Using systems and processes to make better decisions for the agency with Misty Larkins

Running an agency can be a lonely proposition, but it doesn’t have to be. We can learn how to be better faster if we learn together. Welcome to Agency Management Institute’s Build a Better Agency podcast presented by White Label IQ. Tune in every week for insights on how small to midsize agencies are surviving and thriving in today’s market. With 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant.

Please welcome your host, Drew McClellan.

Hey, everybody. Drew McClellan here from Agency Management Institute with another episode of Build a Better Agency. You know, back when I was an agency employee, long before I own my own job, I will admit that I was one of those employees that really bucked against systems and processes. I think it’s part of my personality. I don’t like to be told what to do or how to do it.

But I also think that because I came up on the creative side as a writer, I also believed that the more system and process that was put around my work, the more constructive it was. I know today that that’s not the case, but I think a lot of our employees really wrestle with the idea of system and process.

And so for many of you, because many of you are also not somebody who loves to document systems and processes, particularly if your agency is smaller odds are you have a lot of the way the work is done in your shop is through tribal knowledge, that everybody kind of carries it in their head, which of course is dangerous.

If somebody is out sick or on vacation or has a baby and is gone for three months. And also what ends up happening is, rather than the agency’s way of doing work that ends up being Babette’s way and Bill’s way and Drew’s way and Mary’s way, and that there’s no consistency. And so depending on your role in the agency, if you work with lots of different people who sort of dictate the way work gets done, it’s easy for that to be really confusing and frustrating.

But more than anything else, it is very, very difficult for an agency to scale in any significant way without defining some of the ways we get work done. So some systems and processes around how work moves through the agency, and it might be everything from how do we onboard a client. How do we handle discovery, meetings with a client to, you know, how do we how do we quality control our work?

How do we check to make sure that there are no typos or other stupid mistakes before it gets to the client, whatever it may be, that there is great benefit and value to actually thinking about and developing some boundaries. I think of them, you know, the bumpers that they put up in bowling alleys for little kids. Think of it that the system in a process is kind of those bumpers that keep you from sort of getting into the gutter and, or, or hopping lanes altogether.

And it kind of keeps you in the lane, not where you need to be. And so that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Our guest, is Misty Larkins. She and her agency, or she has helped her agency go from 3 or 4 people. They’re over 20 people today. And a lot of the work that she has done at the agency has been about how to modify the way they work.

So that people can come and go, and the work still gets done at a quality level that they are happy with. So we’re going to talk a little bit about how they how they went about it. What were some of the barriers that got in the way of that? And again, as you as you’re listening to our conversation, I want you to be thinking about your shop.

And if some of your key people went down for the count with, you know, whooping cough or won the lottery or fill in the blank, but we’re going to be gone for a month with very little notice. What would happen in the shop? That’s what I want you to be thinking about as you listen to this episode, and as you think about how you want to grow your agency and what might be in the way of that growth.

Okay. All right. Let’s welcome Misty to the show. Misty, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us. Our thanks, drew, thanks so much for having me. So to give everybody a little bit of your background and sort of the, the relevance story a little bit to give them some context before we dig into the conversation. Sure, sure.

Yeah. So my background is around 20 years in the marketing advertising sales space, something different companies, but something in that kind of area and all of them. I’ve worked in both the private and public sector, in non-profits, everything from very small startups through to large corporations like PepsiCo. So across the board, I would like to say a little bit of everything is my background.

And then, you know, the the relevance origin story is, is an interesting one, kind of born from a few different areas but centered around the idea that, you know, PR r in particular, and marketing in general often suffers from a lack of measurability and, you know, ability to show return on someone’s investment. And I think there will always be that nebulous area.

But it was kind of founded with the idea that, you know, maybe there could be a more transparent way to do things and to deliver things to show value. And so that’s that’s kind of where it started back in. Gosh, I think 2000 and I want to say 2012. And then I joined the relevance team in 2020 19.

Yeah. 2019. About six years ago, really as employee number 3 or 4, really successful company already. And it really my job quickly evolved into how do we take this business that is successful and turn it into something that’s scalable, turn it into something that is more easily able to repeat success over and over? How do we hone in on what’s really great?

So that’s been my role at relevance in the six years that I’ve been here is, you know, my background is in client service. When it comes to that. So really taking what I knew about that and my, I guess, my affinity for processes and making, you know, making everything better than the way I found it. And that’s really been my background there.

And relevance as an agency has evolved over time to hit on a lot of different areas, but all centered around how do we help businesses that are usually not the top dog in their space, but they want to be like, how do we help those businesses be part of their growth story? How do we find the things that make it special?

And for the gasoline on the fire? So that’s kind of me and relevance in a nutshell. So relevance when you got there was what kind of an agency, what were they doing at that time? Yeah. So it’s primarily centered around PR, so helping brands get mentioned in publications that matter to their industry or to their overall goals of a business as a whole.

So places like Forbes Inc, entrepreneur, you know, like the big hitters in the in the business area, mainly around building the credibility of businesses that might be doing great in their space, but really wanted to grow into industry owners. So it was like helping them take what they had and get that that kind of like third party stamp of approval that they could not only put on their website, but that they could use in their sales collateral.

And like I said, they were doing a great job. And I think that that’s really based on the fact that, you know, the two founders of the company had spent about 15 years forming relationships with publications and contributors and editors, like they had a really solid foundation. And so they were able to work within that network to get these businesses solid results.

