10 hours a month doesn’t need to be there at all.

Drew McLellan:

When I think one of the things that I remember was an aha moment for me when I read the book and then when you taught the workshop was we’re under so much pressure to magically produce these ideas that we skip things like gathering bits and pieces of information that feels disparate and may not feel related at all. But when we ask ourselves the right questions, we do go into the ice cream shop and go, “Wow, that was really efficient,” or, “Wow, that made me really feel like I’m a valued customer,” or whatever the thing is. But we rush to the idea generation stage because we’re under so much pressure and if we took a little bit of time to gather the data and to gather inspiration the way you talk about and teach, now we have a bounty of moments and facts and feelings that we can then use as the raw materials for these ideas. And I think a lot of times we just skip that step.

Carla Johnson:

Absolutely. And I’m going to just refresh everybody on the five step process, and then I want to share a really fun example that I came across about a month ago. The five steps of the process, I call it the wheel of innovation because like a wheel, you continue to go around and around and around, it’s not something you do when you’re done. The first step is to observe, observe the world around you. So you just talked about being in the ice cream shop, we think that innovation takes a lot of heavy lifting upfront. And really if we just put our phones down and pay more attention to where we are in any moment, a little bit more presence and mindfulness, it’s really interesting how much we can start to take in and notice. And if we think about innovation and creative thinking being all about connecting the dots, then the observe step is all about collecting those dots.

And when you get down around the circle here a little bit, when we eventually get to that generate step, the more dots you’ve collected for the observe step, the more rich and vibrant and relevant those ideas are going to be when you generate. So that’s the first step is to become more observant to the world around you. And then the next one is to distill what you have observed into patterns. And there’s no rhyme or reason what those patterns are. They can be tall things, short things, it can be about people. In the book, I take the example of having gone to the coffee shop near my house in Denver, and one of my patterns that I distilled my observations into we’re just icky things. It was poopy smelling diaper, a guy chewing his fingernails, trash on the floor, things like that. And the fun thing that I learned along the process is that the first two steps observe and distill into patterns from a neuroscience perspective are things we are genetically wired to do.

Like we are all here today because our ancestors observed the world around them and then distilled those into patterns, patterns of safety or danger or patterns of things like it’s seasonal, it’s warm, it’s cold, and they adjusted their behavior accordingly. So once you give your brain a little space to start some of this observation, it takes off because it’s like, “I know how to do this. This is how I’m wired.” And it will auto automatically go from those observations into those patterns. And now the third step is relate. And it’s really the bridge between the theoretical of observing and distilling and relating it into the actual work that you’re going to be doing. And the relate step is really what gives context to what you’ve experienced for what you need to accomplish as an agency. And when this step either isn’t done or isn’t done well, it becomes really, really obvious because I see a lot of copy and paste examples of creativity or innovation where they literally took something that they saw somebody else do, maybe change the color of the fonts, the whatever, and put their logo on it.

That’s not innovative or creative. And oftentimes it’s not even contextual. So I know some of these were joke examples that I used in the work workshop last year, but they’re humorous improved the point, like Oscar Mayer created a face mask that you can lay on your face that’s a sheet of bologna or looks like a sheet of bologna. Now you think about having a face mask on that smells like bologna, it’s disgusting, it wasn’t related. Whatever it is about beauty and relaxation was not well-related into that idea of the bologna scented face mask. Velveeta cheese made a cheese scented nail polish. These are things that are just disgusting.

Drew McLellan:

Gross. Right.

Carla Johnson:

So those are some things that are over the top that don’t relate. But if you think about it, when you ask a friend, “Oh, did you go see such and such a movie? What did you think?” And your friend says, “Oh, did you ever see Star Wars?” It’s the same thing, just different. That’s because they copied, they didn’t relate the right things into the brand. And then it’s those three steps before we ever get to the idea generation step. And that step four is to generate, but what we tend to do when we get in a pension and need an ideas agencies is that we say, :Let’s have a brainstorm session, a strategy session,” or, “Let’s rally everybody and get together and give me all of your ideas.” And remember, there’s no such thing as a bad idea. And we know most of them are awful ideas. And you’re under pressure, you’re under budget, you’ve got too many things on your plate, your mind is not in a place to be creative. It’s like-

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. And you don’t have a lot of resource around you because you haven’t done the first three things.

