June 9, 2022
Brad Yale and Sara Nay
Listen to the Agency Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/co/podcast/agency/id1577584426
Listen to the Agency Spark Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agency-spark/id1552775257
Announcer:
Welcome to Agency for Change, a podcast from KidGlov that brings you the stories of changemakers who are actively working to improve our communities. In every episode, we’ll meet with people who are making a lasting impact in the places we call home.
Lyn Wineman:
Every once in a while, we like to mix things up around here. So today, we are presenting a special edition for our many listeners who are in marketing, specifically those in advertising agencies. One of the ways KidGlov makes the world a better place is by creating a happy and fulfilling work culture for our team. And I had the opportunity to sit down with two agency leaders who also host podcasts to discuss lessons learned and suggestions for creating an optimum agency environment.
Hey everyone, this is Lyn Wineman, president and chief strategist at KidGlov. Welcome to this special episode of the Agency for Change podcast. I invite you to listen in to my conversation with Sara Nay, the COO at Duct Tape Marketing, founder of Spark Lab Consulting and host of the Agency Spark podcast, and Brad Yale, vice president of digital content planning and data at Medical Knowledge Group and host producer and editor of Agency pod. You can find both Agency Spark and Agency pod on your major podcast sites, and we’ll have links to those shows in our show notes on kidglov.com. Enjoy.
Brad Yale:
Lyn and Sara, how are you?
Sara Nay:
Great. Excited to chat with you.
Lyn Wineman:
Yeah, absolutely, Brad. What a fun group of people you’ve assembled.
Brad Yale:
I want to chat with you guys too. I know we are all podcast hosts and we’re all in the advertising agency space. It’s combination of agency, spark agency, and agency for pod change. And we thought it’d be an interesting, cool idea to have a conversation around what are two or three or four of the top largest trends you’re seeing in the space right now as the agency advertising world moves forward.
Brad Yale:
And as you guys both collectively, you run or you lead or you are some of the chief deciders of the agencies you work for and you operate in, I thought it’d be an interesting conversation to pick your mind about where you think things are going. And I know the first thing we talked about was the idea of taking care of your people and your people will take care of the work.
Brad Yale:
And I think it’s a pretty interesting concept in terms of how agencies can run. So I wonder, to that point, Sara, I’m going to have you kick it off and then we can have a conversation about it. Where do you find yourself on that spectrum of how you take care of the people that you work with and how does the work then resolve itself out?
Sara Nay:
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think it’s an important topic today, especially with more and more people being remote. You can feel a bit spread out. And so with us, we’ve been hiring pretty rapidly right now. And, in terms of taking care of people, it starts in the very beginning. And so, we start with trying to attract people that are aligned with our culture, our vision, our direction, what we’re trying to accomplish with the clients that we work with.
Sara Nay:
And then we make sure they experience that culture once they’re part of our organization as well. And so, I think it comes down to hiring people that are a good fit. And then once they’re in place, how can you continue to take care of them, to collaborate, come together as a group, so ultimately they take better care of your clients. And I see that all the time. Once people join our organization and they’re invested in the work we’re doing, they’re excited about the mission and direction we’re going, it shows how much they care when they’re actually taking care of the clients as well.
Sara Nay:
So, I think it’s an absolutely important topic and love to hear from Lyn and you on how you instill this in your own agencies.
Lyn Wineman:
Yeah. Sara, I love everything you just said, because I feel like the whole agency and marketing world is on fire right now, right? There’s more demand for everything we are doing than I feel like there ever has been and less people available for us to hire, right?
Lyn Wineman:
So, KidGlov, our whole brand is created based on taking care of people and that starts with taking care of our own people. So, we are every day talking about it, thinking about it. And Sara, you said something about making sure you’re bringing the right people into your culture. I think that’s a conscious decision we made a few years ago to say hey, we’ve got a good culture. We’re Best Places to Work already. We’re going to stop tinkering with our culture and start really ruthlessly hand-picking people that fit into the culture, which also makes that hiring process a little bit more difficult. But man, does it make the work a lot more fun.
