How fractional employees are shaping the future of agency culture with Sara Daw

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

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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.

Hey everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute back again with another episode of Build a Better Agency. Super excited about this episode because we’re gonna talk about something that is true for absolutely every one of you. I don’t care where in the world you are, I don’t care how big your agency is, I don’t care the discipline of marketing or PR or web or media or whatever you do, I guarantee you that this episode is for and about you. And what we’re gonna talk about is sort of the changing landscape of how we get work done. I can remember back in the day when I started in the business, long before I even owned my own agency, when I was a kid in my twenties and early thirties, and I guess I started my agency when I was 30, but in my twenties, I can remember, and even early days of my own agency, I can remember we didn’t have contractors.

We had specialists. We might hire a video company if we didn’t have video in-house, or we might hire a photographer, but we didn’t have contractors, we didn’t have part-time people. We had full-time employees who all came to the building where we all worked together and we created our work and our culture together all under that roof. I’ve worked for large agencies and small, so in some cases we weren’t all in the same building because we had 10 offices across the us but we still had in our own office and in the clients that we served out of that office, an intact team. And everybody was together all day, every day, five days a week, if not longer than that.

And it was the way we worked. And we rarely, rarely brought someone in from the outside to contribute to the work we did unless they had an area of specialty that it just didn’t make sense for an agency to have in-house. Then you fast forward and all of a sudden with the computer and with the internet and all the things that happened back in the day, all of a sudden it was easier and more accessible to be able to get to people who had skillsets that didn’t necessarily live in your, in your town or your market. And many of you, and when I bought a MI 15 years ago, many of you were still pounding your fist on the table saying, I want everybody under my roof.

I don’t want contractors. I, we use as a leverage to sell that. We do everything in house. And one of the things that we’ve seen over and over and over again in our research in the audience audit research that we’ve done for the last decade is that when, when an agency says, we are a full service integrated marketing agency and you’re 10 people, or 12 people or 15 people, clients look at you and go, there’s no way. It’s gotten too hard, it’s gotten too fragmented, it’s gotten too sophisticated. You cannot, with 10 people or 15 people, be an expert in everything. Just can’t be done long before covid.

Many of you had started to make the shift, the cost of skilled labor, the fact that you were doing more sophisticated work that required a broader depth of knowledge, but in many cases, knowledge you didn’t need to keep in-house all the time. Many of you started turning to partners or contractors here in the us 10 90 nines to augment your team. And we’re seeing that more and more after COVID for sure. With the shift to a more hybrid and remote workplace, it became easier and easier for people to wrap their head and heart around the idea of rethinking about how to structure your team to best serve your clients, your team, and the agency’s bottom line.

And for many of you, you have found a mix of full-time employees, contractors, fractional skill sets that you’re bringing in and out of the agency as you need them. And so that’s what this whole topic is today is like, how is that working? And how do you create an environment to make all of those different configurations of teams work? So we have an amazing guest. Her name is Sara Daw, and Sarah actually owns a fractional CFO firm based in the uk. She has written a book all about this, what she calls the access economy, where you can access things that, or people that it feels like they’re yours, like they’re your employees, but they’re not.

And how to create and cultivate a culture that supports and allows that sort of structure to flourish. So again, no matter how you’re structured today, I know you’re wrestling with all the time, how do I do this better? How do I serve clients better? How do I do it in a profitable way? How do I do it and give my employees the flexibility that many of them want? And so I think this conversation is for you, whoever you are. I promise you this conversation is for you. So let’s bring Sarah on the show and dig in. Sarah, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Thanks

Very much for having me, drew. Great to be here.

So give the listeners a little sense of your background and how you have come to sort of have this perception and take on sort of the workplace of the future and how it’s different and how it’s working. Where did all of that come from?

Wow, that’s the, there, there’s a lot in there. So yes, so my background is I’m a chartered accountant, qualified with Deloitte, did an MBA, held some finance, senior finance roles, and actually got into this way of differently living and working through the fractional c-suite through necessity actually. So it started with the fact that I was a bit lost, didn’t really know where I was going with my life. I’d done an MBA, I was a ca, and the only people that wanted to hire me were the investment banks and that big corporate machine. And that was the last place I wanted to go back to. Hmm. So I started thinking about where to go next and it was actually on a plane ride, so bear with me on this.