Carla Johnson:

Exactly. And that’s the beauty of it, is that when you need an idea, you don’t have to stop and say, “Let’s do these first three things first.” If you actually go about your day every single day, just being a little bit more observant and maybe jotting some of these things down. I think in the olden days, we would call those swipe files, right?

Drew McLellan:

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Carla Johnson:

Let’s tear the ideas. I still have swipe files both digital and analog, and I have a ton of notebooks where I take with me. And if I know I’m just going to sit someplace, I’ll just start writing down everything that I observe because then when I get into that under pressure, deadline driven, I have to have ideas. Now I go back to that and it fuels that mind space, that head space, that takes me to the patterns. And then I can start, “I have a lot of patterns that I’ve distilled that I can start to see. Do these relate to my current situation? Do they relate? Do they relate? Do they relate?” And then that really fuels that idea generation process. So when I did the research, it said, you don’t really get to creative ideas until you’ve gone through the first 200 ideas. But typically what happens when you’re under deadline, “Okay. We’ve got five, six, seven, pick your top one and let’s run with it.”

Well, when you go through this process, it also builds fluency. So I’m not saying you’re going to sit down and get to 200 ideas every time, but what if you got to 20 or 30 in the same amount of time that you got to five or six before? With whatever your challenge is. And then the fifth step is pitch. And the beauty about the process is that by the time you get to the pitch step, you’ve already done the work to get there because the pitch is the story of the journey of your idea. What did you observe, what patterns, how does that relate into what you’re doing, how did that inspire your idea? Now, here it is, and here’s the outcomes that we expect to see because of it.

And I was doing some reading about a month ago, and I came across a story about Jeff Hoffman, who’s just a serial and successful entrepreneur. And he happened to be at the grocery store one day, and he saw these two displays, and one was the bananas that were the green tipped and the yellow ones that you would buy and eat immediately. And then there’s the brown bananas next to it, the ones that just get more and more brown. And people say, “I’ll buy them to make banana bread and then never make banana bread kind of bananas.” And he said, “No. It’s so interesting because these are priced so much lower than the other bananas because they’re trying to get rid of them.”

And just by that simple observation of looking at the bananas, really noticing that they have a quick expiration date on them and seeing that pattern of a pricing model, he said, “How does this relate into my world as an entrepreneur?” Because he was looking for a new idea, something he could pursue. And he said, “What I’ve observed about the bananas and the pattern I’ve distilled about pricing models, what other industries could this apply to? What other industry has something that may expire soon, that part of it, they would sell at a reduced rate, but it’s not like they’re going to put everything they sell on sale.” They don’t put all bananas on sale. And that led him to the travel industry. And it turned out when he did some research that 10% to 15% of all seats on an airplane are never sold.

That was the spark for his idea. He approached Delta Airlines and said, “If I created a website where you could sell airline seats at a discount, as it got closer and closer to the date and time of that flight, would you be willing to sum me some of those flights at a discount and describe the model?” And they said, “Absolutely.” Well, that led to Priceline, which is now a company valued at 99 billion dollars, simply-

Drew McLellan:

It’s crazy.

Carla Johnson:

… from observing a brown banana. It’s absolutely crazy. And so, I mean, this is a fantastical example of what turned out, but it’s just an example of how you don’t have to stop what you’re doing at the agency every day or every time you need an idea and say, “Oh, now we have to go through this process.” It really is something that you can integrate in your day-to-day experience and that fuels you so that when you need those ideas, when you have to generate them, you’re already ramped up and ready to go.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Love it. All right. I want to take a quick break, and then I’m going to come back and talk about a couple more agency examples and then talk about some of the ways folks are using this on both the creative side and the non-creative side. So let’s take a quick break and then we’ll come back and we’ll chat about some more examples that came out of the last workshop.

