Gareth Kay is a strategist by trade. He’s co-founder of Chapter, a creative business partner dedicated to solving the wicked problems facing pioneering businesses. Prior to setting up Chapter, Gareth was Chief Strategy Officer and Partner at Goodby, Silverstein and Partners and the Head of Planning at Modernista! In his decade in the US, Gareth has led strategy on brands including Google, Cisco, TD Ameritrade, the NBA, General Motors, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. and (RED).
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Gareth’s decision to venture off and start Chapter
- What makes Chapter truly unique
- How to build a business model and hire employees when the work you do is very diverse
- Becoming a client’s partner through absolute transparency
- How to generate new business when you’re in the project based business
- Creating ideas and solutions vs creating “stuff”
- How Chapter develops and retains its staff
- The importance of transparency with your employees
- How Gareth’s perspective has changed since making the jump into ownership
- Things agencies can do to move away from widget sales to selling ideas and problem solving
Ways to Contact Gareth Kay:
- Twitter: @garethk
- Company Twitter: @chaptersf
- Email: gareth@chaptersf.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
Rohit Bhargava is a non-obvious trend curator and an expert in helping brands and leaders be more influential. He is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of five books on topics as wide ranging as the future of business, building a brand with personality, and why leaders never eat cauliflower. Rohit has advised hundreds of global brands as the Senior Vice President of Global Strategy & Planning at Ogilvy and with his own firm, Influential Marketing Group. He also teaches marketing at Georgetown University. A two-time TEDx speaker, Rohit has keynoted events in 31 countries and is regularly featured as a marketing expert by media such as The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and NPR.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Working as a solopreneur vs. working in an agency
- Rohit’s trend report that started as a blog post
- Habits for being a trend spotter
- Big trends for 2016
- VR: How Virtual Reality can become important to agencies
- Data overload: what will happen when all the data available to different parties eventually gets pooled together?
- Understand your clients’ true needs and becoming their true partner
- Architecting an Innovation Day to open up your clients’ wallets
- How to teach trend-creating thinking to employees coming out of college
Ways to Contact Rohit Bhargava:
- Website: www.rohitbhargava.com
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/rohitbhargava
- Twitter: @rohitbhargava
- “Non Obvious” Book Website: nonobviousbook.com
- More Books: www.rohitbhargava.com/books-publications
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!
Tom Martin, author of “Invisible Sale,” has been in the agency life for many years. He has spent 20 years driving new business for agencies. In 2010, he created Converse Digital, an agency that focuses on doing business differently.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- How new business has changed over the years
- Why clients no longer believe in hiring just one agency
- How to define your value to your clients when delivering ideas instead of “stuff”
- Correctly positioning your agency in the days when your client first discovers you
- Painless Prospecting: how to get great leads to find you
- Can Painless Prospecting work for generalists?
- The risks of delegating the Painless Prospecting process
- What your content has to do for your Painless Prospecting process to work
- Why giving away your secret sauce is never going to implode your business
- Tom’s propinquity theory on marketing today
- What you can do right now to get started on the business development path discussed in this episode
Ways to Contact Tom Martin:
- Website: www.conversedigital.com
- Twitter: @TomMartin
- Book: "Invisible Sale"
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!
Ron Baker is the founder of VeraSage Institute, a leading think tank dedicated to educating professionals internationally, and a radio talk-show host called The Soul of Enterprise: Business in the Knowledge Economy. Ron is the author of seven best-selling books, including “The Firm of the Future,” “Pricing on Purpose,” and “The Soul of Enterprise: Dialogues on Business in the Knowledge Economy,” co-authored with Ed Kless.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Why Ron believes that the billable hour and the timesheet need to go
- Value pricing: the differences between different pricing plans
- Ways to add in additional value that isn’t more “stuff”
- How to start a value conversation
- The typical agency objections of value pricing and why they’re false
- How to succeed at the transition to value pricing
- Other kinds of mistakes agencies make when shifting towards value pricing
- The major benefits for focusing on value and the customer
- Action steps that agencies can take when deciding whether or not to utilize value pricing
Ways to Contact Ron Baker:
- Website: www.verasage.com
- Email: ron@verasage.com
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ronbaker1
- Twitter: @ronaldbaker
- Radio Talk Show: www.thesoulofenterprise.com
Ron's Books:
- "The Firm of the Future"
- "Pricing on Purpose"
- "The Soul of Enterprise: Dialogues on Business in the Knowledge Economy"
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!
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
- Offering workshops for owners and their leadership teams
- Offering AE bootcamps
- Conducting individual agency owner coaching
- Doing on-site consulting
- Offering online courses in agency new business and account service
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:
- Common ways internal fraud is committed and ways to prevent it from happening
- How agencies are targeted with email scams
- The ways Drew has seen agency employees embezzle hundreds of thousands of dollars from agencies
- The systems you need to put in place to prevent fraud
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!