Key Strategies for Employee Retention with Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan [00:00:37]: 

Hey everybody, Drew Mclellan here with another episode of Build a Better Agency. This week is one of my solo casts. So if you’re a regular listener, you know that no guests this week, just you and me talking about something that odds are I’ve been talking to a lot of you about recently or something that’s on my mind that I want to make sure is on your mind as well. So just you and me chatting about something that I think is important for you and your shop today.  

Before I get into that, I want to remind you that we have a giveaway. Everyone who leaves a rating and review for the podcast and then sends me a copy of that rating and review and I’ll get into the details of that in just a second. It gets entered into a drawing and you what you win when you get your name drawn is you win a seat at one of our live workshops. So it is a seat for you, the agency owner. It’s not for staff members. So it’s just for you special opportunity for you to invest in and enrich your own professional development. Learn a little bit more about how to be an even better agency owner than you are today. And we’re excited to offer you that opportunity. Those workshop seats sell for about $2,000 and if you’re not a member. So it’s a pretty significant win. All you have to do is get to Denver and spend the two days with us. We know it takes a little bit of time investment on your part. We’re hoping to take the sting out of the price by giving it away for free. So we do a drawing on every solo cast episode. So this week or this month’s winner is Ashley Cook. So Ashley, congratulations. I will reach out to you and let you know that you have won and we’ll get you set scheduled.  

We have lots of great workshops coming up this fall. We’ve got how to grow your existing clients, which got rave reviews when we taught it for the first time in April. We have the perennial favorite Money Matters in October, so lots of good choices. Also, your win never expires. So if you can’t get here in September or October. We have plenty of things planned for the fall or the spring of 26 as well. So here’s how you enter. If you have not entered. If you have entered, you’re welcome to leave another rating and review, but your name never gets taken out of the drawing until you win. So you’re already in there. But if you haven’t done it, go to wherever you download the podcast, leave a rating and a review, and take a screenshot. The reason I need you to take a screenshot is, yes, we do read all the ratings and reviews, and we’re very grateful for them. But a lot of times your username tied to that rating and review is not your real name. You know, it might be tied to a hobby like, you know, I love Disney 92 or something like that. And even if it does have your name, I don’t know your agency. I don’t know how to get a hold of you. I don’t have an email address. So I need you to do that extra that last step, which is take the screenshot, email it to me at [email protected] and we will put you right in the drawing. So congratulations again, Ashley. I will reach out to you, and we will get you scheduled for your free workshop soon.  

Okay, so with that little bit of logistics done, let’s talk about this week’s topic. So I’ve been talking to a lot of you. It’s interesting. 2025 so far has been a mixed bag for many of you in terms of new business and sort of opportunities to present and prospects being responsive and all those things. But for many of you, one thing you’re reporting is that you have one of the best teams that you’ve ever had. Many of you are very, very happy with the team of employees that you have right now. And so, you know, finding the right employee is the first step, for sure, but keeping them, continuing to grow them and retain them over time, where they really add value because they’ve been part of the team for a while, they’re influencing the culture, they’re bringing new ideas to the table. That’s where the magic happens. So what I want to focus on today is what we think of as the ideal employee sort of management structure. Like, what do I need to do as an agency owner or an agency leader to find the right employee? So, first of all, I’m putting the right butt in the right seat. But secondly, once I have them there, how do I keep them? How do I keep them engaged? How do I keep them enthused? How do I continue to build a relationship with them so that they stick around?  

You know, the average agency employee is around for two, three years, and then after that they move on to something else. And so if you can get five or six years or 10 years, or for some of you listening, you’ve probably been at your agency 15 or 20 years. That’s gold for an agency. That consistency, as long as that employee is continuing to grow and continuing to add even more value than they did the day before, you can’t ask for anything better than that. So let’s talk about what that looks like. How. How do you structure that in a way that really helps you build, build and keep and grow a strong team?  

All right, so it starts with the job description. So when you are advertising for a new role or you’re looking for a new role and you’re interviewing, the job description that many of you use is pretty generic and inadequate, and it doesn’t really reflect what the job looks like. And it also doesn’t have sort of the hint of what’s possible in the future. 

So for many agencies, one of the reasons why you lose people is because you’re a smaller shop. You’re 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 people, and your employees work for you for a few years and they look at their direct boss and they’re like, you know what? That person’s not going anywhere. There’s no room for advancement for me here. There’s no way for me to make more money. There’s no way for me to get a promotion. There’s no way for me to add more value to me and my family by adding more value at the agency. 