Hey there, just a quick interruption. I want to make sure that you are aware that you are cordially invited, not just invited, but cordially invited to join our Facebook group, our private Facebook group. All you have to do is go to Facebook and search for Build a Better Agency, and you’ll find the Facebook group. You have to answer three quick questions, you have to put in the agency URL, you have to talk about what you want to learn from the group, and you have to promise to behave yourself.

And that’s it. And then we’ll let you in, and you can jump into the conversation with over a thousand other agency owners and leaders. And there’s a robust conversation happening every day. People are sharing resources and best practices and discussing everything from work from home policies, to maternity and paternity policies, to buis dev strategies. So come join us and jump into the conversation. All right. Speaking of conversations, let’s head back.

All right, we are back with my friend, Carla Johnson, and we are talking about Rethink Innovation, the book, the methodology, the framework, and the workshop that, as I told you on the front end of the podcast is coming up July 11th and 12th here in Denver. Okay. So we talked about Kurt, we talked about Eric. Let’s talk a little bit about Lori Jones at Avocet.

Carla Johnson:

Lori Jones, she’s in my backyard. So that was one of the fun things that we connected when we did the workshop and then at the summit last year. I’ve stayed in contact with her this last year plus because one of the things that she did after the workshop is she took the process back to her agency and taught it to them. And one of the things that they agreed to do, as an agency, is to set a Wednesday afternoon aside once a month and focus on innovation and focus on this process to fuel their understanding of it, their skill level and the need for it. And she said it was interesting in the dynamics across the agency, I think anybody. You introduce something new, there can be a little resistance to change and do we need to do this and all of this. And she said-

Drew McLellan:

Well, and I think a lot of agency owners, it’s the book or the process of the month. And so the employers are like, “Yeah. Let’s see if this sticks or not.” Right?

Carla Johnson:

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And it’s been fascinating to hear from her how everybody in our agency really came on board, even some that may have been skeptical. And this is something that they absolutely look forward to every month is this four hours set aside to really focus on this, to spend time observing something, was it a client, was it a movie, was it another brand? I don’t think she really has a lot of requirements for what you observe, but really understanding and talking through, as a team, what were the patterns that you see now? How do those start to relate into our world and the world that we use? And when you do that, and especially as you look at all of the different areas of interest of the employees at an agency, maybe somebody’s passion is about frogs and somebody’s is about styrofoam, animals, and somebody’s is about biking, and you bring all these diverse observations together and agency people start to play off each other.

You don’t have to be that official creative team, you’re just human. And that’s how your brain works. And I’ve asked her specifically, “Do you see both the difference in the quality of the creativity that you bring to your clients?” And she said, “Absolutely.” Like what they’re bringing forward, and also, again, the fluency and the volume, but also internally in how they function as an agency, they can also really see it there. And I think one thing to her credit is continuing to do it. It’s not something you do and then it’s done. It’s a way that she and everybody at Avocet really approaches how they do the work.

And I think that’s been one of the most fun things coming out of the workshop from last year, is to see that when people continue to practice it, because it is a practice, it’s not a thing that you do, you continue to see the benefits. And I think especially just the dynamics between what the agency world was year by year, over the last five years, it’s changing constantly. And it’s not just that your clients are coming to you saying, “We need more ideas,” but you need more ideas yourself, as an agency, to help your operations, your own structure, your employee engagement, your leadership, whatever it is.

Drew McLellan:

Well, what I love about how Lori approached it and, I mean, this is one of the reasons why she’s such a smart agency owner, but she understood the exponential power of them all sharing the observations they collected and the patterns they saw. So rather than me only working with what I personally observed and categorized into the patterns, now I’m working with the entire team’s collection of data points and observations and the patterns. So, again, there’s just a more robust ingredient list when we all have to think and be innovative, and that’s the power of an agency versus a freelancer or somebody else. It’s that exponential thinking that we can bring when we think together and when we, as you say, bounce ideas off of each other and play off each other’s idea and build on them. And by having all those extra building blocks for everyone to play with, you got to know their ideas are better.

