Drew McLellan is the Top Dog at Agency Management Institute. He has also owned and operated his own agency over the last 20-years. And all through the year, he straddles the fence of working in his agency and working with 250+ small- to mid-size agencies in a variety of ways.
AMI works with agency owners:
- By leading agency owner peer groups
- Offers workshops for owners and their leadership teams
- Offers AE bootcamps
- Conducts individual agency owner coaching
- Does on site consulting.
Because he works with a lot of agencies every year -- he has the unique opportunity to see the patterns and the habits (both good and bad) that happen over and over again. He has also written two books and been featured in The New York Times, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Fortune Small Business. The Wall Street Journal called his blog “One of 10 blogs every entrepreneur should read.”
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Stale employees: how to recognize them and why they’re holding your agency back
- Can these employees be saved? It’s a firm maybe.
- How to have the necessary conversation with stale employees -- you owe them honesty
- The kinds of goals to set to see measurable change and growth before determining their place inside your agency
- The costs to you as an agency owner for working with stale employees to up their game
- How to recognize if you really do have to let the employee go
- How to make a decision while realizing that you aren’t the only person it affects
Ways to contact Drew McLellan:
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!
Art Boulay is the owner of Strategic Talent Management and offers common sense solutions for hiring better employees and making current employees stronger. Art has partnered with AMI for years and has created (through testing A players) profiles for the ideal candidates for most agency specific positions.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Assessment tools for hiring the right employee lead to more objective and effective hiring
- How Art’s tools can assess agencies, what makes them unique, and how that will help to find the right future employees
- From hire to retire: what employers and employees should do to ensure that employees don’t leave right away
- How to use assessments to counteract biases that we bring to the table during the hiring process
- Why asking specific types of questions and having at least two people conducting an interview will reveal what you actually need to know about interviewees
- Tips for making ads as attractive as possible to the people you want to hire and unappealing to people you don’t even want to interview
- Why age is not an indicator of knowledge and skill: hire leaders, not experience
Ways to Contact Art Boulay:
- Website: www.strategictalentmgmt.com
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!
Ann Handley speaks and writes about how you can rethink the way your business markets. Cited in Forbes as the most influential woman in Social Media and recognized by ForbesWoman as one of the top 20 women bloggers, Ann Handley is the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs, a training and education company with the largest community of marketers in its category. Her book, "Everybody Writes: Your Go-to Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content," is a Wall Street Journal bestseller.
She is a monthly columnist for Entrepreneur magazine, a member of the LinkedIn Influencer program, and co-author of the best-selling book on content marketing, "Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, eBooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business." She currently has 290,000 followers on Twitter and writes about content, marketing, and life at AnnHandley.com.
A pioneer in digital marketing, Ann is the co-founder of ClickZ.com, which was one of the first sources of interactive marketing news and commentary. She started her career as a business journalist and editor.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- How agencies can educate their clients
- The MarketingProfs B2B Forum
- Strategies for working on better content instead of lots of content
- Why you need to focus on writing during the hiring process and throughout your agency’s work
- Resources for editing whether you have the budget for a human editor or not
- Why you need to find writers with an audience-centric point of view (and the pros and cons of hiring journalists)
- Tips for creating spaces for creating your best writing
Ways to Contact Ann Handley:
- Website: www.annhandley.com
- Twitter: @annhandley
- Twitter: @marketingprofs
- Company website: www.marketingprofs.com
- B2B Marketing Forum: mpb2b.marketingprofs.com
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!
Jami Oetting is the editor of Hubspot’s Agency Post, which is a blog for advertising and marketing agency professionals. She led the launch of the publication in 2011 and its growth before Hubspot acquired it in 2013. Hubspot works with about 2,500 agency partners and about 15,000 customers worldwide. Now, Jami’s blog is one of the largest blogs for agency professionals. It offers incredible content to help agency leaders grow their business.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- How agencies can and should be getting clients now that we’re not bound by geography
- Why getting business through referrals is still viable -- but why the source of those referrals is changing
- Why buyers have as much if not more information than sellers and what that means for your agency
- Using inbound marketing to attract the right kind of clients (and turn away the wrong ones)
- Why you need to stick with inbound marketing content creation
- Why you absolutely must specialize on a niche if you want to survive
- Why you will struggle to attract great employees if you don’t have a strong new business plan
- Why you need someone on your team who is responsible for marketing your agency
- How to come up with content for your blog
- Why interviews are a great way to create content
- What agency owners can do right now to get the ideas from this podcast into place
Ways to Contact Jami Oetting:
- Website: blog.hubspot.com/agency
- Email: joetting@hubspot.com
- Twitter: @jamioetting
We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!