Continually hone your message with Lindsay Grinstead

Speaker 1:

If you’re going to take the risk of running an agency, shouldn’t you get the benefits too? Welcome to Agency Management Institute’s Build a Better Agency Podcast, presented by HubSpot. We’ll show you how to build an agency that can scale and grow with better clients, invested employees, and best of all, more money to the bottom line. Bringing his 25 plus series of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant, please welcome your host, Drew McClellan.

Drew McClellan:

Hey there, everybody. Drew McClellan here with another episode of Build a Better Agency. As always, we are here to help you think differently about your business to help you kind of peel back the layers and see what you can do to tweak it to make it better. If you’re still standing today, odds are, you are already running a pretty good shop. You’ve survived the recession and all the different things that the economy has thrown at us over the last decade. But the world is changing and it’s changing quickly.

So my goal is to bring you guests who help you think about the next step and the next evolution of your shop. I think our guest today is going to do just that. So let me tell you a little bit about her so we can jump into the conversation. So Lindsay Grinstead works for… Is one of the co-partners of Tonic Consulting Group, which has been around for a couple years now.

But Lindsay started in the, what I call a big box agency space. So after graduating from the University of Florida with a BS in public relations in psych, she moved to San Francisco and began working in the world of experiential marketing, joining Jack Morton Worldwide, starting like we all did back in the day as sort of a low man on the totem pole and growing… Before she left there, she was an SVP and a senior account director consistently growing and managing some of the largest clients in the largest book of business that they had on the West Coast.

Lindsay decided to step away from that and to form a consultancy where she and her partner help agencies. And that’s where we meet her today. So Lindsay, welcome to the podcast and thanks for joining us.

Lindsay Grinstead:

Hi, Drew. Thank you so much for having me.

Drew McClellan:

So before we hit the record button, you said something that I want to just jump right on top of. So you talked a little bit about that one of the philosophies that you bring to your clients is the idea that the very first and most important audience that they serve are their own employees. So talk to us a little bit about that because I think when I go into agencies and I’m sure you do too, no matter how often the agency ownership talks to the staff, they want more.

Lindsay Grinstead:

I couldn’t agree more. And in fact, I’ve actually found it surprising how many agency owners or agency managing directors don’t communicate effectively to their employees. They think they are, and they might say something off hand, or they might have a message one week and then it’s a different message the next week. But what we really try and help our clients think about is not just communicating to your sales team.

I mean, obviously your sales team needs to know who you are and what you do, and be able to very articulately describe and talk about your agency, but every single one of your employees needs to be able to do the same. I am a huge advocate for treating your employees as your first audience. They need to be able to understand and articulate who you are as an agency, what your differentiator is.

So many agencies really work hard to hone their craft and hone their message and they’ll have brilliant outbound marketing campaigns. And then they don’t take the time to communicate internally. And not just communicate at once, but to continually reinforce that message I think is so important.

As I said, it’s not just your sales and your account people because every one of your employees has friends. They have family. They’re at a party talking to about what they do. You never know where that next client is going to come from. So having all of your employees and staff being able to communicate that is so important. I think it really empowers employees as well to know you’re not just a cog in the wheel of the agency, you’re part of something bigger and they understand what that is I think is really important.

Drew McClellan:

In fact, I think that employees are hungry. So the analogy I use is I have a 24-year-old daughter and every day for many, many years, I repeated the same sentence, which was go upstairs and put on your pajamas and brush your teeth every single day. I didn’t stop after the first time because then the teeth would’ve never been brushed.

I’m not equating employees to children, but I do think the repetitive nature of a message, especially important messages that we want them to be able to internalize and own and understand is critical.

Lindsay Grinstead:

I totally agree. It’s that reinforcement. It’s that saying it once in your weekly staff meeting and then reinforcing it in an email. It just kind of becomes a mantra and then you ensure that all of your employees are walking to the same beat. It can be kind of culture building and it just helps define who you are as an agency, so that you can go out and attract the clients that you want to have, and everyone in your agency understands what it is you’re doing and what your goals are or what your mission is.

I also think it’s helpful in terms of it’s… I’m not going to say it’s particularly important, but it’s maybe more important when you have a dispersed or a geographically dispersed agency. So if you have a few different offices. I had a client who in one office, they were selling almost a completely different set of capabilities than another office because they hadn’t com effectively communicated who they are as an agency and what they specialize in.