Brad Yale:
What does that actually look like in practice? How have you both done in policy and execution, what it is you’re talking about?
Lyn Wineman:
Yeah. You know, we have some really great and really well-defined core values. And we literally do talk about them every day. We have a standup meeting every day, we talk about them, we recognize people for them. And as we bring people in, we even start with having coffee with them and not an interview, right? Let’s meet you in the wild.
Lyn Wineman:
Now, sometimes those coffees are remote these days, which aren’t as cool as in-person coffees, but really taking some time to talk and get to know people.
Sara Nay:
Yeah.
Lyn Wineman:
How about you, Sara?
Sara Nay:
Yeah. Same thing. We talk about it early on as part of the interview process. That’s one of the first conversations. These are our values, this is why we’re doing what we’re doing. Is this aligned with you? And just uncovering if they’re a good fit naturally.
Sara Nay:
And then, as Lyn said, we talk about it in a weekly meeting. We have a standup meeting that we do weekly where we talk about our values. And then we also have challenges and related to our values. And so, one of our values is “always be learning, always being exploring.” And so right now, my whole entire team, every single month is coming up with a new monthly challenge where they’re continuing either their education or something in their personal life, but they’re committing to doing something daily so they can continue to grow and evolve and learn.
Sara Nay:
So, it’s talking about them but also creative ways where we can actually put them into practice and hold each other accountable as well.
Lyn Wineman:
Sara, I’m writing down that idea. I think that’s a great idea. Brad, I want to know… You’ve been so great at asking questions of Sara and I, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
Brad Yale:
I don’t run an agency, right? So, I don’t have say-all in the policies and the day-to-day in terms of what happens from the top down, the bottom up. I’m only, I guess, part of that tapestry that makes up the agency that I work for. I view it as, especially within COVID and coming out of COVID, I’ve been very happy to see the idea to me of… I think a lot of agencies would build themselves as family culture. That you’re building a family here and you want to spend more time with your coworkers and the entire idea.
Brad Yale:
And I thought, in a way, that that family culture breeds the idea of that high school clickish mentality. That it’s saying who are the popular kids in this family or this cohort, and you reward them with RFP work, you reward them with new business work. And the thing that I’ve really liked seeing over the past two years of it is, the basic idea that I think your work now is shining through more than ever. I don’t care about parties or beer carts or ping pong tables. I don’t care about that.
Brad Yale:
What I think should work for agency is saying, who are the people you hire to put in place to shepherd a business, the business problem, and provide the best work and find the solutions, rather than being in person and… You like X, Y, Z person, so maybe their work’s not great, but they get rewarded because they’re part of that upper crust culture of the agency spectrum. I’m happy that there’s been more prominence on work and more prominence, hopefully, on the policies you guys are talking about to reward…
Brad Yale:
People are people. Mental health and the ability to say there’s a cutoff time and there’s a time when you’re on. Don’t email someone at 9:30 at nighttime or six in the morning. Let people work in their natural environment and figure it out. And I wonder, has it, from your both perspectives, has your policies of talking about culture and values every single day, has that actually helped with retention and employee happiness and essentially the end work product of being a better, stronger, more creative, strategic, executional agencies?
Lyn Wineman:
Yeah. Brad, I love that. We actually did… At KidGlov, we did a survey of our employees on culture. It was before the pandemic, and we asked those same questions that you hit on. What do you want? Do you want more parties-
Brad Yale:
Yeah.
Lyn Wineman:
Do you want a ping pong table? Do you want a shuffleboard table? Do you want to slide in the middle of the office? And resoundingly, what we got back, was we just want the environment to do great work, right? We want the processes, the environment, we want to like the people we work with, we want to trust the people we work with, we want to like the clients we work for. And then we want to go home, because I agree with you. I don’t need to be their family here at work, because my employees all have families and they want to go home and see their families.
