Creative Agency Account Manager Podcast

Transcript:Jenny 00:02So I'm delighted today that I've managed to get some time in the diary with Mark Probert. Mark is managing partner of Cact.us, the leading UK agency growth consultancy, and also managing partner of Agencynomics, a social enterprise and the largest free of charge community in the UK for agency founders. Welcome, Mark.Mark 00:23Hi Jenny. Thanks for having me on. I feel honoured with the guests you've had on this.Jenny 00:28No, honestly I've wanted to have you on for ages. So I'm really excited about diving into this topic. Would you mind spending a couple of minutes first of all, Mark, just talking about you, your background, a bit of your experience and how you help agencies?Mark 00:42Okay, do you want the short story or the long story?Jenny 00:44However it comes.Mark 00:46Okay, well, maybe it's helpful to go back a few years. So whilst I was at school in Hampshire, I had a variety of different jobs. And as somebody that never really wanted to go to university I had this thing in me where I wanted to go and work and I had various things going on, a car wash business, run a cigarette kiosk of all things, stuff like that, and went into went into college, kind of enjoyed my business studies, thought actually Maths might be the thing for me, I was quite good with numbers at the time, maybe not so much now that this technology to do these things for you. So I went into accountancy practice. And I went in at the age of 18, had a couple of other jobs on the side of the weekends and so on. And I probably then spent about the next 18 years trying to get out of accountancy practice, so 18 to 18 even I can add that 36. So basically I went into different accountancy, doing audits, tax, a bit of M&A work, business advisory. And what I always loved doing was working with SMEs. Absolutely loved it. I love seeing somebody come up with an idea, run with that idea and either make it or not make and we can try and help them a little bit along the way with what we we could advise on. But when I said about trying to escape, I got to the point where I moved up to Scotland probably 19, 20 years ago, with my wife, now wife, Kirsty and joined a variety of firms up here, tried a different couple of different ones, went to Grant Thornton, which is my last one, obviously big, big multinational. And I'd got to the point then really where I was trying to get out of doing accounts and audit and tax and so I wanted to do something a bit different. But perhaps naively, what I ended up doing there was working on some big global brand, you know, audits, accounts, and so on. But I also learned quite a lot at that time in that environment in Scotland in Grant Thornton, about marketing and the value of marketing. So for once, the first time ever in my life, I kind of took a step back and thought hang on a minute. I dabbled into industry once upon a time before, didn't like it, went into a company that was too big came back out into practice. I thought it's probably time to be a bit selfish and go, well forget this party route that everybody kind of steps into in accountancy where you're a trainee, and you progress up the rungs and so on. And I thought it's probably time to try something a bit different. I took time to think about what that was. And that ended up being Cact.us. So I knew Pete, a really good friend of mine that I've known since I was four or five. So there's a whole backstory there which is a different podcast, there's a few stories in there! And he was up in Edinburgh one weekend, we were sat in my living room for a glass of wine catching up, and he said are you okay? And I was, uh, you know what, I just need to do something different. I'm fed up doing what I'm doing, doesn't mean anything, I don't feel like I'm helping anybody, I've kind of lost the sort of buzz. So anyway, he went away, give me a call the next night when he got home and said, you should come and join us. Totally out of the blue, you know, what does that mean? And what Cact.us was at that time, and that was probably seven or eight years ago, nearly now, Cact.us was eight people, Spencer Gallagher, my colleagues, ex agency owners who have grown and sold their agency, their designer build agency. And they'd set up Cact.us and Cact.us was consulting to independent agencies in the kind of 6/ 700,000 turnover up to about four or 5 million space. And they were helping them holistically around, you know, all the areas of the business finance ops - marketing, sales culture, and trying to help people get to what their vision, you know, wherever their vision was, they're trying to help them on that journey. Pete very much helping on the finance and ops, Spencer, very much the tech sales marketing. So, again, long story short, I joined six and a half years, sort of probably about that time now ago and over the time, I've partnered with other ex agency owners. I do very similar to what Pete does, helping very much on the financial and operational side of businesses. That can be getting my hands dirty on some of the stuff up to helping people hire in their finance teams or their operation teams up to M&A work, which last year Cact.us I think we did 12 deals with different varieties. So that's what I now do. And I don't ever call it a job now. I think I ended up when I looked for that role seven years ago, who I had various other opportunities but this one sort of stood out because it was helping SMEs, entrepreneurial people with an idea. And yeah, I love what I do now, it's is not really a job.Jenny 05:19It shows!Mark 05:21There's a long story, Jenny?Jenny 05:23I didn't really know half of that. So it is really valuable already for me. So I know how many agencies you work with and it's very difficult to actually get a time with you to work with you. But when an agency comes to you and says, right, an agency owner says I want to grow. What are the very first things that you do with that business? What do you look at first?Mark 05:44Well the very first thing I do is spend some time getting to know them. Because you know, everyone knows about The Four Fs, as they call them - Fun, Fame, Fortune, Future kind of thing. And what I always want to do is feel like I get to know the person. For me, I did a poll on LinkedIn a few weeks ago, I think I know which way you answered this one, actually similar to me, where is what is the one sort of area of the business you'd really want to, you want to monitor a KPI on? And for me, people thought I'd have said finance, and I said clients. Clients are key to me, like, absolutely, fundamentally, it's about client care to me, always has been. And that for me is, you've got to enjoy working with somebody. And I suppose my motto is, it's got to be bloody hard work for me, but it's got to be enjoyable. And that, for me is get to know the person first and foremost. And then there's all the usual stuff isn't there, funnels of how you get them to work with you, and so on. And suddenly, we implemented a while ago was we put in a health check for the business, where what's really useful for that is, I have a lot of kind of new business, if you want to call them that, calls with people that have completed their health check on our website at Cact.us. And it identifies areas of business where they don't see themselves scoring very highly. So it might be, I don't know, they might not have a cash flow projection, or it might be they have no marketing strategy, bizarrely, even though they're a marketing agency. And these things often root out quite quickly for us what their problems are. And so for me, it's get to know the person first and foremost on, at the moment obviously, a lot of calls, get to really feel like you know them and starting to get a bit friendlier with them. Over time building up a friendship more than a working relationship, I think is really important. And then there's the work side, identifying quickly what their problems are, so that you can help them quickly. Because a lot of people think they need help, like yesterday. But it's trying to identify what the real issues are. Because they might think it's one thing and it might not be that thing.Jenny 07:41Okay, perfect. So I'll include a link to the health check on this podcast as that sounds really, really valuable. And absolutely, you would imagine that it would be some kind of audit. So that sounds like it's super.Mark 07:52It is like an audit, yeah.Jenny 07:54So I know that your specialism is the financial and operation side. So can you talk us through some of the kind of standard financial benchmarks and parameters that you believe would help an agency grow?Mark 08:09Okay. For me, there's huge worries around staff costs, obviously, at the current time as well, that can be a bit difficult for some people to monitor, we've still got all the furlough stuff and that going on, but for me, this is one of the, what's the word for this, this is a confusion in the market. There are other advisors that look at staff costs in a different way that we do at Cact.us. So the biggest thing for us really is staff cost, the gross profits. So that for me is the biggest metric to watch, or one of the big five, as I call them I suppose. So what I mean by us different to others is, a lot of the big networks would treat their gross profit differently to how an independent would. So they will do sales, but lots of terminology now when people call them different things generally, but sales, less cost of sales, equals gross profit. A lot of people will put advisors will put staff costs into the cost of sale. So if somebody, if a web developers working specifically on a on a web project for a client, they might attribute some of their time to cost of sale, to the cost of making that sale. We wouldn't do that. So what we do is very much try and keep a lot of what we do at Cact.us, believe it or not, is try and keep it very simple. So we're quite aware that in the independent space, people don't often have resource, okay, so they don't want to buy in the non fee earners like the finance people, maybe the marketeers or whatever. Project managers, you'll know this, this is what you do in your account management, project management stuff. So for me, the staff cost, the gross profit ratio is we keep sales, the sales, we put pretty much nothing in cost of sales. So it might be a bit of a hosting of a website, might be a licence, you know if you're reselling it to a client, but all people costs are in overheads. So in our view, all people are overheads. As soon as you hire them there are fixed costs. Yep. But a lot of other people completely change that, do it differently, split the employee costs and so on. Some of the big networks do it that way. When I did a deal last year with an agency in Bristol and we sold them to McCann's, McCann's did it that way, you know, but that's because they've got a whole team of finance people doing their numbers and analysis. So what we say is, an agency of a million pound might not even have a full time finance person, more often than not, they don't. So what they should do is another question, but you know what, why make it complicated? You know, why make it complicated?Jenny 10:38Okay. So it simplifies it, from an accountancy perspective or more from an understanding?Mark 10:45I think, by the way, there's no right or wrong way in accountancy. I mean, I can say that I suppose with my accountancy degree hat on or whatever, that you can do it either way, it's up to you. But for us, it's about that day to day, month to month internal reporting. Why make it really complex and take my salary and put some up there, some down the bottom? And then go, Oh hang on, what are my staff costs to my revenue? I'm going to do this funny calculation to work it all out? Or why waste all that time? What we would say is, if you're operating in between 55, it used to be 55 to 65% of your, let's say, gross profit figure, which is nearly a sales figure in the capitalist world. Yeah. Then you are about right, you're running an agency that's about the right kind of staffing level. Although I would say at the moment, a lot of people are edging towards say 70% regularly because they're investing a little bit ahead of sales a little bit. A number of agencies, probably the ones that are faster growing.Jenny 11:43Oh right. Why are they doing that? Just so that they've got people ready to kind of hit the ground?Mark 11:48People ready to hit the ground, they've got the buffer of the government money. So a lot of agencies, believe it or not, are quite buoyant, in terms of cash reserves at the moment, still are, even though it's what, it's 5th May sort of time, they've still got a buffer of reserves. So they're thinking, well actually, we're quite confident at the moment, it's hard to get people, so let's go on hiring, let's try and hire some people in, it's hard to get them. There's still a lot of people, some people moving, some aren't and so on. Why not invest some of that money in people? Because that's ultimately what we're going to be trying to get our value in going forward.Jenny 12:25That makes total sense. Have you got any other benchmarks that you can share with us?Mark 12:30Yeah, yeah. So we tend to say, well I tend to say, that three times somebody's salary is what they should be earning an agency, you might have heard that before? So somebody on 40 grand, they should be doing 120 grand billable work. Lots of the bigger agencies have that number down to a fine, you know, 3.2, or whatever. We would say, the Cact.us fag packet here, it's three. Times 3, is the revenue kind of target for everybody. Liquidity is always one, some people ask me often how much money should we have in the bank, and then they pull out their mobile phone, and then it all goes wrong! You go, it's not about what you've got today. It's about what you've got covering your costs. And so some people work to six times their overheads. So if their overheads 100 grand a month, they can actually have 600 grand in the bank. I think I'm quite a cautious finance person in some respects. I think that's, that's an awful lot of headroom to give yourself if you're trying to scale something quite quickly. And all this I suppose, depends on vision and so on as to what you're doing. But, you know, a couple of months is enough. A couple of months in the bank is enough. So there's a ratio, I do Pete hates this one, I call it, he always calls me Horatio Probert as in Horatio Nelson! This is the current ratio where you do your assets on your balance sheet, bank and cash and your debtors, who owes you money, divided by your liabilities. You know, you owe the VAT man, you are HMRC your payroll, you owe your suppliers if you've got any. That VAT, if that's more than three to one- three pounds to one pound, you're in quite healthy position for a lot of even project based agencies. You know, if it's two to one, you're fine. If it's less than one, you've got problems.Jenny 14:12Some poor agency leader listening to this somewhere thinking, Oh, no!Mark 14:16Well, maybe, maybe!Jenny 14:18And this is fascinating, and what about billable percentages? Do you have any benchmarks around that?Mark 14:26Yeah, yeah. I suppose the minimum for us is 64%. So what I mean by that is, so if somebody has capacity, if they're 80% available to work, they've got holidays, and so on and then nobody is super efficient nobody's a machine or though sometimes I think you might be with all these podcasts Jenny, you're amazing! Nobody's a machine. So that's 80% against 80% of 80% is 64. So what I mean by that is the minimum number, somebody should be able to do that's a billable resource is 64% of their time, and you'll you'll find that you know, in a dev agency, maybe web developers 80 or 90% kind of thing in creative, maybe not as high, then different job roles, not as much obviously account management very different and so on. So we would tend to work on, somebody should be doing about 64% if they're mostly a billable resource, and you tend to find, I think, in some of the industry reports that have been done in the last couple of years that you know, some people ,you will know this well, it works out, I think the average is about 63/65, something like that. So our starting figure is about right usually.Jenny 15:31Perfect. What about your views on account management? Should account management be billable or non billable?Mark 15:43Should it be sorry, billable or non billable did you say? And should it be split up in terms of job roles?Jenny 15:48No. Well, just in terms of the account management role, should it be billable or not? What's your view? Or does it vary? Or is it just, from your perspective?Mark 15:58I think most people tend to say it's not billable. But I still think there is elements of it that could be billable. And it just depends how you're packaging up your offering to your client, isn't it? Really, at the end of the day. If your value based pricing, then you can wrap all that up, and there's no issue is there? This is your price and that's what we create and you know somebody that you and I work with that does kind of thing and so on. So maybe it's chargeable, maybe it has been billed, but that has not been identified to the client as such.Jenny 16:27I have to ask you, because you've mentioned it, how many agencies do you come across that do actually manage to do value based pricing?Mark 16:33Oh limited. I know, it's the utopia, isn't it, people want to try it and, and so on. One that you and I work with, another one that I work with, I work in a pair, I probably should have said this earlier on actually, I work in a partnership with a guy called Danny Turnbull who you'll know, most of the time now. But I also have a number of clients of my own that I've had for years in different guises of support to them and I would say there's probably two of those that do it. One very, very well. But that's mainly because they've got a couple of big clients, and they've had them for quite a few years and I think they've always sold on that basis. And, and one that's been trying it recently, and it's been working. I think that the other thing is, people worry too much about pricing about changing their prices, how do they find out what the competition is doing? And I know that's not that's a hot topic for you and other people. But why don't you just try things? I mean, it's I just don't get it sometimes. I think people overanalyse it all and they overanalyse finance too much, numbers, and it's just like, just try it. What have you got to lose kind of thing?Jenny 17:40That's really good advice, actually. Yeah, absolutely. Well, this has been so valuable already. Mark, thank you for sharing so many benchmarks. I'm sure that's been a few lightbulb moments going off. I'm interested to know about your thoughts on the most conducive agency business model that you've found has worked the best if someone wants fast growth?Mark 18:02Interesting. You'll probably imagine I'll say Pods here?. And I will say Pods, but what I won't say who but, I helped somebody last year, I've worked for them for quite a few years, and helped them sell their agency. And they've gone into a much bigger thing now, I think it's 160 people, a company bought them from overseas. And I asked the owner of that, while I was there working with them and still supporting them and so on, so I asked the owner, I think it was a couple of weeks ago on the on the board call, 'How did you scale your agency?' and I'm thinking, well he's got to have done this by the Pod style, I'll come onto the Pods in a minute, but got it done this via some kind of Pod. And he's just basically, and he's a development agency making the main, and he's just he was just like, so we just made sure we got the best people we could get. And I said yeah, but you must have had a structure. And he said not really. People that are doing the development also sell to the client. And I'm going, how does this happen that you know, struggling with this concept, like quite a bit. And he just said it's just all about getting the best people and training them. And eventually if they go off to say, I want to just be a developer and I don't want to do any kind of account management or sales, whatever it is, then that's fine. We're fine with that. But we give them a lot of training around different areas. And I know you said to me before you had sales training many years ago, you found that like game changing almost. And this guy had done that with people that you wouldn't anticipate would have had sales training. You'd necessarily be giving sales training to the development team and so on. But he said let them try it, let them see how they get on and they might not be able to do it and they probably can't do it all but let's just see. And his point was very much about getting the superstar people in the first place, spending a lot of time on the recruitment side of things. So that's the one I've heard that's a bit different. The Pod stuff, I mean, that for me usually works if you do it right.Jenny 20:02For those listening, who perhaps haven't come across the concept of a Pod structure, what what actually is a Pod structure?Mark 20:09Okay, so you kind of got three bits to the agency, I did it the other way around, you've got the kind of management almost, I mean, that may be the CEO, and maybe the finance director, whatever, as you scale up, obviously a million pounds, you probably, the owners kind of over here. In the middle you've got the core team servicing the client and what I mean by that is a project, we all call it different terminology obviously, but a project, different types of agency, a project manager, an account manager, and then the specialists, it might be a real data specialist specialist or strategists maybe in that role. And then it might be, a mobile and web agency I work with, they just hired a scrum master to go into that sort of PM role. So that they can do the all the efficiency and operational stuff and the management of the work scheduling and so on. The account manager hopefully then is more freed up to service the client properly, the stuff you advice on, obviously expertly, and sells a little bit in the right way to the client, have the right meetings, the quarterly meetings or whatever, talk about the strategy with the client, not be worried about, bogged down with how the team going to service it all. It's the PMs role, and then you've got the specialists to come into the meetings, obviously with the accounts person and hopefully get better ideas out of the client, which the agency can then deliver on. That's the kind of the core bit and that Pods in so many variables to that. That Pod, we tend to say might do 650 revenue up to about a million. But that could be a couple of big clients, can be multiple, multiple small ones, or a mixture of both. Obviously, there is no definitive numbers on these because, as you know, you could have had one client that had the Pods that had 1.8 million going through, it only had two clients, because one of them was a huge client for the agency, the account management team couldn't have coped with five or six other clients, it just wouldn't have been feasible. So that's that, and then you've almost got, and this is no derogatory term, the bench, the bench is the people doing the work. So it might be the development team, it might be, sometimes search agencies I think, don't maybe adopt this model and they see they don't see how it works for them, when they might have an SCO head, a PPC heads, whatever, a social media head and they think, how can this work? But actually it can work, and we've put it into some search agencies before and it does work, but it takes time, the Pod thing probably takes six to eight months to properly put in. Because you're trying to map out what you are now, where you want to go and show people their career opportunities. So you've got to get all that out clear first and understand it before you can go anywhere near doing it.Jenny 22:50And if you get above million pound revenue per pod, how does that pod grow? Or doesn't it? Do you just set up another pod?Mark 22:58Yeah. That's a good question. So I suppose the logical, I say the logical thing, in reality, what happens is you might have, you might have, people bring in a lot of account people don't they, you always want to be hiring the account manager and account exec or whatever and they're not really thinking about the role. So if you've got it clarified, you go well, okay, I've got one Pod, I might start another one and start putting some clients into there, I might have this PM role kind of floating between the two. Then as it gets bigger, you hire in another, or you bring on another account exec into a more CSD, however big the agency is they manage the other Pod, and eventually, I say CSD they're probably the person overseeing. It's a little bit like our friends that we work with, where they've got a CSD character haven't they, overseeing various Pod leads.Jenny 23:49Gotcha, that makes sense. And you found that actually, that's the most conducive, because obviously, different agencies that you start working with, have probably got all different structures. But do you tend to kind of try to formulate that structure? Or give them the benefits of doing that? And do you find that they say, Oh, yes, that's fine, or do you get any resistance?Mark 24:09There's always, there is a lot, obviously, it's pretty, I mean, this is the person's, people's company, you're sort of. And they've got a history of trying to grow the company to a certain stage, and then they're looking for somebody to help and, nobody has, we have no magic wands. We just have, I suppose between us a lot of experience. Yeah. And people do resist it. Absolutely they do. And sometimes it doesn't work. And I've worked with somebody before where they almost took it by the words of the book and tried to implement it really quickly. And they didn't really I think, from stepping back and looking at third party sort of in, they didn't really do what we just said- say What are we now? What do we want to be, in might be this posture and how are we going to evolve to? That can't just change overnight. This is people's lives, careers and so on. You're sort of messing with. They didn't take the time. So you do get a lot of resistance, but actually, they go back to their health check question, I think most agencies we end up working with, the biggest issue is the structure isn't right. So they think it's lots of other things, that actually, when you sit back and answer, go through it all and think of like, it's often the structure is not right. And I don't think there is, I don't think there is another model we've put in somewhere that's really worked better than this pod system. When it's worked well, it's worked really well.Jenny 25:29So Mark that's really fascinating. So what's a symptom that they come with? And then you unpick it and realise it's a structure?Mark 25:37Sometimes, the debate we've had once upon a time actually, often it's that AM/PM sort of split and I know that's obvious to say, but one of the exercises we often do is say, let's say financial budgeting? Yeah. So we're doing I don't know, let's just say we're doing 100 grand a month revenue this year at the moment, it's okay. Well, let's have a high level stab at next year's budget. Okay, where are we going to start? And some people go, well, the sales gonna go up in line like this, or the cost of this, we need to make this much at the top, and then you go, okay, well, let's take it another way. What clients have you got, what you're going to get from those clients? You know, it's just, it sounds obvious to some, but it's not obvious. I know, to lots of people. What are you going to get from those clients, what do you think you could get, all that usual stuff? And then you go, okay, and then they go, but we can't get that and you go, why can't you get it? And I guess our account management team aren't good enough. And you go, okay, well, what do the account managers do then? And then you start to, oh right, so that person's a project manager, then? No, they're an account, you know, and then you start getting into that debate. And that's why I say often, it's the structure. It really is. And always, I think most of the time you find agencies have too many people for the revenue they're doing. Because they're because the structure isn't right. So they're throwing people at it, not fixing processes and systems. And I could go on about this all day, and I probably am.Jenny 27:00You've treated me with this discussion. Because yeah, being an account manager, myself, most of my life, I was a marketing manager for a few years, but most of my life, I've been in account management, and most of that tenure has been in hybrid roles. So I am the project manager, and I am the account manager. And I've only, it's one of those things that I've realised later in my career now, I'm consulting with agencies, how nuts that really is.Mark 27:28It's interesting.Jenny 27:29It just really fights. I mean, I'm sure there are people out there that just can, convinced that it works, and it has worked. But I just see really, really talented, commercially minded account managers coming on my course, this is I suppose this is my day to day experience, and yet they're kind of really bogged down by admin resourcing, scopes of work, of financial reconciliations. And you think, my God, they should be out there selling, growing, adding value to the business, you know, talking to clients and helping.Mark 28:01Yeah, yeah, exactly.Jenny 28:03And just carry on really...Mark 28:08Some people, I hope a few have people listen to this eventually, and some people won't know me or whatever, and they'll think, how does this guy profess to know about this stuff, when he's never worked in an agency, he's only been here six years. And actually, people don't often, but if they asked me what my previous experiences were, then accountancy practices bizarrely, are not that different to an agency. They're not as creative. I'll give you I'll give you that. I'll give you that. But they have account management roles. They have project management roles, they have delivery roles, they have graduate trainees that take up a lot of time for the senior people and that comes resent, you know, all these things very similar. And an often and I think, what did I have in many roles? I had far too many things going on, I was trying to manage 35 clients, a team of 40 people, win new business, up-sell to a client and work with a marketing team, and be head of client satisfaction. So you're like, well, how can you do all those things? Many years ago, I saw somebody I know actually up here in Scotland and went into a role as a new business director in an accountancy. Everyone was like, oh, my goodness, how can you have that completely non fee earning, just just just like going out like schmoozing all the time? Absolutely you could because they got their structure right. They had the right people doing the jobs, the work, doing the technical bits, you know, project managing it for one of the better words. So, it's a very similar industry in a lot of ways that people often overlook.Jenny 29:41And how would you if someone's listening to this, and it's really resonating with them and thinking, actually, we could look at separating these two roles. Where would you advise an agency owner start with that process?Mark 29:52I think the thing for me would be to not necessarily write down what that person's doing, although sometimes that's a good place to start, because then you might identify, is to write down what you think account managers should be doing, and what you think project managers should be doing. And then sitting and looking at the team you've got and going well, okay, well, if the if these are the right people, right seat, if these are the right people, then do they fit into these roles? If they don't fit into these roles, you've got a slight issue, obviously, they need to deal with overtime. But, you know, there might be other roles that they go into. I think you've got to clearly identify what you think the roles are. And then if it's not quite right, you've got to be honest and transparent with your team about that. And so I've got a client at the moment where one of the team doesn't really know what they want to do in their career, but is pivotal at the moment to the agency given the size of it. And really, the agency needs both. It needs AM and it needs a PM. And it really does need these roles separated out, it scores in too many inefficiencies. So what we've done is we've basically job specked out those two roles, and said absolutely, you're the right person to grow with this agency. Absolutely you are. And it's up to you, you go whichever way you want. But we support you, it might be Jenny Plants training on account management, it might be getting somebody else for your project management, training, specialists support around you might be sales training, but you can have all the training you want. But in this agencies opinion, this person needs to choose which role they go. And I think that can sound a bit harsh, but actually, I've worked with many people over the years before I did this, and some people do need that bit of a steer on their career path, they need a bit of help, because they are a bit kind of lost often.Jenny 31:51I agree, Mark. And I also think there's a bit of what do you have a natural tendency for, like, what's your natural default, because having worked with so many different kind of hybrid account managers, and also, project managers, project managers are really good at process, getting things done, being transactional, and kind of their very good with clients. But account managers are, pure account managers tend to be different, they're very, they're kind of, they're looking at account growth, they're looking at business strategy, they're looking at adding value, and you can kind of put them in the middle of a room and by the end of the night, they'll know everyone. The more and more I see these different types of, I think people have a natural tendency towards one or the other. And I think if you ask anyone, I think they'd probably, if they're really honest, it's probably quite obvious from the outside. But asking someone as well, I think would be a good way of...Mark 32:49Do you personality test people then?Jenny 32:51I don't, but, I'm thinking about starting to do it.Mark 32:53Yeah, I know a few people that do that. And it's quite interesting. But then I sometimes think that it's about, it's like you just said actually, if you've got the right people on board, and that in itself is a huge thing, take your time to get the right people and so on. And you want them to grow with you. So why not offer them opportunity? You know, why not go this is us today, and it's almost that visionary piece, and this is a lot of what we would do, is work with, What are you today? Where do you want to go? And now you need to be articulating that clearly to the team. Because if you don't, people will leave, that's proven without a doubt. I mean, there's a lot of surveys out at the moment around this, its lack of communication, lack of clarity of company, which is understandable given the year we've just been on. But what we try and what I'm certainly trying to get our clients to do at the moment is spend time working on what the agency is, where it's going and speaking to the team about it regularly keeping everybody informed.Jenny 33:11Great idea because then everyone feels like they're coming with you rather than fighting against you.Mark 33:52Yeah, hopefully, yeah.Jenny 33:55I think that bit like, just from personal experience, looking back on my career, I was bogged down with spreadsheets. And you know, I was much better at being with people, my communication skills are much better than actually sitting there poring over financial reconciliations, etc. So I just think that this topic is huge, as you say, get the right people. And if they're in the right seats, then the business has a fighting chance of of growing really well. I'm just curious, what types of questions should agency owners be asking you that they don't?Mark 34:31What should they be asking? Oh, goodness. Okay, I've done a lot of pitches over my time before this, before Cact.us and I don't ever get asked about that. I think people think oh he was the accountant and like, you couldn't be creative and so on. And a lot of qualifying out opportunities and working out whether it was right for our firm and for all the rest of it, but people never ask us about if we came up with many innovative ways of pitching or, or even innovative, I suppose upsell sort of opportunities. And what I mean by that is, we came up with this thing, at Grant Thornton actually, I think it was, where we called it the CEO room, because we're not good at branding obviously, you know as accountants, but the CEO room was basically a concept where if you think we were working with mostly some big organisations in Scotland, but also global organisations that happen to have a presence in Scotland, so one for example, had offices I think in Dubai, New York and so on. And so what we came up with, this concept where we get the senior leaders in that company into a room with us, and we would get the top people from audit, tax, whatever it is, M&A, you know, advisory work, and we would just sit and listen and brainstorm, not always sit, but brainstorm around where that company was going. So the company they would tell us like, well, we're in, I don't know, Africa at the moment, and we're thinking of going to Brazil, and so on and blah, blah, blah. And the idea was that, was that we could then sit and listen about all the opportunities that would be for tax planning, or overseas branches. And you know, duty was in most countries in the world. So that in itself bought quite a lot of fee income back to the company, I think that concept.Jenny 36:20Absolutely great idea. And anything else?Mark 36:24Anything else? That they should be asking me that they don't? I can't think of anything else. I can't Jenny.Jenny 36:33No, that's okay. This is so good. And you're delivering some knowledge bombs. And how much visibility of the agency numbers do you think the whole team should have versus just the agency owner?Mark 36:48Okay, so I work with a couple of people. One particular, and I've done some sort of strategy work with the other one is, and they let their team see everything. So like, salaries for everybody, self regulate a little bit. Like, have you read Maverick, the book by Ricardo?Jenny 37:11No.Mark 37:11Oh, you must, that book is a, I'll get it right now. I think it was a family business in Brazil. And the business wasn't doing too well, I think it was a manufacturing business. Anyway, so the son took it on. And he came in with a complete unique way of looking at things. So for example, everybody knew what everybody was getting paid. And this was a big, big company, by the way, they would do a little thing on the door where they would, this is going back quite a few years where they would, you would go in and you would colour tag against your name. So it told everybody going in when they went to clock in, what mood you're in. which I thought was genius. We did a similar thing, once at GT where we did personality profiling, and we had everybody's colours up on their name tag around the office. So when you go round, you could see, all right well, I know Mark's a headcase so I'm not going to speak to him, then. So that was one of the first times I've ever read about this self regulating the pay and so on. And I know two agencies that do that and it seems to work for them. One of them's got, constantly wins, like best culture in the sort of small business section of different things. Very, very open agency. The other one and they're in the UK, the other one is a dispersed agency, a development house where they, they've got people in, I can't remember how many countries around the world, it's not that big, it's probably 15 to 20 people. But again, imagine that one where somebody in the UK could be paid 50 grand versus somebody somewhere else in a different society that's maybe pay 20 for the same job. But it works for them, because they understand that UK living, the cost of living is so much more different, so vice versa, whatever. So it works. Would I do it? I don't know, if I would!Jenny 39:00You've got some good case studies though where it's worked so would you say that you would recommend it?Mark 39:06I don't think I would possibly go to the extremes with the cash flow. Because the cash flow sometimes, although as I said early on, a lot are pretty okay at the moment, that can be a complete stress. And I think that unless you were 100% transparent about everything and everybody understood the commercials and the impact of those and actually, in one of those agencies, they train people on financial the financials as well. So that's probably why it helps, you know, then I don't think I would go personally to that extreme, because I think there are a couple of things you perhaps don't need to share and that pressure almost maybe doesn't, although some people would say that pressure is a good thing, but you can't drive the sales if that's not, you know, is it a good thing? But what I would say is other than maybe the cash flow and probably wouldn't do the salaries, although I've worked, and I've got this sort of gone with a couple of clients at the moment, we're looking at salary bandings, and so and I've worked in places where that's where that's worked and hasn't really caused too many issues at all really. Would I go salaries? Probably not. Would I share everything else? Probably. Because I think the more you hide, the less the team feel they're part of something don't they?Jenny 40:17I agree, yeah, absolutely. Okay, that's good advice. Look, I'm conscious of time. But I do have another couple of questions. In terms of the changes we've seen happening, Mark, I know you were really active on LinkedIn, sharing some fantastic information that you're interpreting really quickly from what the government was talking about in terms of furlough schemes, etc, and grants and aid for agencies. So I know that you've done a lot of work in this area, but what do you see sort of happening now and in the agency landscape in the near future?Mark 40:49Okay. I think there's a few things actually. M&As, obviously, on a lot of people's lips, you're probably hearing that in some of them, if you follow other podcasts, or talks or whatever. But it goes back to what I said earlier on in quite a few agencies and I've got some of these at the moment, I'm doing two deals at the moment where we're probably selling the agencies actually, and another one might be doing a kind of management buyout, which I'm helping on, but people have got money. Some agencies have got a pile of money they've had a CBIL (Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan). They might have just topped that up as well, with a recovery loan that they've been able to get, to get whether it's right on or not, I'm not going to say on this, because it's up to the people individually. But people have got money to spend. And although what I would say on the flip side is, a lot of agencies are doing quite well. So their prices are not going down and a couple we sold towards the end of last year were good good prices, so it's not like you're gonna get necessarily a cheap deal. And if you were I'd probably be thinking, well, why are we buying that? You know, is it the right thing? That's one thing. I think a lot of pipelines at the moment that I see, because we have our own pipeline tool that we've tried to put into agencies and so on, that usually really helps and quite quickly, a lot of opportunities at the specialist agencies, that seems to be coming to the fore a lot more. So if you're a PPC only agency, you know, there's a lot of opportunities to become a dedicated to that. I think the more full service, it's probably a bit trickier sometimes at the moment than the specialists. So that's definitely something I think is changing. And then team, I think this goes back to the vision bit again, there's a lot of turnover of people at the moment. And that's not just people hiring, because there are lots hiring, but actually quite a lot of people leaving. And I think that's, I was doing some reading for a research report meeting last week and it was a Deloitte survey, I think it was last year, saying two out of three people in the marketing space, two out of three people feel that they don't get clear communication on where the agency's going. So for me, it goes back to that, What are we now? Where are we going in the roadmap? Articulate it, you know, quarterly stand ups, monthly emails, or or a quick check in everybody, this is how we're going. And this is your career path. Because there has been quite a lot of churn this year to SaaS businesses that are well funded. Other agencies, people going, well I've had enough of the last year, it's made me think about my career, I'm coming out of the agency game. So as much as this recruitment it's also quite a lot of people leaving, I think that's a challenge at the moment.Jenny 43:19Wow. So that's really useful, what you've just shared actually, the reason for the churn or one of the contributing factors, is the fact that they don't feel communicated with. And it absolutely goes back to what you were saying before about being transparent.Mark 43:32I think it's been, you know, obviously, last year was hard, because I think most owners were like, you know, I got asked on this M&A stuff I'm doing at the moment, can we give them the budgets we did for last year? And the actual results we did. Well to be honest, we were budgeting every three weeks, you know, it was a pain, what's the point, we're changing it every week, because the new scheme is coming in, whatever other clients search, some of the search clients have one of their users working with were coming off a cliff causing all their projects, you know, retainers, so all of that is, it's just created uncertainty. So it was hard, it is hard, isn't it for people to articulate but I think just quickly, the other thing that we've been doing, we've run this mastermind thing recently, we've had 16 agencies as a cohort, we've got five groups go in, we're just about sold out the next one. And what we tried to do for the pre work for that is get everybody to do a Pecha Kucha, if you know what a Pecha Kucha is Jenny?Jenny 44:27Well explain for everybody listening.Mark 44:29So 20 slides, 20 seconds a slide, what is that, I'm the maths person! That's six and a half minutes or whatever. And they're supposed to articulate who they are, what they're trying to do themselves personally, but also their business, where they want the business to go. And we always think that's a critical thing for anybody on this mastermind and we've actually started to do with the clients now because they're weaving it into their creds decks and so on, as quite a quick visual, snappy thing. So a Pecha Kucha for me is if you haven't done one, look it up it's a whole, Japanese for chit chat I think isn't it? Look it up, probably do one because it makes you think about where you'll go in your business. And it's great for the creds. It's great for the creds deck.Jenny 45:08Amazing. Any other final words of advice for an agency leader that we haven't talked about that you think, you know, it's critical to understand if you want to grow your agencies?Mark 45:17Yeah, yeah, actually. So there's two things, I would say. It's one, most people don't have clarity on their pipeline. And I don't mean they don't know what leads a company. They don't have a tool or a process. They have some in the owners email inbox, they have some with the account managers inbox, they have some on the spreadsheet, then they have a SAAS tool that doesn't really tell them it just asks for them to tell you about the stages of how each opportunity is. Doesn't really tell you what's coming in the next couple of months with clarity. So I think a pipe line tool is fundamental. And we've built one over many years, we've evolved over agencies, anybody we work with, we show them now on like day one, or on the strategy day with them straight away or on the mastermind, because it's, to me, it's like the most fundamental tool that they should have in place first. And I think the other bit is, is the vision bit is, is again, we work quite a bit on that with, you asked me earlier on about what we do at the beginning, that to me is a lot of people don't really ever, they don't need to have a three or five year plan, but they need at least a year plan otherwise, what are you trying to go towards? So having that kind of step back and get away from the screens or the office when we're in offices and thinking about where they actually want to go, to a bit around the vision and putting a couple of numbers around that? What's the revenue going to be, what are the number of people? You can guarantee most people will have too many people on it, but then it's a starting point isn't it, is something to aim for.Jenny 46:53You've been talking to me actually, Mark, I'm thinking I need to do that. So that was a real moment of Wow. So I'm really glad you shared that because I'm sure people listening will be thinking the same thing. So Mark, thank you, first of all, for sharing so much value. This has been really sort of eye opening for me. How can people reach you? And who would you like to be contacted by? And what's the best way because I know you've got, it's difficult because you've got so many clients on the go. So I know that your time is limited.Mark 47:27That is fine. So I love speaking to people and hearing their stories like this. So you can email me at mark@cact.us. Funny ending, and, or you can hit me up on LinkedIn. I tend not to accept connections on LinkedIn, I just if people message me, that's just my way of doing LinkedIn, I'm a bit weird. So whether that works or not, Jenny, I have no idea. But I just try to keep it to people I kind of know or have met, but you can send me a message and that's fine, a cover call or whatever. But I'm happy to have a call with anybody and and really, yep, agency owners are often, I've supported quite a lot of finance people in agencies over the years. I probably don't say that enough, actually. So if there's any finance people that think actually I'd be quite interested ito chew the fat over x, y and z if they're whatever, FM or FD or finance controller, whatever, then I'm happy to have a call as well to see if we can help in any way.Jenny 48:22Amazing. Thank you so much, Mark. We'll include those links in the show notes so people can find you straightaway. So thank you so much, Mark. Really appreciate your time.Mark 48:31All right, cheers, Jenny. Take care. 

