Every week, Drew records another video on a topic that has come up in his conversations with agency owners. You can view them chronologically (most recent on top) by different categories, or you can search for specific key words.
This Week’s Video
Comp should be personal
How should we reward employees of our agencies? Of course, you want to pay them fairly. You want to give them good benefits. You want them to have a flexible work schedule, all of that. We often erroneously assume that everyone wants to be compensated number one, by money, or number two, based on what we want to be compensated by, which for many agency owners and leaders, is driven by monetary success. But for many of your employees, that may not actually be the thing that they value the most. They may value time off, they may value a bonus or a raise. They may value perks like plane tickets or theater tickets or a spa day. They may benefit or love the idea of having the opportunity to have a new educational experience that maybe is a little more expensive than they can afford, or that you would normally invest in. It is worth the time and energy to explore with each of your team members what motivates them and what actually matters the most to them which allows them to help you build at least part of their compensation plan in a custom way that serves them and their family, whatever that may be. I think you're going to be surprised that it actually is oftentimes less expensive to the agency what they want versus what you are going to give them. And so it's worth the conversation. And if nothing else, it makes them feel seen and heard and thought of as an individual and that you care about what makes them happy. So it is a win win win all the way around and is worth having that conversation. Full Transcripts »
Run your own race
Sovereignty was a horse in the recent Kentucky Derby and was in the middle of the pack in terms horses favored to win. And I think there was an interesting lesson for us all to learn from the way that horse and that jockey ran that race. So when the gates opened and 20 horses came barreling out, the pace was fast. It had been raining all day. The track was muddy. And so I am sure that everybody was concerned about getting through the race as quickly as possible, but also as safely as possible. But the pace was fast and our horse was about two thirds of the way back in the pack for about half of the race, and then started slowly coming up on the outside and ultimately actually won the Kentucky Derby. But the lesson here for us is that had Sovereignty come out of the gate as hot as a lot of the other horses did, and had run as fast as early as some of those horses did, that by the time they rounded the final bend and hit the straightaway, those horses were fading back. They had run out of gas. They had sort of burned through all of their energy too fast. And I think sometimes it's easy for us as agency owners to watch what everybody else is doing and think we have to do it their way. We have to lean in and we have to go as fast as they are. We have to go in the direction that they go as opposed to having a game plan. So in the post-race interview, they were talking to the trainer and the jockey, and what they saying is that they knew that they needed to go slower in the beginning of the race, because Sovereignty loves sloppy tracks, and he loves when he's behind and he can try and catch up. And so they knew their horse. Just like we know our agency and our clients. And they had a plan. And they didn't get distracted by what everybody else was doing. They just ran their plan. And for them, that was the winning game plan. And they put $25 million or so in their pocket. I think we have to be reminded sometimes that we know what we're doing. We know our agency. We know our clients, and we have a plan. And that what other people are doing around us is interesting and we can learn from it, no doubt. But it doesn't mean we always have to defer to what everybody else is doing, as opposed to sticking to the plan that we believe is the best course of action for our agency, for us to win the race. So little lesson from Sovereignty for all of us today. Watch »
Are you misspending a valuable asset?