Lyn Wineman:
So, we want to be efficient enough so we can get our work done and then send them home to do whatever it is, whether they want to play with kids or do arts or do sports or hike or whatever they want to do. So, yeah. We’ve seen that. I think talking about it just brings it to the surface. I think agencies are one of those fields, or marketing is one of those fields, where it’s so easy to go out and hire a really disruptive, but very talented person, right? That’s that bad apple in your culture.
Lyn Wineman:
And it’s so hard, because they do amazing work. And you have to decide, is my culture worth it? And then likewise, you have that other person who is lovable, lovable Andy, who just can’t write their way out of a paper bag, right? And I think as an agency leader, you have to make hard decisions on both ends of that.
Sara Nay:
Yeah. And on that note, we’ve put a lot of processes and accountabilities in place to assign people to very important metrics, to understand what work they’re doing, what their key priorities are, how much of an impact they’re having in those areas. And when you take a step back and map that all out, it helps you uncover who’s contributing on what level and what value are they adding.
Sara Nay:
And then that helps you. As you mentioned, Brad, who gets more work, who gets the best clients. It helps you identify that, based on a system and process, not just who you might like more in the culture you were mentioning earlier, Brad.
Brad Yale:
Before we hopped on, obviously we chatted a little bit before about what we wanted to use this pod show for or whatever. And one of the things we talked about was the idea of establishing billing practices that support your goals. And we’re bordering on that right now, in terms of how do you put in place policies and scaffolding or structures that essentially make sure that your employees don’t feel like a number in a time sheet system, and they don’t feel like a wheel in a cog.
Brad Yale:
To that end, again, you guys run teams, you run agency. You have a business to run, and I wonder how do you think about charging for strategy? Or how do you think about profitability out of a 45-hour work week? And how that actually works out in terms of dealing and putting policies in place that’ll let your employees actually carry those goals out?
Sara Nay:
Yeah. So for us, I work with another side of our business. I work with a lot of marketing consultants, coaches, agencies, as they’re part of our group, essentially. And the number one thing that I see people struggling with a lot of times, which is… Lyn, I actually shared this with. She was surprised. People don’t charge for strategy.
Lyn Wineman:
Right.
Sara Nay:
Which blows my mind.
Lyn Wineman:
It blows my mind, too.
Lyn Wineman:
It’s the number one thing that we do, right?
Sara Nay:
Yeah.
Lyn Wineman:
It’s strategy. Yeah.
Sara Nay:
Such a value add. It elevates you in the eyes of your clients. There’s so many reasons why you should be charging for strategy. And so ultimately, if you’re not charging for strategy, take a step back and look at that and absolutely charge for it. Don’t just bake it into a retainer-type of engagement, is number one thing I see. But also in the retainer side of engagements, typically we see a lot of people just charging by the project. And that makes sense sometimes.
Sara Nay:
But in a lot of cases, if you can lock a client into a long-term retainer, engagement and price it based on the value you’re delivering and not just the hourly work. That’s where you can be successful as an agency. That’s where you can grow and scale. That’s where you can have predictable revenue long-term and you’re not always having to go out there and sell the next thing.
Brad Yale:
Do you find that the charging for strats… I agree with you completely, but do you find that the charging for strategy is also a reeducation on your client side to say, this is why we’re charging for it. This is the value and the benefit you get from it, and if you had to go through that process of actually educating clients on why this is important and will actually help your business in the long-term.
Sara Nay:
Yeah. I do our sales and a lot of it is educating on why strategy, all the time. Why are we starting with strategy? People come to us all the time. “Oh, I need a website.” I’m like, “Great. We’ll get to that, after we do strategy, because I can’t do a website until I do strategy, and this is why.”
Sara Nay:
It’s ultimately going to save you money, it’s going to provide clarity, your marketing’s going to be more impactful. I could go on and on. So, it is a lot of education around it, but it’s important. And I’m a true believer in it.