Carla Johnson:

Absolutely. And I didn’t think… To share this example with you before, but there was an agency who heard me when you and I first talked about the book on the AMI Podcast who reached out and I did a workshop for their top 25 people like leadership team and next year below about the process. And they said one of the things that they have seen over this last year, it was last July, so since last July, is that everybody in the organization knows how to be more observant, even working with the clients that they have. And you and I talked about this a minute ago about, that’s one of the greatest opportunities for agencies is how do you build more and deeper business with your existing clients because we know that’s more cost-effective than trying to go out and find new.

And so with everybody understanding this process, there’s more people on an account who have those eyes out looking for those opportunities than they had in the past. And I think that’s also a very interesting dynamic because they’re observing these things, they’re looking at these things, they’re looking at what’s going on internally in some of these conversations, and they’re connecting the dots in higher volume and in more ways that I think give help opportunities rise up that we may not have recognized when things were super flush.

Drew McLellan:

Well, and you and I were talking before we hit the record button, 2023 has been a bumpy tough year for agencies in terms of new business. The sales cycle is elongated. Clients and prospects are putting agencies through more hoops before they get an answer. I mean, people are sitting, waiting two and three months to find out if a proposal’s been approved. And then even after the client is awarding the work, they might sit on that work for another 60 or 90 days. So agencies are struggling to hit their new business growth goals. And so it is the time when we have to be investing more energy and effort into growing the book of business that we already have. And so, to your point, this is a critical skill not just for prospecting with new people, but it’s probably even a more critical skill to keep the clients that we have, keep them happy, keep them fired up that we’re bringing them interesting ideas, and to grow our work with them.

Carla Johnson:

Yeah. I think it gives people an opportunity to see potential lines of revenue that they hadn’t recognized before because we’re just caught in our same way of doing things. But even those new lines of revenue, they can be opportunities to solve problems for clients that we haven’t recognized in the past. And I can tell you, when a company sees that a problem can be solved, they’ll be quicker to spend that money.

Drew McLellan:

No doubt. And if you help them solve one problem, you’re going to be their go-to to solve the next one, right?

Carla Johnson:

Yeah. That’s exactly what Kurt was in that situation.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. So the last agency I want to talk about that came out of the last workshop, Asia had a really interesting take on how she was going to use what she learned, and it was all about grooming and growing her young staff to be more strategic quicker than they would naturally or natively develop.

Carla Johnson:

Yeah, absolutely. And I can’t remember where her agency’s at, but it focused a lot on search in SEO, if I remember. And she was growing her team and had brought some new people on board, and she reached out to me following up to our workshop last February. It was last July she reached out. And she said they were doing a mini retreat in conjunction with a client meeting they had in New York. And it was the first time this group of new employees was going to be all together with her and with each other.

And she said she wanted to bring on this new group and teach them the process. So groom them in this way of thinking because creativity and coming up with ideas for her clients is just a crucial part of their business, and she wanted to set this new group up from success from the get-go. So that’s what I talked to her about some ways to groom these new employees so they understand the mindset and understand the philosophy. So it’s not a matter of here’s the process, but here’s the way of thinking in how we approach the work that we do.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Well, I think, again, pre-COVID, when most of us were in brick and mortar offices, we hired kids right out of school. And we knew they would learn by osmosis, by observation, by being around the senior people, by sitting in on some brainstorming. And we knew that they would over time natively develop some skills that they didn’t come out of school with. But now with a remote workforce and everybody’s scattered from all over, a lot of agencies are really struggling with how to mature a younger staff. And in fact, I have some agency owners who are saying, “You know what? Even though it’s cost-effective for us to hire a kid right out of school, we can’t figure out how to train them up. We are now having to spend more money to hire seasoned people.” And so Asia’s idea of, “Wait a minute, we can learn this together and we can apply it,” and what better place to gather observations than New York City?

Carla Johnson:

Absolutely.

Drew McLellan:

And you talk about your poopy diaper list would be long.

Carla Johnson:

Yeah. Looking and watching at New York City.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. But, I mean, here’s somebody who’s investing in her people. She’s still able to get cost-effective employees, but she’s really being innovative in terms of how she begins to develop them and give them skillsets that they would’ve naturally gotten in a brick and mortar environment that doesn’t exist for most agencies today.