Transcript:  Jenny  00:01So I'm delighted to welcome Tim Moore to the show. Tim works for a company called Sonin, and he's gonna talk to you in a minute about what Sonin does. But the reason I invited him onto the show today was, I want to do a series of interviews with account managers and directors who have specific expertise and specific areas of specialism within the creative field. So today, I've chosen to speak to Tim because he has a lot of digital understanding. He's been in the area for a long time, and I've asked him specifically to focus on app development. So Tim, welcome. Tim  00:36Thanks. Thank you. Jenny  00:37So would you mind spending a few minutes just talking about you, Tim, your experience? How long you've been at Sonin and what you do at Sonin and also what Sonin actually does? Tim  00:46Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So my experience was actually sales. I kind of, I left University went into sales roles, various different things, started my own company. I ran a company in something completely different, in clothing, actually, yes, in ski and snowboard wear. And I sold that about 11 years ago, 10 years ago. And I came on board because I knew with Simon, because I knew the founder and he knew my background in sales. And so about nine years, I've been with Sonin for nine years now. And I came on board initially for a short period of time to do a bit of sales. I thought six months and set a few things up, for a startup. And then nine years later, I'm still here. Apparantly I'm not allowed to leave now! Jenny  01:39I can imagine, I didn't even know that about your background, that's really fascinating. So in terms of the evolution of what you've seen over the years with Sonin, in those nine years, what did the company start doing? And what does it look like now? Tim  01:52Yeah, it's interesting, actually, because we started, we were born out of a web consultancy, so websites. My MD, Paul, he saw an opportunity in apps. This was pre iPhone, though so the first apps we built were in a Nokia phone, and it was a, first app we built was a Nokia dating app that required Bluetooth, which is a bloody awful idea. You have to be within about a yard of someone and then you got a notification on your Nokia phone. So someone within a yard lights, you know, because they'd be standing next to you. So the iPhone came along and saved us as a business really, and an app development was a good path. But in the early days, we were in all honesty, we were unsure what we were, there was an argument say we were a digital marketing company and a website developer. And over the years, we've just focused and focused, niche, niche, niched. And now we can categorically say for the last few years, we are an app development agency. That's what we do. Jenny  02:47Love it, very clear, very, very specific. And have you helped, before I dive into the rest of questions, have you found that that niche positioning has actually accelerated the business? Has it helped? And if so, how has it helped? Tim  03:00Yeah, yeah, dramatically helped. And it was something that I was completely wrong about. Because we do also build big web based systems, we do quite often the back end of an app. An apps very thin client, doesn't do a lot. And there's some really powerful stuff going on, on some servers somewhere. And we also get really heavily involved in ITand AR and VR and machine learning, all these exciting things. But in terms of how we present ourselves, we're an app development agency and that's a starting point for our clients. And I say I was wrong, I say to them we can't be that focused with our messaging, people won't contact us, that was absolutely wrong. The more we refined our message and who we were, the easier it became to to market us. Jenny  03:50Amazing. Well done. Okay, so I'm gonna probably pick up on the conversation around app development, beacause I'm eager to pick your brains on that. But first of all, let me ask you the question, what do you think makes a great account manager particularly in an in an agency like yours? Tim  04:05Yeah. For us, I know, you obviously wanted to talk to me specifically about app development? I can't help thinking it's kind of universal. It's understanding business. It's understanding the client, their business, what they're trying to do. All we're trying to do is find value in what we do. Gone are the days, early days, people could call us because they needed an app. I remember a big pharma company, you'll know well probably, called and said, 'We need an app'. We said, 'Great, what do you want it to do?' And they'd say, 'It doesn't matter! We need an app!'  Jenny  04:34Classic.  Tim  04:35But those days are long gone, and everyone wants a return and we want to provide it. So that's what keeps our clients coming back. And so the key for account management is understanding the business, their roadmap, their objectives, what they want, what they want to see by the end of the year, what we're gonna see by the end of a project, understanding the business, understanding value. Those things are integral. I can't imagine that's much different from many other industries as well. Jenny  04:57I agree totally with what you said there Tim. I absolutely agree. It's all about having that business acumen, that commercial understanding. And quite frankly, it doesn't matter what you're actually delivering at the end, as long as the problem that you're solving is the right problem. So in order to do that, you have to have an understanding of the business, so you're talking my language completely. So like, to your point about, you know, they used to come to us and say, 'I want an app, I don't quite know why, just do it'. What kinds of problems to clients come to you with now? Like, how do you, what did they see in your offer? What's the conversation that's had at that stage? Tim  05:35Yeah, I'd say why people come to us is quite varied. But the problems they have, they're trying to solve, are universal. I read something a while ago, there's only nine unique business problems, and I can't list them but it was interesting to me. Yeah, I can't remember who it was, but I remember thinking at the time, that's true, you know, we get a lot of people come in. The type of products we build fall into two categories are either enterprise, back end, staff focused apps. So for big, big company, and you've got some logistics problems, or operational problems, or whatever it may be, and you're looking for technology, you're looking to technology solve that. Or they are customer facing ones, they're marketing exercise to a point, they're trying to increase sales or increase revenue. So we internally we say, make money or save money, there's the two categories that people are looking to do. And so they'll come to us because, we work with every type of industry, and they come to us, because they can't communicate well enough. Most recently, a good example, everybody needs a way to communicate that isn't in person. So they need to build in video chat functions into products or live chat, text chat things. Jenny  06:56Okay, amazing. And I love the way you've described that actually, this internal focused- saving you money, for external customer focus -making you money. I love that. That's just so clear. So going back to the account manager role. So the key thing that an account manager has to have is an understanding of the client's business, the commercial acumen. And then what value do you think the account management role can have within the agency? Tim  07:21Within the agency, well I see it very much is a bridge between the two. I did a talk a while ago on what I called the Bow Tie method, essentially, historically, account manager is sat with account manager. So you've got an agency behind you one side, all these people working away, and you've got a client all and you just communicate  through one point. And I said, I like to flip it on its head and open lines of communication across the board and we do. Project managers talk to project managers. In our case, developers talking to client side development teams as well. More communication, the better. The value I see the account management bringing is an understanding, is essentially a representative on both sides with the client it's a representative of the agency and with the agency, it's representative of the client. So if I'm doing my job well, I understand the business objectives, what the client wants to achieve, where the return is going to be. And I also understand the technology to a point. I'm not technical, haven't been, you know, a bit of a crash course nine years ago when I joined, but I understand what technology can do and how you can leverage it. And so somewhere in the middle of those two things, and being the conduit for both. Jenny  08:33You know, that's a great point and I'd love to kind of pick your brain on this one. Because some agencies try to make a decision of whether they should have account management or not. And I know that depending on who you talk to, some people say, well, the account manager, they don't have the technical understanding so how could they possibly hold a conversation with the clients? So I'd love to get your view on that. Because you said, I've got enough technical understanding, I did a crash course. So that's obviously clearly important to an account manager in your industry, particularly. But talk to me about that kind of scenario. What are your thoughts on that? Tim  09:08Yeah, I mean, my clients aren't technical generally. And they want real world solutions they want it described in a real world way, I've got this problem, how are we going to solve it? And I can, I just had a call just now with a new client and they were saying, here's the problem we want to solve, we want to up communication and this is a problem. And the fact that I understand the technology say, 'Okay, well, we could build a function that does this', because I understand the capability and what we can achieve, I couldn't go and build it for them. And I couldn't advise our developers, and we've got blooming great devs that I can put in contact with their development team. That's why I say I like to open the lines of communication. So everyone's talking, they're not trying to, I'm not passing on information and then passing it back and things get lost in the process. Their lead Dev, our lead Dev will have a long chat, and will cover any security questions, any technology, stack questions, any of that that I don't fully understand that will happen anyway. But because I understand what we can do and understand the client, then that's for us. Jenny  10:17That's a great understanding, you've just explained it so well. I mean, so your skills are in the communication skills. And for someone perhaps thinking about getting into an app development company, in the account management role, it's actually quite reassuring to think, well yeah, ofcourse, the people that you initially talk to, at the client side, don't have that deep level of expertise, or experience in technical understanding. But as the project progresses, you can then open up the lines of communication, as you say, introducing your Dev to their kind of technical person, etc. Tim  10:52Yeah, one of the big things I think I learned early on, because I came into the role and a big worry was I don't know enough about technology and I said I went on a crash course, I just read for weeks and weeks before I started the role. I actually found an old notebook, which was reasonably embarrassing, because the type of things I was writing down with, were a little bit up in the air. Jenny  11:11Could you share something? Tim  11:14It was just wrong. In all honesty, it was just stuff I'd read and got backwards. We've got a great team here. That helped me early on. And in fact, I haven't had to use a lot of it. And I think, now that you asked about values, I think a real good value in an account manager, is understanding people and understanding how to pitch things. I've got clients that will actively avoid technology discussions. It upsets them, in all honesty, and they don't want to know, they just want to know solution based real world results. And I've got some, we just had a new client, join a startup who has got a background in development. And he's fascinated in it and really wants to know, and we're doing some clever stuff with the new serverless technology and he's really interested in. Great, but I'm not the man, so I set up a call with our lead Dev and him, and they're happy that we've got it covered. You know, I don't need to know it. I'm sure you say people coming in... I don't see it as a barrier. It certainly hasn't been for me. Jenny  12:22So it's in your people understanding as well, that your ability to communicate well, I mean, you're a fantastic communicator, but also to diagnose what's needed. You know, let me do an assessment, let me gauge what kind of person we're dealing with. And then you make it happen. So, again, fantastic skills for an account manager. Tim  12:41Yeah, I hope so. That's what I aim to do yeah, facilitate. That's largely it. Jenny  12:46So when you do start, talk us through. What happens at the beginning, like, where do you even start when you are going into an app project? Tim  13:00Yeah, it's a huge amount of questions in all honesty, learning. So our process that we have developed over years, and things have changed quite dramatically, you know, in the way you build technology now, when we started 9, 10 years ago, we were still running projects, from a project management point of view, in a Waterfall method, a lot of research upfront, a lot of documentation, six, nine month builds where the client wouldn't see anything until the end, all this stuff. And now, of course, we're fully agile and it's all about collaborative process and understanding. And so we start all of our our projects with a workshop that although is run from our head of project management, our head of design, and it's about, but it's focused on two things. It's understanding business, understanding users, there are two parts to it. And for me, as an account manager it is fantastically useful, because I sit in a room, we invite stakeholders, anyone that wants a say in the product, and that normally is the group of directors, and they sit for a day and they tell us what the business is trying to achieve, how they're trying to get there. And then we do some research, we do some focus groups so we understand the users whether that's internal or external, because you face the same challenges. If it's staff and you deliver a product they don't want to use, they'll find a way around it, they go back to WhatsApp or whatever it is, the process has to be the same. So when we start a project, it's all about, the more understanding we can get the better. A little while ago, we've done a lot of work over the years in understanding where our value is, what our what our company values are, and we came to the conclusion that we want to build the right product. That's our focus. And that sounds a little bit obvious maybe but there are a lot of agencies that will aim to build the most amazing thing you can imagine or the quickest thing or the cheapest thing, we want to do the right thing. So the right thing for the business and the right thing for the users. And the only way you're going to start that process is questions and understanding. The more we understand the better, we can pitch your idea. And the better it is because the next part is then pitching a solution. And if we understand the user completely, that solution is going to end up at the right product, or certainly we hope. Jenny  15:26Great, so you start with the workshop, then you do some, user kind of investigation. And then you pitch the kind of, the idea, the initial idea, and presumably to your point about it's an agile process, what does that first step, that first stage look like? Tim  15:44So the workshop results in the prioritisation of features into a product, into an app. Here are the features that are going to get you the most value and we look to a release point as early as possible. So the business can start getting value back in all honesty. There might be a nine month development road plan but within the first four sprint's there is a deliverable that you could put out and they could start getting value from it and why not? So after the workshop, and we deliver that prioritise sprint plan, commission it, the project managers start work with their project managers, some wireframing, some design bits and pieces before then into sprints. And we don't even anymore design the whole product from start to end, we design the things that are going to affect the first few sprints because businesses change, that's why the agile and working that way is so good, is that if in three months time the business has different requirements, something  changes in the market, we've seen a few changes over the last couple of years, something changes, we can react immediately. The next sprint, which is in 10 days time, can now be this feature that's more important. And the first part of that sprint is a wireframing session and some design work. So yeah. Jenny  17:04Love it, love it. This is really educational for me actually just to understand what your thinking is. Can you give me an example of what might change for the client in terms of, you know, hang on a sec, we've made a change or the business needs something else? What's an example of something that would change? Tim  17:22Yeah, a good example is, a client that I'm working with at the moment, was working for a number of years, and they do repossession of cars, which doesn't sound very romantic. But it's an interesting business they have. And over the last year, the FCA, for example, came out said we can't repossess cars this year. It's COVID, people aren't earning, you can't now repossess cars. So the roadmap that we had, was very much  there, they have a lot of process and protocol, it has to be quite, they don't want to come to somebody house and steal their car away, it's a very soft approach that they take. And they want their staff who repossess those cars to do it in a certain way. So the app that we're building for them was about walking them through that process and a kind of smooth transition. Most of them are not contentious anyway. You've come to an end of an agreement with the bank, they're employed by the bank, and someone's coming to pick up the car that you don't want anymore. So it's fine. But there's a really good example of it. Well, this is happening. But we know, we're up for a tender for a couple of new banks that want to use us. So could we add these features in and spend the next few months building these features that will help us win those tenders you see. Now if we'd been on a six, nine month plan and it had all been planned, we said, well, we can't really we were in build, we've designed the whole thing we know what we're doing and where we are going. Tough. They came to us, we can't repossess cars, can you pivot? Yeah. Within five days, we're now working on the thing that they need. Jenny  19:02Amazing What a great example as well. Well done for bringing that out. That was  fantastic. Do the clients ask you for measurement? Like, is it clear from the beginning of developing an app typically, that you have measures of success or measurable outcomes? Can you predict that far or is it really difficult? Tim  19:23It's absolutely our aim, as I say about delivering value and delivering the right product is what we aim to do. So we build in what we call as a packaged product success. So from those early days, those workshops, we're identifying a user journey. And we're saying here are the pain points in your current user journey and here how we're going to improve them. And we kind of come up with a hypothesis. This is what we think is going to improve, more people are going to be able to move from point A to point B, that's going to reduce this cost. And that could be for a company recently that do industrial floor paints, for example, which doesn't sound exciting, but it was really interesting product, it was about end customers getting quotes that they wanted and getting the support, they wanted to get to those quotes. Currently, it's a manual, pick up the phone, and they wanted to do it through an app. So that's, you know, we can really identify, currently you produce this many quotes, this many sign offs, this many things. With the app, we can monitor the same thing, how many can we get through. And we get so much more analytics, because in an app, your whole journey can be reviewed. How many times you've logged in, how many times you come back, how many times you press a certain button, all of those metrics are there to be gathered. So we do and then we produce a report monthly after the after the products go live to try and prove our hypothesis, we thought we're gonna save you X amount. A good example is a student housing company. They came to us for something slightly different. If you thought about adding rent payments into the app and I said, I'm not sure people are going to use an app to pay their rent. We did some user research and students said, 'Yeah, be happy to, it'd be be easier'. And I think that the first weekend that it went out there was over six figures went through the app in the first weekend of rent payments being available on an app, because there's was an easy solution for them. So we aim to measurable. Jenny  21:15Amazing, can I ask a really silly question, and it's just totally my lack of understanding, so if a company has already got a website, say that student housing, they're already taking the payments on the website? Is it just the natural evolution that they would, you know, want the app as well? I mean, are there companies that just say that they want it web based? Or is it most companies nowadays, always have an app? If they've got any kind of processing? Tim  21:41It's not silly, it's a good question actually because sometimes the solution is web based. And we are open to that solution. And our aim to build the right product might mean no product at all. And we're kind of okay with that because if we, in all honesty, our focus has always been about long term relationships. We've still got some clients we had from when I started nine years ago. That's our focus. And if I build you something that isn't going to give you a return, you're not going to turn into a long term relationship, you're going to go. So apps are really good at task orientated things, get in, get out, do a thing, check your bank balance, book a ticket - really good, because they focus, and they can also hold a lot of data about you. So they know where you are in the world, they know who you are, because you're probably still logged in, all of those things are really handy. What they're not so good at is things like browsing. So if you sell shoes, for example, you're unlikely to go back to an app to browse to buy new shoes, you'll probably go to Google and you'll start a bit of a search, and you'll go on to someone's website. So it very much depends on what you're trying to achieve, again, bit of a broken record, where the value is. And yes, sometimes it's not. Jenny  22:55Interesting. Okay, so it wasn't such a silly question, after all. So that's, that's really interesting. So again, it comes back to what you said at the beginning about understanding the client's business, wanting to make sure that the solution is spot on for them. So that all makes sense. I had another question. It's just gone out of my mind. Are you finding, I mean, you must have seen such an explosion in the number of apps we've seen in the last nine years? Are you finding it that more and more, it becomes more difficult for a client to actually get their users to use an app? Because I'm just thinking about my own experience of my iPhone? And how many apps I've got and I often find myself deleting the ones I haven't used for ages. So I have my kind of go tos, like, I don't know, the banking app or Amazon app, but it gets to a point depending on what the size of your phone's like, that you're trying to just, you know, filter them out? Have you found that you have to work harder nowadays to get an app to be actually used? Tim  23:59Not harder to be used, harder to be seen. When we started, you could put an app in the app store and it would get downloaded, guaranteed, now it gets lost. So harder for that. We have more data now to know that abandonment rates are quite high. And if you do get deleted, you're very unlikely to get re installed. People won't download again and try again. So you know something we preach a fair bit when we're talking to clients that the initial experience has to be a good one. If it's not the right thing people will delete and they won't come back so that's true. And and again, that's why half of our workshop's dedicated to that user, is there value for them? If there isn't, you probably shouldn't spend your money on building it because they'll delete it and it will never come back Jenny  24:43A point about the users actually because you said that you do some user testing. And then once you have like, not the prototype but the the kind of phase one version with the minimal features, do you always have some kind of beta testing stage where you'll choose a group to try it out or not? Tim  25:02Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely the aim, it largely depends on our clients and what they want to do. The focus is always to try and test it. And we will take, ideally, and often the case, if we've done a focus group on the initial features and what we're trying to build, once it's built, we take it back to the focus group and check off that it is what they want, and they are going to use it. Some projects, we've been lucky enough to do some really quite large scale beta testing. We built an app for a insurance company, for a big car insurance company that was around, when you've had an accident, you open the app, and it walks you through the process of what you now need to do. And so it kind of hold's your hand at what is the most stressful time, a really interesting discovery session for us because, we spoke to people, it is one of the most stressful times, you've just crashed your car. How do you want to be presented with information? And that was fantastic, because we actually got to set up some fake car crashes with the insurance company. So there's a scene and you put someone in the car essentially, and said, right, you've just had this accident, here's your phone, the app to the insurance company on the phone, go, what do you do next? And we got to run a full scale test for a couple of days and get the results out of that and see how they used it. That was a particularly good one. Jenny  26:24That must be quite exciting. So you get involved in all different types of industries and scenarios.  Tim  26:30Yeah.  Jenny  26:30Amazing. And in your role as account director, how much of it do you get involved in? You know, you said at the beginning, you're very much there at the front end, you're there at the workshop with the project manager and the head of design I think you said, but how does the role work? Tim  26:51I mean, I'm there throughout. I don't know whether I'm slightly different because when I came on board with Sonin there was only a few of us, and so I've kind of moved through different roles within the company, always with the sales and looking after our accounts as the main part of it but putting in a project management function, and then employing people that could actually do project management, which is not me. So I'm potentially involved more than another account manager would be in certain things but because we work in an agile way, because we're delivering, we aim to deliver something every 10 days, whether it's some screenshots or a video walkthrough, whatever it may be, so our clients consistently see that we're building what they want. And so I, as an account manager, I get to see that every 10 days, so from the workshop, post live with all of that success stuff I talked about, about how we monitor performance, it's kind of the whole thing, really. Jenny  27:53Amazing. Okay, and to that point about continuing to catch up with clients, do you have any kind of quarterly business reviews or ongoing strategy sessions? Like, how does that work? Tim  28:05Yeah, absolutely. Contact is key. The more contact I have with clients the more I understand them. People are, in general, quite polite. And if they're not sure about something, they've seen something they don't quite like they probably won't say anything. And if they see it again, again they probably won't. And then by the third time, they're really angry, and they're going to, you know, burn the house down. So if I've spoken to them within that period of time, then they'll probably say 'Oh that thing' and we get to solve the solution together and it doesn't escalate. So I do two things, I try and stay in contact as much as possible, and then put in some, essentially quarterly business review. Some clients, it's more like a monthly and then it's an update on more high level things. Again, back to business objectives. In the meantime, I try to take away their business objectives, look at the market, look at competitors, see what they're doing, and provide some some value back to them. So that on those reviews, we're kind of pointing to where they should go. That's the aim. Jenny  29:19Some great value bombs there that you've just shared for other account managers in terms of Yeah, because you're right, I mean, the more frequent you have those touch points, the more opportunity the client has to share any grievances or feed back to you. And then again, those ongoing forums that you have with those clients enable you to continue shining in their eyes, you know, because you are at the cutting edge of what's changing, and all of that insight that you can provide not only about your industry, but also the client's industry and other competitors, etc. So fantastic tips for account managers that might be listening thinking how do I you know, keep giving ongoing value, and what for you Tim, makes a really successful client, agency relationship? Tim  30:05I might repeat myself again really here, it's the understanding piece. I think it was the marketing director of Kellogg's and it was, he was speaking at an event, and you may have seen it actually, but it was about new business. And someone said, as a salesperson, 'How do I get to you, you're the marketing director of Kellogg's, I want to sell to you. How do I get to you?' and he said, 'Know more about my industry than I do. Know about my business as much as I do and have a fresh idea, have an add'. And that really stuck. And I kind of think the same for our clients is, know about their industry, know about their business and come with new ideas they haven't thought of that will help them. And if I keep doing that, they'll probably keep working with us. Jenny  30:55Love that and that guy that asked that question in the audience, he probably felt crushed at that moment, didn't he? Because actually, the question was wrong. You know, how can I sell to you? How can I get to you? But actually, it's more about what value can I bring to you? Tim  31:09Yeah, it was a really good lesson for me, because I think occasionally you get lazy and you think I could, you know, we've just done some interesting work in AR, I could go and pitch an AR app design. So I could call them up they'd want to do something in AR. Do I understand, have I spent the time, have I put the work in? Do I know their business? Do I know what they're trying to do this year? Because you can burn relationships an awful lot quicker than you can make them. Jenny  31:33Absolutely 100% agree, because people buy for their reasons, not yours. You know, if you're going in with your story, your your creds deck your ideas, but actually you haven't diagnosed first, then you absolutely run that risk I think, I totally agree with you. So what advice would you give Tim, if someone's listening to this and thinking, I love the sound of what Tim's working on? How would I, what advice would you give to someone trying to get into the app development space, from an account management point of view? Tim  32:05For a company like ours that doesn't specialise in an industry, some do, most I don't think, I would say read as much as you can, understand business, how businesses work, what their objectives are. A CEO will release a statement at the beginning of the year, and tell everyone what they're trying to do quite often, you can find the information out and the more you can understand business problems and how people are solving them, the better place you are to help solve them in a business like ours. Definitely read about technology, you have to love technology, I do. I love it. I love new technology, I love reading about new technology. Like I said, I'm not technical, I can't do the work but I can see an opportunity in something. You know, over the years, a lot of things have been released, the Apple Watch came out and instantly you can see 10 things you could deliver for a client to help them, because you sit there and watch the cheesy Apple developer conference, reading and learning, reading about businesses, learning about technology, that's the place I'd start. Jenny  33:06Brilliant. So do you typically attract the people that are kind of those early adopters to new technology? Can you say that most people that work there are of that kind of mindset? Tim  33:17Yeah, we employ for it. We employ, we want to see some people, some passion, you know, from our development team. If they've built their own thing somewhere, and they've got passion for it. Love it. And we have days throughout the year where we close the agency every day and do a Sonin Create where we give them a brief and they can go and build what they like. And the whole team's involved, not just the Devs. So where if you thought, I'd be really interesting if you could do something with Bluetooth that, well we have, where when you get in the lift the coffee machine starts because they know who you are, because the app on your phone and the Bluetooth device, so a passion for technologies is quite key. Jenny  34:04Amazing. Do you have anything else like that? That sounds quite space age to me right now. But what other things do you have typically in your agency that kind of highlights how much you love the technology? Tim  34:17Well, the guys are always building their own products and bringing them in. So you know when when machine learning, artificial intelligence kind of started cropping up in a more achievable manner so you didn't have to write your own AI. You could use IBM released Watson, which was their kind of off the shelf option. We've got a client that has the print design, so they're a company that sell websites essentially to print designers so everything you buy is probably done by a design company that they then sell to the company that print it on that bit of fabric, another strange client. And they list 10s of 1000s of images weekly and people sit there and they press buttons. So you know, that is a floral print and it's a this type of print. And the guy said, you know, we could do something with AI and we gave them a few days leeway. And they used IBM Watson and you sent it a bunch of images, and it sent you back those images tagged to say that is a floral print, because the machine learnt what it what we fed it, all the data we had, and it learned. And then we get to go back to clients who've haven't done a thing, potentially save you hours and hours and hours.  Jenny  35:30Wow, wow, wow, this is very compelling stuff, isn't it? I mean, would you say that for most businesses, if they said to you, you know, Tim, help us kind of save money or make money, there would be some technological solution that would enable them to do that. Tim  35:46Yeah, yeah. I believe so. Yeah. I mean, sometimes, you know, we're prepared that it might not be an app, which is largely what we do, like I said, and potentially something they could do in house you know, and we're not averse to that either if they could develop whatever they have further. But, I said, there's some core business problems, I think, if you have them, then I think, I believe you can fix them with technology. Jenny  36:14Great point. And what other trends have you seen in the app space? Tim  36:19Trends in the app space? Well, I say most recently has been all about reducing human  contact. So face to face interactions phasing out, with a video call now not in person and that's been everything. That's staff, people not in offices. So just in the last year, there's been, everything we do has had a tinge of that, somewhere where people aren't meeting, so now we have to, so that's big. The other areas that we work in, that've come up over the last nine years that I've been doing it, is things like FinTech. So open banking has become a thing, you can now get access to your account data. So you can do some really cool things with that. We're working in prop tech space as well. A lot of  historical kind of industry is now looking to technology, looking to apps to help them because you got a whole host of residents in a property and you want to manage that, then an app where you open lines of communication, where you get to send images and text and communicate better is massively advantageous nesting that. So it's in the digitalization of those historical kind of businesses, we're seeing a lot of the moment Everyone thinks that every client I speak to says, 'We're so far behind'. But every industry is really, there's a couple that are leading the way and the rest aren't. Jenny  37:50Amazing. Yeah, I can imagine because they probably think, oh, we should have done this years ago or something. But you know, and actually, right, the pandemic has just accelerated everything, isn't it? I mean, it would you say that you haven't slowed down during this time, because out of most agencies, your services, particularly are... Tim  38:10Last year, in all honesty, when everyone kind of left their offices we did, and things slowed down. And then towards the end of last year, and certainly since vaccination things, and this year, it's gone bananas, it really has. Everybody coming back realising that maybe they've lost the best part of the year. And as a business, they still need to achieve the same targets as they ever had. So yeah, all of our clients have been wanting to do more and our new clients coming in at a faster rate than we've seen before. And to try and use technology to solve some of the problems. Jenny  38:43I can believe that actually, in what you do. So this has been amazing, Tim, you've shared so many tips and values. So have you got any final words of wisdom for someone who's in the account management role? And they are, thinking about working in the area of app development, any kind of thing that we haven't covered that you think might be useful for them to know? Tim  39:04I don't think anything I haven't covered. I think, learning technology and learning the business. I think reading people is important. And I think observing people and understanding the different types of people is equally important. And I find technology is an odd one. It's not something, you said that, it might be a silly question and you were kind of nervous to ask, and that is absolutely what I see all day. People are a bit scared and they don't want to seem silly, and they think they should probably know it although they shouldn't. So understanding people and trying to second guess the questions they want to ask that they're not asking, seems quite important. People work with us on commission things if they trust us, of course and if they understand what we're trying to achieve and if you can understand this objective, understand the technology, pitch the best thing in the world if people don't quite understand it, and don't really trust it, and they're probably not going to sign off on it. So identifying what type of person you're talking to, where your commonalities are, and how to present something to them is, I think it's probably the third part of what I try and do. I'm certainly not an expert at it but I try and teach things at the level of someone I'm talking to. Jenny  40:26Do you know what, I'm so glad you finished off on that point because you're so right. And I'm sure like me, you know, there's that nervousness for looking silly and not being up to date enough. And what you just said was so funny. I see this all the time. So we're not different. So for you to be in that position of first of all, spotting something and then tailoring your approach and making people feel really comfortable because I think that's what you're talking about really isn't it, making people feel safe and understood. And absolutely, yeah, love it. Thank you so much, Tim. This has been brilliant. How people get hold of you if they're interested in learning more about Sonin and what you do? Tim  41:05Yeah. Our website is sonin.agency. That's us. Jump on there. And everything's on there, all our contact details are there. And you can see some of the work we've done as well. Jenny  41:16Fantastic. All right. Thanks so much again, this has been absolutely brilliant. So maybe we can do a part two at some point.  Tim  41:23I'd love to. I really enjoyed that. Thank you. 