Lyn Wineman:
We always talk about even, once you do this strategy, everything after that will become easier and more efficient, right?
Brad Yale:
Sure.
Lyn Wineman:
So essentially, you’re going to pay for the strategy up front and you’re going to save later on because all of the pieces are going to work together more efficiently, more effectively. I think, too, one nice thing about being a smaller agency is that we don’t have to take every client, right? And so, if we’ve got a client that comes in that doesn’t want to pay for strategy, that wants some low cost, one-off things, then we just know, “Hey, I’m really sorry. We’re not a fit for you, but I know there’s an agency down the street that doesn’t charge for strategy. Why don’t you go talk to them?”
Lyn Wineman:
But I just think it’s so valuable. And then I think that leads into the other part of what you asked, Brad. I think that billing for strategy and being selective and what types of clients you go after, helps you really balance workloads. I have worked in other agencies where the model was pretty much based on me working 50, 55, 60 hours a week. And so, it has become very important to me as an owner to actually track how many people in my agency are working more than 45 hours a week, because I don’t want that.
Lyn Wineman:
I know that they will become resentful. I will lose them. They will burn out. The work in those last 10, 15 hours is lesser quality. So, if I can really manage that by billing for what I need to bill for, then it makes the world a happier place as well.
Brad Yale:
What is the avenue that you actually apply then? Because we all know, there’s something that’s going to be… Late nights where you work till eight or nine o’clock.
Lyn Wineman:
Yeah.
Brad Yale:
There’s going to be some new business and maybe you’re ramping up, so you work 60-hour weeks here and there. And it happens. It’s just part of the-
Lyn Wineman:
It does happen. Occasionally it happens.
Brad Yale:
… Yeah. But I wonder how do you actually implement that? How do you, outside of just looking at… You see one team in your agency is working 60 hours a week and they’ve been doing it for a month. Is there some type of policy or structure you’re putting in place that you would also recommend for other agencies to say, this is how you make sure your employees don’t burn out?
Lyn Wineman:
Yeah. Well, we, in our daily standup meetings, we look at everybody’s workload for the week. For the day, for the week, for the month. And we are watching it, we are measuring it, we are getting them help, we’re adding people to the team. We have some flex people that we can add to teams to help them out, but we just think it’s that important.
Lyn Wineman:
And I’m going to tell you, in a time of the great recession, we’ve had one person leave us in the last 12 months. One person. And that person changed careers, so it wasn’t just like they left to go down the street to another agency. And I know, I know, every single person in my agency is being recruited on a weekly basis.
Brad Yale:
Yeah.
Lyn Wineman:
And so, this is my way of just watching out for them, taking care of them. Treating them with kid gloves, which is what our brand is all about.
Sara Nay:
I agree with everything you said there. And we also have used a tool for a while called 15Five which has been really helpful. We basically send out a survey to our whole team every Friday and it asks a series of questions, but one of the first questions is on a scale of one to five, how are you feeling this week?
Sara Nay:
And so, that helps me monitor, overall as an organization, how everyone’s feeling, but also as an individual, over time. Maybe they’ve been at a four forever and now all of a sudden they’re at threes and a two. And so, what can I do to get them back up to the four or five ultimately? So that survey has been… It asks a number of questions, but that survey has been really great insight for us as well.
Brad Yale:
Now, I know we’re bordering on, obviously there’s some mental health issues there and some burnout issues there, but there’s also at the end of the day, an agency has to produce work, right? It has to produce results for hopefully a business solution that your clients are looking for. And this segues into the idea of metrics and how you nail your metrics down.
Brad Yale:
Sara, I’ll start with you here, you’ve talked before about the idea of you based your reporting on the customer journey and what that means. So I wonder, how does that actualize out? How do you think about metrics to report results and to allow them to let you focus on the most important thing?