All I could keep thinking is, gosh, imagine how much missed revenue they left if they’ve been sharing those capabilities across the different offices. They might have been able to find more business organically in their existing accounts. It seems like such a no-brainer and it’s amazing how many agencies don’t communicate to their employees and like you said, reinforce that message.

Drew McClellan:

So I’m hearing all the agency owners in my head as you’re talking, and they’re saying, “I’m so busy. I have a lot of things to do. I’ve already told them three times. Why can’t I just hire people who are smart enough or intuitive enough, or have better memories, so I don’t have to do that?”

Lindsay Grinstead:

That would be great. I think it’s human nature, and I think just as the agency owners are busy, so are your employees. I’ve found that one of the things that gets in the way of any type of change or messaging that you’re trying to kind of create internally is your daily work. In the agency world, our clients always take first priority. So whatever is going on in the agency owner’s world or in your employees world, whenever the client calls, everything else stops.

So the work ends up getting in the way, and so I think employees are equally busy. You just have to keep pounding that drum. It’s like that song that gets stuck in your head so that it stays top of mind, because it’s so easy when the phone is ringing and the client is screaming or whatever is happening to just go back into old habits and to just get the job done, get the clients, whatever the pressing need of the day is done. Then that message that the agency owner has been trying to reinforce kind of goes out the window or it slips your mind.

So I understand and also I have a four year old son. So I understand how frustrating it can be to have to keep saying something over and over again. But eventually it will stick. Eventually you will also get other advocates internally who can begin to do some of the heavy lifting for you as well, and have other advocates on your side who are continually reinforcing the message. At some point, it will become a muscle memory, and your employees will all know who you are and be able to articulate it and articulate it to out to the outside world.

Drew McClellan:

Yeah. We must become our employee’s ear worm is what you’re saying.

Lindsay Grinstead:

Yes.

Drew McClellan:

Yeah. So as I think you know, I wear two hats. So I still own my own agency because I think it’s important to stay, keep my hand in the game. But on the agency side, I apparently repeat myself so much that they actually made me a gift once that crystallized all of this sentences that I say all of the time. So I think you’re right. I think it’s important to have a message that you keep driving over and over. How does an agency owner decide which messages are important enough that those are the mantras they keep repeating?

Lindsay Grinstead:

That’s a great question. I think it’s probably a little different for every agency, but where we typically start or where I typically start with an agency owner is what do you specialize in? What makes you differentiated? What-

Drew McClellan:

You mean it’s not they’re great people?

Lindsay Grinstead:

I mean, everyone has great people. So I’m sure your people are better than the ones down the street.

Drew McClellan:

You mean it’s not that they’re a full service strategic marketing agency?

Lindsay Grinstead:

As great as that sounds, I am a huge proponent of focus and specialization. And I think the age of a client going to a one stop shop, it still happens for sure, but more and more, I hear call clients saying they want experts. They want someone who specializes. They want someone who knows whether it’s industry specific or it’s a specific capability. Something like social media marketing or event technology. A very, very specific thing that clients want that specialization.

It creates a headache, I think for agencies because the client then wants us all to play nice in the sandbox. But that’s a different topic for another day. But I do think it’s really important to focus and to specialize and to understand what is your differentiator. Clients don’t want to hear about your process.

They don’t care about what it is that you’ve developed that makes you better than agency X down the street. They really want to know what you bring to the table that no one else does. So I think that being able to focus… I use that word a lot, speaking of. I have had clients who actually roll their eyes when I say that word again, but it’s important.

Drew McClellan:

That’s your F word.

Lindsay Grinstead:

That’s my F word. I think it’s really important to hone your brand. I understand why it’s scary. I mean, I actually went through this as a business owner myself. I didn’t want to narrow my audience because I didn’t want to niche too much because I was worried I’d leave money on the table. I was worried that there were so many things that I could offer a client, and if I said I only did this one little piece of the pie, then what about all those other clients?

I mean, I understand why people don’t want to focus. You don’t want to get pigeonholed. You don’t want to narrow your customer base. That being said, you do have to hone your brand. You have to hone your brand. You have to focus your message. So once that’s kind of figured out, and it’s not a dramatic shift for a lot of agencies, and I’m not not saying that you then stop doing all of the other work, but it’s really still figuring out if you can articulate it clearly and then you can articulate it clearly to your employees, then you can articulate it clearly to your potential customers.

So when thinking about, God, there’s so many different things that you need to tell your employees, I’m a big fan of keeping it simple. So don’t overload. Don’t overload with a thousand capabilities and a mission statement, and vision, and values and all of those things. How can you create something whether it’s a sentence or a paragraph that an employee can understand and it truly defines who you are as an agency.