Transcript:Jenny  00:04So today, I'm delighted to have my brother Matt, to talk about managing others for the first time. And the reason I've invited him on to talk to me about this subject is twofold really. One, because agency account managers have been asking me about this for a long time. So I'm teaching them how to grow an account. But there's this other skill that they need, which is, as as they get more senior in the agency, they need to be able to manage people well. And they often question whether they're doing the right things. So it's a skill that I think's missing. I'm not the expert in this area. But my brother Matt is and he's been training people for 20 years. And the second reason is, that I'm going to feel more relaxed asking him questions because I, whilst I've been managing people for years, I've never actually had formal training. So I think during this session, it might turn into a bit of a therapy session of the things that I should have done better, being a people manager. So Matt, can we start off just talking a bit about you briefly, your experience and how you help new managers?Matt  01:12Yeah, thank you. Nice to be here. Hopefully, it doesn't get into a therapy session, people are going to switch off. But yeah, so I've been in manager or leadership trainer for around about 20 years now. So what I do is offer a lot of different courses, mainly around management and leadership. But some of them kind of drift into interpersonal skills as well. And so what I do is I coach some new managers in their kind of transition to being a manager. And also, when we had face to face training, I did a lot of face-to-face training with new managers and new leaders and some senior leaders as well. Now it's more online so I'm in online virtual world now. So I've worked in a lot of different companies as well.Jenny  02:03Okay, brilliant. So let's start off because I really would love this episode, to be lots of takeaways for people who are listening to this thinking they're either in managing position, or they're thinking about transitioning. So what are some of the biggest changes that people have to make when they transition into a position where they have to manage other people?Matt  02:24Yeah, I think sometimes, people think they have to have a personality change. I have to change my personality, because now I've got this role. But I think it's the opposite is true. It's being yourself, because if other people see that you've changed, you've got that kind of phrase where people 'You've changed', and you get that kind of stigma attached to you. So you don't need to change. But I think one of the things that I found with a lot of questions I have in courses, is now that they are now managing their friends, how does that work? And I always think it's good to have some kind of informal chat with people. And just to say, how have you found this change now, and try to address the elephant in the room really, because sometimes, we don't. And when it comes to giving feedback later on down the line, it can be awkward. So if you've already addressed it and said, 'Look, there's going to be times when I'm going to give you feedback, and you've got to give me feedback, I don't want it to be awkward. So let's, when it comes to it, hopefully that helps'. But I think changing your personality or feeling that you should, is the wrong way to go with it.Jenny  03:47That's really good advice, because I'm just thinking of the experiences I've had in the past where you're in a team, and then one of you gets promoted above the team. And there might be resentment, mightn’t there, from the team members thinking, 'Well, I wanted to get promoted'. So how do you even begin to tackle that one?Matt  04:10Yeah, exactly. I do think if you're open and you're supportive to those people, maybe they went for the job as well. So if you're supportive of them, and you're open to talking with them, not having a pen and paper in front of you recording what they're saying, it's just an off the cuff, maybe in a coffee shop, just to have a catch up, one to one and see how they're getting on. And hopefully, that will help build rebuild the relationship.Jenny  04:39Do you know what, that is such good advice. And I remember kind of giving other people similar advice, just go and have a coffee, sit down and just have an informal chat about it. And then that kind of relaxes everybody doesn't it? You know, just having that one on one, 'How are you feeling about this' and 'How are we going to manage this moving forward?' maybe, I don't know. But that's great advice.Matt  05:00Yeah, just make sure that the channels of communications are open. I think that's the first thing. I was just gonna mention, it can be quite tricky for people who, you've just been working on your own, and you're very task focused or project focused. But now you have this responsibility of dealing with a team and dealing with all the different, maybe issues and problems with each person, can be quite overwhelming. So it's just to be aware that there's going to be some time when you're going to have to be spending more time with people, it's getting that balance of, okay, where do I spend my time? Is it on task? Or is it on people? And this should be a balance there. And I think when you first become a manager, that's difficult.Jenny  05:48That's such a good point. Did you have people asking you the question like, what is the right balance are people that specific, they want to know what percentage of their day should be task? And what...?Matt  05:58Yeah, I do. And that's a tricky one to answer. Someone on my last course, said, how much time do I need to spend all this management stuff? And that's really difficult to answer because it depends on how many people you have in the team. And it also depends what industry you're working in as well. Yeah, that's a tricky one to answer.Jenny  06:22What do you see are the biggest mistakes that people make when they're transitioning to managing other people for the first time?Matt  06:31I think one thing is, a new manager wants to do a good job, and they want to hit the targets, they want to get to the objectives. And what I see from people is that they take on too much. And they become overwhelmed. And one of the reasons I feel that's behind that is that they want to be able to answer questions, they want to be able to deal with situations and problems. And what that can lead to is a habit that the team come to them for the answers to everything. So if you're getting that as a habit, if you're getting people coming to you all the time, you will be overwhelmed. And people expect that from you. So you almost become the guru. Unbeknown to you.Jenny  07:20I am going to confess something here. Because I think I fell into that trap myself, right. And it wasn't until I was being coached by someone else that they pointed that out. Because I had this open door policy when I was like leading publicists and quite frankly, I loved helping. And I still love helping people. But what I didn't realise was that having this open-door policy meant that I was always receiving questions and being dragged into situations where I didn't need to be. So I was kind of involving myself involuntarily. And it wasn't until my coach pointed out, because, like you said, I got overwhelmed, I was frazzled and ended up staying there really late to catch up on my work in the evenings. And that was a downward spiral. And my coach said to me, 'Well, you're getting your needs met'. And I was kind of slightly horrified at that thinking, 'Oh, my God', it was like a bit of a shot in the stomach, but he was right. You know, I love helping, so I'm putting myself in a position where I'm being able to help people. But as a result, I'm not doing my job. And he was harsh, but true.Matt  08:29You can fall into that rescuer position, where you want to rescue everybody. And you see other people as the victim almost, 'Oh you've got too much work, give it to me'. And sometimes that satisfies our needs, our needs of the knight in shining armour - I can rescue you. And also it's love. Love as well comes into it. You know, because you feel loved. Because people need you. It's like that needing.Jenny  08:57I'm feeling more bad about myself the more we talk about it. And what other mistakes do you see people making when they're managing other people?Matt  09:06I was just gonna say also you know you said about an open-door policy and when you say that to the team, 'I've got an open-door policy', how many people actually come through the door or get in contact with you? Do you go out and approach them? That's what I'm getting at. So it's not like, oh, guys come to me, it's open door. But then waiting for them to come to you can be tricky, because they might not come to you.Jenny  09:36Or the same people come to you, like the same people.Matt  09:40Just in general, the whole team really. You know, sometimes people say I've got an open- door policy, come and see me whenever you need me. And then a lot of managers leave it at that. But then why not get out and see them?Jenny  09:56I was thinking where you going with this? So basically what you're saying is, it's wrong to say that. I mean, nowadays most often, no one has an office nowadays it's all open plan. But what you're saying is, and this is something I read in a book about management, was where the leader would always come in and talk to everybody in the room, you know, acknowledge them and know their name or ask out and it was just that personal touch. And I just think that's really important, when you're managing other people, just to be that kind of, I'm not saying all day, every day chatting to people in the office, but certainly to be approachable and have that personal touch.Matt  10:37Yeah, definitely. And I think it does feed into making people feel comfortable with you and the environment they're working in. You know, one thing that we were talking about was, if you have people that are different from you, they might be more perhaps introverted, and you're perhaps more extroverted. And it's appreciating that they bring different things to the party. The other way around as well, if you're more the extroverted person, and you're in the team, then the manager should allow for that, because you have different qualities that you can bring to the team as well. You know, it shouldn't be that if I'm introverted, and everyone else should be introverted, you know, don't don't make a noise, that kind of thing, you know, if we work in an office environment that is, but I think the whole essence of what we're talking about is being appreciative of other people's strengths and what they bring.Jenny  11:29That's so true. And are you saying that it's better to adapt your own style to suit? Because, you've got to be a bit of a chameleon, haven't you when you're managing different types of characters, different kinds of personalities? And I am just conjuring up ideas of being managed in the past when, you can think about a manager that only respected people that were like them, that had their style. And didn't spend time with the ones that were, I don't know, less, extroverted, for example.Matt  12:04Yeah, it's like, having an appreciation of maybe adapting slightly. I'm not saying you have to change completely, because that's unreasonable. And also, you're going to spend a lot of energy doing that. And it's not, that's not sustainable. So it's having an appreciation about how other people work as well. So some people, if you look at communication styles, perhaps everyone's heard of communication styles, some people need more detail, some people need less detail. Some people need to just run with something. Some people need a bit more direction maybe. Just moving on from communication styles, you could think about leadership styles as well. If you have somebody that's new in your team, what do they need from you? And certainly, if you leave them alone, and don't really give them any direction, they're going to perhaps fail. So you know, this is like a guy called Ken Blanchard, he came up with situational leadership. And this is basically what we're talking about, if you have somebody else who's got a lot of experience, maybe as good competency levels, I may perhaps approach them differently, may give them a bit more autonomy or hands off approach to them. So it's having an appreciation of who you have in your team as well.Jenny  13:22So how do you make that assessment as to which style you choose to manage someone else?Matt  13:28Yeah, there's different styles. Obviously, without some kind of visuals, it's difficult for people to take in. But he talks about motivation levels and competency levels. And you can perhaps have an indication about where people are, and also, how do I approach them? So it talks about direction, coaching, supportive style and delegation style, which is a bit more hands off.Jenny  13:56Okay, so you've got to assess kind of how competent are they in this particular task? And therefore, what's required here of me? Do I have to be a little bit more direction? You know, give him a bit more direction? Or can I just coach? So that's a really interesting, and I think a great takeaway is to think about how competent that person is in that particular task.Matt  14:17Yeah. And the other thing is ask them as well, where do they think they are? You know, because you could, if we are just guessing, that's not gonna be great. If you can ask them as well, you might be able to get some kind of 'What you need from me?' You know, some kind of assessment of where they are, and then you'll know, so ask them as well don't just observe.Jenny  14:37And I suppose again, from my own experience, if you then start giving too much direct direction to someone who's actually quite competent in that task, then you're micromanaging, aren't you?Matt  14:49Yeah, they're gonna feel like they're being micromanaged. And we all know what that feels like.Jenny  14:55And similarly on the other end of the spectrum, leaving someone to just kind of fail, not setting them up for success, saying, okay, so it's the first time you've worked on a pitch, for example, do this, this and this, go and do it. And then they come back and haven't been able to do it because they've never done it before. And then you get sort of irritated with them or something that, again, setting, not choosing the right style is it?Matt  15:20Yes, exactly. And also people can regress as well. So they may lose a bit of competence. And the problem there is that the manager is treating them exactly the same as they treated them before. But they, the person has changed. And we need to have that in the back of our mind as well.Jenny  15:35So it's like, a new face?Matt  15:37Yeah, exactly. It's a lot of adapting.Jenny  15:39So when people come to your course, they want to be managing other people for the first time, what kinds of questions do they have for you typically?Matt  15:58A lot of people come to the course, one of the most common questions is that they've started as a manager, they're doing the managerial things. And also, they're trying to cover some of the work they were doing before, which is obviously tricky, and they're going to become overwhelmed by that. And I guess one of the things is to have a conversation with a senior, whoever that is, to understand priorities, and put it on their radar. But I do think that a lot of people miss out on using some coaching skills, the basic coaching skills. In coaching, we talk about push and pull. So push is giving information. And then pull is asking good questions for that person to think about the answers, and if they've thought about the answer, they're more than likely to perhaps do it. So as we spoke about earlier, the person who becomes overwhelmed because they are now the guru, this is another good way of, of perhaps just asking a few questions, and letting that person go with it. If they've been trained, and they kind of know the answer, you're teasing it out of them, rather than them coming to you all the time. So it kind of feeds into the to the other question as well.Jenny  17:13So can you give us an example of a push question and a pull question?Matt  17:19Okay, so what I mean by push is you're giving information.Jenny  17:26Oh, sorry.Matt  17:26So, if someone comes to you and says, 'When does that report have to be in by?' then you're just giving the answer. Right? You give me the deadline, that's it. Or 'What's the kind of structure that you would want for this report?' And I give them the answer. But if it's something that's coming up all the time, I may ask them, 'What what do you think?' So what I mean, so our natural impulse, maybe that's not a great example, but our natural impulse is to give answers to people. And we've got to try and counteract that a little bit by asking questions, to draw it out of others, because that people grow, and they learn for themselves if we can do that. And I know probably what you're thinking there's, maybe, there's no time for it. See what I mean, so because people say I haven't got time for that, I haven't got time for a quick conversation. It doesn't have to be quick. It doesn't really doesn't have to be quick. And there are times where you can you just give an answer. Because it's time critical or something. But we have to try and think about well, how can I start asking questions and getting other people to feel empowered to come up with his answers.Jenny  18:44So it doesn't have to take a long time you mean, it doesn't have to be a huge conversation. And one of the things, I don't know if this is helpful, but often when I speak to account managers who maybe have a problem in the agency, and maybe it just means that they have to have a conversation with their boss, for example, I say, think of it in three columns. Just think about like, 'What's the problem?' in one column, like 'What's the challenge you've got? what's the what's the issue you have?' And the next column I say, 'How's that impacting? What's the impact on the business maybe or impact on others or impact on you? Like, what's the impact?' And then 'What are your suggestions?' next column. So what's your ideas to resolve it? Because that way, you're going in more of an empowered way to your boss, so that they don't have to think about this from scratch. And in a way if, and I suppose I got this years ago when a boss said to all of us, said you know, we're already busy when you come with a problem. Think of a couple of solutions for me, so we can quickly discuss the solutions that you see, that could work, rather than me having to think about the problem for the first time. Then try to come up with a solution. So I think that's good practice. What do you think?Matt  20:04You know, it's absolutely, they have that in hospitals. And nurses use it. When the nurse has to report something, they have a structure. And this is, I mean, I can't remember off the top of my head now, but they do have a structure. And I think it's really good to have that. And so that person knows, you know, if I do come to you, I've got something here ready. Ready, prepared. Yeah. And maybe I can put that in a link or something?Jenny  20:33That would be great. Yeah, that'd be really useful. So what do you think like the top three things that you should consider, when you want to be managing other people? Like the essential skills that you should have?Matt  20:49I think, first of all, it's the impact you are making through your behaviour. So the perception of you, you have start to become self aware, like, what am I putting across to people, because some behaviours are almost a green light for others to have the same behaviour. Yeah, so I've got to be aware of what I'm doing basically and become more self aware. I was coaching somebody a few months ago and they were telling me a story about, they used to have this feedback of when they looked up, or they were on a zoom call, or, or trying to talk to other people, their facial expression was really quite harsh. And the perception was that they were angry. And it wasn't that, it was like they were concentrating. So when when you think about what you give out, it's really important. And there was a really interesting study that was done by a guy called SG Basade, I believe, I have to be careful how to say that. But he did a study around mood and how mood translates to other people, and particularly managers. And through his research, he found that if the manager had a really kind of a good mood, I don't want to say you know, they're positive...Jenny  22:31That they're juggling..Matt  22:35Comes in on stilts, juggling at the same time! Yeah, but no, he found that that boosted productivity, basically, the team felt a bit more comfortable. And the opposite was true, if they come in with a low mood, maybe a little bit negative. And they found that that there was a link to productivity came down. I mean, it sounds very obvious. I know.Jenny  22:59But it doesn't in a way, because when you're managing other people, you don't even think about these things. It's almost like getting yourself into a different state. And being aware that like, put your woes and worries to one side, because your mood is just gonna infiltrate someone else's day, frankly, isn't it? And, two things, I think another confession time, I think I was guilty of that, again, because I was so stressed out and busy myself. And I was managing other people. So for example, I was typing on my computer, someone would come up to my desk, and I'd look up and go, 'Yes!' you know, like not angry, angry, but I would kind of look up with not a happy face. And people would sort of go 'Whoa!' you know, and you don't want to inflict that on people. And the second thing I say is a bit of a tip that you've just shared, is because we are in the virtual world, there is a there is an opportunity to record yourself on Zoom. And I said this to a group the other day, and because I do it almost all the time because most of my sessions are recorded, I played it back and I did not crack a smile for the first 45 minutes. And I looked like I was not angry, but I just looked a bit serious. And I wasn't feeling serious. But that mood, you know, God knows how it kind of infiltrated the group. But I think that's a really good tip. Really good tip.Matt  24:24Now I'm really paranoid that I haven't smiled.Jenny  24:26Yeah, exactly. Miserable git!Matt  24:32Yeah, the other thing I wanted to say is, making sure that you create an environment where people can come to you, and that feeds into your mood as well, but that's, you know, that's another thing. But there's a lot of talk around psychological safety now. And this originates from a study that Google did on their most successful teams. It's all out there. If you Google this, it's out in the internet. But they found that people who had psychological safety in a team were more likely to give ideas, they're more likely to bring up things which perhaps are a little bit uncomfortable, and maybe, say what was on their mind or how they felt about something. And in a positive way that can help the company and the manager because you know what's actually happening in the undercurrent of the team, rather than everything going underground. You know, everybody after work, bitching about what's going on at work,Jenny  25:39Which happens, right, let's be honest, which happens all too often doesn't it, frequently? I mean, I even get it myself, like the confidentiality is, really important to me. But I end up working with account managers, who will share with me how they're really feeling about the leadership team, for example, and the leadership team have no idea that this is the impact that they're having. And you're right, it's like these two kind of worlds going on in one company. There's the reality of how everybody's sort of, 'Oh God, here he goes again', and what the perception is from the leadership team like, how do you stop that happening? How do you make sure that the whole company has psychological safety and they feel encouraged to speak their minds and maybe fail? I mean, I think one of those findings wasn't it from that study, that you could  admit you made a mistake and not feel you were going to be you know, ridiculed?Matt  26:37Yeah, I think it's the fear of the repercussion of something happening. And it's a really difficult one. I mean, I think it starts with the manager, really. I mean it does, let's face it, it does start from above, the likelihood of that, starting from above, I'm not too sure about but for definitely, the new managers, they can really think about, well how do I set this out? How do I make sure people feel comfortable. And a lot of people think it's quite soft, but it's not soft, it's actually dealing with maybe more sensitive things as well, you know, things that need to be said, so giving feedback to other people. But making that to be quite comfortable, and quite normal to give feedback and receive feedback as well. But for the manager, you have to be quite vulnerable really, you have to show a bit of vulnerability. And that's not to mean that you come in and you say, 'Guys, I'm completely rubbish all the time', because that's going to have a real effect on you. But you know, if you've made a mistake, then you admit, 'I've made a mistake, I've been in the same position as you'. See what I mean? So you're showing a bit of vulnerability.Jenny  27:53Right, which gives people more of a feeling that they can feel comfortable doing the same thing. So setting the lead, setting the tone and do the behaviours that you want to see in your team.Matt  28:05Yeah, and the other thing is, like having shared values as well, within the team. You know, what do you expect from your team members? What can you expect from me? So you've got some kind of working behaviours that people can adhere to. You know, that's a little exercise you can do.Jenny  28:24That's a great idea. Would you suggest that that's done in a kind of workshop environment?Matt  28:28I mean, ideally, yeah. But, you know, in this virtual...Jenny  28:34...virtual workshop...Matt  28:35Yeah, absolutely. And it doesn't need to be hours and hours. It's just, what do you expect from each other, what you expect from me? What are things that are blockers that we can perhaps, identify, and work on?Jenny  28:48I'm almost thinking about doing the session, because I did a very similar session once, years ago, in an office, and we had loads of post it notes. And there were three or four columns and there were questions. And it was such a brilliant exercise, everyone was really engaged, and I think it was, I think you helped me with that one. And it was like, 'What are the behaviours that we want to see in our team?' And oh, my goodness, there was so many ideas and you can use Miro, couldn't you now, in a virtual environment to do the same thing? So that's a brilliant tip.Matt  29:23The other one I was going to say is like being comfortable giving feedback, because that can be really awkward.Jenny  29:30How do you even go about giving feedback? Because I'm sure everyone's leaning in thinking, I need to give someone some feedback. How do I even start?Matt  29:38Well there are structures out there that you can get prepared to give the feedback. I mean, this is a big session in one of the courses that we do, it's really thinking about, think about the person. So, some people are quite sensitive to feedback and some people are, bring it on, that's their kind of attitude, doesn't really matter what it is. But I think a little bit of preparation needs to happen. And there's a few structures, obviously, as I mentioned. But I do think it's got to be done in like a way, which is a care way, a supportive way. But also take into consideration that you're taking responsibility for it as well. So a guy called Marcus Buckingham, he talks about this, he says, a lot of feedback is quite subjective. So you've got to show or say that it's coming from you. Things like, 'Here's how I see it, here's how I see it'. You're not saying, 'Here's how we see it'. So there's a difference. And making it factual. If it's pinned to a process, or something that the company has as a policy, then that's easier to give, because it's there, it's written down. But being, other things are more subjective. I do think we obviously have to give a balance, you know, we have to make sure that get people get praise. But the constructive stuff, you can't dodge it. Because, a lot of people will actually save up constructive feedback for the kind of one off performance review once a year. Which is pretty horrendous. You know, when you get into that review and all of a sudden, you've got somebody saying that last March, you did this. When was that? You can't remember yesterday! And so it kind of depletes the impact of the feedback.Jenny  31:48So can I just pause for a bit because I just want to summarise, this is really useful. So when you're giving feedback use 'I' rather than 'We'. And absolutely, when you really think about it, otherwise, the person's going to think 'Who is this We?' Like, who are all these people that have kind of been talking about me and corners and whispering? And they might get some feelings of paranoia, wouldn't they? So that's a really good tip,  just that tip alone And then sort of, carry on.Matt  32:15Yeah, the obvious ones are, not in front of other people. Every time I say that, I just feel it's so obvious. But I do hear other people say that that actually happens to me!  It's not obvious. Okay. Let me, another confession. Well, it's my boss. Like we had an internal meeting, I remember it to this day. And he asked a question to the room, and I thought I might have an answer. And  I was quite Junior, I'd never spoken up in my life in a meeting, internal meeting. I was totally intimidated. Even thinking about what I wanted to say my face, glow hot red, but I thought Nope, go on Jen. Do it. Do it. Put your suggestion forward. Anyway, so I gave my suggestion. He turned to me and said, 'That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard'. On my life. He said that, right? Honestly, my face was burning. My heart rate was right up. I felt awful. Like talk about someone pulling the rug from underneath your feet. I mean, in hindsight, obviously, that was awful, shitty thing for him to do. But what did it encourage? It encouraged my future behaviour, never to speak up in a meeting, never to put forward an idea, because you're going to feel awful and it was humiliating, quite frankly, in front of everybody. Exactly. And then what he's doing really, is conveying the message that that is okay to do that as well. You know, to other people. So then you're kind of building a culture of well never say anything, because you're going to get the same treatment as Jenny got. So yeah, you're building that culture, which is quite negative thing. Okay, where do we get to? Oh, yeah. The other thing I wanted to mention is being aware of the feedback sandwich. I mean, this can be, I'm not gonna say to completely dismiss it because in some situations, like, if you've got a specialist who's working and been experienced, they just say, 'Okay, well give me the feedback. What is it good or bad? What is it?' But that's okay for some people, but the feedback sandwich most people know about. So if your boss says to you, I need to talk to you a minute and all of a sudden they launch into 'Look, you're doing really, really well. You're doing excellent'. You know, we're not stupid. We're waiting for the next bit to come in. And we all know that when you hear that word, 'But', you know that the negative bit's coming in, and what do we all kind of focus on? We all focus on the negatives, normally, we don't really hear the praise So, you know, the feedback sandwiches, the praise, the negatives and the praise. What we end up doing is we don't hear about the praise; we just are left with those negatives. And that's what we dwell on for the whole of the weekend, perhaps, if it's done on a Friday. So yeah, just to make sure we're aware that people know that. And I do think, yes, we need a balance. Yes, people need to know, perhaps what their what they're doing right. But be aware of that one, be aware of it and just to be balanced in it.Jenny  35:38Okay, so you said something earlier on that I wanted to just bring back in, that you said, don't save up all of the praise or the negativity for the annual meeting. You know, this is what you did last March. So what you're saying is give feedback on a regular basis, but you're saying don't use that typical structure of, you know, praise, shit in the middle, and praise at the end, because...Matt  36:05I wouldn't take it!Jenny  36:05I would, because it's my podcast!  So what's the alternative? Can you just share something that like, what's the alternative?Matt  36:12Yeah, okay. So there's a structure, which is like, okay, what's the action or behaviour? What actually happened and be specific with that? And then give the impact of it. Or ask for the impact of that. So this happened, or I've noticed this, the impact for me was this. Or, you could say in a non patronising way, what do you think is the impact of that? And a simple one is to then get into is, well what can we do about it? What's next? Almost.Jenny  36:47Nice.Matt  36:48So it's like the action, the impact and then what do we do next about it? I mean, there are a lot out there. And without launching into the course right now, there's a lot more around it that we could talk about, but it's just to get a flavour.Jenny  37:01That's really helpful as well. I think, honestly, I think, as I said before, I never had any training into to how to do it properly. So a lot of people are finding their way with managing others and hoping that they're doing a good job.Matt  37:13Yeah, of course. And I think, you know, especially on a course, if you give too much information, people become like 'What, what, where are we with this?' And if you can just make it very simplified with a few principles around it, that's what people take away.Jenny  37:32Can you give us an example, maybe of someone that you've met in your life that you think of as one of the most successful people managers that you've seen?Matt  37:42I've had a lot of really good people, managers, myself, and I've also in the past had a lot of really, really bad ones. And this is why I love this subject so much  because I can see the effects that managers have on people and their development. And I was a manager years ago, made all the mistakes and realised that it's not an easy job. But there are some things that we can do to make it a little bit easier, and to help other people because that's what you're doing. You're affecting other people and their lives. The person that I think you're talking about is I used to work for Richard Branson.Jenny  38:35Virgin Atlantic.Matt  38:35Yeah, but Richard Branson. So I mean, I think, obviously, I don't know the guy personally, but what he for people was usually he had a people first kind of attitude, I thought. And I think it's just about being human. And, you know, treating people equally and inclusively as well.Jenny  38:57Let me tell the story, because I know you're too, you feel like it's, you know, you shouldn't say it, but you've spent time with it because you how many years did you work at Virgin Atlantic in the training?Matt  39:09Seven or eight years.Jenny  39:10Yes. And he was very accessible wasn't he, I mean you spent like, I don't know, half a day once, you had to spend with him. So you were observing? And also you did end up staying at his house. Come on!Matt  39:25You were gonna say that!Jenny  39:28I was amazed, like, I couldn't believe you. And you said, you didn't even say this recently, but I remember you told me years ago that he got everyone sitting around his kitchen table and was having a chat. Do you remember you told me that?Matt  39:42Yeah. Yeah.Jenny  39:43And he asked you for feedback, didn't he?Matt  39:47Yeah. I won't go into the details. But he was what he was doing was trying to get opinions and ideas of a certain situation that they were having in the airline at that time. And that just tells you that he was open to other people's ideas, and I wasn't anybody special at all, you know, I was a trainer. And that's what I liked about him. He was, he didn't have that hierarchical kind of feel, you know, 'I'm the chairman of this company'. It's kind of just human to human.Jenny  40:21And I think that's the takeaway from that story really isn't it? He was asking for feedback, which I think is a really good thing in itself. You know, what do you all think? Because then people that are in your team feel more empowered to make the answer, rather than you imposing your views or imposing how you think it should be.Matt  40:42So yeah, exactly.Jenny  40:44He's always struck me, I mean I've never even met him, but he's always struck me as a personality in the public eye that just looks like a great person to work for.Matt  40:53Yeah, yeah, for sure. I'm sure other people have had bad experiences. But I think in general, for mine, it was good. But and also he kind of empowered people to make decisions as well, and also to not always be the one that's kind of making a decision, but asking first, before you make a decision as a manager, or, you know, leader of the company, let's say. But yeah, inclusivity, I think was the major thing.Jenny  41:24Are any questions that people should be asking you about managing other people that they that they don't ask?Matt  41:33I think, understanding differences in others is one thing. And, making sure that, we all have differences in terms of how we're motivated, we're all motivated by different things. And some of the mistakes that I think managers can make is, they try and manage, sorry, try and motivate in the same way that they're motivated. And it just doesn't work. So it's trying to get underneath what drives the person and knowing a little bit more about them. I mean, there's been loads of books written about it, a guy called Patrick Lencioni, one of my favourites, and he talks about three signs of a miserable job. He had a book that was called that, and he was saying that anonymity is being, is quite a miserable thing, right? If people don't know you, within your business, or the manager doesn't know you, how miserable is that going to be? But it's not, it's not kind of being poking, you know, how many times you've been divorced and stuff like that, it's about knowing a little bit about the person. So if they've got kids, maybe they have difficulties, they might need a bit of time to pick up the kids, you know, it's the nuances. That's what I'm getting at.Jenny  42:50Do you know what, this is such a good insight, it's to understand what's important to other people. And because of this remote way of working, for example, I know that some agencies, for example, recognise that everyone's Zoomed out. And they're really, really busy. So they've made a policy that they don't have any internal meetings scheduled for Friday's, for example. Because, unfortunately, you're working a million miles an hour often in agency. And if suddenly you look at your diary, and it's just meeting and meeting and meeting, you don't get anything done. And I don't know what you've been hearing from different businesses you're working with, but everyone seems to be working harder and more intensely in this remote environment from home because you don't have that wind downtime from driving the car going home and things. So that understanding of everyone's individual scenario, like  homeschooling, all the parents that I feel so sorry for, well, you included, that had to homeschool, whilst you're trying to have a full time job that's really busy.Matt  43:53Yeah, exactly. And one thing that's come up a few times on courses is, having clear channels of how do I communicate when I need to? And what kind of software are we using for what, and someone suddenly said this, like, a couple of weeks ago, they said, 'Look, we don't we don't know, when we're doing a piece of work, where do I add that? Is it in Microsoft? Is it in a meeting on Zoom?' So I think those kind of norms need to be clear. You know, when you're communicating if you need to get hold of me for an emergency, Whatsapp is the best one, you know, whatever it is for you. And so make sure that your team know how to communicate to you, and what kind of contribution they have to make and where they make that. Does that make sense? So, you know, is it on Microsoft Teams?Jenny  44:50Is it on Slack?Matt  44:53Is it on email? What's the best thing and this is a couple of questions I had, but that's quite a common question. So, for a manager to be able to get that across, I think it's really important.Jenny  45:03You see, this comes back to the point about time management. Time management, everyone's struggling with time to get anything done. And what I've noticed on Zoom, when people are talking to me that there's these pop up sounds 'Bing, bing, bing!' I don't know what's going on, but it probably an email that's come through, and their attention is distracted. And there's this fascinating study that it says, if you're concentrating on a task, and you're distracted, it takes up to 25 minutes to get back to the task that you were focusing on. Now, can you imagine how unproductive your day is if you've got pop ups, and you need that deep time to work on things that lend themselves to more concentration, like proposal writing or generating ideas? But everyone seems to be in this pop up world- WhatsApp, email, and you don't, it's almost like we don't help ourselves do we?Matt  45:56No, exactly. There's a book about it. And the guy's name is Cal Newport, I think his name is, and he talks about deep work. And, he's saying that it's just making the point that we don't really have time to do some really concentrated quality work at times, because we've got so many other things going on. There's so many people talking about the distraction kind of world that we're living in. And, you know, even on courses, you know, sometimes on courses, you get somebody who's like this side, that they're, they're not facing the camera, but they're obviously doing some work, at the same time. It's just impossible. You can't concentrate on more than one thing at a time really.Jenny  46:41I agree, and probably a completely separate podcast about it. But to your point about if you are then in a leadership position, or managing others, it's almost like telling your team, look for these hours or these blocks of time, I'm not going to be available on email. But if you need me in an emergency, like call my phone, so to have one agreed way that they can interrupt you if really, really necessary.Matt  47:06Yeah, yeah.Jenny  47:08Okay.Matt  47:10I was always impressed with one manager I used to work with, he used to record a message every single day to say what he was doing. So, he would say that I'm in meetings from two to four, if you need me, you can get hold of me at this point. So it was for clients as well. But I just thought it was a really nice touch, he would record it every single day.Jenny  47:30That's really good, that's a good tip.  It was Ian by the way.  Oh, was it? Okay, what books or sources of inspiration would you recommend people read if they're interested in learning more about managing others?Matt  47:42I'm a bit of a hoarder when it comes to management books, I always kind of think, what's new and shiny?Jenny  47:48Don't read them, just put them on the shelves so it looks like you very well read.Matt  47:52Yeah, look how many things I read. But sometimes you dip in and out of them because there's certain things about them that you say, I'm interested in that bit. But there's a few, I mean, Five Dysfunctions Of a Team is really good - Patrick Lencioni. He makes the point in that, that conflict is quite good. Not particularly between people, disliking people, but it's about ideas, it's about ways forward. Rather than thinking, oh, gosh, you know, Jenny hasn't got the same kind of view as me and that being a problem, it should be a positive, it should be a good thing that we are discussing ways forwards and tasks. So I do think Patrick Lencioni is really good and he's got about five or six management books. And they're great, I really like them. Adam Grant is really good. He covers a lot to do with management, but also things outside of management as well that make you think. If I had the titles with me now, I would give them to you.Jenny  49:04I think the author's name is fine. as good.Matt  49:07Okay. And I would also look at emotional intelligence as well. You know, Travis Bradberry, and Daniel Goleman. It's about, a big part of it is self awareness. You know, and how your emotions, you can think about when you are what they call emotionally hijacked. And there's another phrase for it, which, which is the Amygdala Hijack, where certain things will make you respond in a way perhaps, which you didn't want to respond. So there are triggers and I think, as a manager, to have a view on what your triggers are, and how you deal and manage those triggers is really important. So that's another area I would definitely get you to look at as well.Jenny  49:58That's really useful.Matt  49:59There's a new one, which is called The Evolved Leader as well. I'd look at that and a few coaching books, which I was...Jenny  50:06I'm going to be spending a lot of time on Amazon!Matt  50:12I know I could go on and on here. I could give some recommendations in the notes if you'd like?Jenny  50:17Fantastic. We'll do that, Matt. That's great. So just finally, can you tell us a bit more about your course? And if people are interested in coming on this, 'Managing others for new managers', how can people book?Matt  50:31Yeah, I've got various different ways. If you want to contact me, contact me on matt@bottledlearning.com, and then I can give you the dates of what's coming up next. So probably the easiest way.Jenny  50:42All right, fantastic. Well, thank you so much. That was I think, hopefully, that was really going to give a lot of food for thought for people who are maybe in the position that they're going to be managing someone or they're already managing someone and hoping to get it right. So thank you so much for sharing so much. It's been brilliant.Matt  50:59Thanks. I’ve enjoyed it. Thank you.