Brad Yale:
Now, I’m going to say here, I’m a data strategist, so I think about this stuff a lot. So I wonder your perspective on it.
Sara Nay:
Yeah. We actually launched a marketing assessment two weeks ago, and it asks people a series of questions in terms of their marketing strategy. And the number one area where people are struggling with is metrics. So, I already knew this, but it was nice to have… Because based on the conversations I have all the time with business owners, it’s this overcomplicated foreign thing. And it doesn’t have to be.
Sara Nay:
We work with a lot of small businesses. That’s our audience, small businesses. And so, data metrics, it doesn’t have to be as complicated as they think in often cases. And so, one of the core concepts we teach in strategy is the customer journey, and basically we help people outline how someone can get to know, trust, try by repeat, and refer a business. And so, ultimately those are the stages we’re trying to guide clients through.
Sara Nay:
And then we identify, okay, based on these stages, what metrics should you be tracking for each of these stages? Because that’s where your clients are, that’s where they’re going, that’s the journey they’re on.
Sara Nay:
And so, for example, it just depends on how you’re getting awareness for your business. Are you doing paid advertising? Okay. Yes. Metrics need to be tied to that.
Sara Nay:
Are you getting referrals? You have a referral program? Okay, what metrics should you track to that?
Sara Nay:
Now, they go to your website, who’s converting? So, it’s basically understanding the process people are going on, the journey people are going on, and then identifying metrics from there.
Lyn Wineman:
That’s cool. Sara, our situation’s a little bit different. We work with mostly nonprofits and social impact campaigns. So, when we work with nonprofits, they almost always have a measurable goal related to fundraising or event attendance or people who are participating in their programs. So, we can usually measure those.
Lyn Wineman:
But one of my favorite upfront questions is to ask somebody what does success look like? And then using that to build your metrics out of that, because I think a lot of times we get excited about the campaign and we’re moving forward. And even if you’ve done the key strategy steps, you don’t stop for a moment to say, how are we going to measure? What are we going to measure? What is the number we’re looking for? Right? And so, I love asking that question.
Lyn Wineman:
We also do, with social impact campaigns, they’re almost always grant funded and grant funders always want data back of some sort. So, we’re always trying to do our best. And of course, digital marketing is always gives you numbers. Sometimes there are some intangibles that you’d like to be able to measure that are a little bit more difficult, but we’re always trying to work it in there the best we can.
Brad Yale:
What I very definitively have learned over the past 10 something years of doing this kind of work, is that when it comes to metrics and data and analysis, the vast majority of people don’t care about the raw numbers. It doesn’t matter to them.
Brad Yale:
What they care about is what the numbers actually mean. And my joke is that, as a data analyst, I’m the messenger of either good or bad news, and the messenger tends to get killed because of it. And you have to approach and say hey, take a step back and say look, they’re not mad at you, they’re just… Whatever the numbers are, hopefully they’re good. But if they’re bad, it’s simply a way to tell a story and to say, how do you make something better based upon whatever the black and white numbers are saying to you?
Brad Yale:
And I wonder… I hear you, the fundraising part of which is clearly a hard goal. It’s a hard goal of saying we want to fundraise XYZ amount of money, versus say a customer journey, which is the touch points to get someone somewhere, to have them take an action, including engagement metrics along the way there.
Brad Yale:
I’m always wrestling with the idea of how much data is too data? Or, too much data. Sorry. And how do you work with your teams to be able to explain to your clients at a third-grade level, what this means? Because again, people don’t… As long as the numbers make sense, they want to know what it means. How do you work with your teams to let them understand to go along the lines of, where is this going for the client as opposed to saying, this is just the performance?
Sara Nay:
Yeah. We are all in on a tool called Agency Analytics. I don’t know if either of you use it, but you can create really valuable dashboards for clients that pull in all their data from different platforms to one place. And so, we give our clients access to these dashboards, but it’s pulling in their Google analytics, their email, their social, their reviews. Basically, the most important things we’re looking at.