Drew McClellan:

Yeah. We go out into the field every year and we do primary research with CMOs about their relationships with the agency. And you’re absolutely right. The number one thing that is a deciding factor for them hiring and firing agencies is the niche or the expertise or the there of. And you’re right that for some clients, it is, “I want you to know my industry.” And for them you have at least 25% of all your clients sit in their industry. They want that depth. And for others, you’re right. They want specialists.

In fact, in the survey, it showed that most clients who responded to the survey had relationships between two and four agencies and they like it. They like having lots of different ideas and people around the table. What they don’t like is what you alluded to is that we bicker amongst ourselves.

Lindsay Grinstead:

Well, it is hard.

Drew McClellan:

Sure.

Lindsay Grinstead:

I mean, I have been in this situation where the client throws a creative idea out there and it’s kind of ripe for the taking. So in the event world, we would decide that it needed to be some sort of event. And the digital agency would decide it needed to be a digital campaign. It can be a bit of sharks in the water.

Drew McClellan:

It’s a little survivor-esque, right?

Lindsay Grinstead:

It is a little survivor-esque. But when it works, it can be brilliant and I do think that when you can get agencies… And a lot of that starts from the client side and cultivating a culture where the agencies aren’t threatened that one’s going to take their piece of business. So they stay in their lanes. They know what they’re doing. They’re all beating to the same drum, but they’re all bringing, like you said, creative ideas to the table.

When agencies can get along like that, and I had some clients who did a really good job at cultivating that kind of creativity that can happen when you have multiple different agencies and types of agencies and types of specialists sitting at the table. The results can be fantastic. And in the end, I was always… I was an account director. So part of my job was kind of leading the team.

I really felt strongly that to not get paranoid that all the agencies were trying to take our business, because ultimately if we can all work better together, we are all going to generate more revenue for the agency. It’s a rising tide. If the client is happy, they will keep giving all the agencies more business. Let’s partner together and this can only help us in the long run.

Drew McClellan:

Well, and I think the other side benefit to that is when you work well with other specialists, they become a new business conduit.

Lindsay Grinstead:

Totally. I was just going to say that you never know when that other agency that you’re working with or partnering with, they have a whole base of clients as well. So they will feel comfortable bringing you in and introducing you to other clients because they know that you’re not going to take their business. They need to be threatened. You’re only going to enhance what they’re already doing for their client.

Drew McClellan:

Yeah, absolutely. So for you, when you guys work with agencies or when you think about agencies listening, I think what I find fascinating is that this idea of differentiation and building a brand and all of that, that’s what we do for a living. And yet, man, it’s hard to do when you’re looking in the mirror and have to do it for yourself. What gets in the way of an agency from your experience seeing themselves accurately?

Lindsay Grinstead:

I think this is true for probably all of us or at least I know it’s true for me. We just get into whatever we are doing. We’re heads down. We’re doing the same thing. I think this can happen in your personal life. It’s happened to me at Tonic. It can happen to an agency. You’re meeting the client’s needs. You’re doing what you need to do to keep the agency growing and thriving. I think it’s two things.

One, I think it’s hard to step back and take the blinders off and see what’s really happening and really call a spade to spade. I also think a lot of people don’t… They know what their challenges are. They know what the problems are, but they almost need someone else to tell them. I’ve had clients say to me before, like I was talking to them through something or an observation I’ve had and they’re shaking their head. They’re nodding knowingly, closing their eyes saying, “I know, I know.”

Drew McClellan:

Right?

Lindsay Grinstead:

So whether it’s denial or there just isn’t time and capacity to deal with whatever that is. The status quo is easier, right? It changes what’s hard. So even though they know that there’s X, Y, Z going on, it’s easier to just to keep plotting through and plowing through and putting band-aids on trying to fix things versus taking a pause and a deep breath and being true and truly evaluating the situation at hand.

Drew McClellan:

Well, I think for a lot of agency owners, their work life is pretty much they just run from biggest fire to biggest fire trying to put out fires all day. So on the day that they actually have time to be thoughtful about that, they’re sort of wiped out and it’s hard to sort of gear back up for that sort of big picture thinking without either someone walking you through or a process.

I think it’s always difficult. It’s always easier to prescribe for someone else than it is to look at yourself because the consequences are also different. As you said, when you declare that you are going to only be the agency for pharma meds that work with menopausal women, I’m obviously just making that up, you are walking away from lots of other opportunities, but where agency owners have to get their head around is there’s so much opportunity in that space and you get to be head and shoulders above all of the other options if you declare that that is your area of expertise.