I was on a plane ride my first solo ride with, with my daughter who was one, my first daughter. And I was looking for somewhere to sit on the plane. And this, this elderly lady took the daughter out my arms and said, come and sit with me. And we got talking. And it turns out that she had a portfolio career. She was a portfolio non-exec of huge UK retailers, household names. And that opened my eyes to a portfolio way of working. And I saw that this was a way that I could be a portfolio CFO, so work for a number of different businesses, be self-employed my own boss in control of my destiny, dictate my hours, and have more agency flexibility and control over my life.

Yeah, I could add enormous value to SME entrepreneurial growing businesses who needed my skillset, but just didn’t need it full time, didn’t want it full time, couldn’t afford it full time, but I could be equally committed to these businesses a day a week or two days a month, I could dial my time up and down. So that’s, it was the necessity of being able to find something where I could be mom and maybe work a couple of days a week being mom and have a career going forward. So I just couldn’t see how that could happen in the corporate world.

Yeah. So, so when a ball ballpark, when was that?

Gosh, that was back in the early two thousands.

Okay.

So quite a while ago now.

So before the great recession, before covid, before fractional, fill in the blank c-suite, fractional C-R-O-C-F-O really were common vernacular. We didn’t talk about that very often. No, back, back then. So, so when you started to propose this idea to businesses, how did they react?

It’s really interesting. So you’re absolutely right. No one knew what I was talking about. Yeah. The only word I think that business owners and entrepreneurs had for sort of like my category, if you like, back then was interim, which actually isn’t what we are. ’cause interim tends to be sort of full-time, full on, and then a gap, and then another gig full-time full on. And this is ongoing permanent, but part-time or, or fractional as the is, as the word that’s been sort of, that’s taken on and gained traction now. So interestingly, I started looking around for others that were doing this and there were, they were few on the ground at that point, but there was another individual who had already started doing this a couple of years earlier, a guy called Colin Mills, and he had set up the FD center finance director, the same CFO, and I met up with him and, and joined and, and, and we went forward together.

So he was also disillusioned with corporate life, right. And we started talking to entrepreneurs. And what’s really interesting is once they, firstly they were intrigued by the offering. I mean, it’s a good talking point. It was new. It still is new by the way. So they’re intrigued and they, they can’t quite believe that it works so well. So I remember one of my first clients saying to me, you know, what’s the catch, Sarah? This sounds too good to be true. I get you, you’ve got the experience I need. I can dial the time up. We, we work together. I pay as I go. There’s no long-term fixed contract. It’s as good as the relationship is every day you deliver value. And if I don’t like it, I tell you to go away.

And, and I said, yeah, that’s exactly it. And interesting enough, we, you know, we’ve worked with that client for many, many years growing it from, you know, one country to working in over 40 countries. So it did work. There wasn’t a catch. Yeah. But, but I can understand how, you know, on the face of it, it can seem like that.

Well, especially back then, right? It was just so, it just hadn’t been done enough. I think today, when you talk about fractional c-suite people, I think people, whether they think it’s right for them or not, they at least understand the concept. Yes. Yeah. So how did all of this lead to, so you have a brand new book out called Strategy and Leadership as Service, how the access economy meets the C-Suite. So how did the book come about and talk a little bit about the access economy. That’s a great phrase.

Yes. So regarding our business model, you know, we’ve grown our business now into 17 countries. We know what it does, a fractional c-suite. We know how it works, but we hadn’t really focused on why it works. I’m a learner and I wanted to really get under the skin of that thought leadership space and really dig into why it works. And what were the sort of concepts perhaps drawing on academia and other adjacent sectors as to understand what was actually going on here. I undertook a master’s with Oxford University, and I should say in Paris. And I, I developed my dissertation on understanding why this business model worked and drawing on academic concepts.

And the ones that I drew upon were the access economy. So I saw that there were parallels between the disruptive business models that we’re all going to, you know, we’re all familiar with, I’m talking the likes of Netflix, the Spotify, Uber, Zipcar. So these access models where instead of owning the goods and services, we access them and we pay as we go. Now tho those businesses are doing really, really well. They’re a new way of going to market. Yet what I noticed with some of those business models is that for them to be successful, we needed to feel as if we still owned the service or the goods.