Transcript: 00:01Welcome to Episode 27. This is the top 10 tips to be successful in agency account management. And the reason that I'm giving you top 10 tips is because we've now passed 26 episodes on this podcast, and we've had some fantastic guests sharing really, really brilliant advice for agency account managers to up their game, to be more proficient in what they do, and to be much more successful in their role. So I thought what I'd do is reflect back on some of those interviews, and pull out some of the best tips that I think have been shared on the podcast. So this episode is highlighting all of the top tips that are going to help you in your role. 00:48The first piece of advice that I'd like to pull out is from episode number one. This was with Kate Whittaker, Kate has 30 years as a marketing client. She's dealt with hundreds of agencies through her time. And she said, good account management makes everything run smoothly. But great account management is what transforms the relationship from a client supplier to one of a real partnership. And she said, we're quite specialist in what we do. And industry knowledge is really important to me. So the account director I work with in our current agency will often just drop me an email with information, snippets of news, industry news, and competitor activity that she thinks I might have missed. So I think that was a great tip. Always make sure that your client knows that you're thinking about them, and keeping them top of mind. So if you're not doing this on a regular basis, then make sure you set up Google Alerts and send a piece of information that you think is relevant, but not only send it, also tell them why you're sending it and why you think it's relevant to them. And perhaps any action that you believe needs to be taken as a result. So, great piece of advice from Kate. 02:05Quite a similar piece of advice taken from Episode Two of the podcast with Tina Fegent. Tina has 25 years working in marketing procurement. Again, she's really competent dealing with agencies. She's actually worked agency side as a commercial director many years ago. But she spent a lot of time dealing with agencies from a marketing procurement perspective. And she says that the, when asked about the most important skills of an account manager is for her all about being proactive. And she said, 'I think being able to hold senior level discussions are really important, and being financially aware.' And she said, I think that it's an area that could be really improved in terms of having those 'why are we all here?' conversations. And what she's referring to, is why is the client actually investing their money in that PR campaign, that digital asset, that event, ultimately is because they need to drive sales. So having a business acumen, being commercially aware, is really, really important. Because she says at the end of the day, the key one is being focused on the client's business. That's what is top of their mind. And that's what we've got to keep top of ours. Fantastic advice from Tina. 03:25The next top tip is taken from episode number three. And this was with Marcus Cauchi, it was called 'How to sell to existing and prospective clients'. It was probably one of the most popular podcasts. And during this interview, Marcus shared some really straight talking advice. And I've just picked out a couple of things that he said on the podcast, which I'd love to share again. He said your job is to always make sure your customer is the hero of the story. Stop talking about you, your agency, your past glories, no one cares. That's like showing photos of your ugly children to strangers. Focus on the how you helped a client achieve their strategic objective, how they benefited from it, what they learned, what journey they went through the ups and the downs. Because I think that's what makes a real story. So I think, some fantastic advice from Marcus about making sure that when you have a conversation with a client, it's about how you can help them but not focusing on what you do. So tell a story, be really proficient in understanding your past case studies and how you've helped other clients that are similar to your client achieve their strategic imperative. So that was a fantastic piece of advice. He also went on to share another piece of advice that I wanted to share with you because again, I thought it was spot on. He says establish right from the outset, what their vision is for the next 6, 12, 18, 24 months. And looking at that direction, they're trying to take their business, so that you can stay ahead of where they are making sure that you're co-developing a plan. So if resource is required, identify what those resources will be, when they will be required, what the trigger points are, and identify what budget is going to be required in order to be able to recruit them, and make sure that you understand the client's competitive landscape. So I think, again, what all three of these podcasts really keep reminding us about, is to stand in the shoes of the client, and to really understand their world, their business, their challenges, their opportunities, where they're investing their money next year. And a little tip for you, if you go to seekingalpha.com and you have a huge enterprise client, then you may be able to download the transcripts from the investor relations discussions. And these typically are where CEO, CFOs and generally the C suite present their plans to the company's investors. So it's a great source of information to understand where their focus for their business is going to be for the coming years. So, brilliant advice from Marcus, if you want to, if you haven't yet listened to that podcast, then I would urge you to go back and have a listen. 06:32Tip number four is from episode number four. And it was an interview I did with Phil Lancaster. Phil spent 20 years working in a very senior role at JWT. And he worked on some amazing global brands. And he shared some fantastic advice on this podcast. And I want to pull out a couple of things he said, because now he is actually helping agencies develop relationships with the C suite. He says, I think the brilliant skills required of account management is that you have got to have an understanding and an innate interest and curiosity around two things, one of which is the broad business world. How do clients make money, for example? How can I help them make more money? And how can I grow their business? But equally, you've got to have the qualitative skills, the EQ, the genuine intuition and desire to be interested in anything creative. So I thought that was a fantastic summary of, again, what is so important  in the role of account management. And he also sort of warned us he said, I'm working with a lot of agencies right now to whom a relationship with the C suite at their clients organisation does not exist. And he believes they're really, really vulnerable. Because decisions can be made, no matter how good the agency's work has been, or is at the moment, decisions can be made, which have no bearing whatsoever on the current relationship, and output and now suddenly mean that the business is gone. So again, I hope this is a reminder for you to establish relationships with the most senior level clients in the client organisations you're dealing with, because Phil's absolutely on the money here. If anything happens at a change of senior leadership at your client side, then this will inevitably one way or another trickle down the organisation and you will be affected. So make sure that you're keeping an eye on who the C suite are, and also have a plan to connect with them and develop relationships. 08:55Tip number five is taken from episode number five called the fundamentals of successful client management with Carey Evans, and Simon Rhind-Tutt. They have a company called Relationship Audis and Management. And they go in and audit relationships. And the reason I'm so supportive of the company is because when I was working at Publicis, I invited them in to audit a relationship that we had with one of our biggest customers that was worth £700,000 a year. We were struggling a little bit with this relationship, to be honest. And they, as they do, they organised face to face evaluations, interviews with key members of the client organisation, both very senior and quite junior, and what we discovered about that relationship and the feedback that they were able to garner for us, enabled us to put an action plan in place to address all of the concerns and complaints. And I think as a result of what they did for us, we extended that relationship by two years. So that account ended up, we kept it. So it was worth £1.4 million and quite frankly, it, we could have lost it. So I was so impressed with what Simon and Carey's business did, I actually when I left Publicis, I went to work for them for a little while, about nine months. And I conducted interviews on their behalf with client organisations on behalf of different agencies. And it was just fascinating what clients will share with you, when you really are able to ask the questions in a way that helps them to open up. So if you're listening to this, and perhaps you have a big, important client relationship that isn't maybe going so well, and you really want to understand, you know, from the client's perspective, what's going well, where the areas of development and improvement need to happen, but also to have that opportunity to talk about their future needs in the business, then Simon and Carey are the people to contact. And on my interview with them, again, it was just tip after tip after tip about how agency account managers can get better. And they shared with us a couple of statistics that I want to share with you that may be food for thought. So they said, because they carry out lots of surveys, they have lots of benchmarking data, that 63% of clients claim that their agency has never asked them about their expectations of the agency, which, as I say, is not setting off on the right foot really. And if you don't know what your clients expectations are, it's a damn sight easier to deliver them and beat them. Sorry, if you do know what they are, as opposed to simply assuming you know what they are. And this is emphasised, they said even further, when you've got an existing relationship and your client leaves, and a new client joins, and you maybe are assuming that they're gonna want everything in the same way, the same size, the same job, the same package. And of course, they're not. So making sure that from the outset of a really key relationship, that you're asking really great questions, you know, things like for you to turn around to me in six months time and say, 'do you know what, this was the best decision I ever met made, was bringing you in, or continuing our relationship'. And for you to say that to me , what needs to have happened between now and then. And then just going quiet, and letting the client tell you what success looks like for them. 12:45So great piece of advice there. Another tip that they shared is, you know, they asked the question, what proportion of time does a marketing manager on average, in their working week spend working with all of their agencies. And most agencies believe that typically, a marketing manager, their client, spends between 30 and 70%, working with their agencies. But the reality is, it's 7%. So just let that sink in a moment, if you think that your client, they've got an inordinate amount of things to do in their role, lots of different things, demands on their time. Actually, what you do with it with your client is just a tiny, tiny fraction of their day. Because if they have 7% of their working week spending with all of their suppliers, all of their relationships, then you just form a very, very small part. And I think the takeaway here is to really make sure that every interaction with your client matters, so that you're prepared, but you also have that understanding of where the clients at. And Carey and Simon went on to give a piece of advice, saying, you know, ask your client to put in a diary session, just half an hour over a coffee, so that you can ask them questions about their working week. How do they spend their time, what other challenges are they facing, and that really is going to give you some insight into the world of your clients, so that you can understand them better. 14:21Tip number six is taken from an absolutely stunning podcast interview I had with David C. Baker, called 'Agency Leaders Guide to Account Management'. This is Episode 24. And David just quite frankly, shared tip, after tip, after tip, and I just was so blown away by all of the value he shared. But I've picked out one tip that David gave in his interview, which I think was very, very insightful. And I would really encourage you to look into this because he said this is going to strike people as pretty strange and that already made me kind of lean in further to what he was about to say. But, and this was in response to him being asked what makes a great account manager, he said, go to Google and look up 'theory of change', or 'model of change'. And then flip to the image tab and see the 1000s of theories of change. And peruse those someday and come up with a model that's unique to your agency, about how your agency interact with your clients,  how you bring them along, what's your theory of change? And he said, it's an area that not a lot of people have experienced. And we just innately know, at least we think we know how to present a new idea to someone and convince them of it. But if you spend a little bit more time, more like a scientist, and think about what is your perspective on theory, or models of change, it would really help you as an account manager too. So I thought that was a really, really, very unique piece of advice, which I've never heard anyone say, but he's absolutely right here. Because often, we are in a position to present new ideas to clients, which represent a huge change for that client. And there's something called status quo bias, where clients often just want to follow the status quo, they don't want to make big changes. So only by understanding those changes, are we able to address that in our presentation. So I would really urge you to take David's advice up and have a look for yourself, and see if you can come up with a model for your agency. 16:51Tip number seven, this was taken from Episode 20, called 'How to improve the way you work with a marketing director'. We had Sam Bridger on, and Sam again shared some fantastic advice for agencies and agency account managers in how to work better with your clients. And again, a bit like Kate Whitaker, Sam has been in the industry for over 25 years, working with various agencies. And now she works as interim marketing director. And for her, she has to go into a new company, as probably head of marketing, and really hit the ground running. And the first thing she likes to do is to understand how many different agencies the marketing department are dealing with, because she likes to quickly understand who they are, and then bring them all together so that she can benefit from their collective thinking. And again, I thought that was a fantastic piece of advice, that it's beneficial often for your marketing directors, or the people that you're dealing with, to get all of the agencies together. And who thinks about doing that? And her piece of advice was try and find ways yourself to bring the agencies together. And that would be really beneficial and helpful to your clients. So she suggested perhaps run an afternoon workshop, where you all where you invite all the agencies together and talk about an issue that the clients facing maybe in the sector, for example, or with a particular customer, or a particular brand, or whatever it might be. And then she said, do it in the afternoon, have a couple of hours workshopping, and then a couple of hours of going out for a drink maybe and getting to know each other. And she said it really sets the ball rolling, and it demonstrates a way to add value. And that's a great way that the client can see that you're being proactive. So, again, she said, don't be afraid of the competition, because often other agencies you bring together, may be offering something similar to you. She said just embrace it, and use it as an opportunity to come together collectively to give the client the best value. So again, a fantastic tip that you might want to take on board from Sam. 19:08Tip number eight I've chosen from Episode 23. And that was with Simon Barbato, who is the CEO of Mr. B & Friends, and it's called 'How to move from agency employee to agency owner'. Simon started his career in the early 90s. He was actually in client service to start with and quickly moved into a planning role. So his agency now that he went on to form is a very successful, fast growing agency. And he sees the value in the strategic planning role and has a planning department in his agency which is a really key differentiator. And his advice for agency account managers was curiosity is one of the key drivers of great account managers, the ability to show interest, to ask questions, dig deep to unearth the background to a client's business or business problem, for example. And I think all of these things provide a really great canvas in which they can then build creative briefs or build project briefs. So if you don't have that innate ability to drive into the client's business, I think that you'll operate on a very surface level, and therefore probably have a transactional type relationship with your client, rather than a deep relational engagement. So drive into the clients business, dive further into their sector, understand their customer, their market, and where they're going, so that you can be much more informed and provide a lot more value to help them grow their business. So brilliant advice there from Simon. 20:51Tip number nine is taken from Episode 26. With Dr. Laura Janusik, called 'What account managers can learn from the science of listening'. And Laura is a specialist in listening, she has been studying it for years, she has a PhD in communication with a specialisation in listening. And I learned a ton from her chat. And one of the things that she said was listening is a brain based activity. So you can't actually tell if someone is actually listening to you through the what she calls the 'non verbals'. So even if, for example, someone is leaning forward, nodding, smiling, making eye contact, actually, that doesn't mean they're listening to you. And the only way you can tell if someone is listening, is by how they speak, how they respond. Now, why that's important for account managers is the following. She said account managers particularly need to do a lot more listening than they do speaking. So being able to bite their tongue and allow the client to talk. And then doing those things like confirming, which is paraphrasing, and then asking if you're right. So she gave an example, if your client says something, rather than just going on to the next topic, you can say something like so if I heard you correctly, you said this, this and this. Did I get that right? So you're playing back what your client just said to you, or what you think your client just said to you. Because then it gives the client the opportunity to say, well, you almost have it right, but I forgot to say this, for example. And that really does happen quite a lot. Or they can just simply say yes, spot on. You've got it absolutely right. Which is always the ideal, obviously. But if you've paraphrased it wrong, and you've clarified it incorrectly, then that gives them the immediate opportunity to say, Oh, no, no, no, that's not what I meant. What I meant was this. So this is all really good tips for us, as account managers, to make sure that you are playing back to the client, what you believe you've heard that they've just said, because that's the only way we're going to be crystal clear about what the client said, because time is money. If we get that brief wrong, and we go away too quickly, and start working on a proposal that takes two weeks, then that's wasted effort, wasted time, because you don't want to go back to the client with your proposal and they say, well, that's not really what I wanted. So make sure you get super clear from the outset and play back to the client what you think you heard. Brilliant advice from Laura. 23:36Tip number 10. And the final piece of advice was taken from Episode 25, 'How to use the power of surgical empathy with your clients', with Dr. Mark Goulston. This was a fascinating episode for me from someone that I've been following for years. He is just a fantastic fountain of knowledge. And he wrote one of his most popular books called 'Just Listen'. And he said that he uses acronyms in his book to make something easier to remember. And he says you want to be a PAL in conversations. And pal means purposeful, agendaless listening, purposeful, agendaless listening. He says one of the reasons people don't listen is because people have an agenda. So if you've got an agenda in your head, and you go into a meeting, you struggle to really listen, to be really present. And he believes that people are afraid to empathise, particularly in the business world. Because he says if I really find out where the other person's coming from, what's really important to them, what they care about what they really need, and it doesn't match what I'm selling, then I can't sell them what I have. And you know, it's an amazing way of looking at it because if we go in there thinking about what I want them to buy from me, then it clouds our conversation. We're not really listening authentically, and empathising, really openly. So, fantastic piece of advice, go into meetings, and really be present. Listen to what the client is actually telling you. Because like Relationship Audits and Management that go into client situations, they're listening for what's not being said. And often they say that the things that, you're reading between the lines of what the client is actually saying, and in order to do that, you have to stop thinking about your agenda, and be purposeful, agendaless, and listening. So using that acronym to really help you improve your listening skills. So I hope those 10 top tips were useful for you and served as a bit of a reminder for perhaps what you could be doing in your role as an account manager. 26:02A quick reminder if you are interested in knowing who's coming up on the next podcast, and also listening and hearing new tips and advice for agency account managers, then come over to my website, accountmanagementskills.com and sign up for my newsletter. The newsletter goes out every week, or two weeks and I try to include as many tips as I can, new tips that I've learned through listening to someone on the podcast myself, or things that I'm reading and sharing. And also I can let you know forthcoming trainings. So until the next time, have a great week.

Jenny  Okay, today I'm delighted to speak to Dr. Laura Janusik. She is regarded as one of the world's top researchers and educators in the field of listening. She has a PhD in communication with a specialisation in listening and an MBA. Her company Listening to Change offers training, coaching and consultancy services for both individuals and teams and organisations to really help them transform by using listening as a strategy. So a very warm welcome Laura. Laura  Thank you, Jenny. I'm very excited to be here. Jenny  Not as much as I am! Laura  I don't know on a scale of one to 10, how excited are you? Jenny  Before I ask you to fill in a few of the gaps, listening is the most important skill for any account manager and I've been wanting to get an expert in the field of listening. So I am absolutely thrilled and delighted to dive into these questions, because I know you're going to deliver so much value. So on that note, would you mind spending a couple of minutes just filling in some of the gaps about you, your background and also why you decided to spend so long studying listening? Laura  That's a great question. Where I am currently right now is I'm leveraging my over 20 years in academia, to bring listening to a more general audience. Specifically, through coaching and training. The way that I got into listening was purely by accident. To be honest with you, I had a career that I call, I was a millennial before millennials were born, which is a way of saying that I've had a number of different careers in my past. I was in human resources for a number of years. And I did all the different areas of human resources for about 12 to 15 years. And I sold some things and just did many, many different things. But when I was in my early 30s, I decided to go to graduate school to get my master's degree because I wasn't feeling that I was as smart as my friends. And I wanted to feel smarter. I decided to major in communication. And what I had wanted to do at that point Jenny, was just develop interpersonal curriculum for companies. They paired me with a world leading expert in listening, Andrew Wolvin, as my advisor, and I told him within the first two to three weeks of meeting him that I was not going to become a listening person. I didn't know what a listening person was, but it didn't sound like something I would want to be. And he was very gracious, he said, Laurie, you can be whatever you want to be. So fast forward, I'm entering my final semester of my master's programme. And I thought, you know what, he's going to be writing my letters of recommendation, I should show a little bit of interest in his passion. So I signed up for his listening course. And within two weeks, it totally changed my life. I thought this is what listening is, why don't people understand what listening is, it is so important. And there's so much more research out there that needs to be done, that I totally changed my career trajectory and decided to stay on to get my PhD so I could really focus in listening and help build the research in that area. So I didn't choose listening as much as the universe chose listening for me. Jenny  Can you remember back during those two weeks? What was the crux thing that you leart that really shifted you from interpersonal curriculum to, I'm going to specialise in listening? Laura  I do totally remember that Jenny. He had us read an article that was about listening processes, and listening models and it included, probably about eight different listening models. And I did not understand that listening was a process or listening could be modelled until I read that article. And I thought, you mean there's more to listening than just sitting there looking like you were listening! You know, there are actually these steps that go on in our brain. And prior to that I had never really thought about listening as being a brain based activity. It was just something we did kind of like breathing. You didn't have to understand the intricacies of it because your body just did it anyway. But in listening our body doesn't always just do it anyway, of course. And that's one of the things I think that we begin to stumble upon and go, wow, I'm not such a great listener after all. Jenny  To that last point, why do you think we all think that we don't need any listening training? Because we're great listeners? Laura  I think there are a couple of reasons. Number one, because we're born with the ability to listen. And number two, I think that, well I know that, most elementary schools and Junior High's and High Schools do not cover listening as an area to be learned. So if we don't have to learn about something in K through 12, we generally don't think it's important because if it were important enough, it would be in the curriculum somewhere. And until we start unpacking what something really is, we just don't think that it's important because we're doing it already. And we're doing it at a certain level. But we could do it so much better, if we understood it. Jenny  How can you tell if someone's listening to you or not? Laura  Well, the crux is you can't really. You can't tell by looking at them. This is always the piece of information that really blows people's minds. There is absolutely no non verbal that we associate with listening, like eye contact, head nodding, body leaning. None of those things correlate in any way, shape, or form with what's going on in our brain. Listening is really about understanding or making meaning. That's the goal, or crux of listening. And that all takes place in our brain. And even though I can look in your eyes, I can't see past them to your brain, to really see the words that are going on in there to know if you're listening to me or not. So what we often do in communication is we perceive listening behaviorally. So we do look for the eye contact, we do look for the head nods. And when we get those symbols from people, those nonverbal behaviours, then we make the assumption that they were listening to us. However, it's a very dangerous assumption, because as you well know, we've all learned how to 'fake listen'. We learned that in school too, on our own. We wanted to look really interested and we looked like we were taking notes, but we were actually writing a letter to a friend. Or we established eye contact, because we knew that the teacher or professor would expect that, but we were actually thinking about the party that we would be attending on Saturday. And to complicate this even more Jenny, is cultures have different acceptable listening behaviours. So every listening behaviour that we can think of is actually a cultural norm. And those norms vary from culture to culture. So to give you an example, there are two cultures where when you nod your head up and down, that actually means No. And when you shake it side to side, that means Yes. Can you imagine going to that culture, because I'm in the opposite culture, that the head nod is Yes and the shake is No. So I would go to that culture and I would be reading those nonverbals absolutely, incorrectly. And I would be thinking, when they were shaking their head, oh they don't like this at all, but maybe they were trying to show me that they liked it. So we have to be so careful with those things.  Jenny  That is so fascinating. Can I ask you, because in my past, in my youth, I spent years working in Greece, and I don't know if that's actually one of the countries but actually, when they say no, they kind of lean their head back, you know. Laura  So you totally get this right. You it's because you've actually seen it. And what was your perception of that when you were there? Jenny  I thought he was quite rude because they tut at the same time. This is not everybody, but there is this, you know, like that. It means no. So cultural differences, isn't it? It's just getting used to it. Laura  It is and we oftentimes think that people who do things different than us, in those nonverbal ways, are rude and they're not being rude. They're being very appropriate to their culture, and we're the ones being rude because we didn't learn their culture well enough to communicate with people appropriately within it. Jenny  I'm just thinking of my audience now, account managers, you know, maybe many of them are working on global accounts, and therefore are dealing with different cultures. So this is a good topic to kind of understand. But thinking more about, so you can't tell if someone's really listening? Laura  You can't tell through the nonverbals. You have to listen to how they're responding. Are they responding on topic to you? Are they asking you questions on topic? Are they doing those strategies like confirming, to show that they actually understand or not? So that's the only way you can really tell if somebody has listened to you. And if you've created shared meaning with them. Jenny  So that's really important for account managers to realise isn't it, that if I want my clients to know that I'm actually listening, then repeat back what they've just said or clarify or ask continuous questions on the topic? Laura  Yes, exactly. And account managers particularly need to do a lot more listening than they do speaking. So being able to bite their tongue and allow the client to talk, and then doing those things like confirming, which is paraphrasing, and then somehow asking if you're right. So Jenny, if I heard you correctly, you said this, this, this and that, did I get that right? Because then it gives the client the opportunity to go, 'Oh, well, you almost have it right but I forgot to say this'. And oftentimes that happens. Or, 'Yes, you have it, right'. Which is always the ideal or, 'No, no, that's not what I meant when I said that, this is what I actually meant'. And all of those are equally valuable. Jenny  Very valuable. You just mentioned biting your tongue. I remember you mentioned that to me when we were planning this podcast. Tell me a bit about that because I think that's a fantastic tip. Laura  Yeah. In the UK, and in the United States, it seems like the average time between speakers is about a half a seconds, so point five seconds. What I recommend that we do as listeners is after the other person finishes speaking, so the client finishes speaking, I recommend that an account manager bite their tongue for a minimum of three seconds. When you bite your tongue, there's that physical sensation so you know you can't speak. It's a little bit awkward in the beginning, but it does keep you from speaking. And what I know about both of those cultures is people become a little bit more uncomfortable with silence. And so they like to fill the silence. And that is a strategy then to get the client to speak more. Because as an account manager, I know what I know. But I don't know if what my company can provide is really exactly what this client needs or wants. And I need to get as much information from that client as I can to make sure that we are match. So the more information I can get through them talking, the better off we're both going to be. Jenny  A slight side note, but to that point, is there some kind of science behind how someone feels when they are speaking? Laura  Ask that in a different way so I understand that better.  Jenny  Okay. So the rule of thumb, and I agree that we want to get the client speaking 70% of the time because they have the insight really, it's our job to uncover it. And so listening and asking really great questions. And I think in general, people like to talk about themselves, don't they? They enjoy sharing, many, or would you disagree with that? Laura  I agree with your qualifier, many people enjoy talking about themselves. There are different types of people in terms of how much they feel sharing, in terms of personal lives, or particularly when they're in a sales type information they don't want to give too much, it's almost like going to a fortune teller. You don't want to give too much because you don't trust that this person is really a fortune teller. And so you don't want to give the account manager too much information because then they will just tell you what you want to hear. So I think that we do sometimes have people like that. But the brain research in terms of the neuroscience does talk about our brain synchronising together And when we can speak and listen in a way that, so it's called dialogic listening, so you speak in a way that the other can listen to you and you listen in a way so the other can speak to you. Then our brains synchronise more so and when we have more synchrony, there's more understanding, and there's more likeability. And the really interesting thing to me is, there's also an element of agreement. So, we can listen to people that we disagree with, but still synchronise with them. So what I often say is, it's our job to listen to understand, not to respond. And understanding doesn't mean agreement. I can understand somebody who's at the opposite political end of the spectrum than I'm at. I can understand and not agree with them, but I can understand them. Jenny  Fascinating. What else did you learn through your research that really stood out for you? What other surprises did you find? Laura  I think one of the big ones, I was one of those women who went into it thinking that women were much better listeners than men were. And you're shaking your head thinking? Well, there's a caveat here. So, from a brain perspective, the comprehension, the amount of understanding, there is no significant difference between men and women. However, there is a significant difference in those nonverbal behaviours that we like to attribute to listening, like the head nodding and the body orientation. So women significantly show more of those behaviours than men do, which is why women get the perception of being better listeners. Jenny  Fascinating. That is fascinating, that's another one that I'm going to be re-quoting.  Now something that you said, that has really stuck with me, is that you call listening a strategy, not a skill. I think that's a genius thing to say. What made you say that? Why is that true? Laura  The more I got into the listening research, the more I understood that we had different goals and could have different goals with how we listened. And many of us understand this implicitly, because we have learned to shift the way we listen in different contexts. So for example, how I listen at work might be very different than how I listen at home or how I listen with my friends. And so I'm listening for different things, and to different things, depending upon the context. I'm sorry, I started talking there, and I forgot the question! Jenny  No, it's fine. The strategy, the fact that... Laura  The strategy. So it goes back to what do I want to get out of this interaction, because if I can identify what I'm listening to and for, then there's a goal involved, and I have a much better chance of meeting that goal, if I've identified that goal. But if I haven't identified that goal, then I listen habitually for what I always listen for. And I might not get what I needed out of that conversation. Or I might think that it was a useless conversation, when in actuality it was because I was not listening appropriately. Jenny  Now, this also speaks to helping account managers go into client interactions. Because what happens in our world Laura, sometimes it's quite difficult to get airtime with the client, because they're busy doing a million other things. And actually, the one thing that we're working on for them is a small part of their day. So we want to make sure that small part of their day actually, is significant. So it's kind of a little bit of a performance. So when we turn up, it's good practice to, prepare, have a pre-meeting plan. And actually, what you've just suggested is a good strategy for account managing in general, to kind of pre think about what are the questions that I want to ask? Or what are the answers that I need to gather from this client interaction that are going to be most helpful? And does that form part of your training as well? Laura  Yes, it does. And Jenny, what you're also speaking to, well, two things actually. Number one, an account manager is actually, I guess I would view an account manager more as a liaison. So this is the person who is the point central between the client and between the creatives. And it's quite likely that the way that both of those groups of people process information in their brains is very different. Creatives process information, and habitually are thinking creatively...? Jenny  Creatively. Laura  That's the word, I could not find that one, yes creatively! Where as, as you said, with a potential client, their meeting with the account manager is a very small part of their day, and they're doing all of these other things as well. So they're not necessarily in the habit of meeting with account managers on a routine basis. And so being this liaison between the two, and understanding that they may be approaching you with a way of listening that works more effectively for them within their organisation, but doesn't necessarily work for this conversation. Because it gets into the four listening habits, which have been identified in the research that was published early last year, in March of last year actually, that identified not only listening as a habit, and that is really important, because a habit is something we do routinely, but we can change. And how can we change it? They have found that there are four different, I like to use the analogy of a strainer, ways that we strain information or filter information. And how we filter information really talks about what we're listening to and what we're listening for. So we can listen connectively for people, and how information is going to affect people. We can listen and strain through reflective, which is our past experience, asking questions like, 'Have I ever been in a situation like this before? Have I ever seen an ad like this before? How did it turn out? You know, what didn't work about that?' We can listen analytically and analytically is all about the details of today. So I'm going to be thinking and asking questions like, 'Well, my deadline is this, can you meet this deadline? And here's my budget, are you going to stay within my budget?' So those types of questions. Or we can think and filter through conceptual, which is the possibilities of tomorrow and beyond? So the what ifs, so I just have the big idea or the big picture. And I don't really want to nail it down now because I want to explore all of the other possibilities before I nail anything down. Jenny  So these are the four listening habits?  Laura  Correct. Jenny  And do we all fall into one of these default habits that we do mostly? Laura  Yes. And I say that with a little bit of hesitance because people can have more than one dominant habit. And since listening is a habit, we can choose different habits in different context. And that's where I think the whole listening is a strategy and not a skill. Understanding how to adjust what we're listening to and what we're listening for, based on the context, is really important because then it increases the chance of us getting what we need or want. And identifying how the client is listening. There's evidence that how we think, how we listen and how we speak are all connected. I can't see your brain so I can't see how you think, I can't see how you're listening. But I can listen to how you speak. And if I can really understand how you're speaking, then I can understand how you're thinking and listening, which means as an account manager, I can better align my communication to yours to give you what you want and need more quickly. So we can then cover other things as well. Jenny  Wow. So is the ideal scenario to go into a client interaction as an account manager, identify the client's listening habits and adjust our approach accordingly? Or is it to anticipate what this interaction requires from us and go in with our listening habit that's most conducive to the context? I don't know if I've overcomplicated it! Laura  Yeah, no, no, you've asked a great question. The more we get educated in this, the more I would say we could do both. So for example, if I am going in, because I know that I'm going to be presenting a proposal, and I'm going to ideally get a signature on the bottom line there, then I know what my goal is. And I know that that goal is going to require some analytical thinking and listening and speaking, because we've got bottom line numbers here. However, there are some listeners who might be listening conceptually, who don't focus as much on the bottom line. But the possibilities, what's this going to make me look like in the future? Is this going to be a slam dunk for me? Is this going to help me climb the corporate ladder if I can land this account? So those are the conceptual what ifs of the future. And so both and there is, I need to go in and get this signed, because it's potentially a big contract for me. However, I need to be able to assess what the client needs to hear as well before the client will sign because I need to speak into what the client needs to hear before the client will sign. Jenny  You gave me an assessment to do before we spoke. Is that assessment assessing what habit you kind of tend to have when it comes to listening? Laura  The Echo Profile which you took, asked you to think of a particular context. And so within that context, that's primarily how you think then. Jenny  Okay. Because I'm thinking for account managers now, how valuable it would be if we were to give that test to our clients and take the test ourselves! Laura  Yeah. You may or may not get your client to be able to take it. But if you take it yourself, and you get just a little bit of training and listening, then you're better able to identify what the client's thinking and listening style might be, based on listening to how they speak. Jenny  Amazing. Go on Laura. Laura  I was going to say, so your results, Jenny.... Jenny  I don't know whether I want to listen!  Laura  Go ahead. Do you have your results handy? Jenny  No, I didn't find the results. Laura  Oh, you don't have them? Oh, I apologise to you. Actually, do you want to take a break for a second? Because I can go grab them? Jenny  Okay, so I've taken your your test Laura, and you're sharing with me the results. And I see that you have Connective, Reflective, Analytical, and Conceptual. And you've gone straight to this slide to show the dominance. So can you talk us through what you can see. Just generally when you approach this. Laura  Yes, and you are a fascinating profile.There are 41 different profiles that exist. You are an Experimenter, it's called, which means that you have a triple dominance Jenny! You are triple dominant in Connective, which is the people and how things affect people. Analytical - the details, and Conceptual the big picture and possibilities of the future. Where you were relatively low would be Reflective. So that's learning from your past experience or bringing your past experience into things. So what this suggests is when you listen as a triple dominant, you actually do a really nice job. The only thing that you might want to do to improve if you want all of these four cylinders firing at the same time so to speak, is take a little note card in with you that says, 'What about my past experiences'. So just bringing in your past experiences to something. But as a triple dominant, that is minimal work compared to somebody who might be single dominant. So for example, I've seen people who are single dominant in Analytical, and they didn't understand, they hated to go in and small talk, because they just did not understand the value of small talk with a client. But if you're speaking with a potential client who is highly Connective, they are totally into that small talk. So small talking is an avenue of respect that you have to approach further. If the client is highly connected, and you're highly analytical, if you go in there and give deadlines and budgets and details like that, that's not what they're interested in at all. They're interested in how this solution is going to feel to the people who are using it. How are they going to like it? How is it making their lives better? So they're looking for those types of things. How does it solve the problems that they're currently having, as opposed to how much it cost or when it could be built by. So you're not aligning your communication well, but once you get a little bit of education in these four different habits, then you can assess by listening to the client or the potential client, you can assess what their style might be, and then begin speaking into that style. So for example, I was saying that I did coach an individual who is just highly Analytical. And what I had to help this client do, was really learn how to small talk, first of all, potentially, when he was with Connective possibilities, but also how to assess what the other person is. And then I have a little cheat sheet of different questions and statements that align with each of these four, and really worked with this client to be able to remember to ask questions like this, as opposed to the questions that he just felt most comfortable with being Analytical. Jenny  This is so fundamental, because the the account managers job really, is to build that rapport. And what you're talking about here is adapting your communication style to be more conducive to the client style, so that you build that rapport. Because ultimately, people like to do business with people like themselves. And and you're absolutely right, if you have someone with Analytical dominance and that the client wants to small talk, then that's going to be a struggle. And even more so, if they're lacking awareness, I mean, at least the individual that you were coaching, has gone through this test to understand that. Laura  Yes, and did some some private coaching with me, and just felt so different afterwards. He understood his wife much better because his wife's dominance was not Analytical! So yeah, there are just so many transformations that occur with just a couple hours of education in this. Jenny  I mean, it's a natural question about, this is an Echo Listening test, is this something that you have developed? Or you're an ambassador for this programme? How? And also, how can people do it? Because I'm sure a lot of account managers are kind of leaning in right now thinking, wow, I want to know what I have here. Laura  This is magic. It really is magic. And I align this with listening intelligence, because the more we recognise about listening, the better off we can be with it, and use it. I did not have a hand in developing the Echo Listening profile, though some of my research does support it. So research builds upon research. So some of my research is reflected in the development of it, of which I'm very proud. But one needs to be a certified listening ambassador guide to the Echo, and I am a certified practitioner in this. So any of your individuals, if they're interested could reach out to me through my website Listening to Change, and I could order them a profile and then do a reading with them. Another thing that I have coming out that might be of interest to account managers, particularly at an entry level point, is I'm doing an online course for the 10 listening tips for leaders. And that will include this Echo Listening profile as well. And that will be a link from my website within the next month. Jenny  Amazing. That sounds fantastic. We'll include the links in the notes Laura for sure. Cheeky question? Can you share one tip or any more tips that you think account managers could benefit from?  