Lindsay Grinstead:

Well, what’s amazing once you define your area of expertise is there’s so many benefits to it. So the first thing, you can now have really focused sales and marketing efforts. You fish where the fish are, so you now know exactly who your target is. You know where they are, what conferences they’re going to, what blogs they read, what podcasts they listen to. So instead of doing this mass marketing campaign or having your sales people kind of scattered all over the place just hoping to find a target, you’re focused.

You can really be targeted in your campaigns. The other thing that’s amazing, and I know it’s… I first didn’t believe this, but you’ll have less competition. There’s less people targeting that specific medicine for menopausal women. That is very specific. So now you are the expert, which the client wants an expert in that. You’ll have less competition. Then you can also potentially even charge more. So if you think about it-

Drew McClellan:

Without a doubt. You could absolutely charge a premium, if you are an expert. It’s the brain surgeon versus general practitioner. Right?

Lindsay Grinstead:

Exactly. I mean, who doesn’t want to be able to have higher revenue with less competition? It’s just getting over that hurdle of this is all we’re going to do. And we might expand our capabilities at some point or we might expand into another line of the healthcare industry or different element of that or something, but having that focus and having the discipline to have that focus. That’s the other thing that I found challenging. I worked with a client recently and we’d honed their message. We were reiterating it to their internal employees. We are helping them communicate it externally. And then an RFP comes. It doesn’t fit in that focus.

Drew McClellan:

It’s a big juicy RFP, right?

Lindsay Grinstead:

Yeah. It’s a good one. Right? It’s a good one. It’s the eternal debate of do we take this even though it’s not in our sweet spot or it’s not where we want to be eventually. But God now we’re leaving potentially X million dollars of revenue on the table. It’s something that I grappled with when I was on the agency side and it’s something I’ve grappled with my clients and I get both sides.

It’s easy for me to say, as a consultant, “Turn down the RFP, stay on your niche. I’m not the agency owner who’s looking at the books thinking, “Man, we could really use that revenue.” So I understand and appreciate the challenges that come with that. But again, I’ll reiterate. I think it’s important to think about what’s the opportunity cost when you go after that RFP. Are you taking resources away from your sales and marketing efforts to develop your niche further? Or are you going to be… If it’s not in your sweet spot, are you going to be tapping people and really kind of stretching people into an area that they’re not experts in.

So in the end, sometimes those projects that seem so great or that their revenue, even though they’re not exactly what you do, they’re a double edged sword for sure.

Drew McClellan:

So I want to talk a little bit about how one finds the discipline to do that, but let’s first take a quick break and then we’ll come right back to that. One of my favorite parts of AMI are our live workshops. I love to teach. I love to spend two days immersed in a topic with either agency leaders, agency owners, or AEs and our AE bootcamps. But most of all, I love sharing what I’ve learned from other agencies from 30 years in the business and all the best practices that we teach.

If you have some interest in those workshops, they range from everything from money matters, which is all about your financial health of your agency to best management practices of agency owners, to new business, to AE boot camps and a plethora of other topics. Go check out the list and the schedule at agencymanagementinstitute.com/livetraining.

Okay, let’s get back to the show. All right. We are back and Lindsay Grinstead and I are talking about the riches and the niches idea of agency models. And that it’s a challenge and that it’s hard to walk away from our opportunities as they’re presented, but that there are obviously huge advantages and you’ve heard me preach these before.

As both Lindsay and I believe, sometimes repetition is a very good thing. So we’re going to tell you about it again. So when you work with a client and you’ve identified what their niche is, how do you help them? What are the tools or the practices or around the discipline of actually honoring? So on the one hand, I think it’s tough to figure out what your niche is. And let’s assume that that hard work has been done, but now you have to actually walk it out. How do agencies successfully do that? What does that look like?

Lindsay Grinstead:

So I hate to start with, I will say it’s not always easy, and I think that there are a lot of decisions and lot of things that you have to weigh when making these decisions. But I think the first thing like we’ve said is communicate it to your employees and then begin to communicate it externally. Have some sort of outbound marketing campaign. When opportunities come in, you’re constantly evaluating. You need to evaluate each opportunity to determine. Is this where we want to be? Is this what we want to be doing? And if not, what are the opportunity cost? What is the cost? What will this cost us? Not just financially, but what does this mean if we decide to go after this opportunity?