And like, I kind of mentioned before, it really worked because PR in particular, and this is no shade at all on any, you know, kind of more traditional PR agencies because they think all different kinds of agencies have a space here and do great work. But a common criticism that we got was that they people had these PR agencies and they said that they were pitching, but they weren’t seeing any results.

Right? So they felt like people felt like they were throwing all this money out. They weren’t getting anything for it. And so our kind of value proposition was, well, we if you want to be in the Wall Street Journal, I might not be your girl, right. Like I might not be that fit for you, but I know solidly that I can get you in publications that are going to help you build that credibility.

If we work within the network and, you know, like you kind of listen to the things that we say and have the type of content that we can promote on your site. So that’s when I joined. That was the foundation that relevance was built on. Okay. And so that was 3 or 4 people. And we’ll fill in the middle in a second.

How how big is relevance today. So today we have yeah we had about 20 people now sold our full time capacity. And then we work with a series of contractors and freelancers obviously to fulfill parts of our business. Yeah, just like everybody does. But yeah. So we have about 20 full time employees on the relevant side. And then we actually have a sister agency that branched off as well that has about six people there.

And a couple other things going on in different areas. But yeah, relevance itself is about 20 full time people. So you talked a little bit about that. You’re sort of process oriented. So when you got to relevance what what did the process documentation look like? What what how were our how are they getting the work done. Yeah.

That’s really cute that you think we had process documentation and I was teeing that up for you. I know, I know agencies and process are not always handed. Yeah. Yeah. And you know I think that, you know, not just agencies but businesses in general. Right. This first few years are hard. They’re hard. It’s you know, it’s it’s a race to figure out what your, you know, your ideal client profile is and what your value proposition is and how you how do you get business in the door, right.

Like the the push is to get the dollars in the door. And then later you can worry about, okay, like how do we retain them? How do we figure out how to deliver this more efficiently, more effectively. So yeah, when I joined, you know, we were stay relevant was just coming out of that. Okay. We have we have a great base of clients now we kind of know what our story is.

We know we have to offer. But there was no look at the time. Everything was done in spreadsheets. If it was done at all, everything was done in spreadsheets. You know, all communication, knowledge, tribal knowledge. There was that there was no repository of, okay, like, why did this work? What? There was even no evaluation across the current client of what makes this client a good client.

And is it truly a good client, or is it only a good client on the surface in terms of revenue, but not in terms of margin, right. Because they can be very different things out. There was not really a process by which anybody was like codifying or evaluating or interpreting all of the data that that we had. And so really step one for me was a full evaluation of the last two years of clients that we had had, and taking a deep dive and looking like, are these, you know, kind of putting them on a matrix, are these, you know, a high touch clients or they find margin clients?

Are they low touch clients or are they low margin clients because there’s room in the quadrant for all types of clients. But obviously everybody wants the low touch, high margin clients, right? Right. Yeah. And if you can’t identify a which clients those are on your roster and be what connects them and makes them that way, then there’s no way that you can go out and find more of them.

Right? So that was really the first project that I undertook at relevance. In addition, I was managing clients as well, like helping on the client side. That’s really the first thing that I did was, you know, kind of try to take that knowledge and pinpoint what which of the clients that are the ones that we should be looking for more as.

And then from there, it really just kind of then turned into, okay, like, what about those clients? What were the things that we did process wise, you know, like, what are the things that we should maybe try to do better? And it’s really kind of blossomed out from there into what we have today. So that that’s okay.

Great. I now know who my target audience is, but how do you how do you go from having no process to starting to define process? And, you know, I would guess that if you were an agency of 3 or 4 people, you had a rock star or two. And at that point in the agency, the owners were like, oh my God, if Babette quits, we’re screwed.

Like we have to, right? Right. We can’t have that person leave. And, you know, obviously one of the challenges with an agency is, you know, unless you own the joint, odds are everybody leaves sooner or later. So how do you how do you not build a business? I I’ve seen many agencies have these jerry rigged job positions because John happened to be good at four things that were absolutely unrelated to each other, but they created a position around him.

And then when John leaves, they’re like, oh, we need to find that unicorn again. Right? And that magical unicorn does not exist. So now I have to hire four people or three people or whatever it is. So how did you go about identifying, moving from sort of, personality or person, skill based agency to an agency that basically you or I could swap in or out and the work would still get done and get done at the quality level that you’re happy with.

Yeah. So we call that so on on in our in at relevance we call that dragonfruit right. So yeah. And not just on the people in the skill side we call it dragonfruit in terms of like what we can do. Right. Because I think there’s also when you have a bunch of connections in, in the agency world, whether it’s a publication or whatever, where you have an established that it’s things like maybe you know, someone who’s willing to do you a favor occasionally, right?

You can’t really use that as part of a case study, because that’s dragons. Like, it’s not even apples to apples. I made a joke and I was like, that’s apples to dragon fruit. We can’t do dragon fruit all the time. So it was similar to that. So the first thing that we did was, okay, we we took a step back and we started writing down, which sounds very barbaric, like just like writing down what are the exact things that we did when we started.

Right. Like what did the like? Did we have a formal kickoff? Right? Did we how did we build that relationship with the client to to what it is today? Okay. So like there’s this there’s this magic in science, right? Like there’s relationship and then there’s the thing. So we we started writing down and documenting the process from start to finish where we could.

And we went back with clients that were existing and tried to figure out what that was to you. So it’s like, okay, this is the way that we, you know, during the kick off, these are the kind of things that we do. Right? And we created an actual documentation and the kickoff process that we now use for every single client.