The only way for me to do that is to move on and go to another agency, which is very rarely the case. But if we don’t communicate that, I think particularly to younger employees who don’t have sort of the professional maturity to see and understand and know what’s possible in terms of career pathing, then a lot of times you lose an employee and in an exit interview, they share that with you, and you’re like, oh, my gosh, I had grandiose plans for you, but I clearly didn’t do a very good job of communicating those grandiose plans. 

So starts with the job description. Earlier this year, earlier in 2025, if you’re a member, you should, in the member only email, you should know that we have created what I think are really, really strong job descriptions. And I think there’s 37 or 40 of them, which as a member you have access to. But even if you’re not a member, I want to tell you what’s in the job description because I think this is the magic. 

I think most job descriptions don’t include everything that the job descriptions that we wrote that we think are best of class include. So if you’re going to do a job description, you want to include these things. So you’ve got the title and all of that. So you’re going to start with the day to day responsibilities. So as fill in the blank, overseeing this or doing that, you will be responsible for and then bullet pointed the overall responsibilities, those day to day responsibilities of that role. 

Then the next section of the job description is key areas of responsibility and time allocation. So now what you’re doing is you’re taking those areas of responsibility and you’re breaking them up and you’re articulating in more detail what is included in doing that. So I’m looking at a sample that’s for the creative director. So the day to day responsibilities, there’s six or seven of them. So it’s, you know, ensuring brand consistency and quality across all creative outputs, staying up to date with emerging trends in both traditional and digital advertising, et cetera, et cetera, etcetera. That’s under the day to day responsibilities. 

Then under the key areas of responsibility and time allocation. For example, on this job description, creative strategy and concept development is 30% of the job. And then it lists under bullet points underneath that specific deliverables, defined deliverables against what creative strategy and concept development look like. So it’s going to go down and it’s going to break out all of the different responsibilities of the job. But very important, it also says here’s how much of your day or your week or your month you’re going to spend on doing this. 

So again, under the creative director, the next one is team leadership and management. Well, on our job description it says 25%. And by the way, if you’re a member, we know that you’re going to have to modify these job descriptions a little bit to be exactly right for your role or your agency. But, but I think we’ve gotten you about 95% of the way there. The important thing is this portion of the job description gets very detailed about what that job looks like and how much time that person will be investing in this particular aspect of their job. 

Then the next section is key performance indicators, KPIs. How are we going to measure together, you and I, how Are we going to measure your performance so that you know when you’re doing a great job, a good job, not so great a job. And so now we’ve put measurable metrics for each role in the job description. So again, a candidate or an employee, if you decide to deploy these after you’ve already hired someone, is going to know exactly what they’re being held accountable to and how it’s going to be measured. 

This is a critical part of job descriptions that I don’t think most job descriptions include. But, but it’s really important because it tells the candidate or the employee, this is where I need to be focusing. And by the way, if they’re going to advocate for themselves in terms of talking about they want a raise or a promotion or that they’re doing a good job, here are the points that they know that they have to be able to speak to to tell you that they’re doing a good job. 

The next section of the job description is required skills. So it’s both hard skills and, and soft skills. So the hard skills are going to be proficiency in certain software or whatever it may be soft skills may be about, in this case, for example, exceptional creative vision or the excellent communication and presentation skills, whatever those are. 

Then the next section of this job description is the 30, 60 and 90 day onboarding plan. And we’re going to talk a little bit more about onboarding in a, in a minute. But for each job description, we’ve broken out what they should be able to do, what they will have accomplished in the first 30 days, the first 60 days and the first 90 days. What this does is this gives you and the new employee. So obviously if you’re rolling these out to an existing employee, they’ve already had their onboarding. But if you’re rolling this out to a new employee, this very clearly gives them and you a roadmap for how they should be spending their time in those critical first couple months when they’re getting to know everybody, they’re getting to know the job, they’re getting to know the clients. 

But it is a way for you also to temper everyone’s expectations. Like we know you’re not going to get all this done in 30 days or in two weeks. We’ve mapped it out so it feels manageable. But it’s also a plan that we can follow so that we’re on the same page about how you, how you’re going to get proficient at your job in those first 90 days. 