But I think it’s just important to continuously be in communication with your team and with your leadership team, with your account team and ensure that you as an agency owner are involved in those decisions because obviously there’s times that your employees don’t necessarily know all of what’s happening behind the scenes. And you might need to go after an opportunity even if it’s not in the niche. I don’t know. I just want to say, I know there’s not like a one size fits all solution because I think it is on a case by case basis.

And the one client I worked with that they decided to go for this RFP, even though they knew it wasn’t in their sweet spot, it was definitely not what they wanted to be. It wasn’t their one year, five-year, 10-year plan. But the revenue was too great to pass up. They spent three weeks heads down, got the RFP out and then didn’t ultimately win it because it wasn’t in their sweet spot. And the client could read through that in the RFP response.

So instead of having three weeks where they could have been honing their message or doing something that would’ve moved the needle further to help them develop their niche. They lost those weeks and those resources and that money going after an RFP that ultimately they didn’t win because it wasn’t in their sweet spot. So like I said.

Drew McClellan:

I’m guessing everyone listening has had that experience where they have this nagging thing in their gut that says this is not right or whatever, but the prize is so great or they’re slow and they’re looking at a layoff. So they’re scrambling and they chase after it. I think clients, A, to our discussion earlier, they want the expert, but B, they can also sense when you know it’s not right. So there’s a lot of, after looking back and going, “Oh, I can’t believe how much time and energy, and resource we wasted chasing that.” One of the things that I think agency owners undervalue is their own gut instincts.

Lindsay Grinstead:

I totally agree. I’ve been there.

Drew McClellan:

Yeah, we all have.

Lindsay Grinstead:

Most certainly we all had RFS and even won the business sometimes. And that tap dancing, I just remember doing so well, more than I’d like to admit. I think I thought I was doing a good job at it. The client saw right through me. I mean, the client knew. We were just plugging holes in that row boat so we didn’t sink. We were just trying to figure it out and get that project out the door. And that’s not right for the agency. That’s not right for the client. That’s not right for… It doesn’t make sense for anyone.

So I think that your gut instinct is so many times it’s right. And, I don’t know why we don’t listen to it more often, but like you said earlier, if you are an agency owner right now. You have survived the recession. You are doing something really right and you clearly have a good gut at instinct. So I think we just need to listen to it more.

Drew McClellan:

Yeah. Okay. So back to the discipline. So in terms of doing this, one of the things that I think agency owners need to remember, and I’m curious about your take on this is they’re not going to do it all right the first time. And this is an evolution, not a you flip the switch off on Friday and you’re an Italian restaurant and you turn the switch on Saturday, and you’re an Asian restaurant. It’s not that.

Lindsay Grinstead:

It is an evolution. And I think what I always try and talk to agencies about as well is I just call them working documents. I mean, this is our current working document, but let’s evolve this. Let’s make it your own like have each of your employees be able to describe what you do in their own way, so that it sounds authentic. And if something’s not working, let’s tweak it, let’s revisit. Let’s continue. We want to keep moving the needle forward. I don’t want to swing the pendulum from left to right like you said, or from Italian to Asian overnight, but there’s room in between to evolve whatever you’re trying to go.

Let’s evolve it, let’s continue to tweak it and hone it. You might even find that you need to refine it more. Or maybe you refined it too much. Let’s broaden a bit. I definitely agree that it’s an evolution. They’re like I said working documents that we continue to revise, and tweak, and hone.

The agency I worked at for many years, Jack Morton was really good at continuing to hone the brand message. And if you look back over the past 20 years, the core of what Jack Morton is hasn’t changed, but they just continue to tweak it and hone it, and then communicate that out to the employees. Or if you’re adding a new capability or skillset. That adds to the portfolio of services you can sell. But how does that affect your brand? How do you hone your message? It’s not something that we do once and walk away from. That’s also when it gets forgotten. It’s something that I think you continue to revisit and make sure that you’re either still tracking or let’s adjust as needed.

Drew McClellan:

Right. I think one of the other challenges of sort of embracing a niche is that many agencies have loyal employees that they have been with them for a long time that I call them stale employees who perhaps have not stayed current, or who do not have expertise in that niche. Now there’s a very real consequence to making this choice, right?

Lindsay Grinstead:

For sure. It is-

Drew McClellan:

Painful.

Lindsay Grinstead:

It is painful. It is painful with those… I’ve called them lifers. Those folks who’ve been there forever and have sold the same thing forever. And it can be a very painful process. I had a client who went through exactly this. I genuinely didn’t know if the employee was going to survive the change. I didn’t know if they were going to survive it. It’s a painful process. You have to do a lot of hand holding. A lot of communicating.