Hmm. So even though we absolutely knew logically that we don’t own the music when we log onto Spotify, it feels like we do, because we have our own account. We log on, we scroll down, we curate our music, we know other people are listening to it at the same time, but it’s ours. And we, and we, we customize it with our own playlists, et cetera. And they’ve baked something called psychological ownership into that model. Hmm. So the feelings of ownership are hugely important. Our possessions are, are really important to us as humans. And I wanted to test, and I did through my work, my dissertation was to test whether psychological ownership was present in the long-term relationships that fractional c-suite individuals have with their clients.

And that’s what I found was that there are these things like intimacy and psychological safety and control, that if you build that into the relationship, it can still feel like the business owner employs these people, the ownership piece, even though they know they don’t, it feels like ownership and therefore the relationship can go on for a long time. And, and that’s what I wrote about in my book. I thought more people need to know about this. So I turned it into, into the book.

Yeah. So it’s interesting when you think about like the Netflix and the Ubers, nothing’s at risk if that go. I mean, you might get be late or you might not get your movie, or you might, your playlist might get jacked up. But you know, when you’re talking about a fractional CFO or CMO or CRO, there, there’s a lot of trust and risk on the business owner’s part of not having that person in-house 40 hours a week. So I can totally see why the, the hunger to feel like you own that relationship like this is no different than an employee. Any one of my other employees would be critical, especially at the c-suite level, because the trust and sort of all the secrets they know that they have to your business, they have all the keys to the kingdom.

And so you would, you would have to build in that level of, again, intimacy and trust. So in my company, we work with a fractional outsourced CFOI have for many, many years. But, but they have done everything, to your point of making me feel like when I, when I email my, my person, my CPA who works at that firm, they respond immediately. Like they’re right down the hall from me in an office, and I’ve walked down the hall and said, Hey, yada, yada, yada. And they’re like right there. So they’ve, they’ve created that intimacy, that access, that feeling of connectivity that allows me to trust that, you know, they’re in my bank accounts, they’re in our credit cards, they’re in all the things, and I trust them as much as if they were, to your point, a full-time employee.

So that’s fascinating.

Yeah. I think, I think, so this is the nub of it, I think is, I think what the illusion that the employment is the sort of gold standard and you get all this trust and intimacy and security of supply and all that sort of stuff from being employed. I think that’s an illusion. Yeah. I think it’s, it’s not the employment contract that is giving us that. Of course there are some things in employment contracts that, you know, we’ve got some rules in there that we have to obey, right? But actually, actually all relationships employed or not should have this psychological ownership and this relationship piece. And it isn’t, you know, we, we, you know, we can move on our employees at will, people can leave us at will quickly.

And actually I think it, if we think about the relationship a bit more deeply, we realize that it is far more about the relationship than it is about an employment contract. And you are gonna have quite a lot of people in businesses that are employed that where you just don’t have that trust.

Right.

So I feel like we need to sort of, you know, release our shackles a bit from the employment notion that just by having employment contract, we’re, we’re all in and we’re all good ’cause we’re not. And actually I think the, the self-employed model with highly committed csuite individuals and fractional leaders who have chosen, deliberately chosen to work this way, and they’ve chosen to work with the businesses that they’ve, that they end up with, right. Because there’s a passion and a purpose for them, and that they, they sort of live and die really by their, their last day. You know, every day that they’re in that client, they’re highly accountable. You have to be used to being evaluated all the time, right.

To deliver value. So actually you can have a far more healthy relationship, I think, and go back to the basics of a relationship by stripping away the fact that, you know, this notion that employment brings, brings all of that to us. So I think it’s, it can be quite refreshing in a way. I do understand that business owners want to have that, that sort of reassurance and trust that this person isn’t gonna leave them in the lurch. And I, and I think, you know, that goes down to the relationship on both sides that builds. But there are also organizations, you know, like the one I I I run and, and others out there where we, those organizations will take responsibility for making sure that these fractional c-suite individuals are up to the job.

They are totally committed. So they will, they will, there’s a bit of governance there, a bit of a bit of oversight and accountability at another level, which can give an extra level of reassurance if, if businesses want it.