Carla Johnson:

Yeah, it is. And one of the things, when I did research on the book, and there’s a lot of examples from Emerson in St. Louis because I’ve known their CMO, shoot for almost 20 years and watched the… She’s such a prolific idea person and creative person, and her agency is DDBO in Chicago, and Marcia Iacobucci is the creative director there. And so as I worked through this process and codified what Kathy and the other people who I interviewed with, I also talked to Marcia about how this looks in the agency world to get the quality and quantity of work done for a client like Emerson who has high expectations, who needs a high volume and fluency of high quality ideas.

And so, in hindsight, I feel lucky that we had so many of those conversations about, well, it would work that way in the corporate world, but if we tweak it in this way, it also works in the agency world. And I think that’s really important because she said, “We are paid on our last best idea,” and that’s a client side. But she’s also looking at it from the behind the curtain. And the last best idea also matters in how the work gets done internally.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely. Yep. And I think that’s a really good point. And I think, when we think about big ideas in our world, in the agency world, we immediately default to creative ideas, creative executions. And I think a couple of things. Number one, I think agencies more and more the demand is on the strategy side where businesses need us to help them solve business problems. And, yes, have a creative execution about how we go about executing that, but they need the big idea before the creative execution. They actually need the business idea. And like we’ve talked about all through this hour, we also are in deep need of new ways of doing the work that we do because the world is changing all around us. And so I just want to talk a little bit about, some of your observations of how people are using this not for creative execution, but business solutions, technology, things like that that we are all facing every day.

Carla Johnson:

Yeah. I can’t remember if we talked about this the first time on the podcast, but I’m pretty sure I talked about it in greater detail in the workshop, is that there was a woman in finance in the company that she had time set aside one week every six months for innovation inside their company. And so she’s a finance person. And the nice thing about the company is that they said, “We don’t expect everybody to come to innovation and be the idea people, contribute in whatever way you’re comfortable with.” And so they would put people into diversified teams based on interest of contribution. And hers was more along the money side because she worked in finance, ultimately, is this a financially viable idea? And so through her experience in the innovation week, she was fascinated and she saw opportunities in her own world.

And she went back to her role in finance, started to observing, “Where am I spending my time? Where could things be better? How could I innovate?” And she saw that there was a report that she did every single month that took 40 manual hours to do. So a week, a month to pull it together. She taught herself a programming language because she had worked with some IT people, taught herself a programming language and that report now takes about 12 minutes to run. So you think about not only from-

Drew McLellan:

It’s crazy.

Carla Johnson:

… an agency perspective, billable hours, holy smoke. But think about how that person feels every day coming to work, what they’re able to contribute. And that soul sucking, grinding work is behind her. And the example that’s if somebody in finance can be innovative, holy smokes, we all have an opportunity, right?

Drew McLellan:

Right.

Carla Johnson:

I just had a call with a client I’ve been working with since about the fall of 2018 who shared with me, this was somebody on their marketing team, who was doing some due diligence on some technology that they were looking at. And she used the five step process to really hone in on, absolutely, specifically, what problem do we need to solve? And so she ended up not having to buy an entire portfolio suite of technology, but actually just one little part. And instead of it was something like $20,000, they only spent $6,000. But this little piece of technology, over the course of one year, saves 400 hours. And so that’s an example. Innovation and creativity isn’t just about that big idea that you put in front of the client. And if you can get 400 hours away from a tedious process that you can now make billable, that’s incredible these days.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. It’s a beautiful thing. Absolutely.

Carla Johnson:

And I think it’s also a story that you can share with your client, so your clients understand what you bring to the table is, absolutely, not just marketing or marketing or sales specific. It’s business specific strategy.

Drew McLellan:

Yep. And, honestly, that’s what they want. They want us to help them make their business better. And hit-

Carla Johnson:

Exactly.

Drew McLellan:

… their KPIs, and that’s not just a sales goal.