So in a job description where it is not the Department head. The next part of the job is skills you need to learn for a promotion. So let’s say it’s a associate account executive we’re going to have in the job description. If you’re an associate account executive, you here’s what you need to be good at, hard skills and soft skills to earn the role of an account executive. Here are the hard and soft skills you need to develop. 

What that says to an employee is there is room for growth, there is a path and here’s what the path is. So this is, this feels to us like a really complete job description. It’s very clear about what the job’s role is day in and day out. Is very clear about how that employee should think about spending their time. It’s very clear about how that role is going to be evaluated, what the skills are that are required and also what those first 90 days look like if it’s actually a new role. 

So that leads me actually to career pathing. So when you have a set of job descriptions like this for every role in your agency, you also have built out the career path for every role. So again, if you’re a Junior Woodchuck and you want to be a Woodchuck, here are the things that you have to be good at. And so when we get into more of about the one on ones and the educational goals, in a second you’re going to see how all of this starts to knit together. 

So I as the employee now have my job description. It tells me what my job looks like, how I’m going to be evaluated and it also shows me what I need to learn, where I need to lean in, where I need to grow and if I want to keep growing with the agency. Again, if I’m a Junior Woodchuck and I want to be a Woodchuck, I need to be better at presentation skills or I need to be better at this software or whatever it may be that allows you then to for every employee to be able to talk to them about, you know what, right now you’re a Junior Woodchuck and in most cases someone’s a Junior Woodchuck for two to three years before they are eligible to be promoted or they have the skills to that allow us to promote them to be a Woodchuck. 

If being a Woodchuck is something you aspire to, then let’s talk about that and let’s put together a path to help you learn the skills, both hard and soft skills that you need to be a full on Woodchuck. And then again, you have the conversation with them when they get promoted, great, you’re a Woodchuck. If you want to be a Senior Woodchuck someday, and the conversation goes and you can show them literally the entire career path, it also is an opportunity to say to somebody who’s in a certain role, okay, you’re a Junior Woodchuck. 

A lot of people who are a Junior Woodchuck aspire to be a Woodchuck. Is that something. Now that you’ve been with us for three months, six months, a year, do you aspire to be a Woodchuck, or is there some other role in the agency that is interesting to you? Sometimes people, especially younger people, they don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t know what’s possible in an agency. So they may have been hired to be an account exec. 

And they’re looking over at the project management department and going, you know, I don’t love all these meetings. I don’t love all this client FaceTime. But I. What I really love is keeping everything on time and on budget. So instead, yes, I’m a Junior Woodchuck, but I think what I really want to be is I think I want to move over to the project management department. What skills do I need to learn to go from Junior Woodchuck to either Junior Project manager or project manager? How do I do that? 

So the career pathing allows you to have really robust conversations with your employees about their aspirations, about their skills, where they have gaps in knowledge or skills, and they need to sort of shore those up. But it’s much easier to do that when you have a roadmap in front of you and you can talk to them about all the different sort of directions they could go professionally, which does a couple things. 

Number one, it says to them there is a path. There are options for you other than the job that you have today. You don’t have to leave the agency to become something different, whether it’s making a lateral move to another department or it’s just moving up the food chain inside the department you’re in now. 

Number two, it says, I actually care about your professional development. I want to help you be as successful as possible. I want you to be able to make more money, make more contributions. I want you to stay a long time. So let’s talk about long term. Let’s talk about what your opportunities are here at the agency. 

So there’s that. The other thing it does is it gives you. When someone comes to you and says, I’ve been a junior Woodchuck for two years. Why aren’t I a Woodchuck? You can go back to that document and say, well, you know what, Babette, let’s take a look. You have these three hard skills that a Woodchuck needs, but you’re missing these two. You have these four soft skills that a Woodchuck needs, but you’re missing this one. And so you still have some growing to do. You still have some learning to do before you’re ready to be a proficient Woodchuck. 

I’m not going to promote you into a role that you’re not ready to be successful at. So if you want to double down and you want to spend more time developing those skills, hard and soft, I’m happy to do that with you. But this is why you haven’t been promoted yet to the Woodchuck. 

So career pathing critical. I will also say for many of you who are north of 40, I hear you grumbling all the time about having a career path. Like, I figured out my own career path. I hustled, I stayed late, I did all the things. I talked to my boss, I took classes, I did whatever. I carved my own path. I know, I know that back when we were young and in the business, nobody was career pathing for us. 