Yeah. I, so for example, again, the fractional CFO that we work with is part of a large organization. And so one of the, one of the, one of the other things that I think makes this idea of fractional resources so interesting is, you know, if I have a full-time accountant and they give notice, all of that institutional knowledge walks out the door when they leave. Yes. Hopefully they’ve documented their processes and their systems and all of that. But in the, in the fractional model where you do have a company behind that, you’ve got backup and you’ve got systems and process. And so whether they go on vacation or they have a paternity leave, or they leave the company, in theory, everything just keeps running smoothly.

Absolutely. And, and there, there’s a, there’s a lot of benefits to that. So these types of organizations, I would call them organizers, not employers, and they, they would have teams of c-suite individuals. So the beauty of those organizations over and above sort of working with an individual and in an individual is that you are gonna have access to a breadth and depth of skillset. So not everyone knows everything, right? And you, you know, with one individual, you’ve got one set of skills, one set of contacts, one set of time. Whereas if it’s, if you go with a, with a bigger organization, there’s the ability to tap into more skill sets, more geographies.

If someone gets busy, there’s always someone else to pick up the reigns, holidays, you mentioned it, all those sorts of things. Yeah. That the oversight piece of making sure that these individuals who, who are contracting with these entrepreneurial businesses are absolutely committed to doing it and have the wherewithal and the, the other beauty of these organizations is that they, they look after the whole individual. So, you know, a firm might be engaging with a fractional c-suite individual for a day a week. Well, what about the other four days, right? That they’ve got available and the, these, these fractional firms will make sure that these individuals are occupied the other three or four days if they want to.

So therefore it becomes a proper career for them and there’s a sort of security for them as well. So the whole system works, and I think it’s important to think of it as a system.

Yeah, no, that’s really interesting. So as you, you know, it sounds like you’ve been doing this now personally for 20 some years, and as you have watched recessions and covid and, and hybrid workplace and remote workers and the people embracing certainly more contract labor and all of that, how do you look at the future of employment? What do you, what, how do you see all of this playing out today? And and what do you think, what do you think it’s gonna evolve to?

Yeah, so it is absolutely, it’s on the move. It’s changing. So even over the, you know, the 20 odd years I’ve been going, you know, fractionals become more well known. Sure there are still surprising is, by the way, how many businesses still haven’t heard of it. So we’ve got a long way to go still. However, what I am seeing, the trends I’m seeing are firstly that jobs are fragmenting, they’re unbundling. And often, you know, we go through trends, don’t we? Bundling and unbundling, I think we’re going through an unbundling trend of jobs. Yeah. Into work. So packages of work and, you know, we used to have interns to come in and fill up an extra package of a full-time role. Well, now we’ve got the fractional resources and, and individuals that can come up and pick up pieces of work.

What that means is that I think in the future, we are going to see work being done by more fractional individuals so that you get the right skillset at the right level, which ’cause it means when you’re in a corporate and doing the corporate role, you often find the c-suite actually getting drawn into all sorts of things that aren’t properly their skillset just because they’re there in there full time. Well, now on the fractional model, you could absolutely get the right resource at the right level, paying the right amount, and everyone staying in their swim lane, which is quite nice. We’re also gonna have automation. So some of that job is going to be automated and some of it will be done by fractionals.

So I feel that this unbundling is a trend. And what I also see is a big trend is that if we look at the corporate world, so let’s just spend a little bit of time with them. I know your, the audience here is SMEs, but often this trickled down. What we’re seeing in corporates is that they are having to engage now with fractionals. And if you, if you, if you take this to the area of AI and the tech, all the digital nomads, they’re sitting on a beach somewhere doing their digital activities and getting exposed to all the latest thinking and accumulating the cutting edge skills. And the corporates need those skills. They cannot make them in-house.

Their employee base isn’t getting exposed enough to the activities to be able to do this, right? So corporates are having to engage with these people, and yet these people don’t wanna be employed. I think this is gonna trickle down into more of the CE world. We will engage with fractionals more, but then we’ve got the issue of a blended workforce. We’ve got our employee base and we’ve got our fractional base. I think that brings challenges ’cause these are two different types of people. So that’s one that’s, you know, gonna be interesting to see how we manage those two different types together.