Laura  Sure, sure, actually, I will give you three of my favourite. So two of them, I think I've already given you. The first one is biting your tongue for at least three seconds. And then to add on to that after that three seconds, if the client has not broken the silence, then you want to ask a question such as, 'What else?' or, 'Can you tell me more about that?' So a question that would continue the client speaking and continue you gaining that helpful information? The second skill is that skill of confirming, (and confirming again, is paraphrasing plus somehow asking if you're right), if I understood you correctly, you said this, this this and that. Did I get that right? And the third potential skill. I think actually the third potential skill that would be most powerful, most useful for account managers, because they're the liaisons between people is really learning these four listening dominances, learning how to speak into each of the dominances and learning how to assess others dominances by how they speak. Jenny  I think this will be hugely powerful. And given that it's always quoted as the most important skill for an account manager, I think it's worth the time investing in understanding because, speak to me about some of the results that you've had Laura, from working with organisations, individuals, like, it's certainly going to transform, but could you maybe give a couple of examples of how you've seen the impact of doing this training? Laura  Yes, absolutely. One of my favourite ideal clients is actually working with small companies. And I just had the pleasure of working with a small company in Kansas of the United States that had 24 employees. And they're a relatively new company and they're very proud of their company culture. And it sounds like I'm going away but I'm really going to bring this all back. When you think about culture Jenny, culture occurs because of repeated patterns of something. That's how we create culture. So whether we talk about culture from a larger, 'We're going to celebrate this holiday. And this is what we do with these holidays', to family cultures, to company cultures. And they wanted to become a culture that was known for listening. And so I took them through approximately 10 hours of training together. And not only did we get into a lot of what I call listening solutions, the verbal listening skills that you can do, but we actually identified different places within their company, where they could implement these solutions on a routine basis. So that any new employee entering the culture, entered recognising that they're supposed to do these skills, because everybody around them were doing these skills. So it was a way to enculturate the new people into the skills. So in terms of transforming a company, they're in the process of very much transforming because they're implementing listening in so many of the different routine areas of their company. So I have a very specific example on this. At the end of every meeting, when they're making decisions, they go through that cheat sheet that I had mentioned before that asks the 12 different questions, three in each of these areas, to make sure that they haven't left out any of these areas, because there's no guarantee that the people in that meeting are going to represent all four areas. So it's really important to continually ask yourself if you're representing all of those areas. I also worked with a female who was, she was promoted to be a communication manager at a company. And she was now at the leadership level and definitely not quite as confident as the other leaders who were there, she was the only female leader. And so not only did we work on some of the gender differences, but we worked on the listening differences, and were able to identify the different dominances of the other leaders in the company, and develop the different types of questions and statements she could use with them individually and in group. And the perception of her then, in the other's eyes, just grew exponentially, which of course, gave her much more confidence in what she was doing as well. Jenny  Wow. Sorry, go on. Laura  And then there are other times there are just, there are the 'Ah ha's' that individuals have, when they find that they have been the square peg in the round hole, so to speak. So I love working with groups. And when I do a group profile, we can see what everybody's dominance is. And sometimes you see there's only one Analytical person and the rest are Connective conceptual, which could happen a lot, particularly in the very creative fields like marketing and sales, particularly marketing there. And so that person who is Analytical who has always felt like the odd person, and everybody else has treated that person as the odd person, because said person is the one always saying, 'But what's the budget? We're not going to get this done in that deadline'. And everybody else is just, you know, having fun brainstorming, they recognise the value that this analytical person is really bringing to them, because he or she is bringing information that they hadn't considered. And that analytical person can then value more the Connective conceptual. And it also gives them a way to talk about what's happening in the room, and what should be happening in the room. So let's all put our conceptual hats on right now, we're not going to worry about anything analytical, no details here. But let's brainstorm for the next five minutes, you know, or now we need to get really analytical because we have to talk about whether we have the funds to be able to build this better mousetrap. And we have to talk about whether we're going to be able to get it done by the clients deadline here. So it gives us a different way to talk about what we're doing. And that talking about it then changes the way that we do it in our brains. And it takes us back to that synchrony, which is part of collective intelligence for the group. Jenny  Absolutely fascinating. For so many different benefits, you know, because up until this point we've been discussing how it affected the client and the account manager and the confidence levels and the rapport building. But actually, there's a huge piece here about internal efficiencies, culture, people working and gelling together, understanding one another, feeling part of it, being perceived as more effective or feeling more, you know, efficient and effective. So, there's just no end to the benefits really, is there? I just think this is so, it's should be part of everybody's training actually. Laura  I definitely would agree with you. I would love to take this back to primary education, really start listening there. But since we haven't, yes, this is a way for people to have a superpower. Jenny  And you're absolutely right, that it isn't taught in schools. And perhaps that's the mission, isn't it? That's where we should be starting all of this and this awareness. Wow. This has been absolutely fascinating. Laura. There was one other thing that you shared with me that I would love to just mention before we finish, which is the different cultures again. You mentioned in the States, there's a general kind of half a second pause between conversations, but you also gave examples of other areas of the world where it was up to six or seven. Laura  Yeah.  Jenny  Can you talk to us about that? Laura  Sure. So the three examples that I like to use, The States - which is approximately a half a second between speakers, and then we've got some of the Asian cultures where there's up to seven to eight seconds between speakers. And then we have the Italian culture and the New York Jewish culture, where there is no time between speakers because the speakers are actually overlapping each other, interrupting each other. And the interesting element to all of this, is the reason that all of the cultures do it differently, is that's how they show respect in their culture. So in the Asian culture, I am going to pause for seven to eight seconds to show you that i'm really considering and honouring the information that you've shared with me and think about it before I respond to it but in the Italian culture where they're actually interrupting each other, which you know would be extremely rude to other cultures, the reason that it's respectful there is because it shows that you want to co-create the conversation with them. You want to create the story together. So with account managers who are working with clients from around the world, definitely understanding how respect is shown in the culture through simple things like pauses or non pauses is really important. Jenny  I wish I'd taken your training before I went to live in Spain for three years because I used to have to excuse myself from dinner parties and go and sit in the other room because my head was exploding! And you know in hindsight, it was the difference in how they communicate, everyone talks at once and you know! So this is absolutely fascinating. Laura thank you so much for coming on. I think this has opened up so much possibility for account managers. I think it's lovely to know that there is a tool that they can capitalise on to help them get better at listening. So can you just tell us the best way of reaching you and ideally, who would you like to be contacted by? Laura  The best way to reach me is either through my website Listening to Change, and there's a place where you can actually then link to me on there and send me a question. So you can do it that way, or you can link with me on LinkedIn, so it's laurajanusik. And then my ideal client? Individuals who are interested in improving their individual listening. Teams - so whether it's the team leader or somebody on the team. I love to help teams better align their communication and understand this, not only to work more productively internally but work more efficiently with external stakeholders as well. And then I love working with small companies to help build their culture to be a listening culture. Jenny  Amazing. Okay, fantastic. We'll include all of those links Laura and once again I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you so much for your time. Laura  Thanks Jenny, it was my pleasure, very much.

Transcript: Jenny  Well, today, I'm absolutely thrilled that Dr. Mark Goulston has joined me. He is a very sought after business advisor, consultant, coach, speaker and psychiatrist. He has such an impressive background. He's the author of several best selling books including 'Just Listen', that I'm holding in my hand here, and in the background with Mark, 'Talking to Crazy' and 'Real Influence' and 'Get Out Of Your Own Way', all bestselling books. He hosts the extremely popular podcast 'My Wake Up Call with Dr. Mark Goulston', where he's interviewed some prominent figures like radio and TV host, Larry King, leadership guru, Ken Blanchard. He's also a regular LinkedIn live host called 'No Strings Attached' and he's written for Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Business Insider, Huffington Post, Psychology Today and many more. He's the inventor of Surgical Empathy and this is a process for getting through to anyone, by going to their psychological core, and unlocking what's holding them back. He was a UCLA professor of psychiatry for over 25 years, and a former FBI and police hostage negotiation trainer. So I'm honoured to have him on the show today. I'm very grateful to Marcus Cauchi, our mutual friend who's put us in contact. Mark, welcome to the show. Mark  That's a lot to live up to. Jenny  It certainly is very impressive Mark! Can you help me fill in some gaps there? Tell me a bit more about yourself in your own words, and how you became an expert in listening and getting through to others? Mark  Well, I think it started because after my training, I was really fortunate, I trained at UCLA in psychiatry, and I had a mentor who was one of the pioneers in the area of suicide prevention, a fella named Dr. Ed Shneidman. And if you look him up, you'll see  they're almost synonymous. And he was a main referral source for me when I started out. And something that was my good fortune is that I had applied for a fellowship and just before I finished training, the fellowship was cancelled. So I just shrugged my shoulders thought, well, I'll go out there and see if anyone will come and see me. But I had the good fortune because when I would be with patients, yes I had a protocol, but I didn't necessarily have to report to anyone. And what I noticed in my suicidal patients, and I had a fair number of them because Dr. Schneider would refer them to me is, I learned to not just look into their eyes, but listen into their eyes. And increasingly, I got this feeling that what they were saying in their eyes is you're checking boxes, and I'm running out of time. And if you look basically, if you have a loved one, or a teenager or a spouse, and you look into their eyes, they're all screaming out, this hurts so much I can't take it anymore. But what happens is they scare people. And what I realised is when I was checking boxes, it was really a way to protect myself. And what I realised is if I listened into their eyes, if they couldn't come to me, I had to go to where they were. So I'll share one anecdote, which really was one of many, but this was probably the most dramatic one. When I was early in my practice, I used to moonlight at a psychiatric hospital, which means I'd cover for other psychiatrists. Over the weekend I'd meet patients, I'd go up to the wards and I'd medicate and I'd write prescriptions. But sometimes you'd be awake for 24/36 hours and so on one weekend that happened and on a Monday I came in to my office to see someone, I'll call Nancy. Nancy had made three or four suicide attempts before I was seeing her. She'd been in the hospital at times one month, two months, back then you could stay in the hospital a long time. And I'd been seeing her for six months and I didn't think I was helping her. She'd come in, that was the longest she'd gone without an attempt or hospitalisation, but when she'd come into the office, if you're me, this would be Nancy. She wasn't exactly catatonic, but she was disconnected. So on this Monday, after not sleeping, there's Nancy, you know, characteristic pose, and I'm looking out of the room and all the colour turns to black and white. So I'm looking at a room and it's black and white and I thought well, this is interesting. And then I got these chills, and I got cold. And I thought I'm having a stroke or a seizure. So I'm a medical doctor, I'm a psychiatrist. So it wasn't rude, because she was looking at me, so I did a neurologic exam on myself. So I'm going like this, I'm looking at my fingers, I'm tapping my elbows, I'm going to see if I'm having a stroke or a seizure. And then I realised I wasn't. And then I had this crazy idea that I was looking out at the world through her eyes. And that the world felt black and white and cold to her. So I just leaned into it. And the more I leaned into it, the worse it got. And because I was sleep deprived, I blurted something out, that normally I wouldn't. I said, Nancy, I didn't know it was so bad. And I can't help you kill yourself. But if you do, I will still think well of you. I'll miss you. And maybe I'll understand why you had to to get out of the pain. And I thought, did I think that? Or did I say that? And I thought I just gave her permission. I thought I just blew it. And then she hesitantly looked at me. And then she grabbed on to my eyes. I mean, she grabbed onto my eyes with her eyes. And I thought she was going to say, 'Thank you, I'm overdue'. And I said, 'What are you thinking?' And she looked at me, and she said, 'If you can really understand why I might have to kill myself to get out of my pain, maybe I won't need to'. And then the colour came back. The coldness went away. And I kept looking into her eyes. And I said, 'I'll tell you what we're going to do. I'm not going to give you treatments, and programmes that you've already been through unless you ask for them. Because if I give you all those things, you'll nod politely, and then you won't do them. And you'll come back and you'll tell me, you weren't able to do them? Would that be okay?' And she kept looking at me with a look that said, 'Keep talking. Keep talking, I'm intrigued'. And I said, 'What I'm going to do instead is, I'm going to find you wherever you are. And I'm going to keep you company there. Because you've been there alone, too long at the worst times. Would that be okay?' And then her eyes started to tear up. And she started to heal. So you'd mentioned something called Surgical Empathy. And I just gave you an example of kind of what it looks like and what it feels like. And here's something I discovered about suicide. And if you're watching or listening in, you might relate to this, and other people don't get it. Death is compassionate to psychological pain that's unbearable. So death is compassionate to hopelessness, that won't go away. Which is why people who are feeling hopeless, helpless, worthless, useless, they attach to death as something to take the pain away. And what I've discovered with Surgical Empathy, what I did with Nancy, and what I'm now training people around the world to do, is if they can feel 'felt by' you, and if you've read my book, just listen, you'll know it's about how do you get people to feel 'felt by', it's great to feel understood versus misunderstood. But boy, when someone feels 'felt', and they feel safe, they lean into it, because they don't feel safe or felt by anyone. And so, I think what happens with Surgical Empathy, is they let go of death as the way to relieve their pain, and they grab on to feeling 'felt'. So is any of this making any sense because you've been so patiently listening to me. Jenny  I'm very conscious, because I'm reading the book, Mark I want to pick up on a couple of things. You say that you blurted it out. For me, in that moment, it obviously came very naturally to you what you needed to do with her to make that change, and obviously it impacted hugely, and that was a turning point for her. And I'm sure probably the first time that anyone's spoken to her like that. That she felt 'felt'. So that was the first thing that I kind of picked up on. I also want to tell you that I've been listening to a lot of other podcasts. I've watched your LinkedIn Live, and you have this way, with your voice, that it's very soothing. And I actually felt quite emotional listening to your voice. So does that have a part to play when you want to get through to someone? Mark  Absolutely, in fact, something I will share with you and your viewers and listeners. I do a a version of mediation and conflict resolution that uses Surgical Empathy. And tell me if you can picture this? Picture a group of people, a group of executives or Board of Directors, and I actually developed this working with couples who just hated each other. So picture this, there is a group or a couple individuals, they're in conflict. And what I do with them, is I will say, 'Pick three topics that you can't talk about without getting into an argument, that need to be talked about and resolved'. So they can usually come up with those. And then I'll say, kind of tongue in cheek, 'Well, it looks like we have agreement. We have agreement that you can't talk about those without arguing and that's a good start'. And I make sure, 'Are we in agreement that those three topics need to be resolved?' And  they say 'Yes', they say, 'Great'. Now, would you also agree that when people are talking to and with people, we are making progress towards resolving those problems? Would you agree, when people are talking to and with each other? Yes. Would you also agree that when anyone is talking over, down or at another person, the progress stops. And what happens is, whoever you're talking over, down or at at, starts to tense up, and starts to want to react? Would you agree to that? Most people agree with that. And I say, great. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to pick those topics that you can't talk about. And I'm going to ask you, you parties, show me the way you need to talk about it so we can solve it. And that means show me how to talk to and with each other. And at the first sign someone is talking over, down or at another person, I'm going to call a timeout, because progress has stopped. And I'm going to take that person into another room, or if it's a Zoom  we'll do a breakout session, and I'm going to find out what's going on with that person. You know, and I'm going to talk them down from DEFCON 1 to DEFCON 5. And often they'll vent, but I'll let them vent,  and I'll say 'What's really going on? Now I understand that. But what's really going on? Why does it so matter to you that you have to get your way, and you can't agree?' And so they open up and they open up. And then I will coach them. I'll say, 'So show me when you go back, the way you want to talk about it so you don't push people away. Because, do you think the way you're talking about it is going to make anyone want to agree with you? Even if you're right, who's going to want to agree with that? You know, you're reminding people of their abusive mom or their abusive dad, no one's gonna want to agree with you. So let's practice that'. And then we'll give it a try and do the best you can. Because you know, if you get agitated, I'll bring you back here and we'll refine it. We have all day. But can you see that approach? Jenny  I love the approach. It's the 'how' isn't it? It's having agreement upfront, 'how' are we going to address it? And over, at or down, that's the rules. So I love that because everyone understands the rules, and then they can self regulate, can't they, or maybe? So I love that. Why do you think that we are so bad at listening, and yet everyone thinks they're great listeners? Because the story you described before, with the suicidal lady, was, you were first of all listening enough. And then you started meeting her where she was, empathising. So why do you think, we all think we're good listeners, but really, we're not. Mark  Well, one of my favourite quotes comes from a British psychoanalyst named Wilfred Bion. And he talked about listening and one of his quotes, and I think he was talking about presence. And basically his quote was, 'The purest form of listening is to listen without memory or desire'. Because when you listen with memory, you have an old agenda that you're trying to plug the person into. When you listen with desire, you have a present or future agenda that you're trying to plug them into. But in either case, are you listening to where they're coming from, or their agenda? And in my book, Just Listen, I use a bunch of acronyms to make something easier to remember, and I say you want to be a PAL in conversations. And PAL stands for Purposeful, Agendaless, Listening. Purposeful, Agendaless, Listening. And I think one of the reasons people don't listen is because most people have an agenda. I wrote a blog on why people are afraid to empathise, especially in the business world. And one of the reasons people are afraid to empathise in the business world is, if I really find out where the other person's coming from, what's really important to them, what they care about, what they really need, and it doesn't match what I'm selling, if I'm going to be really showing that I'm of service, and I care about them, they're not going to buy what I have. So I'm afraid to empathise and bring up something that means I can't sell them what I have. But the problem is, if you're forceful, you maybe can push something through to someone who's intimidated by that. But, boy, if it doesn't work out, or they feel that you've sold them too hard, you're not going to win many friends or influence too many people. Jenny  No, and I completely agree with you. I mean, my audience is principally those managing client relationships on a day to day basis. It's their job, first and foremost, to listen to the client to understand their needs, their business challenges, their problems. And whilst they don't have a selling agenda, it's certainly an agenda in their minds to want to help. How can I add value to this relationship? Regardless whether it's with my products and services, or maybe, I could introduce them to someone in my network, or provide a piece of information that they will find useful, any trend or market insight? So what advice would you give to those account managers that are managing those client relationships, that are going into a client meeting, trying not to have a specific agenda, but being really present? Do you think, I mean this is the feedback that I get, is in order to do that proficiently, you have to be flexible, and sometimes account managers lack the confidence to go in there without some set questions or some set agenda of some type. So what advice would you give to those maybe who are in that position? Mark  Well, here's something I'll share with you. Five of my books are bestsellers, pretty big bestsellers in Russia. And about a year and a half ago, I gave a presentation along with a Nobel Prize winner named Daniel Kahneman, he wrote a book called Thinking Fast and Slow, and it was he and a fella named Joseph Pine, who wrote I think The Experience Economy. Great people, and we all headlined. And my talk to about 1000 Russian managers, probably account managers, leaders, a whole bunch of people, the title of my talk was 'Change everything you know about communication'. And what I said to them, and there's actually a video clip, (I'll send that to you, if you want to add a link to it), I said to the audience, if I focus on what you're listening to, you're listening to me. And if I respond by giving you a bunch of bullet points, you will write them down. You'll try some of them. Most of them won't work. You'll say it'll work for him, he's an expert. Maybe one or two will work. But if I have good stories, and I am a good communicator, you'll give me your mind for now. And they're looking at me like I'm a little bit crazy. Maybe I am a little bit. And then I switched the tone of my voice. So they heard my tone, even though I was translated into Russian in real time. And I said, but if instead of focusing on what you're listening to, and you're giving me your mind for an hour, if I focused on what you're listening for. And I got it right, without you telling me and I delivered on it. You'll give me everything. And then I said, 'This is what I do, when I make presentations to some of your listeners or their companies, because it's often the same three questions. Let me see if I get what you're listening for. You're listening for something that will get you better, measurable results. Because that's what you're judged on is measurable results. And if you get better ones, you might get a promotion or a raise. And what you're also listening for is a way to get those results, that's less stressful, and more effective, because the way you're doing it now is stressful. You're all drinking too much. Your people are drinking too much. It's really out of control. And I asked them, 'Is that true? And he went 'Da, da'. And then I said, 'And I think what you're most listening for, is that I can give you tips that are tactics that are immediately doable by you. And you don't have to buy a book because I haven't written this book yet. Still haven't. And there's no course that I'm trying to sell you into. So you're listening for tips and tactics that I can give you to accomplish that, so you can get better measurable results that are less stressful. And if we do that, it will be worth the more than $500 in a day of your time that you gave to be here. Is that true? And they went 'Da da'. I said, Come on, sit down, sit down, calm down. But that was focusing on what they were listening for. So if you're an account manager, and you get a sense that the other person is smiling, but it's not a Yes, they're being polite. They're smiling. They may not want to say they don't understand what you're talking about because you're using too much jargon. They're just smiling politely. But if you're more of a seasoned account manager, you'll know that smile is not a yes. It's trying to be polite, because they've checked out. They just haven't gotten up and left. And then at the end you might say, 'Do you have any questions?' And they might say, 'No, no, I think I heard what you say' or and then you might get anxious, well, 'Can I share some of the other things we're doing?' and that's really going to drive them away even more. And, and so here's a tactic and tip that you can use from our podcast today. So picture that scenario, you're talking to them, and they're smiling, but you can tell they're not engaged. And what you say to them is, 'I'd like to pause for a minute'. And they're gonna wake up because it's like you called on the kid in the back of the class who was sleeping, 'What, what what?' I'd like to pause from it. And then you say, 'I went to the beginning of our conversation'. And you're listening, because they've never heard this before. They'll go 'Ha'. 'I went to the beginning of our conversation. And it was kind of like this. You came here looking for something and whatever, I came here wanting to sell you something. And you were looking for and listening for something that we haven't covered? And can you tell me what it was when you came here, when you were listening for something or looking for something that we haven't covered? Because we have a little time left. And we might be able to address it. If I can't handle it, yeah, there may be people I know who can help you.' Jenny  Excellent question. Mark  And so you get them to open up. And what you then want to do is get them from being withdrawn into riveted in attachment to you. And then when they tell you whatever it is, you say 'I'm so glad you said that. I wish we had started with that at the beginning. Can you tell me why that's important to you?' And then they're opening up further. And you said, 'Oh, I'm so glad you're telling me that it all makes sense.' Then here's a question. You have to get advanced in this to be comfortable. I'm comfortable with it. But I'm a psychiatrist. And the next question is 'Jeez, you've told me what you were listening for why it's important, you know, between you and me, what's really going on? And they're going to go, 'What?' And then you say, 'Yeah, between you and me, why are we doing this? Because you and I have much more in common than either of us have with our CEOs. Our CEOs, they go to another company, they're going to get a parachute. You and I just trying to make a living. I'm trying to sell stuff, you have to buy stuff, that doesn't backfire. We're like, we're peers. So what's really going on?' And they may pause, but they've never heard a conversation like this, they're going to be intrigued. And then you say, 'Can I share with you the answer I get from other people in your position?' They're going to be curious. And then you say, 'I don't know if you can relate to this, but I've spoken to others, and when they opened up to me, and it was clear that we were peers, both of us just trying to make a living, more than a couple of them have said, 'I need a win'. And when I've asked them, 'Wha't does that mean?' They said, 'You know, you get paid for selling things. I get paid according to my judgement and what I buy. And I bought some things that didn't really work out and my boss kind of questioned my judgement. What I need are some wins, where my boss doesn't question my judgement'. And then what I suggest to people, and you may lose the sale, but within a relationship for life what I'd suggest you say to the person is, 'Let's forget what I'm selling. Tell me not only what a wind would look like, tell me what would cause your boss to get a promotion and then give you one? What? Think of what's going to get your boss a promotion, or a raise. And if you're instrumental in helping them get a promotion or raise in there, someone who shares their good fortune, they're going to give one to you. So let's brainstorm what that might be. Jenny  Mark, this is this is gold, it really is. I mean, a lot of what you've just said, it's about breaking down those barriers, isn't it? And you can see when you when you play out that scenario, the depth of connection that you would then establish with the client. And I feel that more and more I'm seeing account managers communicating with their clients, through email, for example. Too much through email, and not enough verbal. Obviously, we're in a remote working situation currently, but still on video and on telephone. I don't know why they don't approach conversations more in that in that way? And I suppose on going back to confidence levels, and whether that's experience, confidence or worrying about the outcome? Are there any tips or strategies you can share around how you would overcome the internal, maybe dialogue you have? You know, they're not interested in that. How dare you speak to them like that, that kind of voice? Mark  I live truly to be of service to other people. I don't sell anything. And when I'm with people, they quickly realise that I am here to help them be as successful, have the best life possible. And, I'm not about money. And I'll tell you what happens, at least in my stratosphere, but it's taken years to develop this kind of trust from people. I've discovered that when you give value, true value to people who are very wealthy, and you don't hit on them for anything, they appreciate you because they were able to lower their guard because you weren't grabbing at them. And then they'll come back because I don't ask for anything. And they'll say, how can I compensate you? And something that I learned from my good friend Marshall Goldsmith, a big executive coach in the world, is well, you can pay me what you think it's worth. Or you can donate to a foundation that I'm connected to stop teen suicides? It's up to you. I understand when you're young, I can't do that, I got to get my numbers, and I'm not at that level. But I'm throwing a lob into your future about what you might evolve into. Jenny  That's really good advice. And your point of coming 100% from service is a good philosophy no matter what level of experience you have, isn't it? Because if you go in there with the agenda lists, no agenda, and just think I want to help, how can I help? And then you're fixed on solving the client's problem, to understand it first, and then think about how you can help. I think that's a general good philosophy, to put your mindset into more of a kind of structured and focused way. Mark  Why I'll tell you something, you know, we hear this term, the Imposter Syndrome. And what I've noticed is social workers, nurses, most doctors don't have the Imposter Syndrome. Because they're not selling something to their patients. They're trying to get them well, they have this higher calling. And I think the Imposter Syndrome in business, is if you're selling something, you know you have to get your numbers. And so down deep, you know, I care more about getting my numbers than really being of service to them. And so I'm an Imposter because when I say the words, and when I say some of these lines, which if I hear it again, I'm going to tell the person lose the line, 'What keeps you up at night?' I think that's a line that has come and gone. And what happens is people see through it that you've one to some training that teaches you to ask certain questions, that sound like you care when you don't. And I'll share something with you that I used to call the Miracle on 34th Street Sale. So some years ago, I would meet with people and sometimes it would take me, sometimes I would fly to meet them, or take me several hours to drive there, and pretty quickly, I would focus on what's truly important to them, and critical to their success. And then when we surface that I would sometimes say to these prospects, I'd say my advice to you is don't hire me or buy my product or service. This is after taking three hours to get there and they go 'What?'  I said, I just focused on what will get you a raise or make you successful. And there's at least two or three things that come to mind for me, and they're not what I do, and they're not my product or service. But I know two or three people. Now, if you don't have them internally, I know two or three people, you know, you probably should talk to and get those things taken care of. And an account manager said, 'Let me get this straight. You drove all the way here. We had a pretty good conversation. And I might have hired you and you told me not to hire you'. And I said 'That's right'. He said, 'Why did you do that?' I said 'Because as I got a clear idea of what would get you a promotion or a raise, but I realised you needed to do other stuff before you use me. And I just sold you on something much, much bigger than my service or product'. And he said, 'What's that?' 'I just sold you on a unicorn. I just sold you on trusting me. Which means I can call you back at any time as I continue to be focused on your success and come up with things that might help it'. Jenny  Lovely, that's such good advice. And I think it's really sort of setting the tone for what's going to make you successful in an account management role. Really. You describe in the book, the four levels of talking and listening, which I thought was a lovely way to understand the different levels. Do you mind spending a couple of minutes talking about that part? Mark  Sure. When we're in a conversation with another person, we can talk over them, at them, to them or with them. Over, at, to or with. And the way you know you're speaking to them is when you talk over them, they're insulted. If I gave a talk to a group and they weren't martyrs, and there was a break and I was talking over all of them, if there's a break in the middle of my talk, they shouldn't come back and hear the rest of it. If you're talking at them, people will either be scared, and they'll hunker down because you're reminding them of some bully in their life, or they'll stick their chin out at you, like, you can talk at me that way. If you're talking to them, they'll nod, this is business as usual, you've addressed their needs, and it looks like it's gonna go forward. But the gold standard is when you talk with them. And when you talk with them, you'll see that they relax their shoulders, because they can lower their guard and they feel safe. And it's when you talk with people, that things get done, as we mentioned earlier about the mediation approach of talking to and with, people lean towards each other. I'll share another exercise, which you haven't heard about. I've been rather busy and in COVID I've written two books. So one of them. One of them is called 'Why cope when you can heal?' about how to heal from trauma and not just recover from it. And the second one, which is coming out tomorrow is called 'Trauma to Triumph, a roadmap for leading through disruption and thriving on the other side'. And in that book, I talked about the huva technique. And if you practice this once a day, with one conversation that you want to go well, if you practice it for a week and make it a habit, it will change all your relationships. And you've done a very good job, by the way. So Hoover stands for, what you do is you have a conversation with someone. And afterwards you rate yourself from their point of view, on a scale of one to 10. One being lousy, 10 being great. H - is from their point of view, how much did they feel heard out by you? Did you interrupt them? Did you try to top them? Did you try to one up them? How much do they feel heard out? U - How much did they feel understood? In the way you show you understood them as you ask them say more about that. You're curious about what they're saying? V - How much did they feel that you value what they said? They remark and they see the application of it and how it could be valuable. And then A - is how much do they feel you added value to what they said. And I will tell you, you get a 10, 10, 10, 10 score.  Jenny  Thank you. Mark  Beacause I felt heard out. These are not short answers and you're letting me go. I felt understood by you. Because you dipped in and you made sense of what I was saying back from me and your viewers and listeners. I certainly felt valued by what you said. And then you certainly added value by being able to pause and genuinely see the application of it. So you got a good score. Jenny  Thank you so much. Coming from you, that's massive praise for me. Thank you so much. I want to pick up on the You. You said, 'I rate myself on being understood'.  Did I say things like, 'Tell me more about that. What else? What else?' I'm finding, Mark, that when I have, personally have conversations sometimes, say for example, I say, 'Oh, I went to Greece on holiday last year'. The person I'm speaking to said, 'I went to Greece as well. And we went here and we went to this taverna and it was great'. And all of a sudden, I'm talking about their holiday. Now, I've used this example, but I'm sure the person that wants to empathise with me and say, 'Me too. I went to Greece'. But can you give us maybe... Mark  So what's happening is, I was fortunate, I've had eight mentors. Unfortunately, they've all died. The last one was Larry King. I had breakfast with him for two years before COVID every morning with a group of our breakfast group. And I was a student of Larry King. And he was just busy being Larry King. He's an incredibly curious person. And I said, 'Larry, I just discovered your magic', because I like to deconstruct how people do things so other people can do it. I said, 'Larry, when you do interviews, you're a plus-er,  you're not a minus-er and you're not a topper. So you're plus-er, meaning you're always adding to what the other person's saying, not your own personal anything. You don't give opinions. You don't give advice, but you're always having them go deeper. You're very curious. And that's a way of being a plus-er. So why did you do that? Why the green hair. Without judgement, you do it without judgement. 'You shot a lot of kids, why did you do that?' No judgement. And you're not a minus-er. You don't jump down their throat. You don't hit them with a gotcha. So people love to be interviewed by Larry King, and you're not a topper. And see, what you were mentioning is, you'll say, 'I went to Greece'. And someone else will say, 'Oh, we did, too and we saw all the islands plus we took a cruise and we made it over to such and such'. So that's being a topper. And so that's another exercise you can ask yourself. Was I a plus-er? Which is valuing and adding value? Was I a plus-er? Or was I a minus-er? Or was I a topper? Jenny  I love how you create models for everything. I do that too. And I think it's a way for everyone to remember these things, these principles. So thank you for this. This is amazing. I've been taking a million notes. Mark, tell me in your career, what has touched you the most? Because you've helped, I mean, literally hundreds and hundreds of people throughout your life. Can you talk to us about a scenario where it really has impacted you personally the most. Getting through to someone? Mark  Well, I think I shared this scenario with Nancy. I mean, that was kind of a watershed thing. I knew it was helpful, listening into people's eyes. But I listened into her heart, which which had grown cold from depression and suicide. But I'll tell you, there is a backstory. One of the things that caused me to look into people's eyes, and I'll share this story and then we're probably going to have to start to close it up, I got it back to back interviews here. But before Nancy, I remembered when I was in training, I was called to see a patient who had been put into restraints. And I was called to okay the restraints on their arms and legs and put them on anti-psychotic medication because they were pulling at their IVs, they pulled at a respirator too, but that was on them. And they were kicking. And the doctor said, 'Just go up there and okay the order'. So I go up there, we'll call him Mr. Jones, and I go into the room, and he can't talk because he has a tube in his throat. He's going 'Ah, ah, ah', and I said, 'What is it?' and his eyes are like saucers. And I said, 'What is it?' And they said, 'He's just psychotic'. And I kept talking, and I gave him a pencil to write something and his hands were tied down. And he just scribbled. And I thought, well, maybe they're right. And I said, 'Look, you're pulling at the IVs, you're kicking, you're pulling at the respirator, and we had to put your arms and legs down. And I'm going to give you something to help you sleep. And then when when you're rested, we'll take everything off'. So a day later, the doctors page me and they said 'Mr. Jones is up, he's sitting in bed, he's off the respirator. And he told us to page you'. So I go into his room. And he looked into my eyes. And he said, 'Pull up a chair'. So I pull up a chair. And then he kept looking at me and he said, 'What I was trying to tell you, is that a piece of the respirator tubing was broken and was stuck in my throat. And you do know that I will kill myself before I go through that again. Do you understand me?' My eyes just watered up. And I said 'I'm so sorry. So sorry. I understand'. So it's events like that, that caused me to say I've to do more than checkboxes and make sure I'm asking all the appropriate questions. And what I've shared with you, when you're talking to an account manager, and it doesn't look like it's going well, my version for you who are listening in, they're listening for and looking for something that you haven't covered. And so give them the chance to bring it up. Jenny  Love it. Thank you so much. Honestly, Mark, this has been revelatory and absolutely so valuable for people out there thinking about evaluating how well they are listening and getting through to other people. So I want to be respectful of your time. How can people reach you Mark and learn more about you and read your books? What's the best place to go? Mark  Well, if you go to Amazon, you'll see I have nine books there now, so you have Amazon UK. If you go to markgoulston.com, I blog a lot and I'm just sort of a content maniac. I have a podcast called 'My Wakeup Call' (wakeups one word), and I speak to thought leaders, change agents from around the world. I spoke with Margaret Heffernan. She's in the UK. She's one of the top TEDx speakers. She was wonderful. And then I have something on LinkedIn called 'No Strings Attached', where I interview my guests, and I say, 'Just give nuggets and tips with no strings attached, that meet these criteria for my viewers and listeners. I never would have thought of that. That could work. I could do that today'. Jenny  Such a lovely concept. Honestly, I'm going to include all of those links in the podcast notes. So Mark, thank you again so much. I'm absolutely honoured that you came on. And I've really, really enjoyed it. You've had me riveted for an hour now. So thank you so much. Mark  Well, well, you could sell HUVA vacuum cleaners - HUVA. You did a great job. Thank you.  Jenny  Honestly, that was amazing.