Totally get it. But you know what? It’s a different world. And the kids today, the employees today who are under 40 actually expect us to have a path for them. They don’t believe that it is their responsibility to carve out their own path. 

Now will you every once in a while have an employee who is ambitious enough and a self-starter enough that they carve their own career path? Absolutely. But do you really want to risk waiting for all of your employees to do that? No. You don’t want to have a revolving door of people who feel like you’re not invested in them and you’re not invested in helping them grow. 

So do the career pathing. This is, this today is a requirement of an agency owner or an agency leader is that we are able to talk to our employees about the possibilities of how they could advance. It’s not really optional anymore. So I know that some of you don’t like it, some of you probably love it because it gives you something very defined. But whether you like it or not, it is a reality of the work world today. So it’s not worth it to not do it, just to sort of dig your heels in. 

So as my mom used to say to me, suck it up, buttercup. And just do the career pathing. 

All right, so we have the job description, we have the career pathing. This person is now on board. They’re coming to their first day of work. So what does onboarding look like? What is a great onboarding experience? 

So again, in the job descriptions, if you’re a member, we’ve broken it out the 30, 60, 90, but we believe that you should have map out the first, very deliberately, the first four weeks, that first 30 days of onboarding. Often what we do is we wait too long. It takes us too long to find the right candidate, we negotiate for too long on salary or whatever, and we are anxious for this person to get started. 

So in many agencies, our onboarding is: really glad you’re here. Here’s a hat with our logo on it. Here’s your password to your email. And by the way, you have a client meeting at 10 o’clock—go. And that’s whether you’re in person or you’re virtual or you’re hybrid or both. We do not do a great job of onboarding. We just sort of throw them into the fire and hope that they figure it out. 

Or we have a day or two of onboarding, which is basically just asking them to drink from a fire hose. Remember everything we said between filling out the forms and signing the handbook thing and understanding the vacation policy and learning the project management system and learning how to do their timesheets and learning about all the clients and trying to remember everyone’s name—and then poof, three days later, we’re done. 

Human beings cannot absorb that level of information all at once. And so really slow, really sort of deliberately and diligently mapping out the first 30 days. After 30 days, the 60 and 90 days inside the job description—that’s more about them evolving into their role, that’s more about them becoming more proficient at their role. But that first 30 days should be pretty orchestrated from your perspective. 

So whether it’s meeting with the team, whether it’s client lunches, whether it is what meetings they attend—and that you are stretching it out so that they are not bombarded with all that information in a very tight couple days, which honestly, they’re just going to forget most of it. So being thoughtful about how you spread that out, being thoughtful about what that looks like for the first 30 days, and setting up meetings on their calendar for them for the first 30 days… 

So let’s say you’re hiring somebody in the creative department—making sure that you’ve got meetings with all the account people they’re going to be working with, with the other production people they’re going to be working with, with accounting, all the different departments they need to interact with—but not in the first 48 hours. You’re going to stretch that out over a couple weeks of that first 30 days so that they have time to acclimate. They have time to actually do work every day while they are sort of learning the ropes. 

So onboarding: a little slower, a lot more deliberate, and the first 30 days very mapped out. So you should have a process, an onboarding process that everybody gets plugged into and that it gives them room to breathe around all the information that they’re taking in. 

You know, you’ve been at your agency for a while and a lot of your employees have been at the agency for a while, and we forget how overwhelming it is to try and learn everything right off the bat. And so just don’t put them in that position. 

Okay, so we have a great job description. It’s very detailed. It tells them exactly what to do, how they’re going to be measured—all of that. All our job descriptions create the career pathing so we can have the appropriate conversations. We have invested in a month of thoughtful, methodical onboarding where there’s a little bit of information doled out every day. 

We have one agency owner who in their onboarding, one of the things that she built out, which I think is really cool, is an email series. So every day for the first 30 days or the first couple weeks, the employee gets an email—an automated email—from her, talking about some aspect of the business, like the origin story and things like that, which I thought was kind of a cool idea. 

But let’s just say our onboarding is done. They’re onboard now. So now—how do we invest in this employee? How do we make them feel like we are in it with them? We want them to win. We want them to be successful. We want them to grow. 

All of that happens in the one-to-one meetings. 

So we believe the best practice is that every other week every employee meets with their direct supervisor for 20 to 30 minutes. So again, let me say that—every other week every employee meets with their direct supervisor for 20 to 30 minutes. 