Yeah. We’re actually seeing it in our industry already. We’re already seeing, for example, you, you, you might have in, in the good old days, you might have a full-time, front end web developer on staff. But now when you look and you’re looking at your payroll costs and you’re like, you know what, look, we only do five websites a year. We don’t really need that full-time person. Those are not inexpensive people. What if we had access to somebody 20 hours a week, or we hire them on a contact contract basis when we need them. So I think we’re already seeing that. So I, we need to take a quick break, but when we come back, I want to talk about that idea of this, this new workforce, this mix of fractional, fractional team members, we’ll call them, and employees in a more traditional sense, and your thoughts about how do we create an environment where everybody feels connected and the work gets done without hiccups and all of that.

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

So check ’em out and come join us. All right, let’s get back to the show. All right, we are back and we have been talking about this idea of fractional employees. And many of you already have been explo exploring this. You know, we’ve been talking more about c-suite folks or I would think of as admin people, people who are not client facing, doing client work. But many of you have embraced this idea of a fractional employee or team member by hiring contractors rather than full-time employees by maybe having part-time employees who are in another part of the country or another part of the world. So it certainly is, we’re seeing it every day in agencies big and small.

So Sarah, when we think about the fact that we are, you know, back in the day you created culture by everybody coming into the office five days a week. We were in a building together, we took coffee breaks together, we stood around the water cooler and talked about our weekends, and we had physical proximity to create culture and connectivity. And there was a lot of sort of eavesdropping on conversations and then sticking your head in and going, oh, I meant to tell you X, y, Z. So to, in today’s world, whether somebody has fractional team members or not, a lot of us are working more remote or hybrid.

We may have an office that we’re only in the office three days a week, and in some cases teams are rotating in and out of the office. But it’s rare that they’re all together. It’s a very rare agency today that has all of their employees living in one city and that they’re working five days a week in an office. So we’re now crossing time zones, we’re crossing in sometimes, so in some cases country lines. So how are you seeing what is the, what are the best practices? If, if I own an agency and I’m doing exactly what we’re talking about, I’ve got some, I have some full-time people that are in the office a few days a week, and at home the other days I have some part-time people and some contractors.

I have some fractional people that are not my employees at all, that they are, you know, here in the states at 10 99 to me. So how do you create a work culture that creates that psychological ownership and that, and the connectivity that makes it work?

Yeah, it, it’s, it’s a really interesting one. I mean, I think what, what, what was interesting for us, so we’ve always been, you know, the 20 odd years we’ve been going is that we’ve always had remote right relationships. So our c-suite individuals have, have never come into our office. We didn’t even have an office until we built up a significant sort of central team. And so we are very used to having a dispersed geographic workforce. Yeah. And, and what’s interesting actually is that before Covid, there’s always, before Covid and after Covid isn’t there, right? Yep. Before Covid, we were the odd one out with our clients as well because everyone was in the office and we were the one coming in and out.

And that was seen a bit odd. But now post pandemic, that’s normalized because we’ve, we’ve moved to hybrid and remote working more generally. So, so it’s become, obviously it’s become more mainstream to be hybrid and remote and have disperse workforces whether they’re employed or fractional. And yet, how do you do it? How do you, how do businesses create meaningful relationships of the bonded teams that worked together across distance and and technology. And I think the way, the way we did it, and we were using technology all the way, all the way through was, you know, Skype and the, yeah, the funky video conferencing back then. But the way we did it was we were very deliberate about the times we were together.

So firstly, you were very strong on culture and, you know, whole sort of movement, if you like, of our business was that we had a vision of wanting to change people’s lives for the better, but also being sort of anti-corporate, if you like. And a lot of people joined us away from corporate and also wanting to live and work differently, which united us. So I feel like it’s really important that businesses have a vision and a, and a purpose that they can unite their people together behind, regardless of what that is. And regardless of the way, you know, the way they operate and where they sit in the world. And then we were incredibly deliberate about how we’d be communicated. So we made sure that we came together frequently, either through technology or and physically.

So it was definitely an and but obviously the physical touch points and the physical get togethers, you know, when you are in, when you are in big, big geographies, were maybe twice a year, so not sure, right? Not that frequently. But we made a huge effort to be very deliberate about when we came together and how often that was. And we also created small teams. So we, we, we wanted a level of intimacy with our people and realized that could be quite hard when you’ve got lots. So we created small cells of 10 to 12 individuals around the world. So everyone had a home and everyone had a local base, even if they didn’t see them because they were spread out around the country.