Carla Johnson:

Absolutely. Yeah.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Yeah. This is awesome. I’m so excited that we’re bringing this back around and we’re going to give more agencies an opportunity to learn from you. So, again, everybody, the workshop is July 11th and 12th, you can register on the website. Carla, in the meantime though, if people want to access the book, you’ve got that great quiz that reminds everybody that they are an innovator, but what kind of innovator they are. So give everybody some ways for them to reach you, to learn more about you, to access your content, whether they show up in Denver for the workshop or not.

Carla Johnson:

Absolutely. And the assessment that Drew just mentioned, it teaches you, it shows you what type of innovator you are. And you can go to my website, it’s Carla Johnson, Carla with a C.co. There’s no am I say it’s .co for the great state of Colorado.

Drew McLellan:

I like it.

Carla Johnson:

And then if you want to take the assessment, it’s carlajohnson.co/ami and that will take you to the assessment and you can find out which of six types of innovative thinkers that you are. My website, carlajohnson.co. And you can also check out my blog, lots of great resources there, and then sign up for my email newsletter. And every other week I send you a new story, case study, application tool, way to make it real in your world. And I always love it when people connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know that you heard me on the AMI Podcast.

And I just wanted to share one last thing, Drew, that you and I talked about before we got rolling is I was in Nashville this week to speak at an event for credit unions. And after I spoke, I was opening speaker, a woman came up to me and she said, “I’m from an agency. I own an agency.” And I told my team, “I don’t think this first speaker’s going to be anything for me, but I’ll just sit in and listen so I know what my clients talk about.” And she said, “I came away with so much learning that I never imagined was applicable, that I’m going to take back and show my team.” So if you want to bring the best to what your clients want to see, I think it’s important that you bring the best to your agency first.

Drew McLellan:

That’s right. I agree. Thank you for doing this. We’re actually doing this on a weekend. So thank you for carving the time-out to get this recorded. Super grateful. And Daniel and I can wait to host the workshop, and we take away a lot of great ideas and a lot of great learning when you’re in the front of the room. So we’re excited about it, and we’re excited to make your smarts available to our community so we can’t wait.

Carla Johnson:

Absolutely. And if anybody has questions, send them ahead of time. I’ll make sure to cover them and we’ll talk it out. We have a really good time.

Drew McLellan:

We do have a good time.

Carla Johnson:

It’s a fun, interactive, you can learn and have fun at the same time. And we absolutely do that with this workshop.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. It’s very hands on, it’s very interactive. It’s not sit and listen to somebody talk for two days. You’re going to be working on case studies, you’re going to be broken up into little teams, you’re going to be actually doing the process while you learn the process, which is really awesome.

Carla Johnson:

Yes. And so you will have tangible things that you work on that you can take back to your agency as soon as you’re done. I think that’s an important thing to remember.

Drew McLellan:

Yep. Awesome. All right, guys, this wraps up another episode. Really hope we see you in Denver in July. A huge shout-out and thank you to our friends at White Label IQ. As you know, they’re the presenting sponsor of the podcast. So always really grateful to them. Check them out at whitelabeliq.com/ami. As you know, because I’ve been telling you for the last couple of years, they do white label, PPC, dev, and design, and they are spectacular. They’re born out of an agency, so they really understand how to build a pricing model so that you can be profitable while still outsourcing that work.

And as things have gotten tight for a lot of agencies in 2023, a lot of us are looking for ways to take a fixed cost and turn it into a variable cost. And they’re a great way to do that. They are fantastic partners, good human beings, and I think you’ll enjoy working with them. I am always super grateful that you keep coming back for more here at the podcast. We are north of 400 episodes at this point, and just have so many more people like Carlo that we want to bring to you. And so you keep coming back and I’ll keep coming back, I promise. And, hopefully, we’ll see you guys soon at one of the workshops this summer or fall. In the meantime, you know how to reach me through at agencymanagementinstitute.com, the longest email address on the planet. I’ll see you next week. All right. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 1:

That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of Build a Better Agency. Visit agencymanagementinstitute.com to check out our workshops, coaching and consulting packages, and all the other ways we serve agencies just like yours. Thanks for listening.