That meeting is owned by the employee, not the supervisor. So the employee schedules the meeting and probably schedules it over a long period of time. So every other Tuesday at 10am we have my one-on-one. The employee also is the one that comes prepared for that meeting. 

And so in the show notes, you’re going to find a document that you can download—the one-on-one meeting agenda. So the employee is going to fill this out in advance, not just come and talk to it, but have it filled out in advance before their one-on-one meetings. They’re going to bring a copy or send a copy to their supervisor. 

And here’s what that one-on-one meeting contains. It’s dated, and then there is a check-in. So—my personal and professional best since we last met. It’s a way to icebreak a little bit. It is a way for the employees to connect on a personal level. So I might share that I went on vacation with my family or it was my wife’s birthday and how we celebrated it—whatever it is. 

And then my professional best—it gives me a chance to brag on something. It might be, I’m bragging on a coworker. Might have been a great client meeting, it might have been something that I produced, a client raved about, or we got great results. Whatever it is, it’s a way to ease into the meeting and to sort of create a connection. 

Then the very first thing is: What is your priority issue or growth goal for this quarter? In other words—and then there are two bullets—what is my growth goal for my professional growth, and what is my growth goal to serve the agency’s growth? 

It is critical that every employee understand that to exist in the agency world today, we must be lifelong learners. We have to be growing all the time. There’s no way to not be obsolete if we don’t keep growing. And so you want to be very clear with all of your employees that you expect them to have growth goals for every quarter and you expect them to accomplish those growth goals. 

So for example, my priority issue or growth goal for this quarter—to serve my professional growth—it might be to improve my presentation skills. And then I’m going to come to you with a plan of how I’m going to do that. I’m going to join Toastmasters or I’m going to lead four lunch-and-learns inside the agency—whatever that may be. 

So I’m the employee who wants to get better so that I can get promoted from a Junior Woodchuck to a Woodchuck. I need to take some responsibility for my own professional growth. Now, I’m going to get support from you—and sometimes that might be financial, sometimes that might be time to work on the goal, whatever it may be—but I need to own that. 

And then to serve the agency’s growth, what I’m going to do—my growth goal for the quarter—is I’m going to attend a conference to learn more about the industry we serve, or I am going to be a part of the new business team that’s doing this, or I am going to help clean up the old archive files that no one can find anything in—whatever it may be. 

So I’m going to have two growth goals a quarter: one, how do I as a professional get better? And two, how do I help the agency get better? 

And I believe that accomplishing growth goals should be part of an employee’s evaluation. So you had four quarters since we last sat down and talked about your performance—we’ll get to this in a minute—and you only accomplished one of your growth goals. So you had the opportunity to have up to eight growth goals. You accomplished one of the eight. 

So what that says to me is you’re not particularly committed to getting better at your job or to advancing your career. And this is very insightful information for you to have. Why? Because everybody in your shop doesn’t think the same way about their job. 

For some of your employees, it’s a job, not a career. It’s a punch-in, punch-out job. It is a means to an end. And you need to understand that because how you invest in those employees is going to vary based on how they invest in themselves and in the agency. 

So the first thing on the one-on-one meetings is that priority growth goal for the quarter. Then they’re going to report on the progress of those goals. So in the first meeting of the quarter, you’re going to agree together what those growth goals are. 

And I would highly recommend, especially the more junior your employees—although honestly, with all employees—that you come to that first meeting with some ideas of how you want that employee to grow, both themselves professionally and how they can help the agency grow. And then they’re going to come with ideas too. 

You’re going to discuss them, you’re going to pick one, prioritize them, and then from that point on, every other one-on-one meeting in that quarter is them reporting on the progress of those goals. So, you know, I’ve done two of the four lunch-and-learns, and I’ve asked for feedback on my presentation skills, and I found out that I say “um” a lot or whatever it is that they’re learning. They’re going to report to you, their supervisor, how they’re doing. 

Then the next thing on the one-on-one is good news to report. So that might be internal news, it might be client news—there’s a chance for them to keep you plugged in to what’s going. One of the things we hear from agency leaders and owners when they implement this one-on-one meeting strategy is how much better they feel about how plugged in they are to what’s going on in the agency. 

They just feel like they’re informed on so many more issues so much quicker than they used to be because of these meetings. 