Obviously, each individual, you know, account strategy has the opportunity to layer on their own relationship building tactics interact, but they have a process that they can, you know, that they can follow to make sure that they’re getting all the information to to set the account up for success. So that’s kind of like step one was like kind of like reverse like doing an autopsy.

You get so kind of exactly situations both that had gone well and once I said ended poorly. Right. Because we had examples of goals. And as we were doing that, we figured out, you know, the first thing that we figured out is that the accounts that did really well, there was an established way that we communicated with those clients.

Right? It was kind of like the Goldi, like Goldilocks, like not too much, but not too little. Right? Like identifying these are the things that clients like to hear is follow up. These are the things these are the touchpoints. Right. So we we started with accounts and then started like establishing okay. Like taking all of the knowledge that I had for managing accounts for, for decades.

Right. And then the person who now leads our account to in the same thing. Right. She had been in in brand management, account management for a really long time. So we started like just taking that knowledge. And the first thing was to get it on paper, right, was, was to do that and then create a list of parameters.

Right. So everything that we did started as document. And so as you were documenting, were you documenting what actually was being done or was it aspirational? Both. Right. So it was both okay, this is what’s happening now. And this is what we think works. And this is what we think doesn’t work. And this is how we wish it would have gone right.

So right. And as we were doing that first was the process of documenting. And then the second layer of that, once we felt like, okay, we think we have a little bit of a process. Next came the tools, right. So the next thing was, okay, what in a perfect world, if budget were no, you know, there were no limit.

Like what tool would we look for to help make this better? Because rules to us as an agency wasn’t necessarily adding a lot of people. Right. Because we weren’t to the stage yet where we could say, oh yeah, if we add we had ten people, they can immediately handle this much more and we can grow our business. This much know is figuring out how can we make each person that we add to the team the most effective and efficient possible, so they can handle as much as possible without risking burnout?

Right? So after the process came the tools. And the first thing that we we added was a project management tool because we didn’t have one, we were using spreadsheets, right. And we were handling a lot of content, whether that was internal content that we were writing for, for brands, for their blogs or external content that we were pitching out.

Right. And, and in, in kind of the PR world, especially ones where we’re like kind of pitching fully, fully incepted articles, right? Or we’re saying, hey, this is something that really fits in your slimline look. We did all the work for you. It’s you’re not going to get in trouble with your editor. You know, it doesn’t come off as promotional when you’re pitching articles like that.

The worst thing that you can do is pitch it to two different people and have it publish under too violent. And now you have duplicate content, right? And that was the first thing that I said when I saw that spreadsheet. I was like, how do you make sure that that doesn’t happen? Right? And they’re like, well, we there, we just hold off.

And I was like, well, hope it’s not a strategy, right? It’s not a strategy. Right? And you need something a little more than help. So we we implemented an actual like project management software and, and a fully architected like we did a custom build through we use Clickup. That’s, that’s the, you know, the one that we used for hours.

But we implemented a way by which we could actually track articles through the process. And it had checks and balances and not gone. Not that would we haven’t had any issues at all with kind of content winding up in the wrong place since then. So we did that. And that was probably, I think I believe was six, 6 to 9 months after I joined the team that we kind of did the research.

And then, you know, that took a couple of months to figure out what was going to be the best solution for us and then getting everyone onboarded. But it wound up being a really, really good decision. So that was kind of the start of our process. Was the documenting and then the tools that we add to it.

So at what point do you, first of all, was that somebody full time job? Because that sounds like a lot of labor. No okay. No I no, no, that was and that’s you know, I think that that’s another challenge that small businesses have is like, you know, you want to do these new things, but you any time you want to, whether it’s adding a new service to your lineup, I feel like so often you have to have proof of concept before you’re willing to dive in, right?

So it’s like you find someone on your team who might have a little extra capacity or winds up being, you know, like my responsibility to, like, test it out. And then once we have proof of concept that we can make it work and it fits within our service and then we can take the plunge and hire either a specialist or, do you know, external training on it that know, like all of that, all of the research was was really done by me.

And then by by Emma who runs our account team. You know, a lot of a lot of the new services and the trial and error has, has really been on us for a long time to do. And as, as we were making, you know, kind of a lean team. So I wish I was somebody full time job to do that.

But I was not listening there like, oh, this sounds great, but I don’t have the person or I don’t have the by. And I think it’s one of those things that this is a place where a lot of agencies get stuck and, and, and it’s hard to grow when there’s Drews way and Misty’s way and Mary’s way and Bill’s way.

And until there’s that agency way and there’s an understanding that we all must do it the agency way, whether it’s whether your way was better or not is sort of irrelevant. It’s like, this is the way we’re going to do it. So. So what did those like, at what point did you start folding in the team and helping them understand that the way they had done the work in the past wasn’t going to be the way they did the work moving forward?

Yeah. That is you are absolutely right. That is one of the most difficult things I think, in taking taking an agency further. And I can see where it’s easy to get stuck there. So I think that, you know, our approach was to we were a small team, right. So it wasn’t like we had a ton of people to, to, I guess, feel a certain kind of way about how we were going about it.

But, you know, after we made the decision to be like, we need this tool or we need this to be a more formalized process, you know, we outlined the benefits of it, why we thought it was the way it should happen. You know, any potential fall back or, or setbacks that we could see coming from it. And then we discussed it as a team and everybody had a chance to weigh in.