They were, they were still connected as a local team. And then we had national teams and international teams and functional teams. And so I feel the way to do it is to be very, it’s to design a strategy of culture and strategy of communication and togetherness, prioritize it and be very deliberate about it. And don’t just assume it’s gonna happen and make sure that when you come together, it’s the things that you can’t do when you are set apart. So it’s very special. And then there’s use the technology day on day to communicate for sure for the more functional tasks.

So you guys were all remote, so that was a little different, right? Everybody was in the same boat. But now when you’re going into clients’ offices, in some cases they are, they still have a physical presence or they’re hybrid today probably. So how do you, I I think oftentimes the person who’s remote or is fractional is the one that feels a little out of the loop or dis more disconnected. People forget to invite them to meeting, like all that kind of thing that happens or they don’t overhear conversations ’cause they’re not physically in the same space or whatever. So how do you, how do you navigate that as one of the folks who is not on site, who’s not full-time, how do you make sure you have the connections with the people and how do you help your clients create that environment?

Because your odds are today you’re not the only fractional employee they have, you’re probably not the only hybrid employee or remote employee they have. So how are you helping them when it is a mix of in-person, not in-person, not create kind of a they versus us, you know, mentality, the locals versus the remotes.

Yes. Yeah, I think, I think the, the way we’ve done that is to start off with, when we start a client engagement and working with a new business, we would try to be as onsite as possible, as much as possible in the early days to get the vibe, to get the understanding of the business. So that’s an investment Yeah. Of, of commitment. And actually, you know, it doesn’t mean that when you turn up on the onsite that everyone else is gonna be there as well. Right. So, you know, that’s the point, isn’t it? But I think the first thing is to is to show you, we show we are committed and we will, we will make a big effort to understand the culture of the business.

Now some, some businesses, you know, will be more remote than others and in which case we’ll slot into that. But if they do have two or three days a week and a lot of people are adopting that as a hybrid model, we will make sure that we’re in there every week to be, and to show that we’re committed. We are not retreating away, we are not just there for the work, we are there for the people. Yeah. It’s about, I think to be fractional, to be honest, to be fractional, you need to be brilliant at, at relationships, communication and relationships are the, are the key things and have a curiosity about individuals. So I think we need to move away from thinking fractional is about delivering tasks and work.

It’s still about forming relationships. And this is where I fall back on psychological ownership because to create that bond, there are some key things that we can do to create the bond. One is both parties need to feel they have control of each other. And I, and I mean that sounds a bit bit brotherish, but what that means is accessible, available, and approachable. So the key thing is, for every business that we work with, we make sure that when we are not on site for them, they can always call us. And we’re, so that means that if we are on site with one business, we might take a call from another client, right?

Sure. Because

We made that open and we would expect them to call us when we are another client. And as long as we get, we communicate and every business plays the same game, if you like. Right? Everyone wins, you’re always accessible. We’ll take calls on a weekend, we’ll take calls, you know, at 10 o’clock at night because we know things just don’t pop up in a nine till five. Right? And so I think it’s about showing interest in the client, like we’ll call up the, call the client, the business owner out of the blue and say, how does that pitch go last week? Or we’ll pop in or we’ll spend perhaps instead of working from home one day we’ll work at their offices. We might be working on another staff, but we’ll be there.

Right? I think

Physically there,

Yes. Yeah. So it, it’s about, it’s about thinking about those things that show commitment and interest in the whole business, not just the bit of work that that we are doing. We’re on their journey with them. The other side of it is co-creation. That’s another way of building relationships, whether, you know, you’re remote or not doing things together. So co-creating strategies, co-creating events and conferences, whatever it is, if you do things together, you, you’re both self invested. And the other side of it is, is intimacy. So I, I feel the other thing that’s really important’s fractional and for employees to do is to, you know, go to the happy hour, be there on after work one day, don’t rush off and retreat, re retreat to your house, spend time.

Or if it’s hanging out in a, in a, you know, in a teams call or something or a Google Hangouts hang out,

Right.

Show, show the fact that you want to get to know the whole people involved and be prepared to share some of yourselves. I mean, I think one of the best things I ever did really early on with a client was that they moved offices and their whole employee base went to paint the new offices. And I showed up and did it as well. I didn’t have to do that, but it was one of the best things I ever did and I really enjoyed it and got to know everyone.