Brad Yale:
Sure.
Sara Nay:
And so, it can be really overwhelming for a client to have access and see all of it in one place. And so, on a monthly basis, we meet with the clients and we pull out the biggest highlights and do a high-level overview. But in most cases, again for my clients, they want to know what their conversions are. So, the traffic to their website’s nice. Obviously they want to see traffic, they want to see improvements.
Brad Yale:
Yeah.
Sara Nay:
But they want to have phone calls, which we’re tracking through CallRail. They want to have their calls increasing and they want to have their form fills and conversion goals increasing. So honestly, that’s where I spend a lot of time with my clients. I’ll go over the other things, but I’m like, the thing I care about is conversions because that’s what’s going to make you money, ultimately.
Sara Nay:
So that’s where we primarily focus on, when we’re doing monthly reports.
Lyn Wineman:
I imagine with that report, too, you could see where people are leaking out of the system, right? I think that’s an important data point. Like hey, our calls might be great, but our conversions aren’t. Or our website traffic is exactly what we want, but our sales are not. And so, that allows you to tinker with the campaign, or let’s say refine is probably a better word than tinker, right? But refine and optimize the campaign based upon what’s happening there as well.
Sara Nay:
Yeah, absolutely. It allows you to figure out where the fall off is. And then for us, we’re doing quarterly strategic plans, and so it’s paying attention to the information. And if we’re getting a bunch of traffic, but no one’s converting, we need to analyze the conversion of the website and see, are we not attracting the right people? Or is the conversion message not correct?
Sara Nay:
And so analyzing that, continue to test that, and that guides your next priority for the next quarter, ultimately, is fixing that problem.
Lyn Wineman:
Yeah.
Sara Nay:
Paying attention to the data, seeing where the drop off is next quarter, and shifting your focus based on where your biggest need is.
Brad Yale:
So, we’re talking about conversion and that leads to the last thing that I wanted to pick your minds about. This is the idea of taking time to work on your agency business. I think there’s an old joke in the industry that we do a very good job of advertising, marketing, providing promotion for the clients we work for, but we do an awful job at doing it for ourselves.
Brad Yale:
We’re just… We don’t think about it enough, and it goes by the wayside. Previously to this, Lyn, you had mentioned the idea of you’ve started treating yourself like the client with a true marketing plan. What does that look like for you? How has that helped you prioritize your business and what has it done for you?
Lyn Wineman:
Yeah, because up until the point we started to do that, we were always the easiest thing to push, right? So, when we’re trying to manage people’s workloads and saying hey, how do we get you out of here after 45 hours? The easiest thing to push would be well, we’re working on our own website or our own things. And so, we got caught flatfooted at the beginning of the pandemic, because we had relied so heavily on networking and not on marketing, which is honestly just ridiculous, that we stopped and said, all right. This can’t happen anymore.
Lyn Wineman:
And we did our own strategic plan. We did our own marketing plan. And it is… Honestly, it has really worked for us. We are continuing to see high growth, quarter after quarter after quarter. And starting to see more conversions of our own, as well. But our strategies include content marketing and sponsorships and podcasting, so it’s been a good strategy for us.
Brad Yale:
Sara, how has that worked out for you?
Sara Nay:
Yeah. So, on the side of where I do more consulting in this space, we work with a lot of solo consultants and coaches, where they’re maybe looking to grow and scale their teams at some point, but they’re just starting out. And where I see people struggle all the time is they just start doing all of the client work themselves, because they can, because they have capacity, because they don’t have the demand yet. And they’re just holding on to all of these things. And then they look up and they’re like, we haven’t spent any time working on developing our own business because we got really busy doing all of the client work because we could.
Sara Nay:
And so, people like that, in that scenario, I always try to encourage them start small, hire your first virtual assistant, hire your first account manager. Find people that can write content, because that’s the time suck. Get the people in place, and you as the business owner needs to absolutely focus on the highest payoff activities. It’s the biggest challenge that I see on a consistent basis, when people are just getting started ultimately.