But once everybody bought and that was it, right. Like we weren’t having any further conversations about it. We weren’t going to go back and try to reinvent the wheel like we were going to forge forward with this. And I think that it it wasn’t without its challenges, like we all had to learn together through that. But I think that having that touch point of saying like this is what we all agreed, and that’s now the way that you have to do it is really I hate to ever be like an absolute.

It’s like it’s my way or that this way or that way. But at some point, right, like if your goal is to truly take something and it’s not exponential growth, but like get past the hump and truly make it something that that is sustainable no matter who’s in the driver’s seat, you have to make those choices. And sometimes you have to draw a line in the sand about how.

And we still have those conversations, right? Especially as we grow. Right. Like we have we have an account team that manages, like our relationships with our clients. They’re doing. They’re the architects of strategy. Right. And then we have an editorial team that works with all of the writers, whether they’re in-house or freelance, on whatever pieces of content that we’re doing.

And and they’re you know, there can be some silos and they’ll come up with ideas that might make their lives easier, but they don’t have the perspective of, like, well, this is going to make this entire team’s life harder. And unfortunately, they’re the revenue center of our entire organization. So if we’re making their lives harder, that’s counterintuitive for how we want to move forward.

So like, you’re just going to have to understand that there’s a reason why we’re doing it this way. So yeah, I mean at some point the but but I think that for us, we try to create like a psychologically safe work environment where people can raise the questions and so long as they’re done in like a respectful way that is, is thought out, that’s fine in that space.

And then the expectation is we explain to them, this is why I’d like maybe give them some context, especially if they’re no, not as familiar with the evolution of the business. And we give them that context and then we all agree to move forward. Right. And I think that creating that safety around transparency and like having conversations has helped stave off any like serious pushback, I think.

Not that we don’t still have, you know, conflict or differences of opinions, but I think it’s really helped with the the communication in the team work for us. So for you, so you so you started this process when you were 3 or 4 people. How when you’re building it for 3 or 4 people, do you know that it is scalable.

So and you bump into some things where it wasn’t scalable. Yeah. Yeah. So I think when, when we were first building it, it’s going to sound morbid, but it was always, could someone do this if I were hit by a bus. Right. Like if I, if I were to walk out when we jokingly then turned it into, we had an employee who we love to is in our editorial team later on and decided to get married and then quit his job.

They both quit their jobs and he wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail for like eight months. And so then it turned into if I get hit by a bus that it turned into if I decide to go hike the Appalachian Trail, right, right, right. Couldn’t somebody do that? So that was kind of our litmus test. Right. Is is there knowledge that is missing in this process or some specialized skill set that someone that we could reasonably see hiring right, with maybe both a couple years, an experience and then like it could someone straight out of college do this if they were given the right instructions?

Right. So I think that it’s hard, right? It’s hard when you’re especially our team was highly skilled lots of experience. So yeah. So using that as a litmus test was hard at the beginning. And we definitely had to make adjustments and learn when we did start growing the team, especially when it came to more, you know, newer people who didn’t have a ton of not just working experience but but job experience.

General. Yeah. And that has that has always been and still continues to be our toughest, our toughest hire. And it’s hard because I want everybody has to have a first shot. Right. Somebody has to give people an opportunity. And being located where we are, we have a great journalism school and I would love to keep talent here and even if it’s only for a little while, right.

Like, even if we’re only a stepping stone on their journey, I would still like for that to be something that we do. But it has always been our toughest position to feel like we’re equipping them with the tools. Like we have a very extensive onboarding and training process. It’s about a month and a half of training before we kind of even let them have a client of their own.

But it was very difficult and we had to make a lot of adjustments as we grew. It’s easier, right? As the team grew, we got better at it. Like we got we formalized better processes. But yeah, I mean, like there was always that like the biggest one was, oh, I didn’t I didn’t know that. I think that that was something that was just in your head that you knew.

And just like you thought that everyone would know that and you didn’t write like not everybody did. So, yeah, I mean, like, there was a lot of things that we had to adjust and, and we took our like I said, our training process was probably around 2 to 3 weeks in the beginning. And now it’s over a month and a half to make sure that new employees feel equipped to do to do the job, because it’s a lot right?

Like we’re still a lean team, even even where we’re at, we still every position I, I jokingly say like, we’re like a professional sports team, right? Everybody is is operating hopefully at the top of their of their capabilities. And so we still ask people a lot that, but we hope that the training that we have and the work that we’ve done to make those processes very clear, easy to follow, makes them feel equipped to do the job.

I’m gonna take a quick break. When we come back, I want to talk a little bit about sort of the idea that where’s the creativity when you’re following system and process and, you know, and where’s the magic? Because, you know, you want employees who are innovate of and who are thinking outside of the box. And so how would you keep them in a box?

Do you also encourage that out of the box thinking? So let’s take a quick break. Then we’ll come back and and jump into that. Hey everybody, just want to remind you before we get back to the show that we have a very engaged Facebook group. It’s a private group just for podcast listeners and agency owners that are in the am I community.

And to find it, if you’re not a member, head over to facebook.com, slash groups, slash b a b a podcast. So again, facebook.com, slash groups slash baby podcast. All you have to do is answer a few questions to make sure that you are an actual agency on our leader, and we will let you write in. And you can join over 1700 other agency owners and leaders.

And I’m telling you, there’s probably 10 or 15 conversations that are started every day that are going to be a value to you. So come join us. All right. We are back. And we are talking about sort of the idea of when you’re a small shop, how do you go from two or 3 or 4 people to 20 plus people in a way that is scalable, that’s sustainable, and that allows people to come and go, and we’ll talk about that in a minute.