Yeah. I, I I think it’s those sort of marginal moments, like the happy hours and that we’re all painting, so we’re talking and we’re listening to music and we’re ordering pizza and all of that. I think that’s where sometimes remote employees or fractional employees miss out on the connectivity because either they think they shouldn’t or they can’t participate, or it’s, well, I’m not getting paid to do that. Yeah. Or, and I, and I think you’re right, I think it’s an investment on both sides saying this is a relationship and relationships require commitment and time and sacrifice and all the things that we know are true, but we just don’t, we just don’t apply it in this case the way that we should.

Sometimes

I think it’s very easy sometimes in fractional work to feel that we’re, it’s a transaction and we’re just delivering tasks and competencies. But if you think about it, anyone could do that. Any good right qualified person could do that work to have the long-term relationship have to think of it in a whole new dimension around a relationship. And it’s about building trust and being committed and showing commitment.

Yeah. Yeah. So as, as we wrap this up, I’m, I am curious from your perception, where does this end? Do you, do you, do you think, do you think companies someday will not have any employees? Will we be a complete hybrid piecemeal, put fractional team members together to create the perfect team? Do you envision that we’ll always have a core set of employees that maybe are more client facing and that the fractional and remote employees sort of are the support around that? Like how, as you look forward planning for your own business, but also as you think about just, you know, the work you did in your dissertation and sort of the idea of this evolution of work, because I don’t, I don’t, the genie’s not going back into the bottle.

We’re here in the states anyway and I don’t know if you’re seeing it over there too, but here in the states we are having a more of the large corporations go, you know what? This hybrid thing isn’t working. We’re back in the office five days a week, and if you don’t like it, that’s okay, then somebody else will take the job. But I, I don’t think that’s going to be the norm, particularly. I think it’s one of the reasons why small businesses have an advantage is that they can be a little more nimble and more flexible than a big corporation. So I’m just curious what you see if you look into that crystal ball, what do you see happening in the next five, 10 years in terms of the workplace

A bit? Yes, I think I agree with you by the way, what you just said around, you know, some going back into the office and you know, full time. I, I don’t think I, I don’t think that’s gonna go go mainstream. I think we are, the genie is at the bottle. We do want more flexibility for our and control over our lives and, and going self-employed and fractional is one way of doing that in terms of the erosion of employment. I think that there is gonna be an erosion of employment as a notion that that’s the only model over the next five to 10 years. Will it completely collapse? No, but I do think it will, there will be, its an and conversation. I think there’s gonna be more acceptance of the self-employment and the fractional model because it’s more agile, nimble, you see, right.

Even for the corporates, it’s the way the corporates can have a core and then have a a, a donut ring around it if you like, where they bring together the fractional skill sets to nimbly and agilely deal with all the turbulence that’s in the market at the moment. Because the, what I, what I interestingly saw through Covid was that the corporates were building out their c-suites. More and more CXO titles have arrived on Wikipedia. You’ve got families and hierarchies of c-suite titles ’cause more at the c-suite level, which is rigid, costly, fixed headcount and not going to be, you know, not going to be the sort of right setup to react quickly to things.

So I feel like this is an alternative way of doing that. I think there will be a call and then I think there will be rings, if you like, of fractional workers at various levels who will be able to then come together in teams and groups to, you know, for long periods of time, short periods of time part, you know, on a fractional basis to, to get the work done. The key thing I think though is to remember relationships in this. We’re humans, we want to be part of communities. So I, I feel that even if we’re fractional, we need to be, we are going to want to be part of different communities.

I actually think though the communities won’t just be your, the employed or the, or the organization anymore. I think there’ll be communities of fractionals and it’ll be a much more sort of networked and fluid system if you like, where we do have homes, but we have multiple homes. So that’s the way I think it’s gonna go in the next five to 10 years for sure.

Yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s a fascinating idea that you can have access when you think about it. You can have access to subject matter experts that you have, you have no way to keep busy and employed full-time, but when you need ’em, you really need them. And to be Exactly. And I think and and to be able to tap into that and like you say, nimbly sort of tap different people on the shoulder when you need them and yet they’re already a part of the organization. They already know your systems and processes. Yeah. They already know how to work inside your organization. You know, that in some ways it, it can be the best of both worlds if you build the infrastructure to support it.