So, good news to report and then support I need to do my job. Priority issues to discuss or questions that need answers or input. 

So one of the other great things about this is when I, the employee, know that every two weeks I’m going to get your undivided attention for 30 minutes, a lot of things that I would be bothering you about through the week I can hang on to until my one-on-one meeting. So it also is a consolidator of questions. 

Next thing is heads up—and that might be client or internal issues, anything else—and to-do’s from this meeting. 

So the employee comes to the meeting with this completed. If they do not come to the meeting with this completed, reschedule the meeting. Make them reschedule the meeting. Again, what I love about these meetings is it will give you so much insight into how your employee feels about their professional investment and their job, and is it a job or a career, and how much time and energy are they going to put into it. 

But do not tolerate them coming to this meeting without this filled out. You’ll notice that nowhere on this sheet or in what I just described to you are there project updates. This is not a conversation to talk about what’s on your plate. So if one of the problems—if they say the support I need in my job is I’m really struggling to prioritize the work I have to do and I can’t get it all done—then sure, talk about it. 

But this is not a traffic meeting or a project management update meeting. This is not. This is not a meeting for project updates or a traffic meeting. This is a deeper conversation about their job. It’s about what’s on their mind, what’s in their heart, how they’re growing, what they need from you. It’s a very different kind of meeting. 

Employees love these meetings because they don’t get your undivided attention very often. And you will love these meetings because you will learn a ton about both the employee, the work they’re doing, the teams that they’re on. You’ll feel much more plugged into what’s happening in the agency when you have these meetings. 

At the end of every quarter, now we’re ready to look back on the quarter and see how we did. So I’m going to tell you more about that. But first, let’s take a quick break. 

Hey everybody. Just want to remind you before we get back to the show that we have a very engaged Facebook group. It’s a private group just for podcast listeners and agency owners that are in the AMI community. And to find it, if you’re not a member, head over to facebook.com groups B, a bapodcast. So again, facebook.com groups babpodcast all you have to do is answer a few questions to make sure that you are an actual agency owner or leader and we will let you right in. And you can join over 1700 other agency owners and leaders. And I’m telling you there’s probably 10 or 15 conversations that are started every day that are going to be of value to you. So come join us.  

Okay, so we’re back and we’re talking about how do we find, retain and grow amazing team members. So we just talked about the one on one meetings and that’s quarterly growth goals. So it’s a natural evolution of this. And you again, you can see how all of this is knitting together. 

It’s a natural evolution at the end of the quarter that you would have a conversation about their quarterly growth goal. Did they accomplish it? How are they feeling about it? Did the accomplishment of this quarterly growth goal trigger what the next quarterly growth goal should be? Or is it going to be something completely different? 

This is the opportunity for you to do a mini review. This is the chance for you, you know, annual reviews. It’s really hard to talk to somebody in October about something they did last November. A, you don’t remember. They don’t remember. It’s not recent enough. And so we are firm believers in the quarterly mini review. And we’ll get to the annual review in a minute. 

So in this quarterly mini review, you’re going to talk about their growth goals. You’re going to talk about their performance against the KPIs that are in their job description. You’re going to talk about how they show up against the company core values. You’re going to have an hour long review of their performance over the last quarter. 

Now, if you’re following the AMI bonus program, you’re probably talking to them about, here’s the criteria for whether or not you get to participate in the bonus and here’s how you’re doing this quarter against that so again, you’re course correcting in a much more recent and relevant period of time than waiting until the end of the year. 

So you’re going to do that for every quarter. So at the end of the quarter you’re going to do an hour long mini review, KPIs, growth goal, core values, that sort of thing, and then you’re going to set the growth goal for the next quarter and you’re going to do that quarter over quarter. 

So now it’s annual review time. So you’ve now had three mini reviews, the fourth quarter’s mini review. And by the way, when I say fourth quarter, I don’t necessarily mean chronological core. You know, you’re not all going to start all this January 1st. I’m just saying whenever you start this in the fourth quarter of that cycle, whenever that is, now you’re going to do a bigger review. You’re going to do an annual review. 

Some of you love to have the employees self evaluate, which is great. Some of you are going to do a 360 with their team members, that’s fine. Some cases just the supervisor is going to do a review. You can decide how to do that because the mini reviews are so effective that the annual review is a quick glance backwards. 