But right before the break, I said, you know, I, I think one of the things, one of the reasons why agencies think of systems as like a foul word is because it sounds very much like a formula. And everybody who’s in the agency space likes to think that we are creative and we innovate, and we come up with unique things for clients and all of that.

So how do you balance the desire as marketing people or PR people or creatives to create something new, and yet have a system or a process that you have to follow? Yeah, yeah, that that definitely is hard. I think for me, for me, it’s always been a struggle to write because I feel like I have a very, like creative side of my brain.

And I personally, I joke that when people think PR, they think like sex in the city, or they when they think of advertising. Do you think of Mad Men? In my life, I so much of my life is spent in spreadsheets, but I’m like, do you know how to build formulas? Because you’ll really love this job, right? But I think that for us, luckily, like in the in the PR aspect specifically right there, there is the element of, oh, like, how do I create an angle that’s both going to be timely and exciting, but also what this brand wants, right, like is you’re constantly doing like what does the brand want versus what do editors

want. And journalists and then like, what do people actually want to read. And so like there’s a creative aspect there that I think people who have that urge to kind of like create something that sets. Is that right? Like or at least a can. Similarly, when we got into doing creating more, you know, content for brands, there’s there’s a certain creativity.

I think, in understanding and learning how to speak a brand’s language and how to connect with consumers, like creating the type of content that actually gets read. That’s not just a filler piece to to satisfy some algorithmic formula to get them to show up, which is important to. Right. But like, yeah, we want we want to balance. I’d like great content that people actually want to read and helps move them along the path to purchase and, and then content that, you know, gets picked up by news outlets.

And so that’s like one piece of it. And I think for another side of it. Right. Like, yes, we have processes and we have them for a reason, but we always I value innovation. Right. So I think that marketing in general on growth marketing in particular is a constantly moving and evolving thing. There’s always something new to learn.

There’s always something new to test. There’s always something, you know, new that you can try. So for a lot of people, the ability to constantly iterate on things and try new things and learn new things satisfies that kind of like learning and growth element. Now, will I say that? Well, you know, we’re not necessarily a we’re not a, you know, a New York PR firm that pre-COVID was taking people out to dinner.

And we like doing these experience type marketing. And we might not be a good fit for people who, you know, that that that is something that sells them intrinsically. But I think that the type of people that fit well here are highly competitive because we like to win. And I think anything having to do with search or landing PR hits is very competitive and fulfills that, and that kind of like reward center in your brain and and yeah, so, so people who are competitive and people who want to be true partners.

Right. Because I think that the nice thing about working with lots of different types of businesses across different industries is also that you get to learn so much about different areas, like, I never thought that I would know so much about even being a woman, about women’s health and women’s reproductive health. But we had a telehealth client that we worked with for several years, and we have, you know, clients in finance and banking and clients and travel and tourism.

So I feel like it doesn’t get old because you’re constantly learning something new, whether it’s about a new industry or a new type of client that you’re looking to attract. So I think that there are. Yes. Well, there are reasons that we have processes and things that need to be followed, otherwise it would be chaos. I just still think that there’s room for kind of like that creative type of thinking within the parameters of that.

It can be a hard balance. So yeah, it is a balance for sure. You know, I think one of the other challenges sort of along that same vein is, you know, for a small to mid-size shopper in. Yes, you’ve you’ve tripled in size in the last six years. So, you know, that’s adding 3 or 4 positions a year.

You know, I think particularly today’s younger employees have aspirations of meteoric growth in their career for both title and role and salary. So in a relatively flat organization, like most small agencies are most small and mid-sized agencies are. Do you just know that you’re going to have some senior people that just tap out, because there’s other opportunities that you can give them?

How do you like you said, it’s hard to hire the kids right out of school. It’s great to have somebody that has some some connections of their own, a Rolodex of contacts, people who they actually can call favors in for all those sort of things. How do you keep your more senior people satisfied when you’re not a 300 person agency and they can’t go from Junior Woodchuck to Woodchuck to senior woodchuck, you know, in a year or two?

Yeah, yeah. It’s that is it’s still a struggle of ours. Like to be completely transparent. I think we have a core team of people who have been here kind of since the beginning like that. The OG people who were here when we were the original, like the core work still here, right? Like we’re we’re all still here and have been here for a really long time, but we kind of struggled, like you said, with that, with that middle layer.

And I think that we’ve done a couple things right is one, we tried to develop a way that that people could see a trajectory, even if we are a relatively flat organization, that they could have different or more responsibilities. You know, they could whether they wanted to, you know, if managing people was a part of their their aspirations.

Like, we have a couple of those opportunities. But we tried to be really transparent during the hiring process. Right. And explain, like, listen, if your idea of professional growth looks like a ladder, this might not be the place for it, right? If your idea of growth looks like, you know, learning new things and taking on different responsibilities and you know, with, hey, that that is, is in in conjunction with that, then we can be a good place for you, right?

I think that the, the, the benefits and the people who are going to do well here have a different mindset about success. Right? And it isn’t necessarily correlated with with titles. It’s more correlated to impact it to be completely frank. But those people are very hard to find. And even people who say that they don’t care about the titles, they do care like they they absolutely do care.