I hope you come away with lots of new ideas about the account management role. Now if you are an account manager, and you want to raise your value,  increase your confidence, improve your consultancy skills, and grow your existing accounts, then come and join me at the Account Accelerator Programme. The next one starts on 15th April. It's for three months, and I take your agency from unpredictable project revenue to more predictable account growth. If you want some more details, please contact me on LinkedIn at Jenny Plant or drop me an email at jenny@accountmanagementskills.com. I'll see you on the next episode.Transcript:Jenny   So, I'm beyond thrilled today to have David C. Baker with me today. David is a leading authority on positioning, reinventing and selling firms in the creative and digital space. He's author of five books, including The Business of Expertise, a book Dan Pink described as essential reading for entrepreneurs in any space. And he's considered the experts expert. David describes himself as part researcher, part scientist and part educator. He's advised over 900 agencies and co hosts probably one of the most well known podcasts in the agency world 2Bobs with Blair Enns. He also happens to be a lifetime member of Mensa which is incredible. I'm honoured to have him on the show today to talk about everything to do with account management. So David, a big warm welcome. David   Thank you, it's really good to be here. Account management, now 80% of the people just left, except for the day to day- they tune in to you because of account management, right? But if anybody else said that we're going talk about account management today, zoom, everybody's gone! Jenny  That is so true! I know that you've written a lot about this. I'm a massive fan, I've followed your work for a long time. And I know that you have a really strong point of view on many things. And I often find myself listening to your podcast, and kind of nodding and saying, yes, so there were several where I just felt, 'Yes, David's actually said things that I've been thinking'. So I'm so excited about this interview. So, would you mind by starting off by, I know you are a legend in the industry, so many people know you. But just giving a little bit more detail about how you work with agencies. David   Sure. So I had my own firm for, I can't remember, it was five or six years. And through a strange set of circumstances, I started advising my peers. And so, I do that, I've worked in 30 countries. I only work with the smaller, independent firms. So, I don't work for the ones that are a part of holding companies and so on. And now I only help them with how to make better business decisions around their positioning, around staffing, merger, acquisition, succession stuff. I'm not qualified to help them do better work, there's lots of good help for that. So one of the strange, I never would have predicted this, but one of the strange areas where they seem to really soak up whatever sort of insight I and others can give, is around roles, particularly account management and project management. So, when you invited me to come on your podcast, I was eager to do that, because I just think it's such an interesting topic. To me it is and it should be more interesting to other people. But it's also so much more relevant than some of the things that we spend a lot of time worrying about. In other words, your clients will notice poor account management long before they notice work that isn't up to your standards. But we focus on the work more than we focus on how it's delivered and how we lead clients. So that's sort of why this is important to me. Jenny  You've described the agency account management role as the most difficult job in the agency. Can you tell me a bit more about why you think that? David   Yeah, and the last thing they need is a bigger head, right! So, account management people are strange, power hungry, very persuasive. The last thing they need is to hear that, but it's true, because it's the only role, well, I guess the principal has a little bit of this, but it's the only role where they have one foot firmly planted on both sides of the fence. I think of it as sort of like an ambassador, but it's even worse. So if I'm the US ambassador to China, then my allegiance is to the US. But I still have to see things through China's eyes. But then an account person has to be a lot more balanced than that. They can't give away the firm, but they have to be the clients advocate within the agency. And so that's why it's the most, I don't think it's the most important role, I think that's a PM, but I think it's the most difficult role for sure. And it's very few people who can do that role well. Let me just insert something, this strikes me every time I say this, I think, if somebody else were saying this, I'm not sure I would believe it, and it's that, everybody who is a great account person, is a failed something else. That's because you don't go to school to be an account person. You don't.  And nobody says when I grow up, I want to be an account person. They always went to school for something else. We know that because there is no schooling, I mean there's training and so on, but there's no schooling for it like formal schooling. So they've tried something else and discovered that they were really good at account management and they adopted that life. So it's strange, it's so important and yet we don't have a formal educational track for it. Isn't that strange, like we do for design and advertising? Jenny   It's so true. And what do you think are those magic skills that an account manager discovers that they're good at? David   Listening for sure. I think that's really critical. The ability to push back on a client without causing unnecessary offence. So, I think of it as sending a client to hell and helping them enjoy the trip, so to speak. So we're not losing the client, but we're definitely communicating something that needs to be said. I think also, the ability to grow an account, which I'm sure we'll talk more about at some point. So the client will have questions and you try to answer them, and then you ask questions. But the ability to ask really smart questions is, I don't think anybody is better at that than account people. Those would be probably the core skills, I think. And there are some core skills that don't exist in account people. That's great organisation, it's very rare to find a great account person who doesn't also need somebody following around behind them to clean up the mess, just honestly. Jenny   You made me chuckle with this. What do you think the problem is with expecting account managers to also do the project management role? Because when I work with agency account managers, they come to me with the title of account manager, but actually what they're doing is this hybrid role of managing projects and having to grow the account. David  Right? Well, part of the challenge there is simply ability to do both of those things. And this was a complete surprise to me in that when I was doing research around this, in the early 2000s, I wanted to see if there was a pattern, a personality profile pattern, that match certain roles at firms. And I started out because I had a conference in San Francisco for 50 creative directors. And I thought, all right, I have all these victims in one place, I'll just give them all this personality profile. And there was no pattern whatsoever. And it was kind of an expensive process, it cost me about 4000 bucks. So I thought, well, I'll just drop this, or maybe I should try one more thing. And I had an event coming up in Dallas with 40 account people. And I decided to give them all a personality profile again. And the difference was staggeringly different. I think it was 85/ 86%, whatever, that almost all, but two or three people, had the same personality profile. And that personality profile was not, it didn't indicate strengths around organisation, or objectivity, or process orientation. What it indicated was an ability to communicate well, to know where to push back, to take a relationship over forcefully to lead it. So, there are some people, maybe 20% of account people who are really good at PMing as well. But in most cases, what makes you a great AM, makes you a pretty terrible PM. To take this a little bit further, when you have an AM who's functioning in the role of a PM, often things get dropped, that's kind of obvious, but they also have a propensity to give away too much of the shop because they get lost in this desire to make the client happy, sometimes at the expense of the firm. And that's where that role gets a little bit weird where they're trying to straddle both sides of the fence. So when you have an AM doing a PM role, sometimes the work isn't as organised or buttoned up. And also they need the PM to be a balancing force so that we don't give away too much to the client. Jenny   I'm nodding because this is so true, and I think it's going to come as a really big food for thought for many agency owners who are actually thinking about this role. So, I mean, what happens for an agency that has the PM leading that client relationship? David   And that's particularly true with newer firms that are more slanted towards digital work for sure. But what happens there is two things. And the first could happen at any point and it tends to happen sooner rather than later. And that's that a PM will miss some cues that maybe the relationship is slightly off course. Their focus is on competence and objectivity and delivery, and they don't read some of the signals that the client is needing a slightly different treatment, they need a little bit more coddling and so on, a little bit more wrapped in relationship, that's the first thing that happens. The second thing that happens, and this doesn't show up for quite a while, it could be a year or a year and a half, but it's that the client typically doesn't grow as much as it could have if it was being managed by an AM. So a PMs perspective is to do great work and to not mess up. It's not to take risks and grow the account. The account person's job, the way they view it, is to constantly take risks and see what else we could do for the client. Not in a way that is a misuse of client funds, but like they just see opportunity in there. And  they're not worried about messing up from time to time, because they have enough confidence in their abilities to sort of save the account, and most of the time, that actually does happen. But they have this outlook of always wanting to grow an account. So that's what happens when you have a PM, functioning as an AM, is that they miss some personal cues sometimes, and in other cases, they don't grow the account. I want to mention, though, that we can't just rely on the fact that somebody is called a PM or an AM because people use those phrases. There are a lot of people called PMs who are actually functioning as AMs. And the opposite is true as well, there's quite a bit of confusion in this space I think. Jenny   I agree, absolutely. I agree. Was there anything in your findings, in your research, to show that the pure account manager enjoyed more the client interactions? Because sometimes when I've met the role of an account manager, but actually it's a PM role, they like to be very transactional, I've done that tick off the list. They're not the ones that naturally want to speak to the client or engage as much. Have you found anything in your research to show that that's true? David   Yes, it's absolutely true. And in DISC language, that's the personality profile that I use, that would be somebody typically, with a low 'I'. They don't need a lot of social interaction to be satisfied. And what they're doing is motivated by a genuine desire to serve and please the client, but they don't see the need for all of the relationship side, to them that's inefficient, and it's also not all that welcome. It takes energy for them to do that. Whereas the best account people are not always energetically from a relationship standpoint. What they do is they are really good at seeing how the individual client on the other end of the line wants to be interacted with. And then they adapt their style to that. So if the client prefers a brief email with two choices, that's what they get. If they prefer a long lunch or a drink to discuss a tough topic, then that's what they do. Relationship driven people are really good at seeing what other folks need and want and they deliver in that way. Somebody with a PM profile will default to less relationship management. Now the best ones can adapt a little bit, but they find it exhausting to have to pretend to be like an AM when in their hearts, they're PMs. Jenny   I just love this so much. During COVID, you ran multiple free webinars, and I know you attracted hundreds and hundreds of people from the agency space. During those webinars, you advised firms to keep the AMs and PMs and flex with the skill players. Can you tell me a little bit more about why you why you advise that? David  Yeah, it doesn't make sense on the surface. It doesn't seem obvious to me that that would be the right thing to do. It seems to me like we're in the business of doing advertising or creative or digital. So we got to keep those people and that the AMs and PMs are sort of redundant. And I don't believe that at all. I think that the core in American football, we call it role players and skill players. So the role players in this example are AMs PMs, and in some cases some strategists and also new business people. Those are the ones that make the core of your firm. And if that strikes you as odd, it's because you don't believe that that contribution is as billable as the other things, but like I said before, clients notice deficiencies in AMing and PMing long before they notice deficiencies in the work. They also won't notice much in their experience if you're working with a contractor who's a writer, as opposed to an account person who is a writer. So the core staff, the people that are with you all the time, the ones that they get used to are the AM and the PM roles, and then new business and in some cases strategy. And then all the skill players are the ones that you can assemble for a particular team at a certain time. Ideally, I think a client wants all those people full time and on staff. But when that's not possible, it's better to flex with the skill players and not the role players. Jenny   Lovely, thank you for explaining that. So when you start working with an agency, where do you typically see deficiencies in the performance of the account management team? David   Well, it always starts with having the right people in those seats. So if you're working with a firm, and they don't believe in account management, and this comes because they worked at an agency, for instance, and they wondered what they did, and they called them suits, and they thought they just needed expense accounts and ate up the budget. Right? That's a perspective that still lingers in this field. And it's, and that's because it, there are a lot of cases where that's actually true. So in that world, they diminish the role of an account manager, and they don't have one, that's one thing I see frequently. Another thing I think I see, and this just blows my mind, is the occasional firm where they don't think account management or project management is billable. Really, that's crazy. And there were a couple firms in the US, especially around the packaging side, where their clients wouldn't allow them to charge for it. So they discharged $400 an hour for design or something right, and those days are gone. I'm talking about modern firms who don't think that it's billable, or they just tack on some percentage on top of it. The other that I see, is assigning PMs to AMs and in that scenario, AMs are more powerful and persuasive. And so the PMs don't typically have as much power as they need in those relationships. And so the AM is sort of ordering the PM around and in my world AMs and PMs are exactly equivalent and need to create this healthy joint tension. Another area I see pretty frequently is, and this one makes me really angry honestly, and it's that we don't see separate career paths for PMs and AMs. Instead, we think that you start out as kind of an assistant to an AM, and then eventually, maybe we'll let you talk with a client every once in a while. And then when you're really good, you get to talk with a client. And that just diminishes the role of PMs. I think PMs are just as important as AMs and their career paths are completely different because, now you may start out as a PM and discover that wasn't the right fit for you and you bounce to an AM or vice versa, but the roles and the personalities and the outlooks are very different. That's one thing I see very frequently. Jenny   Where do you see it working really well? Have you got an example of where you've witnessed a PM and AM working seamlessly together? Because this is something that often a lot of people talk to me about, how do we actually establish roles and responsibilities? And who's going to speak to the client, who's going to lead the meeting? Where does one stop, start and the other one finish, etc. David  I think the aim should be the primary interface with the client all the time. Not because we're trying to protect the client from anybody else. In fact, the PM should be the primary backup contact and we're not trying to keep the PM from interfacing with the client at all, it's fine. But nothing should happen with the client that the AM doesn't know about. That's one of the basic ways to divide labour. I think one of the things that I'm hoping that people will get, is how to work better together and to create sort of that healthy tension. 30 years ago, before I was in the advisory business, I remember I won't mention his name but he used to say this all the time, that, and this was before there was much research about what made a great PM, and he would say, if you like your PM, you've got the wrong one. That's what he would say. And the idea was, that the very best PMs are sort of like taxi cab dispatchers, they're short, abrupt, to the point, matter of fact, and to some extent they are, but in the best scenarios, the AMs feel like, I could never get my job done without great PMs behind me. And PMs are so grateful that they're not AMs because that's not what they want to do. So there's this healthy tension that comes about between them. But it's not just about AMs and PMs working really well together, there are other systemic issues that can get in the way. So for instance, if you have an AM, who's having to manage a lot of accounts, they can't give the right attention to that, they can't be expected to grow those. I found that kind of the ideal number is one to four, one to five accounts. Or if, the salespeople are consistently delivering clients who are not a great fit, who don't trust the firm, they aren't spending enough money, they can't corral the decision makers, then as an AM you can't be responsible for those results, right. So it really is a picture of teamwork all working together. And, moving the firm forward, together, I have a lot of respect for both AMs and PMs. But I would say that, between those two, the one that needs more respect in our field than they get now is the PM side. The AM's are going to be okay on their own. They amass respect, that's part of what makes them good at what they do. The PMs don't, they're labouring in the background doing great work. And we notice them when something fails, but we don't necessarily notice something when things are great. Jenny  Have you seen evidence of how it affects a PM then, if they're not given the right attention, or they're not being recognised? What have you seen from firms that have that scenario playing out? David   Well, fortunately, PMs are often self motivated. And they're going to do a great job regardless until they just leave the firm. AM's get their feelings hurt, and you'll know if they're unhappy, right, a PM will just keep doing their job! But if you're going to stand out in this marketplace, first of all you've got to have a really brilliant positioning that sets you apart, I'm just assuming that, but after that, once you land a client, what clients really notice is brilliant account management and brilliant PMing, and the better, you can manage that with both of those branches, then the better off you'll be, it'll really give you a leg up in the marketplace. Jenny   I've got a little side question. You mentioned the sales team earlier on. Just curious, in your experience, where have you seen a good pass-over between the sales team and the account management team? Where do you see that? David   A lot sooner than it is? Jenny   I was expecting you were going to say that! David   This is such a mistake we make. So I view sales, not marketing, but sales as essentially assessing fit, and answering objections, and so on and setting the table. Once it looks like that prospect is going to begin working with the firm, then sales continue, but those sales are led by the account person. So the account person needs to be introduced very early in the process. If you don't do that, then these are the problems that occur. One is that the client will get attached or will bond with the salesperson who needs to leave the cave and go kill something else and drag it back. They can't afford to get dragged into being the account person. So that's one problem. The second problem is you don't want to count people to feel like they're inheriting all these promises that a salesperson made, right? It's just resentful. And a salesperson has no incentive not to make crazy promises just to close an account, right. And the third reason is that we really want to let the salesperson focus on what they're great at. So I'm a firm believer in introducing an account person very early in the process, and they actually close the first project with the client. And then the salesperson should never be seen by the client again. Now the only time you have a salesperson who feels obligated to insert themselves into the relationship is if the account person is not a capable seller or grower of that account, in which case they have to rely on the salesperson. That's a fault with the AM. That's not the way sales should work. Sales should only be about new business, not existing business. Jenny   Thank you. I'm sure a lot of agency leaders listening to this, we'll be thinking about that. That's great advice. And so, something that I read on one of your blogs, you said that you suggest agencies ask their clients to take a personality test, which I think is absolute genius idea. Can you tell me a bit more about that? David  Yeah. And if there's any qualms about it, you just give them yours and say, 'Hey, we're really big at this firm in trying to match up how we work with you based on what you prefer'. And so I don't know you well enough to know what those preferences are. But if you would be interested in taking this, then I'd love to set you up. And you might enjoy it. Here's mine, if you want to look it over and see what it says, And invariably, they'll take it. And then they'll say, 'Hey, could I get one of those for my partner too, I mean life partner...' And then there's lots of fun discussion. But even if you don't want to do that, there are some very simple two question sort of quizzes that you can ask yourself without ever talking to them to see what kind of personality profile they are. That way you'll know how to manage conflict, you'll know how to be efficient, but also give them the attention that they want. Are they somebody who likes to be in charge, and they want to have options? Is it somebody who wants to see all the details? Or maybe it's somebody who wants to see all the process step by step? Or it could be somebody that just wants to be inspired? You know, so it's important to understand how each client is different, and then treat them differently. You're not in the service business, you're in the expertise business, but there isn't any reason to not make the process as smooth as possible for clients, to whatever extent you can. Jenny   You mentioned earlier on that you use the DISC profile, do you recommend that one for clients as well? Is that your go to recommendation? David   It's not the most accurate one, the most accurate one is Kolbe or PI. But DISC is very accessible and inexpensive. It's where I did most of my research. There's some other pretty good ones too, like Myers Briggs, Indra. There's five or six that are really, very accurate scientifically, the rest are kind of not. But even some of those will be sort of useful, if nothing else it will be interesting. Jenny   Great, okay, thank you for that. So one of the observations that I've made from training account managers, is the lack of coaching and guidance from the agency leadership team. Can you tell me if you've experienced the same? David   Yeah, I have. And I would say, it's not just a failure in coaching, it's that they just don't know what they're doing. You know, they don't have anything to add to it right? That's not something that's common across all successful principals. The only thing that's common across all successful principals is that they are risk takers. Some of them are great account people, and a lot of them are not. They feel like, in the early days that their firm is successful because of their account management, which is not true at all. It's more because of their strategic insight. And so when they finally give that up and let somebody else do the account management, they discover how good that person is. And it's beyond what they ever could have imagined themselves. So I don't think it's so much a failure of leadership, I think it's just simply not having a lot to add to it. A lot of principals are really bad at account management, and they're even worse at project management. So it doesn't surprise me that it happens. I think that's why advisory practices like yours have so much opportunity out there, because there are principals who care about this, but they don't know what to do. And so they rely on an outside expert to help. Jenny   I think it's definitely a big gap. And that's why my programmes are at least three months, because I like to work with that manager over a period of time. So going back to the account management role, what would be your advice for someone listening, thinking, I really want to up my game, I really want to develop my career in account management. What's your advice for how they should do that to be successful in account management? David   Well, I think having an articulated point of view around, and this would be a lot easier if if, as an account manager you're working with firms who consistently are in the same space, whether that's vertical or horizontal positioning, if you're working for seven clients, and none of them have anything in common then I think it's very difficult for you to be a great account person. But if there's some commonality between them, then learning their field as much as possible, staying in touch with what's happening around it would be critical. And then learning great communication skills, maybe even signing up for some personal therapy, understanding yourself, understanding what your hot buttons are and how to talk yourself down off the ledge. I think networking with other account people is really good. Widely read as well, get feedback from right after a meeting, get feedbacks- anybody else from your team that was in there- like what went well there? What didn't go well? That's one of the difficulties with this field is that there's not just one very specific body of knowledge you go learn, it's really about being a better human more than anything. There's no role that's more human than the account person. And, so being self aware, learning how to read, learning how to de-escalate, those are all really critical. And I'm not even talking about like, understanding the particular nuances of your of your client work, which is big enough, right? Jenny   This is such good advice. I wish in my career, I'd started reading and seeking external counsel much, much earlier in my career. You know, I feel that much of my career, I started in the early 90s, in an account management role, and you feel like you're being pulled from pillar to post, not really having any commercial guidance as to what your role is. And so that's fantastic advice. And also understanding yourself because we are the principal communicators and that's our currency. David   Right. Something else I would add would be, and this is going to strike people as pretty strange, but go to Google and look up Theory of Change or Model of Change, and then flip to the image tab and see the 1000s of theories of change. And peruse those someday and come up with a model that's unique to your firm, about how you as a firm interact with your clients. How you bring them along, what's your theory of change. It's an area that not a lot of people have experienced, and we just innately know, at least we think we know, how to present a new idea to somebody and convince them of it. But if you spend a little bit more time, more like a scientist, and think about what is your own perspective on theory or models of change, it would help you as an account manager too. Jenny   That's great advice. I recently read a book, and there was some research that came out at the end of last year, about how we should bear that in mind when we're presenting ideas to clients. And they they use the principle of status quo bias. And they broke it down into what actually constitutes status quo bias. And some, examples of how you can overcome status quo bias. So you're saying exactly the same thing? I think that's brilliant, brilliant advice. So, what do you advise agency leaders do when they say to you that they want to grow their accounts? What are your go to pieces of advice for them? David  The single thing that I think is most important there is to keep simulating the first year you work for the client. So presumably, when you land a client, they were already working with somebody else. If they weren't, then they probably are not a good client. In other words, you're not the first agency they're working with. That's a sign of a client, that's a good fit. And they came to you because something about the previous firm was stale. They weren't reinventing things, they were just doing the minimum, whatever those things were, and you impressed them out of the gate. And you were a little bit surprised you landed it, and now you're doing everything you can to fill those expectations that they have. But then you slide into the same thing that the other previous agency did, and you have new clients coming along all the time. And you kind of forget these and you don't every year say, 'All right, let's not just modify last year's plan. Let's instead look at what would we do completely differently if we inherited this plan from another agency? What could we do differently?'  And I think that's the biggest thing you can do to grow accounts and to keep them. The goal isn't to keep them forever. The goal is to keep them for the right amount of time. And that could be for two years or five years, seldom is it longer than that. And the key to that, there are things out of your control obviously, but the key to that is to treat it like it's a new year every year and this is a client we're still really trying hard to impress. Jenny   That's great advice. And it's something that we talk about in the account accelerator programme, being proactive, coming up with new ideas. I read a study, and one of the questions to clients in this study was, 'When you change agencies, what are some of the primary reasons why?' And the top answer was 'Because they never gave us anything that we didn't ask for.' So it sums up what you're saying, don't rest on your laurels. You mentioned that typically on average, an agency would keep a client between two and five years. Just curious, what do you think happens after five years? Where do you see the problems occurring agencies have very long client relationships? David  So in the early days of a relationship, they're more likely to listen to you and they're more likely to pay you some sort of a premium. That tails off in time. It always does, it's just a matter of how long it takes to happen. I think agencies, especially agencies that are growing, and whose capabilities are changing faster than their client needs are changing, I think a healthy turnover of your client ratio is a really good thing. And it's not the way it is in the field though, you hear people bragging all the time about how we have our first client still 11 years later. And I think, if you have them for the right reasons, that's great. But it could be that neither of you is all that ambitious, I don't know. I think you want to have an episodic relationship with your clients. The more it's just a steady presence, the less they're going to listen to you carefully, or pay you much money. You don't want to be the occupying force that moves into people's farmhouses and eats their crops and dates their daughters, that's not what we want. We want the deliberating force that falls from the sky to cheers and fixes things and then moves out. That's more the relationship we should have with our clients. There's exceptions to that. But in general, we're too in love with long clients. And that's part long term relationships with clients and that's partly because we suck at new business, and we're terrified of losing clients. Jenny   It's so true. Do you think those ones that get stuck are just disrespected? The respect is somehow diminished if you've got the client for too long? David   Well that's the default for sure. Now, if you are really good at consistently, over time, looking for ways to grow that clients presence in their marketplace, then that's very different, right. But it's not that many firms that do that. Most firms sort of slide into this old couple routine, where I know where I'm supposed to sit on the couch, and like what I'm supposed to do after dinner, and it's not all that exciting. It's just what we do, this is not my marriage, this is somebody else, but we're not taking the risks, it's not like a dating relationship. And so you don't want the client relationship to get into the old couple thing where you're just doing, because nobody wants to pay a lot of money for that. And people aren't listening too carefully to each other at that point. Jenny   Interesting because, you said, unless you're helping them grow their own presence, which is so true, but in order to do that, you have to have an understanding of their business, and what their challenges are, and what their problems are, so that you can help. And then it comes back to your previous point about, if you're not specialised enough, and you're spread so thinly across so many different clients, both in volume, but also in industry, and how you're going to get to that point where you do have the expertise to offer the right value? David   Yeah, exactly. In the end, you're kind of cheating your clients, if you aren't setting this up in a way that really serves them well. And that's why I'm such a believer, here's one thing that just leads to everything I do, and that's let's be better business people, there's a lot of people helping you do better work. I want you to be a better business person, not just for your sake, but for their sake. I want you to force your clients to listen to you, not because of some power trip, but because you know what you're talking about and it's in their best interest to do that. You need to amass this sort of power, and then use it for good, not use it for evil (and that's probably some Bible verse, I don't mean it in the Bible sense), but there's something about, we're an unregulated marketplace. And the barrier to entry is non existent. Tomorrow I could be whatever I want to be in this field. And because of that, there's this sloppiness around how we do this work. And it's no wonder that we're kind of later in the process, we're not paid as well as other professional service providers. I want to change that because there are a lot of people in this field who are really good at what they do, and they deserve to feel that spotlight of the impact that they're having on their clients. And that is often mediated through great account management. You don't find many really successful firms who don't have great account people as well. Jenny   I so agree, and I want to up the quality of what we do. I mean, I know you did a whole episode on this, but you talked about the consulting firms, and I was looking at a chart the other day about how much these consulting firms are kind of taking over so many different creative agencies. You've got the likes of Accenture, Deloitte, and I can't help but think it's only a matter of time before those more proficient consulting skills they have, sort of blend seamlessly with the creative agency component. You know, I can't believe that. And I don't know what's going on behind the scenes with that. But I think we do need to up our game. David   Yeah, absolutely. The only thing they can't do is this wild, insane, essential creativity, that they they have not figured out how to do that. That's the only trump card we have. I need to think of another word than trump card. Right? It's the only thing we have, and and they keep buying firms. But if we get our act together, and are really good at delivering strategy, in the right context of account management, then we can win that game. I really do believe there's something this industry has that the consulting industry doesn't have. Jenny  How many independent firms that you work with have a planner? David An account  So you're coming from the UK, only the agencies here call them account planners. In my structural model, I call them planners and people look at me, like what are you talking about? Because you guys, you guys invented account planning. So they would typically call them strategists, or researchers. And I would say that probably, maybe a third to 40% of them have somebody who is specifically dedicated to that. Otherwise, they kind of throw it into the account management side or they may have a contractor on the outside. So that's an area where an agency could beef up their offering significantly. Jenny  Yes Do you advise people to consider having a strategist? David  Yeah, absolutely. A strategist should be a part of that role player staff that isn't a contractor and it needs to be an essential part of your offering, it needs to be the first thing you do at the outset of a new client relationship. Jenny   Fantastic. How do you think the agency business model, David, is going to evolve in the future? David  Well, we haven't typically lead much evolution there, we've typically more responded to what's happening. The shakeout from 2020 is a little bit unclear to me. I do think agencies got more comfortable using remote folks. And so there'll probably be more contractor relationships that they'll get comfortable using and assembling a team. I do think that's probably the biggest change that's coming, in that there'll be core teams and then it'll be more like the Hollywood movie studio model where we assemble a team for a year and a half with this client project and then we disassemble or we go to the next thing or something like that. I think that's one thing that will be different. You have a lot of young people coming along who don't have any experience in this field. And so there's a lot of things they need to learn. But I love the fact that they're not coming with a lot of assumptions. And so they're thinking very differently around pricing, and around delivery and mix of services. So I think that's going to be really good for our industry. I wouldn't want to be running the firm, having done so for 30 years and doing things the way I was 30 years ago. I think that's probably a recipe for disaster. I do think software is going to take over more and more of what we do from the bottom and from the top, these consulting firms are going to take more and more what we do. I think we're going to have to get more into the advisory space and less into the implementation space. And all of those things are really good pressures to have because I'm not sure we would change without those pressures. Jenny  I agree. Have you noticed a trend in the US as there is here in the UK? I was on a Beamer roundtable and there was a discussion around titles of account managers, and lots of agencies were taking the decision to change the title to consultant. Are you seeing the same trend in the US? David   Yeah, and it's a little empty frankly. As if this is really going to change things. For one thing, people don't want to be consultants when they grew up, trust me on that one! That's just window dressing, it's just one of those silly little things we're doing telling ourselves that we're really making a difference. I don't think it matters to clients all that much. You want to act like a consultant for sure. But whatever you call yourself, I don't think matters. We've gone through all kinds of different titles. And to me, that's all window dressing. I'd concentrate on more the essence of what somebody's doing. Jenny   Are you seeing any trend for employees of the agency having the confidence now to set up on their own? David  Oh, sure. Yeah, whenever you have a widespread disruption, like 2020 was and before that a little bit, and 2011 a lot, 2008 a lot in 2001, people are let go, and they just are forced to essentially work on their own, and they discover they enjoy it, and it goes really well. And so we'll look back on this time, last half of 2020, and the first half of 2021 and see lots of new firms founded, and that's good. That's really good. I think that's the kind of fresh blood that we need. There'll be a real distinction though, between, you're not going to find a lot of people starting firms who weren't already in this space, so there won't be quite as much learning as has happened in other high response economic times. So they're going to bring some bad habits with them because of where they were. The other thing that's happening is that on the later end of things is that principles are not staying in this space, as long as they did before. It used to be a life sentence, you did this and then then you didn't do it, and then you didn't work anywhere else, that's not the case at all anymore. People are discovering in their 40s, that there's one or two more careers after this, and they're leaving the field. So there's a lot more churn in the space, it's a lot more to keep up with, a lot more interesting, a lot more change overall I think it's good. Jenny   Are you seeing principals, kind of building and selling and then building again, and selling quite quickly. David  Some of them are, but they're usually not building on the second run, they're not building another agency like this. It's not a great investment to build an agency like this if you already have one and you run it well, there's a good chance you can sell it if you do things, right, but it's not the easiest kind of place to sell. So what they're building instead is like a software company or a product company. They've learned how to do those things around the edges, and it's a lot more interesting to them, it's a lot more scalable to them. One of the things that they discovered in running the firm is that there are a lot of things that come with it that they just don't enjoy. And so they're trying to get out of that requirement, and they're trying to build a company that is more scalable to them. Jenny   What kind of things do they tell you that they don't enjoy? David   Managing people is top of the list. Nobody got into this field wanting to manage people, nor did they think about what gross would mean. Gross for them means doing less of something that they enjoy, and more of something they don't in many cases, and that's managing people. That's the biggest thing, and especially if you are conflict averse, and you don't like coaching people, then the staff is just a consistent daily pain in the neck. If you're really good at those things, and there are a lot of people who are really good at that stuff, they don't necessarily enjoy the process as much as they enjoy seeing somebody's career really take off and see how somebody leaves. That's the other thing that's happening too is you'll have more boomerang employees. So somebody who works someplace, goes somewhere else, often for the money or because a family member is moving, and then they come back and they work at the same place that's happening a lot more than before too. And that's satisfying, because it gives the principal this sense of how much impact they're having. Jenny   Do you see a big impact for those agencies that really establish culture very well in their agency? Really genuinely, putting people first? David There's a really significant benefit to the employees and to their job as a leader. Not so much in terms of the client experience or the effectiveness of the work, and that's where I think we mix things up. You need to do great from a cultural standpoint, because it's the right thing to do because your employees deserve it. Not because it's a point of differentiation in the marketplace. We're talking about culture way too much publicly instead of just doing it. Jenny   Totally agree. David, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for sharing so many insights. I've made loads and loads of notes, and I know everyone listening here is going to get some a-ha moments! So thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. I really appreciate it. David   You're welcome, Jenny. Thank you for having me.