We talk a lot about billable time, how we track time and does that time actually translate to an invoice, and what do we do with all the time we write off. But we spend far less time thinking about the non-billable time. The question is, where is all of that non-billable time going? You want to make sure that you value every hour of your team's time at the same level, regardless of how it appears it's being spent. In most cases, when agencies pay attention to non-bailable time, a couple of good things happen. Watch »
Tax planning for 2025
April 15th has just gone by. And for many of us, that is a day we remember that date in infamy. It's the day we must write the check to the IRS, at least here in the United States. Today is the day tax planning for 2025 must start if it hasn't already. What I mean by that is I want you to get with your tax preparer or your tax strategist—and I hope you have a tax strategist—and say, based on my ‘24 taxes, what could I or should I have done last year that would have reduced my tax burden this year? Watch »
How do agencies “do” strategy
Is being good at strategy innate, or is it something that can be learned? The reality is that where we landed was the answer is both. There are absolutely some people, and odds are most of you if you own or are a leader in an agency, who are innately strategic. You just naturally know where to lean in and what questions to ask. You are curious about business and your clients, making you a very strategic thinker. Often, this also makes you the bottleneck inside your agency because you're the only strategic thinker. Many agency owners will tell us how frustrated they are that they can't get the rest of their team, whether it's account service folks, subject matter experts, or creatives, to think as strategically as you would like them to. So that gets us to the other side of the equation: can strategy be taught? Watch »
Do what you can
I think we are in a season of making due, with the tariff, the stock market, and all the other things sort of reacting around us. Our job is to stay calm and make do. New business is not coming in as fast right now, and clients are not spending as freely right now. We have to just know that this is a season for us to weather and weather together. So lean in, take advantage of resources. Come to our Q&A every month. Let's talk together about this. We're going to be trying to provide as much guidance as we can through the newsletter, through the Build a Better Agency Summit, through all of those things. But it is a time for us to be wise about what we're doing, doing more with less and doing that for ourselves, our agency, and our clients. I want you to think about how you kind of batten down the hatches for your clients? How do you help your clients weather this. The agencies that help their clients weather economic uncertainty, just like we did in covid, those are the agencies that when we come out of this – because we always do – when we come out of this, those are the agencies that are going to be rewarded for showing up as a great business partner, a great business strategist, a great thinker who helps our clients do the right thing even in tough times. And so I want to encourage you to look for ways to do a little more for your clients right now. Watch »
It’s time to be bold
At this moment, there's a lot of pause, and there's a lot of fear that has caused everybody to freeze. What we're hearing from agencies all across the world, but particularly here in the United States, is that the pipeline has just dried up, that clients and prospects don't want to talk about more budget or a new budget. They're frozen in place as they wait for things to settle down, for the tariff talks to change, for some certainty to come into this great uncertainty. We're also seeing that same behavior showing up in agencies and agency owners that you, too, have paused. You're not initiating big new programs. You are not creating new things for prospects, clients, and team members. I want to challenge you in this: right now, while the world is watching and waiting, we don't have to watch and wait. We have all this control over our own business. We can't control what the economy is doing, our worldview, or what's happening politically, but we can control how we show up in our own businesses. Watch »
Knowledge Sharing
One of the conversations we're having with many agency owners these days is how to take the knowledge that one person or one department has inside the agency and infuse it through the entire organization. Knowledge sharing around clients, around the industries you serve, is becoming more and more critical as we look to grow our existing client base, as we look to serve our clients better, to be more valuable to them, to increase their spending with us year over year, it requires us to have a depth of knowledge around their specific business, around the industry they serve, around the work we do, and of course, the work that we do on their behalf, the marketing work. But in many cases, that information is siloed inside of the account service department or some of your production people. Or it might even be siloed with you, the agency owner or an agency leader. We have to build infrastructure inside our agencies for internal education programs. One of the things I want you to think about for 2025 is how to ensure that knowledge is not isolated in a person or department. Watch »
Bonus Criteria
As agency owners, we make a couple critical mistakes when it comes to giving bonuses. The first one is that we just give out money in the fourth quarter because we have money left over. And so we “reward” people. But we haven't done anything to change their behavior throughout the year, to get them to earn that money and to understand how they can help the agency have even more money at the end of the year. And number two, we structure bonus programs based on longevity rather than tying it to KPIs that are something that everyone in your organization can achieve. Watch »
Time to Raise Prices
Many of you are realizing that your expenses have been rising for the last several years. The one thing that hasn't changed is how you price. Several folks are asking how I can have this conversation with clients and how I can have this conversation with prospects. The good news is that with prospects, the conversation is pretty straightforward. This is what we charge. Most of you don't actually talk about an hourly rate with your clients. 99% of you are project-based, which means clients want a thing or a series of things, and you're going to give them a flat fee for the delivery of those things. So it might be strategy, monthly PPC or SEO campaign, or something else, but you're not really unraveling for them your hourly rate. You're just saying you want these deliverables. And here's the price. So for prospects, it's pretty easy. You need to start calculating your prices based on a minimum of $175 an hour. Here's how you have that conversation with your clients. Watch »
