Knowledge Sharing

Hey, everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute this week coming to you from Wilderness Lodge at Walt Disney World. You know, one of the conversations we're having with a lot of agency owners these days is how to take knowledge that one person or one department has inside the agency, and how do you infuse it through the entire organization. Internal education programs, not necessarily learning from outside the organization, but learning from each other. 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 grow their spend 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 figure out ways – we have to build infrastructure inside our agencies for internal education programs.

So many of you will do if somebody goes to a workshop or a conference, they'll come back and do a lunch and learn. But even that is only capturing a sliver of what they learned, and the rest of it all lives in their head, which means that it probably doesn't get translated to the rest of the team. And it certainly doesn't get codified. It doesn't get documented in a way that someone could reference it after the fact, or when that person leaves the company. And so one of the things I want you to be thinking about for 2025 is how do we make sure that knowledge is not isolated in a person or in a department? But how do we start to build infrastructure inside our agency so that we are constantly teaching one another what we know and that we are having some – we have some way of documenting and creating a library of insights and data and facts so that when anyone on the team is looking to be – to level up how we help a client or how we go after a prospect that's in the same industry, they have access to that information.

So I want you to be thinking about, far beyond the occasional lunch and learn what could or should you be doing to make sure that the knowledge that lives in your agency, number one, stays in your agency, whether someone comes or goes. And number two gets infused throughout your organization so that everybody has access to and is aware of that knowledge, even if they don't absorb all of it, they at least have been introduced to it, so they know where to go find it if they need it.

All right, I've got some thought. I'll see you next week.