And I think that that has been a it’s been a hard pill for us to swallow, I think understanding that. But I, I think that for us, it was a little bit of, you know, how we recruit people, but then also setting our expectations differently internally. Right. Like knowing that not everybody’s going to stay forever. And that is okay if we are, you know, helping them to become the best version of themselves or helping them to become a better version of themselves, and we are a stopping point along their journey, then that’s fine, right?

Like, we we we can take pride in that. And, you know, as long as we continue to create an environment that is that is welcoming and fulfilling, then we’ll attract the right kind of people. And if we have the processes in place to to train those people up, then then everything’s going to be okay, right? And I think once as soon as we made that mentality shift, like, of course we want to keep we want to keep everybody right.

We want to keep our star performers. We want to keep we, you know, we want to we want to do that. But the reality is, like even marketing and advertising as a whole, there is a there is a cliche that the only way to move up is, is to move over, right? That it’s to agency habits to do that.

That’s a just a common, commonly accepted, a commonly accepted thing within the industry. So it’s like it’s a little bit of that. But yeah, I think a lot of it was a mentality shift in figuring out how to show people what growth looks like here. In a way that’s tangible, you know, so we put together ways it’s like, okay, like this is the type of experience that that the next role, you know, this is what they do and this is what you need to know.

And this is the, you know, band for that. So like we, we we put that on actually on paper we didn’t have it before. But then yeah, it was mostly about honest conversations for us. And and it continues to be a challenge that we’ll have. And I think we’ll continue to have just because we don’t we don’t want to be 100% right.

Like that’s just not who we are in our core at work, who we want to be. We want to we want smart growth versus kind of like rap, super rapid growth. But I think too, it gets back to that. This is why you have to have system and process when you acknowledge everybody’s not going to stay forever, you know, and and even for those of us that have been in the agency space for a while, you know this adage of, you know, you’d work someplace three, 4 or 5 years and then move on to a new role and a new salary and all that that’s been around for eons.

That’s not to do that. And I think sometimes we forget those of us that are in leadership positions. We we sort of look at younger employees and go, oh, they’re not as loyal as they used to be and blah, blah, blah. And the reality is, when we were their age, we were no more loyal than they were. We did the same thing, right?

We you know, when you talk to an agency person, odds are for the most part, they have not been at one agency for their entire professional career. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that the only the only difference to me is that now with remote work and the internet, it just makes it even easier, right? Like it makes it even easier.

And so like, there’s more opportunity for people to be mobile where mobile before like you would see people like from the journalism school, right. Like they would move to the Chicago side in New York, because those are the places where you had the mobility to jump from agency to agency. And it was easy because you didn’t have to move.

Right. So I think you’re right. Like, you can ask anyone who’s been in the game for a while and yeah, the probability that they’ve been at the same place the whole time is so, so low. But yeah, I think it’s just it’s a byproduct of, of just it just happens. Right. And I you know, I don’t think it’s something that we, we, we can spend too much time crying over spilled milk.

Right. Like I think we just have to adjust. Like you just have to create create the, the most appealing job and environment that you can and, and hope that it attracts the right people and create the systems and processes by which you can help them learn and grow. And then if you part ways, then you find the next opportunity.

And I think that that’s, you know, like there are lots of bright people out there. And I joke that what we do isn’t rocket science. Like it’s, it’s it’s it requires skill and it requires art. But we’re not brain surgeons, so you don’t have to wait, you know, for the next brain surgeon to graduate, we can we can go out there and find someone who’s who’s talented or trained the next person up.

But yeah, well, I think to it, it, I think for small to mid-sized agencies, it really begs for a great interview and onboarding process so that you are trying to match people who want to find a home, if you will, and and are clear about what they want to learn and and that you have people in place, whether they’re internal or external, that they can learn from and they can keep growing.

And so whether they grow inside your organization and help your organization grow or they outgrow your organization, at some point in time you get the benefit of that growth for as long as they’re with you. Yeah, exactly. And that’s, you know, that’s honestly another situation that that we’ve come up against is. Yeah, I think nonprofits call it like mission drift.

Right. So it’s when nonprofits try to take on things that operate really outside of their their core purposes, because it might have like an ancillary benefit for us. There’s I think the same tendency, and it comes down sometimes to employees who they want to grow, they want to learn, but they take an interest in something and right, and when I found myself in that situation with an employee, it’s always to me that an honest conversation of listen, like I will help you learn and grow.

And I will be honest with you, when you have outgrown the parameters by which our agency can take on whatever it is that you’re interested in, right? Because and it’s not like a it’s not a personal thing. Right? It’s just a for us as a business that that expansion as far as you want to go into that particular area doesn’t make financial sense.

Right? Like there’s not enough of an existing demand. And I don’t think that we can grow it enough. Right. So but it’s always been an honest like, I want you to tell me when you feel like you’re at that point where you’ve reached that, the limit of what you think you can learn and grow and you want to keep growing.

And I will tell you what is possible within the parameters of what we do as a business. And if it’s something that we can add, explore adding to our service, that we will absolutely do that. It makes sense, but it has to be mutually beneficial, right? Like it has to make sense for the business. And that’s not always the case.

Like sometimes it is. And but but oftentimes it’s not. And I never want to stifle someone’s desire to to grow and to learn and to be fulfilled professionally. So I’ll always, you know, try to be someone’s biggest cheerleader and as long as we’re honest with each other and, you know, I think that being professionally courteous about what your aspirations are and what your intentions are is the best way to possibly be because you’re cultivating relationships that will exist beyond when you leave an organization and you never know, like agencies are also well-connected, right?