Yes, yes. So you get the relationship, but you get the work done. And I think the more, you know, the, the, the more the world goes forward is the, the sort of specialism being a master in a specialism, I think is a, is absolutely key to fractional individuals. Yeah. And you have to be know of something and have that sort of deep knowledge of an area. I think also it’s really important that fractionals are well networked because the power of many is going to be really, really important. And also to be a, to be a giver, to be wanting to promote and to give to organization rather than sort of being, you know, most interested in what’s in it for me.

Right? I think those are the three big characteristics of what fractionals need and there’ll be various communities popping up to support them. And I think that’s, that’s the right way to go. So organizers not employers. And I think the other role of organizers could be that if you think about it, the, the Gen Zs of the, you know, they’re going into the gig economy already, right? They’re growing up with it. Not like me as a Gen Xer, I joined late, but the Gen Zs are coming through, they want to work this way from the, from the start, but where are they gonna get the experience from to give, to give this skills back? And I think that’s where perhaps fractional organizations could also do some mentoring to bring these communities on and help them get the skills they need to be able to keep adding value.

So yeah. But that, you know, that’s all to see how that unfolds. But I’m interested in that area particularly.

Yeah, it’s fascinating. Is it, I think it’s a great opportunity for business owners who are open-minded enough to figure out how to tap into it and how to create a culture where it can really thrive. And so like you, I’m, I’m fascinated to watch sort of how it plays out over, over the next, you know, five or 10 years. ’cause I I think it’s gonna be very interesting to see how we, how we redefine work.

Absolutely.

Yeah. This has been a great conversation Sarah. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and your experience. If folks want to buy the book, learn more about the work you do, follow up and ask a question, what’s the best way for them to, to, to get in touch with you?

Great. Yes. So if you want to buy the book Strategy and Leadership as service, how the access economy meets the c-suite that’s on Amazon or route ledge.com. If you want to get in touch with me, I’m at the CFO center and I’m on LinkedIn, soor on LinkedIn. So yes, please do get in touch. I mean, just love to hear people’s experiences. It’s, it’s fascinating as you say, seeing the industry grow.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for being with us today. I appreciate it. You gave people a lot of things to think about, so thank you. Brilliant.

Thanks Drew.

You bet. Alright guys, this was a great episode and just in terms of saying, well, how we’re working, many of you are already working this way, whether you’re working with an outsourced something or you just have part-time employees or contractors, we’re using a lot of language for the same thing. But many of you, most of you actually are a mix of employees and contractors in some way. So the idea of how do you create a culture where everybody feels connected, that where it doesn’t feel like, oh, they’re not, they’re not a part of the team, they’re a vendor, they’re a partner as opposed to no, they’re, they’re one of us and they are part of our team.

Really some great ideas about thinking about that and, and even just the idea of sort of that psychological safety and that that psychological ownership probably things that you’ve been doing, but maybe you didn’t have a label for or something to sort of think about in that tangible way. So lots of, I would call it deep thinking homework off of this episode. Like, how do you wanna build the workforce of your agency for the future and what do you need to do to create infrastructure to support that and make it successful? So lots of, lots of good takeaways, lots of good meaty nuggets to chew on. And I hope you take the time to, to talk about this with your leadership team to really give it some thought because just like you are, not, none of us are working the way we did five years ago.

You gotta know we’re not gonna be working the way we are now five years from now. So how do you begin to think about that? And as Sarah said, be intentional about what you build and how you put that into play so that you can be as successful as possible. So, lots of, lots of good stuff there. Before I let you go, two things, 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 they, they are this model, right? They are an outsourced white label web design, PPC and design team. So if you need development work or that, these guys are exactly what Sarah’s been talking about.

They come, they come in, they become part of your team, they help you have subject matter experts who allow you to offer your clients more than what you can do with your in-house team. So check them out at White Label IQ dot com slash aami. They have a special deal just for you as podcast listeners as you know. ’cause I’ve been telling you that for a while. And certainly last but not least, I I love getting to hang out with you every week, so I don’t get to do that if you don’t keep showing up. So thank you for coming back. Thank you for all your feedback, for the reviews, for the shout outs in the Facebook group that tell me what, who you want me to talk to and what other, so topics and subjects you want to hear more about.

You just help me make the show better, more fun for me, more fun for you, more valuable for you. So keep that feedback coming. I, I appreciate it and I am really glad you’re here with me. So thanks for listening. Alright, I’m out. I’ll see you next week. Thanks for listening. Bye.

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