It doesn’t matter if you are a small shop, a specialized shop, in a major market, or based in rural areas – odds are, your biggest struggle right now is attracting and retaining talent. Many agency owners are losing sleep over staffing up or even worse, losing one of their key players. Interestingly, how you’re hiring may be one of the reasons your tenured employees are giving notice.
Right now, employees and prospective employees hold all the cards. They are being recruited by organizations that can pay better than any agency and offer what appears to be a more stable, slower-paced work environment. What is an agency owner to do?
I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but you should make people work harder for the privilege of working for you. In this episode of Build a Better Agency, we’ll walk through how playing a little hard to get will earn you better prospects and future employees and keep your current employees satisfied.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here.
What You Will Learn in this Episode:
- Why there is such a high turnover rate in agencies across the country
- What you can do to attract and retain top talent
- Why you should play hard to get, despite the challenges of hiring
- How to strengthen your interview process to make better hires
- What to look for in potential candidates for your team
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 those 250+ agencies every year, Drew 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, Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Fortune Small Business. The Wall Street Journal called his blog “One of 10 blogs every entrepreneur should read.”
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Ways to contact Drew McLellan:
- Email: drew@agencymanagementinstitute.com
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/drewmclellan
- Website: https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/
Tools & Resources:
- Agency Owner Life Plan: https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/ami-OwnerLifePlan.pdf
- Agency One Page Business Plan: https://agencymanagementinstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/ami-businessplan.pdf
- Adam Carroll’s Podcast: https://masteryofmoney.lpages.co/babl-blueprint/
Culture matters. As agency owners and leaders, we get that. And we love creating a “great culture.” But, developing a great culture is about more than beer o’clock and having a ping pong table. Yes, fun is important. But if you want to attract and retain the top talent in your industry, that alone is not going to cut it.
John Waid of Corporate Culture Consulting joins us on this episode of Build A Better Agency to teach us a fresh approach to developing agency culture. He explains how to identify and define your organization’s culture, so you can align it with your strategic goals.
By focusing on organizational culture instead of a more superficial definition culture, we create an environment where the best employees want to stay and thrive. It enables us to map out our core values so we can weave them into the DNA of the agency and establish clear rules of engagement for clients, peers, and leadership alike.
John has a very unique perspective on how culture comes to life and how you can foster a culture that is outcome-focused. This conversation will reshape your perspective even if you think you have this one nailed.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here: https://www.whitelabeliq.com/ami/
What You Will Learn in this Episode:
- Superficial culture vs. organizational culture
- The factors that contribute to a great agency culture
- How your culture plays a major role in talent acquisition and retention
- How to set behavioral expectations that bring your agency’s core values to life
- Why a great culture has the potential to course-correct a poor work ethic
- How to introduce new values to your agency and maintain them for years to come
Ways to Contact John Waid:
- Website: c3culture.com
- Email: jwaid@corporatecultureconsulting.com
- Phone: (404) 915-3051
- Twitter: @C3PeopleSkills
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnwaid/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/c3culture/
Biz dev, mentorship, and relationship management are critical responsibilities of every agency owner. But the hours in a workday are limited, and if we fail to delegate with confidence, the work that is uniquely ours will not get done. It’s just too easy to get sucked into client work or internal issues that we shouldn’t be focused on. Every agency owner needs a #1 who walks, talks, and leads like an owner because they enable us to actually do our job.
In this episode, AMI’s own Craig Barnes chats with Drew about his observations as to what it takes to recognize, find and keep a great lieutenant from his lens as the facilitator of AMI’s Key Executive networks. Craig also walks us through how to groom an existing employee who you believe has the potential to fill that role.
Throughout his experience running his own agency for 25+ years and his role at AMI, Craig has gleaned some invaluable insights about leadership team level team members in the agency world. If you are interested in learning how to identify that critical player for your team and prepare them for success, this episode is for you.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here: https://www.whitelabeliq.com/ami/
What You Will Learn in this Episode:
- The common traits of agency key executives
- All of the different functions that key executives can serve
- How to identify key executives on your team and groom them for success
- How you can grow as an agency owner so that your key executive can flourish
- Why this is the ideal time to find and nurture a new leader
Ways to Contact Craig Barnes:
One of the challenges of agency life is that typically everything we sell is a custom job. It’s tough to build in efficiencies or systemize our production when we never make the same deliverable twice. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Back in Episode 100, we discussed the idea of structuring your agency as a wonder bread factory vs. an artisanal bakery and there are different pros and cons for each.
Website By Tonight’s Jared Gold successfully transformed his agency from an artisanal bakery into a wonder bread factory for web development. And in this episode of Build A Better Agency, Jared joins us to share the lessons he learned throughout the process so you can apply them in your own agency.
A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here: https://www.whitelabeliq.com/ami/
What You Will Learn in This Episode:
- Jared’s journey from artisanal bakery to wonder bread factory with Website By Tonight
- The benefits and drawbacks of productizing your agency’s service line
- The lessons and insights Jared learned while switching from custom to standardized deliverables
- How to determine what parts of your agency can actually be productized
- Creating firm boundaries around your productized offerings so that you can always meet expectations
- How Jared’s target audience changed when he introduced the productized service line with Website By Tonight
Ways to Contact Jared Gold:
- Website: https://websitebytonight.com/
- Free Productized Agencies Directory: turnkeyagencies.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredgold1/
Additional Resources:
- Agency Planning Tools: agencymanagementinstitute.com/herecomes2020
- Access Jared’s agency-to-agency project/partner referral Slack group:
https://websitebytonight.com/partner - Jared’s agency partner program: https://websitebytonight.com/faq-partners