Like you never know. You think you don’t want to enable a bridge, right? Like right. You want to. And I think that that’s it. It happens, right? It happens. And I hate when it happens. But I think that if we we all understand that I want to maintain relationships beyond my tenure with any particular company and art. Let’s set them up for success.

Right? Like that’s all I can hope is that the employees that we have, we are only a stop on our way, that they intend to set us up for success, you know, for to to successfully keep going after their departure and then in turn, I’ll support them in any way that I can in their professional endeavors in the future as well.

Well, and we have to remember that in the grand scheme of things, especially if you have still have a physical presence and so your employees are within a certain geography, there’s a lot of boomerangs that come back, right. They leave something sounds better. You know, for agencies, a lot of our employees will go over to the client side, typically for money, and then they get over there and they’re like, no, I can’t do this forever.

And I need to get back to that fast paced, high energy environment that is that an agency? And, you know, for most agencies, a boomerang employee is like a godsend because they come back and they’re so excited to come back and all they do is tell everybody how great it is there and what they missed and all of that.

So another reason for not burning, for burning a bridge is because they may ask to come back, and you would want them to feel like they could ask to come back if they were right. Yeah. No, exactly. Exactly that. That would always be my help. Yeah, that would always be. My hope is to part ways with an employee and and encourage them that.

Yeah. If if something changes or if we become the path that you want to find yourself on again, we, you know like that that is on. Yes. I would love for that to be every scenario. Yeah I would hope that. Yeah. So as we kind of wrap this up, I’m thinking about PR, maybe one of the disciplines of marketing that has changed the most in the last decade or so.

So much of what we think of as PR isn’t PR anymore, or there’s this whole sort of gray area around content. Is that PR, is it marketing, is it whatever? But like what a PR agency used to do, which was really just pitch media and what they do today, which is much more varied and layered, requires that employees keep growing and learning.

And in a small shop like yours, how? With balancing life, work balance and the workload and all the things. So we started this conversation around system and process. So what system and process do you have around continue all learning and growth? Yeah. So we have our entire account team set aside. They have a learning objective. And sometimes it’s once a month.

Sometimes it’s every other month. It’s just really dependent on what we’re asking them to undertake. So they have learning objectives and are managed by the department director. And each month they do the learning objective, whether it’s a course that they take or an article or an exercise. And then they all get together and they talk through it, right, like talk through what were the challenges that they saw or what were the biggest insights that they got from it?

And they discuss it as a team because I found that, you know, we have a lot of in-person employees, like the majority of our team is is in in-person, and we try to do that when possible, because what we found is that both the collaborative nature of working together and being able to talk through challenges, like in person, it is something that is very difficult to replicate successfully with remote jobs and and to, you know, the ability for them to form their own relationships with each other and kind of build that, you know, interpersonal they have lunch together or they’ll go on walks, right?

Like that’s something that you don’t get as a remote employee. And again, like, I’ve worked remote and it was fine. That’s not why I don’t thrive in that type of environment. Husband works from home. Need is great. But in those learning opportunities and that ability to form connections is how we’ve seen the most growth in our team, you know, and then even taking it beyond that and sharing within, like they have their own slack channel and they they’ll share articles that they’ve read and they’ll, you know, they’ll be like, oh, you should read this.

And this is like my key insight. Or they’ll share webinars even amongst themselves. Right? So allowing them to set time aside from that intentionally. Right. Because again, as a lean team, we ask people to handle a lot. So we don’t want to ever overload them in a way that makes them regret the day that they signed. They signed up for this and so intentionally saying yes, like, we know that this is what we think at full capacity.

This is what we think you could handle, but this is what we’re going to set your goal at, because we know that you need this time to continue to like, learn and grow and rest. Right. And there are periods for each of those. So making it a standard part of their their week or their month to engage in those type of activities, whether it’s something structured that they’re the director the department puts together or something that is is self-paced and self-directed.

But allowing them the freedom to set that a time aside intentionally has been how these, you know, kind of incorporated that constant learning and growth into their overall environment. And, and for you, do you think they feel that it is an expectation or an obligation or it’s just something they could do? So I think it’s a little bit of both, right.

If it’s something that is is more of a formalized learning thing, that’s that’s an expectation. Right? And it’s generally we try to pick things that are truly going to be impactful on their like make their lives easier, right? Like if you can learn this scale, it will make your life easier. The other I hope they feel is just an opportunity, right?

Like I, I share things in the channel that that I read, I subscribe to. I don’t even know how many newsletters, you know, industry wise or other, yours being one of them. Right. And so I try to share, you know, if I, if I read something that I find insightful, that I think that they would benefit from, I try to share it in there and then I try to summarize it.

Right. So it’s kind of like, you know, tldr here, here are the three things that I thought were most helpful in this. So that, you know, they if they have time to read the full thing, they don’t have to feel obligated to do so. But that, you know, they at least know that I’m trying to like add, add to their collective experience of working here and and encourage their, their development.

So I hope it’s a little bit of both. So last question what’s the system or process that you think is most important for you to develop or experiment with next? What what haven’t you done around system and process that the agency needs? So I haven’t quite got there yet. I’ve been working on it. I really did the thing that I’ve hated the most out of any job that I’ve had is time tracking, right?

I really hate the idea of making someone inventory and catalog every single hour of their day, right? Because it it feels very tedious. And it also feels very big brother to me. Right. And if we want the titles employee who is, you know, very driven, intrinsically driven, they are self-motivated. That is likely to drive them insane. The time tracking.