The agency owner had to go to a lot of meetings that maybe they wouldn’t have had to go to before, just to ensure that this account person was communicating effectively. Ultimately, I think like lots of account people, they looked at how they were getting compensated and realized I either get on board with this, or I need to jump ship.

It is really hard too, especially if you are now telling them they can’t sell something. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve seen that case, but if you’re trying to move what your core capabilities are, and someone’s been selling things that don’t fit into that new world or that new model.

Drew McClellan:

Or they can’t chase after the kinds of clients they’ve been successful at landing in the past is another, right?

Lindsay Grinstead:

Yes. Absolutely. So you’re changing the rules of the game on them and folks, folks honestly, either get on board or they don’t. And so many times I think, and I don’t mean to sound crass, but I think we’re so scared of someone leaving because they’re going to walk away with all these relationships they’ve cultivated over the years. More often than not, I’ve found that your clients have relationships with lots of people at your agency or multiple people.

Drew McClellan:

And if they don’t, you better make sure they do.

Lindsay Grinstead:

Yes, exactly. Exactly. So very rarely have I seen one person be able to get a bunch of business to walk, at least overnight. Maybe over time things evolve and change, but I think it’s important just like we were talking about earlier, I think we all get into things and have our blinders on and we don’t want to emit certain things. I think it’s important for an agency owner to be able to look at something very objectively. Evaluate all the accounts that those potentially stale employees have. Like you said, make sure there are other touch points within your agency. And if someone can’t get on board, they’re probably causing more distraction internally, and they’re not going to walk with all your clients.

It’s hard to admit that I think, but I’ve seen it more often than not that once those employees, if they don’t get on board, if they choose a different path or different direction or a different agency, things settle down internally. The turmoil is gone. It ends up being okay.

Drew McClellan:

Well, I think the other side of that is I think agency owners, it’s just a heartbreak to… They look at that person and think, “Boy, when I had to pay 10%, they stayed. When we had to work late on this project, they stayed. They were with me from the very beginning. I know their children.” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we get so emotionally connected to the people who we work with and who serve our agency and our clients. And we feel such a debt of gratitude and appreciation to them that I think that also gets in the way that emotion.

And I’m not discounting or thinking that we shouldn’t feel that way about our employees. I think it’s part of the humanity of the work, but it does sometimes get in the way of doing what’s best for the business. And sometimes I have to have frank conversations with agency owners that I get that you want to protect Chuck, but understand what Chuck is doing to the other 17 people who work here.

Lindsay Grinstead:

Right. It’s hard. In the agency world, you go through fires with your team. You go through battle with them. So I truly appreciate the bonds that are created through the years of working with one another. My husband owned a business in San Francisco and he was going through something like this, and someone said to him, “You can’t be philanthropic until you’re profitable.”

Drew McClellan:

That’s a great line.

Lindsay Grinstead:

Yeah. It’s kind of always stuck with me is as much as we want to be able to help, if it’s affecting the growth or the potential of your agency or the morale. That’s what a lot of this can do is it can affect the morale and you have that person who’s sitting in the staff meeting saying, “This is never going to work. This is totally bogus. Why are we doing this?” That seeps in and begin to have… All the other employees begin to question like, “Well, why are we doing this?” So ultimately it does more harm than we want to admit.

Drew McClellan:

Well, and this gets back to the start of our conversation in terms of the employees. They know long before an agency owner does often who’s pulling their weight or who’s pulling the ship in the right direction or the wrong direction. One of the things I think we forget as agency owners is that they’re looking at us and they’re not overtly, but at some level kind of questioning our leadership skills when we continue to allow someone who is not contributing to stay on the team.

Lindsay Grinstead:

100%. I mean, you definitely, I think, begin to question. You begin to question, why am I working this hard? That person is-

Drew McClellan:

Right. They’re leaving at five? Why am I here at eight?

Lindsay Grinstead:

Right. What’s the point? You’re letting them get away with it. Again, going back to parenting, you can’t let one kid get away with something and expect the other to abide by all the rules.

Drew McClellan:

Right.

Lindsay Grinstead:

Again, it is a hard fact to face, I think, but you want your other employees to know how important what they do is, and how much you value what they do. And when you let someone else kind of skate or be a nag, or bring the morale of an office down, you’re almost dismissing all of that hard work that your other employees contribute.