Transcript:  Jenny  So Simon, would you mind spending a couple of minutes talking about you, your background, and how you made that transition from agency account management through to agency planning, and then eventually, agency owner?  Simon  Yeah. Hi, Jenny. Thanks for having me on. I'm actually a really big fan of the podcasts I've being listening to it since you started. So, I'm quite, I feel quite honoured to be asked to come and come and talk to you today. So, um, my background is classic agency sorts of management. I started in London in the early 90s and I worked at a part of the Abbott Mead Vickers group, then part of the Ogilvy group, and then I went to work in a brand consultancy called Light and Coley who don't unfortunately exist any longer. And my role was, in my very first job, was an account exec. I learnt very much how to do client service, I was looking after advertising and integrated marketing accounts. And then as I started to progress through my career, I started to become a little bit more interested in the business side of things. And as I got to my last role, which was with Light and Coley, which was an international brand consultancy, I started to want to have a deeper conversation with clients. And I started to become more and more curious about how organisations operated, about how you position brands, about how you develop organisational culture and things like that. So, I started to become extremely curious. I was always really inquisitive as a child, and never ever had any shortage of questions for people. And it was at that point, I started to work with internal planners and external consultants as well, and started to  learn the frameworks of brand planning. And it was at that point that I took the leap from managing clients to  consulting with clients.  Jenny  It's funny, actually, because when you describe the account management role that you had, and your curiosity in the client’s business, do you feel that that is actually a prerequisite for the account management role?  Simon  I think curiosity is one of the key drivers of great account managers, the ability to show interest, ask questions, dig deep to unearth the background to a client's business or business problem for example. I think all of these things provide a really great canvas in which then you can then build creative briefs or build project briefs. So if you don't have that innate ability to drive into the clients business, I think that you'll you will operate on the very surface, and therefore probably have a transactional relationship with your client rather than a deep relational engagement. Jenny  I totally agree. So how do you think that having the role of agency account manager, agency planner, do you think that that fundamentally set you up for success as an agency owner? Simon  Yeah, I would say that all of those experiences provided the framework for running a business really, I can't think of a better grounding to start a creative business than the client services area. I mean, if you think about it, it's so deep, and it's so broad, you’ve got, the first thing is managing people, managing clients, , in providing levels of service, which, , delight, your client portfolio on a daily basis. I mean, that's such an important principle to learn in business. The second thing about account managers is that by their very nature, they're there to help grow accounts. So therefore, they have an ability to work with clients to grow their business to provide betterment to their customers, rather than just deliver against projects. So therefore, there's a bit of a new business angle to client service as well. Then you've got project management, which is obviously about being really super organised, great communication skills, all those sorts of things, resource management in terms of people and then finally and really, really super important, of course, is budget management. And it was at Light and Coley actually, strangely that we were taught how to run a micro P&L for our client portfolio. So, I learned about how to , what was the difference between revenue, what was the cost of goods sold, what was , gross profit, what would the internal cost be and therefore, what would be profit before tax and, and net net? So, it gave me a really great source of understanding of how to, , forecast, from a financial point of view, how my small portfolio of clients would actually make the agency money. And taking all of those experiences forward. I started my first agency back in 1998, which was called The Field. Jenny  Wow, I didn't realise that you had another agency beforehand. Just stepping back one step, I think that's phenomenal. And that's the first time I've ever heard any agency providing training around a profit and loss account. I mean, yeah, I think that should be mandatory, really, isn't it? Because if we're going to be in front of clients, having business level conversations, , and we're looking for business challenges, business outcomes, you need to speak the language of business. And the fundamentals of business is the P&L. So I think that's phenomenal. The other question before we talk a little bit more about The Field, do you think for someone listening, who is in a client service role, that's thinking about starting their own agency, do you think it's necessary to have to do the planning role first? Because obviously, in your role as a planner, you are getting deeper into the client's business, won't you and being very consultative Do you think that's important to do before you make the leap to do your own agency? Simon  No, not? Not really, I think that it depends on what type of business you want to be. There are some really good creative businesses out there that are not strategically oriented. A lot of businesses will claim to be strategically oriented, but there are a lot of really great businesses, which just do great creative work or great digital work. So having a planning capability is not necessary for success. It was just that I wanted to, rather than focus on advertising and integrated marketing, which is where I started my career, I wanted to focus on brand, brand strategy, and therefore this gave me a competitive advantage. And it was through trial and error of my first few forays into doing actual brand strategy. I look back now, and I cringe at how naive and basic some of my solutions were, but it was, it was my determination to learn and determination to  keep practising keep getting better, and that really  drove it forward. So I don't think that you need to have a planning background. There are also many great planners, who you can go out and employ if you can afford it. And at the moment within our agency, Mr B and Friends, we've got  three outstanding planners who are far better at the job than I was ever. So, it's always great to be able to do that. Jenny  So tell me, take me back to that moment where you were employed in the agency as a planner, what was the moment or what happened for you to start to think I'm going to start my own agency? What was the spark? Simon  So I was working on a relatively well known retail bank. And I was an account director. And I started to work with the planning team on the positioning of this well-known retail bank. And the information that I was exposed to from the planning team was information I've never seen about a business before. And it got me really interested. And the more and more I dug, the more and more I thought that's exactly what I wanted to do. And I started to shadow the planning teams, started to move into the role. I started to form opinions, have conversations, I started to position myself up the client chain from the marketing department into the senior leadership team. And it was at that moment that I knew that that's what I wanted to do. So I was given opportunities within that agency to work on other brand strategy work. And it was at the point of, it was around 1998 that I thought, I'm going to give this a go and I left my job without any clients, just with some contacts and some confidence and it worked. It was great. And what was interesting was, it was because of the reputation that I generated as a relatively decent Client Services person that enabled me to have a relatively good network of clients, and it was those clients that became The Field's first clients. Jenny  Wow. So you'd done the groundwork? Simon  Groundwork was done, Jenny  Just taking you back a tiny step. What was that information that the planning team exposed you to? That you hadn't been exposed to? I'm just curious. Simon  Yeah. So it was information about how the bank made money. It was distribution strategies, it was internal culture, it was positioning within the competitive landscape, all of these sorts of things. When I was in Client Services, I would probably get surface level of information rather than that deep level of, of source of information. I wouldn't read an annual report, for example, but the annual report is absolutely where , you find out everything about your client, or your prospects business, . It's information like that, that I suppose I just wasn't exposed to. Jenny  And I suppose, having gone through that journey yourself, do you now, I know we're jumping forward and back because we're at The Field, but now I want to talk about Mr. B. I'm thinking as having gone through that journey, and realised that was a massive revelation, realising how useful that information was, and how much it sparked you to think, wow, this is actually what I should have been knowing about the business? How do you now run your team? Do you make sure that everyone's exposed to that, or kind of set the task of looking for that type of information about the business? Simon  Yeah, I think that there's a slight difference, though, because when you are in a planning context, your role is very, very different to what say, an AD, Account Director might be, and therefore the client will see you in a slightly different way, because you're there to solve a different problem. And I think that as an natural consequence of the client's perception, they will provide you with the information that they feel is necessary for you to get the job done. And so therefore, it's not always, I mean, the amount of NDA's I have to sign for example, is a really great example of the difference between a planner and an AD. Planners are exposed to business sensitive information, your client services, generally speaking, are exposed to information about the project. And I see that there is a difference there. So within Mr B and Friends, we have a fantastic planning department, we encourage all of our client services people to learn as much about the business as the planners are learning. But of course, we have to also respect the fact that they are doing two different roles. And you can do the role together because I did it. , when I started my first business, I did the role I was the AM plus I was the planner, as well, I was also the chief cook, bottle washer and everything else! But the point being, you can do it, but you can't do it at scale. And that's the point, , you cannot, it takes a lot of mental availability for a planner to immerse himself into a business and have that time to immerse themselves to research, to have those stakeholder conversations, to think, to come up with solutions. And then to provide the platform for everybody else to do their job brilliantly. Imagine trying to do that over three or four accounts. It's really, really difficult. And that's why the planning role and the AM role at scale has to be separate. Jenny  So tell me about, again, going back, you started The Field, you were everything to everybody - there's my account management hat, there's my agency owner hat, there's my planner hat. How did you then scale it? Because I'm sure there are people listening also that maybe are in the early stages of starting their agency thinking, this is all becoming quite unmanageable, but I don't quite know how to then grow. So how did you do that transition? Simon  Oh, it was just really incredible hard work, long hours. And the first thing that I did was to build up a war chest, a cash war chest. So, I try to make everything profitable from day one so I could put some money in the bank. And that will enable me to bring people in to share the heavy lifting, so to speak. And so it was, I mean, in those days when I was running The Field, this is when I was starting out and the planning, the projects weren't as big, the clients weren't as important and things like that. So, it was much more The Field is much more of a comms, brand comms agency than it was a strategy sorts of business. But yes, so all of those different things, it was just about a lot of hard work, a lot of application, running through walls and just trying to keep the quality high and the clients happy. And then it scaled. And The Field was only a very small business when you got to 11 people, sub 1 million pounds in fee income, but it was a really successful little agency, and I learned so much running that business, good stuff and bad stuff. Jenny  I can imagine. What happened, did you sell the agency? Or did you close the agency? What happened? Simon  Well, here is an incredible coincidence, because we specialised in the adventure travel market. And when SARS hit in 2003, most of our clients stopped spending money. So we had leveraged the business, painted ourselves into a corner, and revenue just really slowed down. And so I couldn't believe that we would have another source of respiratory problem that would really kill a load of other agencies, nearly 20 years later. But, so I managed to sell the business to a larger marketing services group that was looking to put a brand offer into their comms offer. And so we became the branding department of that larger business. Jenny  You must be Simon, one of the only people that could actually put up their hands and say, I've been here before with the Coronavirus, because you were there with SARS. And you built the agency, the niche that was going to be most affected. I mean, because it has been, , exceptional what we've been through. But, so tell us about what were the biggest challenges for you? So, okay, so you sold Mr. B? Sorry, you sold The Field? And then you started, Mr. B. Were you, how did that transition happen? Simon  So, I had to stay around for a couple of years, with the company that acquired The Field and I always knew I would go back into agency ownership. One of the interesting pieces of advice I got was, a long time ago, was that people in profit, sometimes they don't work well together. And so when I started Mr B and Friends, I'd learned a lot of lessons about creating overhead, during the days of The Field, and I was keen to try to go into the market again as a consultant. So on my business card, when it said Mr B and Friends, it just simply said 'Brand and Creative Consultants'. And that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to take what I'd learnt over the years and go in and help to unravel the plate spaghetti that is often a client's business, and to provide simplicity and clarity around brand strategy, positioning, brand architecture, and all those sorts of things. And the Friends, all of these guys, were freelance contractors that I had generated my black book of, great people who could then come in and work with me on implementation programmes so identity, comms, digital and things like that. And what happened after a couple of years, it just got a massive head of steam again, and all of a sudden, I was working 16 hours a day and I could see burnout happening. But the biggest thing for me really was the fact that I could see the quality was slipping, and I really needed a partner in the business. And so I reached out to my good friend and ex colleague, Steve Richardson, who was then in Auckland, and he was the creative director of DDB Interbrand. And I sold him the idea of coming back to the UK and partnering up. And so that's what he did. And he put his family on a plane and all of his goods and chattels in a container, sent it back. And we said, right, let's build this thing. Because we had the foundation of outstanding clients. We had really good reputation. We had opportunities, and we just needed to get on and do it. So that's what we did. Jenny  So looking back on that moment, again, for anyone listening, thinking of doing the transition, would you advise people to really consider it earlier? Because it sounds to me like you thought you were going to be a consultant, then you started getting freelancers to support you, then you made that transition of having employees and then you thought, well, I actually need a partner, do you think it's imperative to have a partner? Or I'm sorry, I'm asking so many questions. But talk to me about that moment because I think it'll be useful for people to maybe consider different ways of doing this. Simon  Yeah, I think it depends, you've got to ask yourself what type of business you want to develop, I mean, when you take on a partner, you certainly lighten the load, and you can get complementary skills, there's just no way that one person can have all the skills needed to develop a really successful creative business. So, I knew that Steve, because we'd worked together, he was at The Field, I knew that Steve was, had the right metal to be a business owner, that, I mean, level of craft in his work, good at people management, great sorts of alignment with my worldviews and values and things. But most importantly, that run through the wall commitment to just get the job done. And, until whatever, , until it's done thing. And I think that's what was interesting. Was it, do I want to have a 100% of  something very small, that was all about me and so therefore, was a lifestyle business, or did I want to have an equal share in something that could grow and scale and bring other people on board? And  eventually, if we wanted to have an event, that might be a possibility? So, I don't think I would ever regret bringing a partner on board is just helped so much. And I think it's a really positive thing, but it's about finding the right partner. And I do know people that have selected the wrong partners. So it's important that there is an affinity or some knowledge of that person's working pattern, what they believe in, what they value, all those different things. Jenny  And it sounded like you had experience of working together with Steve, so you to kind of you knew what it was going to be like. Okay, so, just to finish off this story about the agency. So Steve, joined you? And then did you just find from that moment onwards, that the journey was easier for you personally? Or was it new challenges, new types of problems to face? Simon  New opportunities more than problems. I think that that's, that was the motivating thing, it was two very seasoned  practitioners, in that hilarious moment that they're almost like a bootstrap startup mode. I mean, I remember, our first office,  there was sewage coming up through the floor. And, we were networking our computers, by sticking two sorts of  cables into the back of each computer. It was brilliant, it was exhilarating. And all we were focused on was building great relationships with clients, doing great work and getting fair compensation. And so it was it was a moment. And then Steve had the requisite skill in terms of understanding what would be a great employee for a studio that he was going to build, or who would be a great friend to do that piece of work over there, if we needed to continue using the friends network. So it was an exhilarating time, and  full of energy, making  great decisions and bad decisions. But, we were doing something together. Jenny  Love it, love it. And you said that you focused primarily on relationships? Can you share any tips around what did that actually look like? How did you create those strong relationships? Simon  Yeah so, and I believe that this is where the planning part of my career helped massively, because we weren't ever a transactional type of business, we have never been a transactional type of business. And I think that the only way that you can build deep, long standing relationships with your clients is to really get under the skin and to be seen as a trusted advisor. And so therefore, you have to have the vernacular, you have to have the understanding, you have to learn the technical parts of your client’s business, no matter what their business is. I mean, some of our some of our clients are pretty, pretty dry. I think, I mean, we've got clients in the pension space for example. But what I couldn't tell you about self-invested personal pension isn't worth knowing, because I put the hard yards in to learn the client's business, even understanding their jargon, their lingo, and everything else because then you become an active participant in the conversation. And when you have that level of depth, you become a trusted adviser, because you're not thinking just about the brief at hand, you've got a more 360 view. And that is for me, which was the really powerful thing. And then with Steve, like, also being a very much a strategic thinker, we were able to deliver brand, comms positioning sorts of advice to our clients, as well as wonderful, inspiring creativity and execution. So it became, it was, that was our whole focus, but , build those great relationships really have them cemented. And the other thing I would say about that, is that my word, the equity that that gives you, because when things go wrong, invariably they do, the client will remember the investments that you've made into their business. So I have a saying about giving without the expectation of receiving. I've always thought that that is a really important trait, no matter what you're doing in in the agency world. And I am still receiving now, inquiries for major, major pieces of work from people that I worked with 25 years ago. Jenny  Wow. So Simon, as your agency grew, and you weren't, you and Steve weren't the key people who were getting under the skin of the business, and really understanding the language that the clients were using and understanding their environments, and really micro level, and I can see why that, , developed really strong relationships. What happened when you started employing more people? Did you feel a sense of 'Oh, they're not gonna be able to do it as deeply as me?' Or was there any moment that you felt a little bit of loss of control? And how did you kind of cope with that? If you did? Simon  You can read my mind! So, absolutely, absolutely. Because we had a certain quality that we would just refuse to dip below. And I think that when the agency got to about 15/20, people, I certainly started to become a blocking point, because I was still doing a lot of the brand work, the brand planning work, then. And I certainly started to become a blocking point. And, when you bring new people in, obviously, they have their own processes and perceptions of what quality looks like and things like that. So, I think that there was a point, when we started to get worried that the magic that we'd created in the early years, was starting to get watered down a little bit. And so therefore, that was when we decided it was really important to re-energise the business with some pretty senior hires. And we've made a number of senior hires. Two really amazing hires one in Kate Gorringe, who's our creative director, who basically is Steve's 2IC. And Kate bought in such a level of experience into the team, not just from a creative point of view, but also from a studio management point of view as well. And that freed up Steve up to develop, to continue developing the creative products of the agency. And from my point of view, I, we bought in Adam Partridge, who's our planning and strategy director. Adam has taken what I was doing, and really accelerated it and made it significantly better. And that enabled me to then start to grow the business in other ways, as well. So, I think that having that humility to be able to accept that you need people better than you, is a really fantastic trait for a leader to have. And, and yeah, they came in, and they started to build their own departments and take what we had done and just make it better. Jenny  Did you, was there any I mean, Adam was obviously very experienced anyway. But did you have any kind of training for Adam in the way that you were doing things with clients? Or did you have a  coming together and sharing your approaches? Simon  Yes, definitely. So what was fantastic was I, I shared with Adam, our process that we like to do and what and what, how we define brand, strategy and brand frameworks. And he came in, he really liked what we had done already, but he identified areas in which we could improve it. And that's exactly what he did. So effectively, the thread of what I had started is still there, but you can just see that it's supercharged. Now it's much better, Jenny  Do you I mean, now you've freed yourself up to run the agency and have more of the vision and the strategy, do you position your agency in terms of favouring a certain sector of the market? Have you got quite a narrow focus with your positioning? Simon  So that is a really an amazing question because agency positioning is the hot topic. How do you create a hugely highly differentiated agency? One of the fears, of course, is that by going through the positioning, the true positioning process, you end up actually reducing your addressable market to the point of even one or two  sectors and things like that. So what we've done is that we, if you go to our website, you'll just see it says brand expertise. Okay, that's what we do. And brand is a transferable and scalable business discipline. And so that's what you will see from the outside, but when we actually go to market, we will talk about brand expertise in and we have two really core sectors. The first is the financial services sector. And the second is technology, media and telecom. So we do work outside of those. But those areas are the founding sectors of the agency and still the two verticals that we have got the strongest portfolio in, and the most reputation. So yeah, we have a broad positioning around what we do. But we also tried to create distinction for our brand, by talking about no added nonsense, we try to just get to the point, we talk in very straight terms, we do not sell clients something that they do not need. If a client comes to us with a business problem, the answer is not always a brand strategy solution, , we might actually send them away and ask them to go and speak to another friend or another agency. So what we're trying to do is create an identity for the business on how we do things. And brand expertise is what we do. Jenny  I love that. I mean, you said this earlier on but I think the sign of a good plan for me is simplification, the ability to simplify. So I love the no added nonsense. And I've been through your website, I think it's fantastic. And also sometimes, presumably, for clients that come to you with a problem, it's defining whether that is the problem that you need to deal with, right? Simon  Yeah, of course. I mean, you should never prescribe until you've diagnosed. And to borrow a term from Blair Enns, actually, but it's interesting, we spend a lot of time in the immersion phase in order to help the clients to understand the business problem. And the types of conversations that we have are so wide and varied. I mean, that's why I love working in the agency world, I don't think I could ever be client side, because I don't think I would have the discipline just to work on one brand. But so we have loads of different clients coming to us with different problems. And what we're really good at is getting to what matters most and actually helping the clients to either confirm, validate or change their opinion as to what's needed to be done. And that's where the strategic nature of brand planning becomes so exciting because you are effecting change at an organisational level, not just at a marketing level, we're talking about, we're talking about the fortunes of organisations, we're talking about people's jobs and the role, the culture in which they operate in. And then of course how the world sees that organisation. It's a really exciting business to be in. And it's the thing that the agency is set up to do and it's the bit that motivates people more than anything else. Jenny  What is that skill that you have, that allows you to do that, because not everybody can go into a client's business and look at, to use your words, the spaghetti, the - we've got this, we're doing this and another and make some sense of it? And then also to simplify it enough, so that you identify the key problem and then start addressing it. So tell me about, if someone's listening to this, maybe they're thinking about going into the planning role, or maybe an account manager wants to transition over to the planning role. What are the skills that you think someone that's really good at the role has? Simon  Okay, I think that a core skill is to understand how business works okay. So I think it's really important that you understand how your client makes money and what prevents them from moving forward. And I think that once you actually can start to picture, the different departments of an organisation, you can then start to understand each individual  part on how it all sits together, it's that, , I'd never say that Mr. B and Friends is a business consultancy, but there is a level of business consultancy in what we do. And so having the frameworks in which to , I suppose segment business problems, having the confidence and I suppose the parameters that question and to dive deep into an organisation is really, really important. Having past experience because we work on, well, how many, how many clients have I worked with over the years, , probably hundreds. And you've probably seen all of the problems in common sorts of problems that other businesses in other sectors have had. So, drawing on that like, huge resource of , within your  memory in your experience. And then breaking things down into smaller bite sized chunks. Somebody once said to me that  if you try to eat a salami in one go, you'll choke on it. So slice it up into small parts, and work on each part, and then put it back together. So I think that the ability to step back, see the big picture, and break up the problems into small bite sized chunks, and then start to elegantly put them back together in a logical way that will enable the client to also move forward, unblock a problem that might may exist, because the problem may be in the market, or maybe internal. And to then move forward. Jenny  Really, really good. I think not enough agencies actually have that level of business consultancy acumen. And I think, our industry, there are so many management consultancies that are taking over, buying up creative agencies left, right and centre, you've got the Accenture's of the world, you've got the PwC. And that trend, I mean, I use one of the charts, the trend that's happening, it's only a matter of time before that traditional management consultancy skill blends quite nicely with the creative skill, and then they have something really powerful. I mean, I don't know what it's like behind the scenes and internally, whether that's all joining up, but certainly, I've noticed a trend of agencies starting to change the title of account director into consultant. So I think there's definitely a trend. I mean, can you say, Simon, I know you've probably worked with hundreds of businesses, but can you say that there's like top three business problems, broadly, that businesses come to you with?  Simon  Yeah, definitely. So I think the top three challenges that we get will be around positioning. So an organisation is unsure of the value that it delivers in to their consumers and in relationship to their competitive landscape. So their positioning may be set up in the past and not fit for the future. The second, I think, is probably brand architecture. So there's a lot of consolidation going on in many vertical sectors. There's a lot of money, private equity money, and VC money and everything swirling around. So there's a lot of companies who are on the acquisition trail, and that prevents that presents itself a distinctive problem because, , how do you integrate an organisation into a larger and swallow it up? What do you do? Do you kill it? Do you track transition it? What's the migration programme? So we do a lot of consulting around that. And then the third is about creating distinction around visual and verbal identity where, it's just not connecting with people, it's not motivating. And when you've actually got a really exciting positioning statement, how do you then bring that to life? And how do you make it connect externally and internally? And I think that when you combine, I mean, we sometimes we get briefs, which have all three elements of that going on, and those are the really exciting brand programmes that we run. But sometimes the work's done internally sometimes and we validate and sometimes the work, , is done with us. There was a fourth one I'd like to just add, if that's okay, it's around organisational culture as well. And we are doing so much work around EBP at the moment, employer brand and setting, really inspiring  internal culture, in order that people can really understand that the business is brand and brand is business and,  , what we hoping to do when we do internal work is that we're creating an army of ambassadors for the brand and at least, at the very least they can articulate what their organisation stands for and what it's all about. That's the hygiene factor. But actually, some of the work that we've done is about helping to retain talent, helping to attract the very best talent, creating an employer reputation, which is outstanding. And we've been doing that since day one. Jenny  Wow. Do you work with external consultants also, so where your work finishes, and then perhaps, I can just see that, is there a cultural specialist that trains the team in making sure everyone is, , talking about the company in the same way? I mean, do you have a network of different companies that you bring in at certain points that you work with? Simon  Yeah, certainly. But we also have the experience and talent with the internal team as well. So yeah, so we've got that internally organised and there will obviously be certain people who are specialist in the area of talent, HR law, and things like that, so that's important. And I know of a lot of internal comms consultants that are available, and they operate with us on a friends basis as well. So yeah, but we do have that talent in house, it's become really important to our own proposition. Jenny  I think there must be agency leaders thinking we don't currently have a planning function within our business. You mentioned before that it was a big hire for you, your first ever kind of Director of Planning? At what point in an agency's development would you say that having a full-time planning person is essential? Simon  Yeah, earlier than we invested, I can tell you, but I'll just say that we waited and got the very best, so it was great. I think that when you get to some critical mass within the business and the conversations with clients are oriented around their organisational strategy or brand and things like that, I think you'll get a know, I mean, we should have brought a Head of Planning in when I was getting swamped, which would have been around that 15  head counts really. We did work with freelancers, and brought them in, but they just weren't invested in that they were hired guns, , they'd come into a great job and everything but then they'd go off. And what you need, when you have that long term account with a client, is that you need the planning capability there all the time. It's like a corporate memory bank, and you don't get that when a freelancer has done the work. So I would have said around 15 people, I mean, at our height, the agency got about 42 people, and we have 4 or 5 in the planning team. Jenny  Would you say that's the reason why you managed to have these long-term relationships with your clients, because you have that planning function, is that a big contributing factor? Simon  I think is a contributing factor. And it keeps the agency relevant, it helps to do, it should fuel the account growth plans and things like that. It's not always the case, I have to say, but I think that it provides a different level of depth to the relationship beyond the brilliant work that the client services team are doing. And it's that intelligence and 360 vision, which unlocks future opportunities. And therefore, I think that you move into a trusted adviser status when you have that within your stable.  Jenny  How does it work internally Simon, with your account management team and your planning team? How did the account management team know when to bring in the planning team and when not to and who leads the relationship? And how does that kind of work? Simon  So client services, our client services team, they will know when we're talking about something that has a strategic nature to it. I also encourage them not to boil the ocean as well. Not every single discussion needs to have a plan out. It just needs to have a really good Client Services person asking the right questions and writing great briefs. But, if we're talking about brand strategy, are we talking about major projects and things like that, we tend to just make sure, check in with the planning team, just double check that, , they believe that they should be present. But the Client Services team own the relationship, and that is crucial, absolutely crucial that there's no ambiguity there. Jenny  Agreed. So I'm just conscious of time. I didn't realise that, I could talk to you all day, especially reminiscing about advertising in the early 90s. I'm sure there's lots of stories that we could swap. And I'm just curious about someone listening to this thinking, wow, this sounds really exciting. And perhaps they are in a planning role. And they think, well, I've got all the skills like Simon, it really helped him, then going to an agency owner role. Are there any tips or advice that you could share, anything that we haven't discussed already, that you think would be valuable to keep in mind? Simon  Yeah, yeah, I think the first question is, what's your motivation to moving from employment to self-employment, and then to the employer status. If it's like me, you’re impatient, and you want to, I suppose do something on your own and prove that to yourself, you can do it, then I think that's a great thing. And I love meeting people that are entrepreneurial, and people that have that confidence in their own ability to go for it. But I think the things that, some tips, I think, is that never forget that it's all about clients, okay? Never forget, if you don't have clients, you don't have a business, and therefore, you have to be client centric all the time. And that's in terms of winning clients, servicing clients and helping clients out and being that  go to person when the client needs you. Understanding how, planners may not know how the commercial side of the business works. So for example, there's a lot of planners that I've met, and we've employed, and it's the first time that they've ever been exposed to the machinations of agency. Learn that. How does an agency stay afloat, make money and, that's really important to learn. And then I think, knowing your value, and how to price, for the long term, not for the short term. And that's another judgement that you have to make. And once you have that going, as I said earlier , build up a bit of a war chest of money on balance sheets. Use the Friends model, make everything a cost of sale, not a fixed overhead to start with. You don't need to employ people, we're now in this incredibly agile environment, where it's the gig economy, work from anywhere, , this is the perfect environment for somebody to set up an agency. And once you have that critical mass in the business, you start to hire and then bring in some experts to help you with legals and employment and infrastructure, even an office if you do decide to go for it. So I mean, loads, the journey that I went on was, , stumbling from mistake to mistake and things like that. And eventually you just get it right. And, and once you've got those foundations, right, everything can then just accelerate. Jenny  Some great tips there. I love the thing about the war chest. I think that's so practical. Lots of really great tips for anyone listening and quite inspiring as well. So how do you see the future for agencies? And maybe planning and account management? Is there anything that you see coming, that you think is significant for the agency world in general? Any kind of trends or things you're saying? Simon  Hmm. So I think, I've just got a view on this, which other leaders may not agree, but I see that clients are wanting to choose expert agencies in particular roles. So therefore, I think full-service agencies are going to really struggle to keep themselves relevant. And therefore, niching down actually is quite an interesting strategy and something that we've very much done over the last few years where we have decided what we are absolutely brilliant at and we decided what we don't want to do as well. So I think that's an interesting one. I think that client services becoming so important to the client environment. There was the Up to the Light report that came out just recently again, which demonstrated the importance of client service, great client service, in the client and client agency relationship. And I think that we have to move people to a trusted adviser position where they, consultancy actually is interesting because as you say, , if you look at the  management consultants, , they drive up the value of their services, they provide a significant amount of value to the client beyond the job in hand. And I think that us creative businesses, we need to start pushing our client services team up that value chain. So the perception that's held of the team by the client organisation is much greater. The last thing I ever want is for a client services person to be the person just taking notes, that's not where we need to be. And from a, from a planning point of view, I think that the opportunity to bring some really great skills into the mid-market is a great opportunity as well. I'm seeing a lot of organisations that, outside of the FTSE 300, and all that stuff. Now, thinking brand is a really valuable business tool. And therefore, there's an opportunity for us to apply that strategic thought to smaller businesses and to start to help companies become more brand led than branded. And there's a real distinction there. And that's something that we're very active in so. Yeah, so I think that's a really exciting moment. Jenny  Amazing. Thank you. That was brilliant. Brilliant advice for agency owners, account managers and planners. So this has been amazing. Simon, if someone wants to find out about you, more about you, or almost a billion friends, how can they get hold of you? How can they reach you? Simon  Okay, so I'm on LinkedIn, of course. So you can connect me on LinkedIn - Simon Barbato. If anybody wants to reach out my email addresses is on our website, mrbandfriends.co.uk. And I sometimes muck around on Twitter, but I'm trying to do that less and less. Jenny  Another distraction! Simon  I just don't have time for anything.  Jenny  Exactly!  Simon, thank you so, so much for sharing so many valuable tips. I think this is going to be really a great episode for many people who are thinking about possibly moving from account manager to planner, or a planner to an agency owner. I think this is hugely inspiring. So thank you so much for joining me and thank you so much for everything you've shared. Simon  Thank you. It's been lovely to have a walk down memory lane, actually. So yeah, I look forward to listening back. Thanks a lot for having me. Jenny  Lovely. It's a pleasure. Simon  Cheers.