So we’re going to talk about the last quarter some, but most of the annual review is actually talking about moving forward. What does the year ahead look like for this employee? How have they advanced? So again, they’re a junior woodchuck. They have told you they want to be a woodchuck. So how have they advanced in both the hard skills and the soft skills to be cut, get closer to their goal of being eligible to be promoted to be a woodchuck. 

So it just changes the tenor of the review because you’ve had these many reviews behind it. And so now you can focus on the future rather than talking about something that happened 11 months ago, which really is ineffective at best and kind of a generic waste at worst. 

So the beautiful thing about that is now that’s a whole system and cycle where you are constantly helping the employee accomplish their goals. You’re helping them decide, I do want to be a woodchuck. I do want to elevate from being a junior woodchuck to a woodchuck. And you’re helping them set growth goals so they can do that. 

You are reviewing them in more real time around the way they’re delivering against the KPIs for their job. So you can course correct quicker if they’re not quite hitting the mark. You’re also celebrating with them more often the accomplishments. So good news, best professional news, you have lots of opportunity to pat them on the back, to celebrate them, to thank them and be grateful for them. 

This is a great ecosystem. And if you want to stop there, you can. But I will tell you that the one thing that’s missing from that is there’s an opportunity, particularly in today’s remote hybrid world, there’s an opportunity for you to have a closer connection with your employees. 

Now, I’m not saying you as the agency owner, if you have an agency of 50, should do this with everybody. What I’m saying is this is a direct supervisor to employee situation, unless you’re small enough that you as the owner can do this. 

So one of the things we hear from your employees all the time is one of the wishes they have about their job is that they got to spend more time with you. They want to learn from you, the agency owner. They want to know that you know who they are. You see them as whole human beings, you are invested in them, and that they have the opportunity to learn from you. 

They admire you. They admire the way you walk into a room and own the room. They admire the way you earn a client’s confidence. They admire the way your strategic mind works. Whatever it is that you’re great at, they see it and they admire it. And they wish they had more one-on-one time with you. 

So this is a little bonus thing. I’m not saying you have to do this, but in the best agencies, they find a way to do this. And this, by the way, everything I’m describing is about one individual employee. I’m not talking about all team meetings or department head meetings. You’re going to have all of that too. But we’re really talking about the individual here. 

So one of the opportunities you have is to spend one-on-one time with each employee. And depending on how many employees you have, they might get to do this once a year, they might get to do it a couple times a year, but it is offering up the opportunity for them to have a social outing with you. So let’s meet for breakfast, let’s meet for coffee, let’s have lunch, let’s have dinner. 

So back in the day, I had a program called Dinner with Drew. So we agency people, we love alliteration, but Dinner with Drew was completely voluntary. And for every employee, based on the size of my agency, they could do it once or twice a year. And so everybody got assigned the months that were going to be theirs. 

And then I would send. So if it was Babette’s month, I would send Babette an email and say, hey, I can do dinner with you on these, any of these days. You pick which day works for you. Feel free to say, no, you don’t want to do it this month, or you don’t want to do it at all, that’s fine. 

But if you do want to do it, once we set a date, then you pick the restaurant and you set the agenda for the conversation. So Babette picks a date, picks a restaurant, we set a time, and I show up at dinner. And with noted exceptions—in my case, I had a couple of employees who were very organized and anal retentive and produced agendas ahead of time—but for the most part, we went to dinner and the conversations really ranged. 

The gambits. In some cases, I had employees who literally brought a list of work things they wanted to talk about, and we spent the whole hour and a half or dinner, however long that took, talking about those issues. But for most of the employees, that’s not what they wanted to talk about. We talked about work a little bit, but what they wanted to talk about was them, their life. 

So if they were a parent, and, you know, obviously I’m a parent, sometimes they wanted being a dad advice. You know, one of my team members loves baseball, and we would have a baseball conversation. Other people, we had other things in common, and we would just sort of touch base, catch up, and as human beings, create connection. 

And I loved those dinners. And my employees seemed to love them too, because I never had anybody who said, no, they didn’t want to do it. Now, could you argue that they felt like they had to? Maybe. But I believe, and this may be my naivete, but I believe everybody left those dinners enjoying them and enjoying the time that we spent together. 

And what that did was it created this really human personal connection that allowed us to work better together. And it made it very clear to them that I was invested in them, that I cared about them as individuals, that I remembered their wife’s name or their husband’s name or their kid’s name, that we talked about whatever it was that was important to them. 