Drew McClellan:

Absolutely. Let’s say you guys are past the point of the clients nailed their niche. They’ve got these working documents you’ve talked about. Now, they actually have to tell the world who and what they are all about. Are you finding that there is… Agency owners always want the magic, easy bullet. So are there some tactics out there that agencies are employing that you feel are getting them on a prospect’s radar screen faster than others?

Lindsay Grinstead:

Good question. As I said earlier, I’m a big fan of the fish where the fish are. So it’s, again, different for every agency, depending on what specialization is. But finding what are your clients or potential clients reading? What are they listening to. Really getting under the hood of who is that client. What industry are they in? Where are they? And finding them. I think in this day and age, I think so many people tend to go to social first.

I actually take a step back before I dive into that. I want to make sure does that make sense for your brand? Is that where your clients are? Are your clients looking at Facebook like for work things, for potential agencies. So I really like to try and evaluate who it is you’re trying to reach and how can you reach them most effectively before getting into really specific kind of tactics if you will, if that makes sense.

Drew McClellan:

Yeah. Again, it’s fascinating because this is what we preach to our clients every day. And yet, sometimes we stumble and we do it for ourselves.

Lindsay Grinstead:

The other thing that I have found very consistently is clients want to grow. They want that rainmaker. They want that person who can bring in the big clients. They know everyone. So many times we neglect that you already have advocates. You already have existing relationships. They’re with your current clients. I really encourage my clients to focus on organic growth and are there new services you can offer your clients? Are there new clients within that organization you can service?

How can you broaden the scope of what you do within one client who already likes you? You don’t need to invent yourself to them. You don’t need to introduce yourself to them. This person is already paying you and likes what you do. So developing an organic growth strategy and sticking to it, and really ensuring that your account team has thought through different tactics of how to grow the book of business, or to be able to have those conversations with the client in terms of, if we had more business, maybe certain rates could be lower, or those types of conversations I think are so often, we want to go out and find that new business and land that new account and win that new RFP and find those new clients.

Then we forget, we have some relationships. Let’s nurture those and grow those. It lot more cost effective to grow existing business than it is to find that new business.

Drew McClellan:

Yeah. One of the metrics that I teach in our workshops is that 70% of your net new revenue should come from existing clients. So absolutely your new business focus should be on your existing clients as well as the new person that you want to take to the dance. No doubt. Well, and where I thought you were going with that, which I think is equally interesting to think about is when you have committed to the niche and when you have expertise, one of the things that I think makes you valuable in a new business setting is the connections you can make for prospects and clients. So when you’ve got a Rolodex… I just aged myself. When you have a network that is robust in a space, one of the most valuable things, I think an agency owner can do is be a connector.

Lindsay Grinstead:

Absolutely. Make yourself invaluable to your clients. I think that is a really great point. I’ve heard a lot of clients say that they want more… What is this agency going to bring me kind of above and beyond? What is that added value? And being an industry connector like that, that is a really great point.

Drew McClellan:

Yeah. But again, that all comes back to you. You can’t be the generalist and do that. You have to pick a lane.

Lindsay Grinstead:

Yes. Pick a lane and stay in the lane. And it’s hard. I know it’s hard.

Drew McClellan:

It is.

Lindsay Grinstead:

I’m sure agency owners are like rolling their eyes at me right now. I know it is hard.

Drew McClellan:

Yup. They’re like, “Stop beating the dead horse.” We both preach out of the same book. That’s for sure. I suspect we could probably talk for another three or four hours, but we have to wrap this up because people need to get back to their jobs and get to work. I know you do too. So what trends are you watching in the agency space? What do you think is something that’s coming up that agency owners need to really be thinking about that maybe is not on their radar screen yet?

Lindsay Grinstead:

I’m just going to say because I have to. One of those trends is specialization. I’ll leave it at that.

Drew McClellan:

Yep.

Lindsay Grinstead:

Another trend, and you discussed this actually on one of your podcast trend from a few weeks ago. I don’t want to say the death, but the days of the AOR are rapidly declining. So what does that mean as an agency owner? How are you keeping your pipeline full? How are you ensuring that you get that business year over year even if you’re not the AOR. How do you evolve your business model if you don’t have those insights into what business you might have, what repeat business you’ll have year over year? How do you staff for that? How do you charge for that? I think learning how to build your budgets and staff accordingly with the AOR relationships on the decline is something that I think a lot of agency owners are grappling with.