However, it’s important for me when I’m trying to calculate agency margins, right? Because I need to take into consideration how, okay, this account is paying us X dollars. How much time are you spending on it? And is that same amount of time like maybe we have a client that’s paying us two times as much that we are spending the same amount of time on.

So like, how can we find more of this client here and less of this client here? If it’s a trade off, the time is this is if Misty does it. She can do it in two hours. But if drew does it, it’s five hours. It is. So is Drew dum. Does drew need more training? Is is are we asking drew to do something that’s outside his skill set?

So yeah. Yeah. Time tracking is critical for all those things. Yeah. Yeah. So that is like the one the kind of like process right now. You know, like we’ve kind of gone the route of like self-reporting after the fact. Like summarize for me how much time you think you spent on this account this month. And, and it’s been an interesting exercise because, again, it’s self-reported.

But then I look at them all the time and I’m like, okay, well, you had reported collectively in your accounts that you are spending 20 hours a week on that work, that that to me either says you’re not accurately reporting your time or I can give you twice as much work. Right. And and I don’t think that the second is true is that there’s so there’s something with the verse that needs to be refined.

So I think that that’s kind of the next, the next thing like to figure out how to encourage that behavior in a way that doesn’t like demotivate or bother like bother people so much that it would be something that was like their line in the sand or the hill that they’re willing to die on, while still getting the information that I need to be able to analyze.

Like, what are our most profitable scenarios? Like where are the areas that people might need support? Yeah. So that that for me is kind of like the next the next big, big challenge to solve. All right. Well, you’ll have to get back to us and let us know how that goes. So what I will do that and we’ll do that.

Thank you so much for being on the show and sharing a little bit about the agency’s growth and the strategy around how to create scalable, sustainable business. It’s no it’s no easy task. So we appreciate you coming on the show and chatting about it. Oh, thank you so much for having me. I, I really enjoyed myself. So thanks for the invite.

So if folks want to learn more about the work you guys do or want to follow you on social, what’s the best way for them to connect with you? Yeah, so you can obviously visit our website relevant icon. Email me directly. It’s just missed the at relevance. I don’t spend a ton of time on Twitter, but you can always find me on LinkedIn is just Misty Larkins would love to connect and chat.

All right. Awesome. Thanks for being on the show. Yeah. Thank you. All right guys, this wraps up another episode. So I know for a lot of you the idea of the grind of articulating how work gets done and figuring out how everybody on the team does something and then finding the best way out of all of those ways.

Because I think one of the things when agencies start to documents, systems and processes, you realize for the first time just how many different ways people are making the spaghetti sauce and that it never is the same recipe. Depending on who’s in the kitchen. So the process of really articulating and defining the agency’s way of doing things, you know, and Danielle and I are coaching agencies or working with an agency who’s stuck in a certain size or a certain profitability level.

It is often that their systems and processes are not robust enough that it that they will allow them to expand into where they want to grow, or that they are doing something the same way they’ve done it for the last ten years and they haven’t evolved their systems or process. And so thinking about how you do the work and how everyone at the agency can do the work in the same way, so that when someone leaves or has a baby and is gone for three months, or wants to hike the Appalachian Trail or whatever it is, that your agency can continue to deliver the quality of work at the same pace that you did when

that person was sort of leading the charge. It’s it’s otherwise if it stays in everybody’s head and everybody has their own way of doing it, the reality is you’re probably going to get you’re going to top out at 8 or 10 people and you cannot grow more than that because you just are tripping over each other with redundancy and differences.

And clients are having different experiences. So I know that it is not the most exciting thing to think about. And I know that for many of you, especially if you came up on the creative side of the business, the idea of systematizing the work we do is almost abhorrent to you. But as a business owner or leader, you have to understand that scale and sustainability is critical for us.

And so you’ve got to find your way to that path somehow. And I think Misty gave you some ideas of sort of how to start that process and how you can do it collaboratively with your team, and iteratively knowing that no system or process stays the same forever. And so I would highly encourage you to at least dip your toe in the water of how do we start to standardize some of the work we do and some of the ways that we serve clients, some of the ways we serve the team.

Many agencies start the systemization process with internal processes like onboarding employees and the hiring process and things like that. So if you’re a little nervous about doing it with client facing stuff, maybe start with the things that are inside your own organization. But it is important that you are able to repeat your success in a way that you could teach.

So with that, I will I will stop the lecture for today, but hopefully you heard a few things that make it sound a little less scary and a little more beneficial to you to maybe give that a try. In the meantime, two things one. Hey, I’m super glad you’re here. I’m grateful that you listened every week. I love the conversations we get to have.

So thank you for coming back and I promise I’ll be back next week with another guest. So I’m hoping that you’ll come back as well. And last but not least, a huge thank you to our friends at White Label IQ. They’re the presenting sponsor of the podcast as you know, I’ve been for many years. They come alongside agencies and they do white label design, dev and PPC.

So whether you have a bunch of people on your team that have those skill sets and you just need an extra set of hands because you’re super busy, or it’s something you want to offer, but you don’t want to carry it internally. They are a great partner. They are. They were born out of an agency, so they understand how your business works and how to help you make money when you partner with them.

So check them out at White Label iq.com/i. And as you know if you are a regular listener they’ve got a special deal there just for you as a podcast listener. So check it out. All right I’ll be back next week. I’ll see you then. Thanks for listening. That’s all for this episode of am, I is Build a Better Agency podcast.

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