Sara Nay:
But as Lyn said, we’ve done the same things ourselves, where we’ve been in this business for 25 years. We’ve relied on a lot of our recognition in our name and having referrals and relationships and making an impact that it is so easy to just put your head down and do the work and grow in a comfortable pace. But it really is important to continue to grow and excel. I tell people all the time, you need to be focusing on referral, strategic partnerships, organic traffic, and then in some cases paid, if it makes sense. But you can’t be all in on one bucket. And that’s where I see people getting really comfortable in. Just focus on that referrals, relationship bucket, all the time.
Brad Yale:
So, it sounds like to me, you’re both advocating for the idea of really documenting and building process that you know has worked over time and applying that to your own company. And to keep everyone moving in the same direction, avoiding mistakes, encouraging improvement to essentially say, what are the things that have worked for us? Yes, be fluid and change over time, but in terms of promoting and marketing our agency, being consistent and understanding what works and what doesn’t and acting on it.
Lyn Wineman:
Yeah. I think, too, we talked about metrics for our clients, but we think it’s important. A sale is a lagging metric, right? It’s something that’s based on something you’ve done in the past. We like to look at leading indicators, and we track things like how many new contacts are we making? How many new names are we adding to our list? How many meetings are we taking? What’s our website traffic?
Lyn Wineman:
And if all of those things are strong, I know we’re going to convert that into sales. So as I’m looking at our plan and saying hey, I need to hire in the next quarter. Do I have the confidence to hire? My confidence is built up on those leading indicators, not so much the actual sales themselves, because we’ve tracked this for long enough that I have a pretty good feel, if we got the funnel full, the business is going to come.
Brad Yale:
Yeah.
Lyn Wineman:
Unless, of course, we have a pandemic and then that might slow things down a little bit.
Sara Nay:
And to your point on, on systems and processes as well, Brad, we’re big on systemizing marketing, so how can you run people through strategy in a systematic way that converts them into predictable revenue traffic, long-term? That’s the process we’re working through, and that allows us to grow and scale because we have systems and processes in place that every team member is essentially implementing and following.
Sara Nay:
And so, I think the smarter you can get with systems and processes, the more people can handle within the 45 hours work because they’re following systems that are mapped out for them, which then allows you to take the time to focus on business growth and other key areas.
Lyn Wineman:
And Sara, I was feeling empathy for your clients, because we did exactly that thing. I remember in year two of KidGlov, we had these big clients and big projects and we were just working, working, working. And they all ended at about the same time, and we took a little rest and came back to work and said hey, nobody’s had time to sell in the last six months, have we? Right?
Lyn Wineman:
And that made a very difficult few months there while we were refilling the timeline. So, remembering to execute on your marketing plan and your sales plan while you’re busy is a key thing as well.
Sara Nay:
Yep.
Brad Yale:
Well Lyn and Sara, I secretly have to admit, I set this up in the hopes that I could not speak a lot, which I think I accomplished, and I could learn from two people who run agencies and actively have to think about these and work on these issues every day and how that might port over to other agencies and other brands.
Brad Yale:
I just want to say thank you for your time, because I feel smarter and I hope anybody listening does too. And I just want to say thank you.
Sara Nay:
Thank you, Brad. Thanks for pulling us together. It was really fun conversation.
Lyn Wineman:
Yeah. Thanks, Brad. Thanks, Sara. I think we all need to go have a cocktail together.
Brad Yale:
Fair enough.
Sara Nay:
Yeah, let’s do it.
Announcer:
We hope you enjoyed today’s Agency for Change podcast. To hear all our interviews with those who are making a positive change in our communities or to nominate a change maker you’d love to hear from, visit Kidglov.com at K-I-D-G-L-O-V.com to get in touch. As always, if you like what you’ve heard today, be sure to rate, review, subscribe, and share. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.