Drew McClellan:

Yeah. I think so too. I think many of them are clinging to the hope that it’s going to come back. I also think AOR relationships existed in a time when marketing was a lot simpler. There were fewer channels. So the need for not industry specialization, but sort of niche channel specialization just didn’t exist. We could be a full service agency at 12 people or 15 people. But today our research shows that when an agency says they’re full service, if they’re under a hundred people, the clients go, “I don’t really think so,” because they don’t believe this. I think you’re right.

Lindsay Grinstead:

Right. And as we discussed earlier about clients wanting to have their specialists and they’re all sitting around the table together. If you think about that, you could have half a dozen to a dozen agencies potentially sitting at that table. The client is not going to have an AOR with all of them. And not every project.

There might be other projects that need someone outside of those six to 12 agencies and they have to hire someone else to come in and kind of be a sharpshooter for whatever that project is. I would recommend, instead of hoping that it comes back, it’s figuring out, so what is this new normal and how do we… In the event world, at least there’s a lot of freelancing contract work because the business ebbs and flows. You can have a small team kind of doing the heavy lifting on an event for the first few months.

Then as you get closer and closer, you have to staff up to where you might have 100 plus people on your team by the time the event actually happens. You don’t have to carry all those people on staff. Whether it’s a freelance model or you budget differently or you charge more, I don’t know what that looks like, but I think to figure out what the new normal is when we don’t have these AORs is something I would encourage agency owners to focus on.

Drew McClellan:

Yeah. I think you’re so right. I think the reality is today, the AOR benefits the agency, but it doesn’t actually benefit the client. They’re better off to have more options and to bring specialists in as they need them.

Lindsay Grinstead:

Yeah, for sure. The only way I was able to have some success with, I guess, client loose AORs, if that makes sense was you could ensure a dedicated team to a client.

Drew McClellan:

Right.

Lindsay Grinstead:

So that was kind of a sales tactic I would use in terms of, if I’m just going project by project, I can’t guarantee that this creative director you love will be available when that next project comes around. If we had some sort of guaranteed revenue or contract or something, that was the only way I was able to find a way around it. And even then the client was a little hesitant.

Drew McClellan:

Right. I think they sort of know they have us over a barrel. So they can just sort of say, “Well, I actually want that one or I’m going to go somewhere else.” You know what, we’re accommodating enough as an industry that we go, “Okay, I’ll figure out how to make that work.” Unfortunately.

Lindsay Grinstead:

I know. They see right through it. I like to think that I had some semblance of control there, but you’re right, the clients know.

Drew McClellan:

Yeah.

Lindsay Grinstead:

They always know.

Drew McClellan:

Dang those clients. Lindsay, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and your insight. I’m grateful that you took the time to do this today. Thanks.

Lindsay Grinstead:

Thank you, Drew. This has been really fun.

Drew McClellan:

If folks want to learn more about Tonic and the work that you do, what’s the best way for them find you guys?

Lindsay Grinstead:

They can find us on our website at tonicconsultinggroup.com. We are also on LinkedIn. So Tonic Consulting Group. And you can reach me at [email protected].

Drew McClellan:

Believe it or not, that wraps up another episode of Build a Better Agency. Man, the time goes by quick. Love sharing this content with you and I love spending the time with you. So thanks so much for listening and sticking all the way to the very end. And for those of you that did stick around to the end, I’ve got a special new twist for you. So many of our podcast guests have books or other things that really expand upon the information and knowledge that they share with us during the podcast.

So we’ve reached out to them and we’ve asked them if they would like to give away some of their books or whatever classes, whatever it may be. And we’re going to throw some AMI things in there as well. We’re going to have some AMI swag and we’re going to actually give away some workshops. So all you have to do to be in all of the drawings, you only have to do this once is go to agencymanagementinstitute.com/podcastgiveaway. So again, agencymanagementinstitute.com/podcastgiveaway.

Give us your email address and your mailing address, and every week you will be eligible for whatever drawing we’re doing. We’re going to change it up every week, so we’re going to have a lot of variety and we will pop an email to you if you are the lucky winner. You can also go back to that page and see who won last week and what they won, so you can see what you’re in the run for.

So if you have any questions about that or anything agency related, you can reach me at [email protected] and I will talk to you next week. Thanks.

Speaker 1:

That’s all for this episode of AMI’s Build a Better Agency, brought to you by HubSpot. Be sure to visit agencymanagementinstitute.com to learn more about our workshops, online courses, and other ways we serve small to mid-size agencies. Don’t miss an episode as we help you build the agency you’ve always dreamed of owning.