In a sharp contrast to the earlier pandemic years, many agency owners said that in 2023, they have the best teams they’ve ever had and want to find ways to keep them around. This is great news, and we want to help keep your agency dream team alive and thriving.

To help in that journey, HR expert Barbara Mason joins me to share what agency owners and leaders can do to help make their employees feel like valued team members while staying true to the agency’s mission and values.

She is a fountain of knowledge — from interviewing best practices and why HR experts need to be a part of your business to how to create the agency culture you want while caring for your agency employees as whole people. She’ll even share her top 3 secret interview questions she uses to get potential hires thinking about how they fit into the agency’s mission and values.

This episode is full of practical and common-sense tips that will hopefully get the gears going and help you keep your agency dream team alive and thriving in 2024 and beyond.

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:

• Two simple things that will help you keep your agency dream team happy
• Transparency goes a long way with agency employees, but know the limits
• What makes a healthy agency culture?
• How more introverted business owners can engage and connect with their employees
• How benefits packages have changed post-Covid
• Creating agency culture in a hybrid or fully remote environment
• The importance of knowing what you’re hiring for and interviewing accordingly
• Motivating agency employees to be more engaged in the work
• HR’s role in having a succession plan for the business
• Interview best practices for agency leadership
• Exercising radical candor in agency communications
• Employment trends to keep an eye on in 2024
• The biggest mistake agency owners make with their people

Video budgets are up in 2024, which means the demand for video content from clients will be high this year. For agencies, it also indicates that we must start utilizing this incredible business development tool for ourselves to know what’s up when our clients ask about it.

Not only that, but video content creation is an incredible medium for agencies in prospecting, connecting with current clients, and gaining valuable data and metrics on what content is engaging to your audience.

Are prospects clicking off your video in the first 10 seconds? Are they even opening the email? Or are they going back to watch it again and again? Video tracking and metrics give us all these answers and more.

Ready to learn more about what will soon be your best business development tool in 2024? Join us in this week’s Build a Better Agency to discover more about the power of video for agency growth.

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:

• How video helps you connect deeper with people
• Making videos vs. being a content creator
• Getting comfortable on camera and remaining authentic
• Deciding what types of videos you want to create and where to share them
• 5 ways agencies can use video to connect with clients
• Teaching clients to use video as a business development tool
• What video data and metrics can tell us about our content
• Using video to market and grow your agency

What exactly makes an insight versus just an observation? What are the different types out there? How the heck do we uncover them? This week, we’re getting insightful about insights and laying out the key characteristics of strong agency insights — like inspiring action and reframing problems.

Chris Kocek will share his favorite techniques for generating insights during brainstorming sessions, like continually asking “why” like a toddler until you reach some real gold. With agencies feeling more and more pressure these days to stay competitive and continuously innovate, it’s important to know what really gets us to those “ah-ha” moments before building out a whole campaign.

And once you uncover those golden nuggets, really selling them to your team for maximum impact is the cherry on top. Join us in this insightful episode to learn how to piece together all of these agency insight strategies from one of the pros.

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:

• Getting to the core of the word “insight”
• Do agencies always need to feel pressured to be insightful?
• When agency owners should be pushing for more insights from their team
• The 3 different types of agency insights
• Inspiring action and problem-solving through insightful thinking
• The methodology behind building insights
• How to sell innovative ideas to clients

If there’s one word that will send any agency owner or employee running for the hills, it’s timesheets. Although one of the most universally disliked words in the agency world, timesheets are still the number one way to detect and diagnose problems within the agency before they become catastrophes.

Essentially, they’re your best friend whether you like it or not.

Timesheets, especially when completed daily by all agency employees (including the agency owner), will give you invaluable data about your agency’s day-to-day operations and where there’s room for improvement.

For agency owners, daily timesheets will show you inefficiencies, areas where more staffing is needed, needs for more training, and so much more. For agency employees, this is your ticket to job security, bonuses, promotions, and recognition for excellent work.

Tune in to learn more about why daily timesheets are essential for agency owners and employees and how to get everyone on board with the practice this year.

For 30+ years, Drew McLellan has been in the advertising industry. He started his career at Y&R, worked in boutique-sized agencies, and then started his own (which he still owns and runs) agency in 1995. Additionally, Drew owns and leads the Agency Management Institute, which advises hundreds of small to mid-sized agencies on how to grow their agency and its profitability through agency owner peer groups, consulting, coaching, workshops and more.

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.

In This Episode:

• Why early detection matters for agency operations
• The diagnostic warning signs that your agency isn’t running effectively
• What daily timesheets show us about our agency
• How timesheets and time-tracking metrics can boost our profitability
• Why do them daily vs. weekly?
• Why timesheets are a good thing and help agency employees defend themselves
• How to get your team on board