And it literally ranged from parenting to politics, to work to sports, to fill in the blank. But it was great fun, actually, for me to create those connections. And I believe it was meaningful for all of them, some of which were with me for 20 plus years. And so it just deepens the relationship. 

So that’s the optional of all the things I’ve listed like, got to have good job descriptions, got to do the career pathing whether you like it or not. I need you to think differently about onboarding. The one-on-one meetings are a game changer because they lead to the quarterly reviews, they lead to those quarterly growth goals. People keep getting better. 

The annual reviews, of course, are part of it. By the way, in your annual reviews, never discuss raises. Separate the raise conversation from the review conversation. Why? Because if they don’t get the raise they want, then they don’t hear the review. Like their head is just buzzing and they’re not hearing you. 

So be really clear with everybody and very publicly. In our agency, raises and reviews are not tied together. So we’re not going to talk about compensation during reviews. If you want to have a compensation conversation, we’re happy to do that. But it’s separate from quarterly or annual reviews. 

And if you want to, after the annual review, if you want to do, you know, breakfast with Becky or, you know, lunch with Lou, or dinner with Drew, whatever that is, try it. I think you’re going to be surprised at how much you enjoy it and how much your employees enjoy it. 

All right, so that is the employee management system. That is the opportunity for you to really pour into your employees to make them feel like they are the valuable asset to the agency that they are, that you want them to grow and get better, and you want to be a support to that, but that it is a shared responsibility. 

Professional development. I have said this a million times. Professional development is a shared responsibility. Sometimes it’s on our time and dimensions and sometimes it has to be on the employee’s time and dime. And this ecosystem really encourages both sides of that equation. 

It makes it very clear you’re willing to invest your time and some money in helping them get better, but also that you expect them to invest in their own professional development and their own opportunity growth of how they can add more value both to the agency and to their own family. 

Okay, so that is the ecosystem, the employee ecosystem. What I would love for you to do is compare what I talked about today with what you’re doing now and look for opportunities for you to level up all of those different places. The job description, the career pathing, the onboarding, the one-on-one meetings, the quarterly and annual reviews. And if you want to—that personal connection. 

Where could you level up and really show your employees that you’re invested in them, that you want them to be successful, you want them to be successful at your shop long term, you want them to stick around, and you’re willing to help them become more valuable so that they can earn new opportunities in the future and also benefit the agency? 

In the show notes, you’re going to get a sample of the one-on-one sheet that I described. So you can download that and use that. It’s generic for any role, so you can just use it with everybody. Again, that’s an every other week sort of an event. 

And I would love to hear how you’re tweaking your employee ecosystem to strengthen that relationship and to make that employee feel seen and valued, and also to get the maximum value out of that employee. That’s critical, too. 

So before I let you go, I want to say thank you and a huge shout out to our friends at White Label IQ. They are the presenting sponsor of the podcast. They have been the presenting sponsor. 

What I love about White Label IQ—so they come alongside agencies that look just like yours and they do white label design, dev and PPC. They were born out of an agency, so an agency had a problem. They couldn’t find a good web partner that was priced in a way that they could make money, but also delivered the quality they wanted to deliver clients. 

And so what they decided to do was create a standalone sister company that would be sort of their outsourced partner for web development. That’s how it started, and then it blossomed and grew from there. So they get—they really do get how you work with clients because that’s how they work with clients, too. 

They understand how they need to show up as an agency partner to make you and the client look great. They understand how to structure the pricing in a way that you can still make money. And they understand the importance of hitting the deadlines and delivering incredible work. 

So head over to whitelabeliq.com/ami to learn more about them and to take advantage of a deal—a special pricing deal that they have just for podcast listeners. So check that out. 

And last, before I let you go, I just want to say thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you for coming back week after week, listening to the show, letting me know what you love about the show, suggesting topics for the show. 

I’m so grateful that you’re out there and that we get to have this conversation every week. I know how busy you are. I know how many resources are available to you, so I am honored. I think it’s a privilege that I get to be a resource to you and I don’t ever want to take that for granted. I don’t ever want you to think I take it for granted. 

I am so grateful that we spend this time together. And so with that, I will let you go. I’ll let you get back to your week and I’m hoping you come back next week—because I’m going to—and I will miss you if you’re not here. 

So see you then. Thanks for listening.