Transcript:Jenny  So today I'm thrilled to have on the show Martin Lucas. Martin is the, he calls himself a mathematical psychologist, which we're gonna dive into a little bit more. But he's the founder of a company called Gap in the Matrix. And they specialise in cognitive data science. And Martin has spent the last four years looking at human decision making and actually what drives those decisions. And the reason I wanted to invite him on today is because he's working with big global brands, and agencies, to really unpick the messaging that brands are putting out into the world to their consumers, why it's not working and how they can do it better. He's got some very interesting and very impressive statistics about the impact that his company has made on those brands. And before I kind of hand over to you, Martin to sort of fill in the gaps, I wanted to read a testimonial given by Rory Sutherland for the work that Gap in the Matrix do. So Rory basically said, 'Gap in the Matrix is one of the tiny number of people in the world who understands that it's psychology, which offers the greatest potential to revolutionise marketing in the next 10 years and beyond'. So that's pretty impressive because Rory is very, very well known in our industry. So, Martin, over to you, would you mind spending a couple of minutes just talking about you, your background? And why you decided to do this research?  Martin  Yeah, well, thanks for having me on. First of all, Jenny, and I'm glad that you picked out the Rory quote because that meant a lot to me. That was a nice piece of validation. So just to give everybody a little bit of background in 2015 or so the business that I had the sort of investment property there had I did that entrepreneurial bet, just bet the house right. And I conducted a four year research and development project examining 'Why don't humans understand one another?' That was that was my main problem statement write everything from 'Why does Facebook not work when it explores all this data about your life that's invading your life? I predicted Cambridge analytical before it happens, all the way through to every consumer, in various different guises is very frustrated with how they're treated. Right? Simple questions. Genuine, when was the last time you got an email that really excited you or touched a personal need for you? Or you saw an advert on Facebook where you're like 'Oh, wow, I really need that, you know'. It's a very broken system. Right? Yeah. And that's what we wanted to pick apart - was not just to, you know, stand on a box and say there's issues, right, everybody knows those issues. We want to understand why. And we wanted to do it from the consumer perspective. So we harvested from 24 academic disciplines, taking the most relevant components to do with consumer decision making. We turned it into algebra, because algebra is problem solving. And from there, we were able to figure out how you should communicate to different groups, and all kinds of different weird, but very practical things like skills of desire, for example, or why somebody absolutely adores and craves and collects pink umbrellas and why other people don't care about it at all. So it's about as much of giving people more of what they want, and less what they don't in a very simple way. And one of the things that I think is very true and even further true today, and I think that's why a lot of global brands are working with us, is a lot of people are caught stuck in that top down architecture, right, which never accounted for the digital age. So what I mean by that is, here's a brand and a logo, we want to sell this product. So we shoved this product to everybody. So it tends to be much more logo orientated, not consumer oriented. And that's one of the key things of what we looked at about why don't humans understand one another. And it's a very kind of capitalist, selfish kind of build, and it's not working. Jenny  So this is, I mean, it's very, very powerful stuff. And you're absolutely right. I mean, you know, engagement is key, and every brand wants to, but this model is obviously it needs some work. So, I mean, can you share with us, because I know that you were talking about statistics of click through rates or engagement rates. Tell me a bit about those findings. From your analysis?  Martin  Yeah, I mean, this is a key anchor that we use in a lot of situations with agencies, brand sales, and our own sales activity, our own marketing activity. So is it's as true in 2015 as it was in 2021. The average click through rate on Facebook is 1.61%. On Google display ads, it's 1.91%, on Programmatic, which are called stalker ads, it's 0.035%. If you just combine three of those things together, which are just three minor parts of a much larger ecosystem of advertising and marketing, and that's $265 billion worth of ads that don't get interacted with and it's 4.82 trillion ads being sent to consumers where it's not just consumers don't like them. It's actually costing people loyalty and actually pushing people away from brands, because you could love a brand, that's how it works within the brain, like you have a predilection for, I like, Jenny, give me a brand that you love. Like if you're gonna shop and what's brand that you love? Jenny  Okay, so I'm into Trinny makeup. Martin  Okay. And Trinny makeup, do you like every product that they do? Or is it just foundation? Is it face masks? Like, what comes to mind? Jenny  Interesting. I like their eye products, their eye shadows and lipstick, actually, they're best for cheek to lip. Martin  Right, cool. So what happens is that we assume, this is me talking about the architecture in most brands, we assume that because you're interested in this brand, we can show you this product. Right? And that's what often happens is that because you've got an interest in it, we'll just show you a advert, what your brain does in a microsecond. 98% of your decisions are unconscious, right? That's your database of life and experience, right? What your brain does in a microsecond says, 'Do we like that brand?' Yes, or no? Yes, we do. Oh, but it's not for the type of product that we like, and then we're going to reject it. So even though you should be engaging with the Trinny products, you don't because of what they show you. And that's how the brain optimises what to do in any given moment. And that's like the microsecond of decision making. Jenny  Wow, it's so true. Because actually, for a mascara, for example, I don't know why this is all become about me, but I will go to Mac, which is a completely different brand. So tell me more about that 98% of what's driving our decisions, Martin  Right, so we humans are chemically driven creatures, right? So let's do a really quick download of we're going to do neuroscience, neurobiology and the psychology of meaning in the quickest way without it being all those things that made it sound like scientifically, BS, right. And I try to avoid any kind of BS with it. Because that was one of the things that I knew in 2015, you can't come to market talking about emotions and psychology and stuff, you have to give them driven outcomes, right. So here's the data of decision making. 95% of all of our decisions are based on emotions. Decisions only become conscious, in only 2% of the things that we experience. So we make 35,000 decisions a day. Most of them are unconscious, I'm not in the mood, I've already eaten,  I don't like that. Or I like training, but it's the wrong type of stuff for me, right? Like, all of that happens is the unconscious. The conscious ones are the 2%, which is your emotional games, right. And the reason why humans are so driven by emotions, and we deal with 108 different types of emotions, we're so driven by emotions, because emotions connected into the reward centre in our brain. So we've all got a friend who thinks way, way, way too positively, right? Like the positive all the time, and most of the time, it's great, but sometimes you just like, just ease up, right? And then you've got a friend, that's that stuck thinking negatively, the glass is half empty all the time, right? Both of those people are getting the same chemical treatment within the brain. Right. So it's not about whether the unhappy person is having a good life, and the happy person is having a good life, right? They're both getting, they've got an architecture in their brain to get chemicals based on feeling good and feeling bad. And that's the system of how it operates. So that's what we humans are looking for. The reason that we're so driven by emotions is that motion gives us chemical releases. And it's perfectly natural. It's nature for us to be chemical kind of balanced machines, right? Jenny  This is fascinating. I mean, I kind of want to know how you got all of this data like, you know, the statistics that you just shared a moment ago before you just said that data was, you know, 1.61%, 1.91%? How did you actually find out that, was that just because you said that you're a mathematical psychologist, which I don't know 100% what that means, but is it crunching those numbers? And how do you access that type of number? Martin  Yes, so mathematical psychology is a specialism within psychology. And it's actually a research capability. And luckily enough for me, it was built about decision making. So obviously, when I when I discovered it, for my purposes, I was like jackpot. This is exactly it, right. And basically, is not just a pure psychology field, it is actually research. So it gives you the capabilities to go and research in different dimensions and things right, combined with that, and I've got a very unusual skill for algebra. So I can connect lots of disparate dots and stuff and do it in quite a fast way. I wanted to train myself to make it more accurate. So how did I find those stats, a lot of hard work and perseverance. We spent six months hacking the Facebook advertising system. So we could figure out the back end of the number of adverts, versus their cost, versus Facebook's profit versus what people spend the money on. And then that got us into what larger brands were doing. And then you know, it's all just been a very progressive iterative thing, which is why give up four years of my life. Two years to do the builds and two years to do all the case study and testing and stuff, you know, and that included as well, because it's not just about data or data architecture or thinking or anything like that. I spent time with sixty five different agencies around the world. And what I was trying to figure out was what don't they know? What is the thinking model taught to marketeers and advertisers? Right? Because we're all conditioned to think in a certain way, right, depending on our cultural environment, conditioning or education. So of course, advertising marketing is currently following a model. And I wanted to understand whether that model worked and what the gaps were within it, because I believe that there were gaps and that I think that's where we sit today in quite a powerful position, just because of the number of global brands that we're working with. It's working well. It took us a while to figure out how to message that, but is working well, you know, Jenny  I so want to dive into the 65 agencies and what you discovered, you know, in terms of importance, what was the first thing that you realise that really, you thought, wow, I had no idea that that was the case, because you've actually referred to it as a house of cards, and the broker model. So I want to dive into that, tell me more about the research specifically around how agencies are working. Martin  And what I found is that you've got a system that's very much generated by the whim. The whim of the CMO, the whim of the creative director and just the whim of people, right. And I don't mean to call it the creative director, I'm not, I'm not criticising individual rules, I'm just saying in the agency model, you've got a lot of whim activity. And just today, I had to, I had to climb one of my business partners off a shelf of anger, because we did some analysis for a global business, right. And we're looking at the research that they've done. And it's a combination of survey data and sentiment research, right. And this is quite common for any brand, any agency, but what you end up with is a partial truth. And then you look at, so we've got 16 different decks from this client, because we're at the research stage, right? And the first deck has an assumption within it. The next step takes that assumption and sees our customers want this 'likely because' and the 'likely because' is based on the assumption, and then the decks progress and progress and by the time you get to the sixth deck, this is now a truth. And their entire system is now being anchored around this truth, which was never actually true in the first place. Jenny  Okay, so some people listening to this, because there's a lot of creative agencies that tune in, they'll say, but hold on a sec. You know, when we develop concepts and ideas,  a lot of it is based on research, we do, you know, focus groups, we do, you know, observation techniques to see how people react. So a lot of kind of work goes in behind the scenes. So, tell me what you discovered about that part of the the way that the creative agency works. Martin  So what we find is not creative agencies just, right, but looking at global brands and things as well, there was one example where they'd bought all the gear and got the testing done, via the creative agency, actually, where they, you know, you put on the headgear, and you measure the customer's emotional reaction to the advert, right. And they got all positives, but they didn't get sales when the car was launched. And what we've pointed out to them is that triggering them an emotion within somebody is not a decision, it's not relevance. It's just triggering an emotion in that moment. So the point about this is that when you look at market research, one of the world's largest advertising agencies, their Chairman, told me that he had a doubt about market research. And he went out and recruited four people and got a budget to recruit those four people, really just to find out, was the market research valid? Or was it just coming from a library and an assumption, and he found that it was coming from a library and an assumption. And that's not me saying that, that's like what the chairman of one of the largest advertising groups and I find consistent evidence of things like that. So it's not really criticising the creative agency model. It's more criticising the fact that if research is not based on why the consumer buys, then you're into a problem. And then in turn, that got us into modelling how different industries actually operate. So for example, we know in the automotive space, the vast majority of automotive companies are caught in a model of car, metal, engine, right? Think about every TV advert car, metal, engine, then once in a while price, car, metal, engine, price, right? That's your consistent model. That's not why people buy cars.  Jenny  When you say car, model, price, you know, when you see a car advert, for example, it's very sort of emotionally led in the fact that someone's speeding along and the wind's blowing through your hair to kind of want for a better term, but just describe to me what you mean by this, this bit about model, metal? Martin  Well, you've kind of nailed it really, right. Most car adverts and campaigns are driven round somebody driving the car, right? The speed of that car, and the price of that car. Right? So basically, it's the look and feel and how somebody uses that car, right? And it works on that basis.When's the last time you sat in a car journey and were like, 'Oh my God, I feel so exhilarated because I'm sitting in my car?'. Right? Jenny  Never, this is my car right?!  Martin  So what you've got is a model where people are trying to drive emotion. But emotion is not decision making. Emotion is a byproduct that either triggers engagement, or happens because of it. Whereas if you look at as an example, when we've done car launches, with the most recent car launch, we did, we had 453, actionable insights split up by various different biotypes. Right. And I'll give you two really key pieces of insight that break this car, metal engine model. Number one, is that the car is second only, and to some first, behind the bedroom, for what you would term as the psychological layer. Right. So if you think about your bedroom, generally you share it with others, sometimes people don't, whatever, right, and the car you might share with family and others. But generally, it's a space that you get to yourself, you can blare your music, you can throw your rubbish on the ground, or you can be really OCD and put it into a bin and you just organise it the way you want. Right. So it's very private, it's a closed door space, very similar to the bedroom. So the reasons and things that we want from a car run a lot deeper. And we've won a lot of business by saying to people that for some people, the main reason they buy a car is the cup holder. Right? It's not the only reason, but knowing, they've got a cup holder, because they're busy doing conference calls to and from work all the time they need a place to put their coffee, if you don't put that in the experience, they're less likely to do it. Right. So that's one version of it. Number two, we did a recent piece of work, we were looking at 27 European markets for a brand, and one of the markets, we identified that 67% of females, if they don't get an affirmation that they can do parallel parking, they're not going to consider that car. Right. And that's got nothing to do with the car, the size of the car or anything like that. And the reason for that is that cars are designed by men. And women generally tend to be slightly shorter than, than men, right? So parallel parking is the thing that bothers a significant amount of women. And so if they can't get affirmation of it, they're not going to feel as secure and they're not going to consider your car. If you don't mention the cup holder or the parallel parking, people are just left to their own devices. And that's the consumer issue. It's you're not addressing things that they actually want. Does that mean we do a TV advert with a cup holder in parallel parking? No, no. But, it does mean that we can do more things with other communication channels, which is what the automotive industry doesn't do like a lot of industries that stuck with big TV advert. And then it's just selling things on price, in the other channels. Jenny  I'm glad you said that. Because I was just thinking, as you said, you know, what you're talking about is features, which obviously have that ability to make the person want to buy it. Because as you said, like you're triggering engagement with the ad. And advertising is a one message medium, so you don't want to be crowding it with lots of different messages. So you're absolutely right. But that doesn't mean to say that you've got the right engagement trigger, to then translate into a buying decision. Right? And that's essentially what you're saying. This is absolutely fascinating. So I'm kind of thinking if I'm an agency, listening to this and thinking, okay, I see what you're saying, did you in your research of 65 agencies find any agency that came close to, you know, acknowledging this or working in a way that was a lot more powerful? Martin  Oh, my work with Rory Sutherland was obviously quite key, right? Because I was attracted to him. I saw him talking at an event, right. And I didn't come from the industry. I came from the algebra world, right. And he stood up on stage and talked about why Uber won based on human control, and I'd written the same paper about this. So I went up to this chap that I didn't know and that's how I ended up meeting him. And then we just ran with our relationship from there. Up until that point, I didn't know about Ogilvy change, actually. And I found Ogilvy change was before Ogilvy did its reorganisation, I thought that they were moving towards that kind of capability, because they had more of the behavioural science and the behavioural economics component of it. But in the general sense, I think that to be super clear, I'm not criticising, particularly the creative agency or the advertising agency model, where we are more coming from when I think about what we do with agencies, is we're giving them more accurate truth based consumer knowledge, right, so that they can then create based on that truth. That's that difference, that we're giving actionable, truth based knowledge of the consumer.  Jenny  I heard you interviewed in another podcast, Martin, and you mentioned the way that agencies used to work. Can you tell us a bit about that? Martin  Yeah, it's my favourite thing actually, it's amazing that you brought that up! So when, of course you're trying to find out over the years I've been trying to find out 'How does thinking work in a consumer context', right? 'What made advertising great, what's made it's more challenging? How much has the digital world affected it?' Right? And one of the coolest things that I found was that the golden age of advertising from the 30s to the 50s, market research was done by an employee inside the agency, and they were a psychologist. So market research was based on that deep truth. And it was based on focusing on the boss of the operation, which I still believe is the case is the female. And I think that the more that the advertising and marketing world has specialised, it's over specialised. So again, a different chairman from a different advertising group, but it's still one of the big houses, said to me that you felt the biggest issue is when they separated media and advertising. Because once they did, that, they lost the connection to be able to control how to communicate to people at the right moment, and the part that sits round it as well. So I think that the golden age of advertising has got a really positive component to it. And why did they fire the psychologists? It was actually when, you know, in the 50s, the advertising body said, 'You've got to stop saying that smoking is good for you because we now know that it isn't'. In that classic way, business world overreacted and got rid of its market research, got rid of its psychologists. And then we began this path towards the more specialised capability of research that isn't inside the agency. So sometimes this capitalism efficiency can end up costing us what made us good in the first place, in my opinion. Jenny  So nowadays, because most, you know, a lot of advertising is online, and we can, everything's trackable isn't it? And tell me what your research kind of uncovered about, you know, how we are measuring the success because, you know, many agencies do have their measures in place to see what's working, what's not. And then, you know, maybe they do split testing or optimization as they go. So, tell me a bit about, like, how you've seen, you know, I think you called it the attribution model of measuring, and you didn't, tell me a bit about what you think about the attribution model. Martin  The problem with the attribution model, it's similar to the finance model of 'LIFO and FIFO' or 'Last in, First out' that type of stuff, right? Anytime you come across multiple models, trying to solve the same thing, it means that nobody actually knows the truth. Right. So if you're saying that 70% of our attribution model is based on first contact, and somebody else's 70 percents based on last contact, and somebody says, well, we're going to divide it equally between the eight pieces of contact, it means that you don't know what works, you don't know the impact, you don't know how decision making actually works based on your consumers. And it's a very fair reason why people don't know it, is because what we're trying to do is to create a model, which is one size fits all. And I believe that we've compounded it to make it even worse over the past 20 years, because the digital age is creating assumption, within assumption on top of research that is creating bias within bias. And you've got all that together. And it's just quite a big cluster swear word. Jenny  Thank you for not swearing you know you can by the way. That's really interesting, because obviously, the click through rate is, you know, all views, number of views, click through rate, these are the kinds of measures that many people use nowadays. So would you say that that's not an indicator? Like, what's your thoughts on that? I mean, if someone clicks on an ad, and then clicks through to the page, is that an indication of a buying signal? Martin  I believe, it is an indication of a buying signal. It's just not an absolute. So what you've got at the moment, is Facebook salespeople are literally trained to be, and they're out there telling all kinds of large brands, don't worry about clicks, worry about impressions, because impressions mean that people will eventually come back to you. And that is like horseshit, since you gave me permission to swear, sorry. I mean, that's just not true. But it's a good sales strategy by Facebook because they're Facebook, right? So the problem that you've got today is that nobody wants to raise their hand in a very siloed, blame free society and say, I look after this particular silo and I don't think that this silo works, or do you know, I mean, it's like the architecture of it all. If you think about human behaviour, there's, in the world of psychology and the world of behavioural science in the world, the human science, there's a commonality and I always look for commonalities because that's how historians do things right if they find, you know, after a battle the king says this and a monk wrote here and a peasant that could write wrote about it, right, let's say they find out the truth. And I think the same thing applies. So humans have got five dimensions that makes them human right across all these all these areas. And it's language, it's religion, it's music, it's art, and it's tool making. And what's going on in the world today is that we've started to rely too much on the tool makers. So because the software says this or because the data says this or we can do this big data project, you can't think of somebody liking a page or visiting a page as an absolute. And that's what Facebook builds its look alike audiences from, that's why Programmatic falls on its butt because it's got a point .035% click through rate. And what people are saying is, well, if we throw enough stuff, you know, for every 1000 that we send, three and a half people are going to click it. Right? What is that actually costing you the other way around? And I think that's part of the problem, some of the stuff that we're doing with brands away from advertising and marketing, and you could debate that this is advertising and marketing in itself, is asking questions like, what does it cost you Armani, when you sell jeans, stacked high as the rafters on a plain, plastic table in Costco? What does that cost you when Armani customers actually see that? We're selling tracksuits in JD Sports, we wrote a paper about this, it's known as thin slicing. And what it basically means is that you you thin slice away somebody's perception of you, so that it changes. And the Costco one was a personal one for me, as my wife jokes I had like a little toddler tantrum about it was slamming these jeans up and down in a Costco. And I've gone from being a loyal Armani customer, and I don't think I'm a snob, I certainly didn't grow up as a snob, but I've never bought an Armani product since because it's just a minister value, you know? Jenny  Your perception of the brand?  Martin  Right. Jenny  Do you separate, because there are some agencies that focus on brand strategy? And really sort of that higher level? What, what is the meaning of this brand? What's it bringing out? And there's other agencies that focus more on the execution of the messages and the maybe more, you know, promotional side of, of advertising? So do you see any difference? Or are you seeing the same problems occurring for both? Martin  I think, brand strategy as a general rules got a little bit stuck in its ways, because the world has been overtaken by performance marketing. So everybody's looking for number based stuff. And I think and I've done this with brand strategy people, as agencies, sorry. I've said that the time for them to look at branding is performance branding, right? If you understand what that brand means, what sits underneath that what its products means why people buy it, who's interested in it, all the kind of stuff that sits around it, right? So what branding agencies should be doing, is the top down architecture that says, okay, Facebook advertisers, okay, Creative, okay, TV, okay, Mass Media, wherever you are, right? I want you to have the space to do your creative work, but I want you to follow these rules. Right? And that could be language, not storytelling structure, but certainly the essence of the story, right? And guess what happens if you do performance branding, the consumer gets continuity, in all of those channels. And that's one of the things where, you know, we get well paid for what we do. And we work with global brands, so I'm not complaining about it, but there are times pretty much every other day where I'm just like, some of the things that we do just seem so logical. Why aren't people thinking about this? But that's the structure of business, right? We're caught in silos a little bit too much. Jenny  Give me an example. Martin  I think, the persona stuff is probably one that comes to mind purely because we've been working on it today. Where you're looking at these personas, and you're like, this is not why people buy, right? If you're going to buy an engagement ring, it's got to be wrapped into either an emotional gain and a story, either an ego lead reason that you're actually doing it and how you want to be seen, or how you want to be treated with the loved one, right? So it's kind of we call it behavioural elastic. Right? So how much meaning does your purchasing go into? In this case, we're talking about an engagement ring, right? So do you want to just impress the person that you're asking? Do you actually want to impress yourself, which is really common, on the ego side? Or are you trying to impress your wider group of friends by that engagement? Right, and nothing is as pure as putting people in each of these boxes. That's the thing. It's all what we call the skills of self. Right? So desire, loyalty, categorization, preferences, all of that depends on the person the moment we did the campaign over the over Christmas, where we did CRM based on the weather. Right? So when the when the wind was above a certain level, we sent a message to people in Scotland about a winter jacket. And we sold out, this is a global brand, a billion dollar brand, sorry, in the UK, and they sold out their stock. Right? Because we made it about the real life, what we call the 2D architecture, what's going on in somebody's life, why are they doing it? If you understand all the scales, I think I've gone off a bit piste from what you asked me but... Jenny  No, it's fine.  Martin  It's like this. This is just all the, the thing for me is like, if you're trying to take a brand and come up with one advert that serves everybody, then you're wasting your time. And if you've got the opportunity and let's just do the basic domestic TV right, ITV has always had the opportunity for you to do localised advertising. And we just worked with one of the global top five entertainment brands, and they do a lot of children's toys, right. And one of the things that we did was code it altogether so we could see, which were the characters that people were interested in based on different regions in the UK. Right. So it means that when they do their adverts, including TV, they lead with the products that the regions are most interested to, because that's how you trigger attention and get the person looking at it. And that's your job done. That's how engagement works. It's not about the story and the feelings of the brand. It's like, show me something that's relevant to me, do it really quickly, then you can trigger my emotion because now you've got my emotion to purchase, unlike when we're talking about the car advert, just because you make me feel happy doesn't mean that I'm ever going to like your car. Jenny  So it feels like quite a comprehensive approach to making sure that we are engaging with the customer. I mean, do you think people should throw out personas altogether? Martin  Yes, I would love them to. One of the most difficult things that I have is that I was trying to be direct, but in a very civil kind of educational way, right? Because you know, babies and bath waters and all that kind of stuff. But personas is really difficult. Like, if a business is architected most of its staff around personas, and here's my biggest issue with personas, Dave, is 35, he's got an income of 38K. He likes Coventry football club. He's a big Doctor Who fan and he spends lots of time on Instagram, right? That's a persona that we came across last week, right? And and that's describing an individual. And when you do that anyone that then works on that it's over prescribed and it doesn't make any sense. And it doesn't relate to what you're trying to sell them. And one of the things that I said to again, one of the agencies and one of the really big ones, was that they'd spent two years combining seven personality tests into one, right. And it wasn't that long after Cambridge Analytica and I said, well, you've got a risk with Cambridge Analytica, and they said, but here's the actual problem is that I could understand everything, about Jenny's life, right? Just like the personality test. That's what Facebook do. I understand all these things. Jenny once liked her pink umbrella. She'd liked a Mercedes page, she likeed Doctor Who once, you like Coventry FC, right? Behind the scenes Jenny could have liked the Coventry FC page, because they got beat six nil, and she wanted to have a laugh at Coventry Football Club. Right? And she wanted a friend to see that she'd liked it on Facebook, right? And she ticked the pink umbrella because she wanted to show it to a friend, right? Or she looked at a particular car because she absolutely hated it. There's a variety of different reasons, you can't use that those things as assumptions, right? And what we said was that you combine the seven personality tests into one, right? Do you know what your biggest missing thing is? You understand all this stuff about Jenny, but you still don't know how she thinks and feels about the product you're trying to sell her? So what's the point? And that's where we've cut through a lot of stuff you know? Jenny  I want to take you back one step, because you mentioned that you gave a presentation or talk about Uber and human control. And I don't know the story. So I'd love if you could share, because I'm sure it's going to be insightful. Martin  You well I mean, Uber's had a lot of negative press and stuff like this. So let's go this is going back like three or four years before they got all the sexist stuff and all the workers rights and stuff like that. And what I'd identified was that we've got, we've got 300 plus algorithms, right, which is all about the mathematics of decision making, the algebra of decision making, we've got a 296 part problem solving model, right? We call it neuro strategy, because it is about thinking and stuff but really, it's a problem solving model where, as we've taken those 24 academic disciplines, the number one thing, the thing that it opens with, which is such a simple but deep question is what problem you're trying to solve. Right? Such a simple question like everything is solving a problem. A pink umbrella is not necessarily just because it's raining, the pink umbrella is because you want to look cool on your way to work. You want to stand out in the streets of London for example, right? I've don't have a pink umbrella, but I've got an umbrella that makes me stand out because I'm a show off. Right. That's it. That's why I like umbrellas. I don't think I've actually ever erected an umbrella, no matter how hard it's raining. I don't even know if that's the right word. I don't think we talk about erecting umbrellas. You see what I mean? If I buy it because I'm a dandy and I want to show off with the umbrella. But, I've lost my school of thought what are we talking about? Oh, sorry. So and what problem do you solve? This is the beauty of what Uber did. Pre Uber, Jenny and I are sitting in a pub, right? And we're supposed to be going for dinner. Jenny gives me a slightly dirty look. And I'm like, 'Oh god, I'm sorry. I'll call them again'. I call them again. Taxi company- 'Be there in five minutes'. It's like ordering a pizza. Right? I'll be there in five minutes. Come off the phone. Jenny's scowling at me a little bit and I feel bad even though what can I do? I can't control the taxi. Right? But I then start to get bothered because I don't be like being late for things even though it's just a restaurant, right? What Uber did, Martin and Jenny are sitting in exactly the same place. And I hold up my phone and I'm like, 'Look, Jenny, it's two minutes away. Do you want to do a shot?' and Jenny laughs, goes 'Okay, let's do a shot right?' Because now we've got human control. The problem that Uber solved was one of human control. We went from being frustrated and not feeling in control, even though it's just a taxi. What I said was very fair, the frustration didn't know when it was coming didn't feel in control. If you're paranoid, like how many times do you go to almost call the taxi, when you're waiting for the 6am one to go in your two weeks summer holiday, you know, I mean, these are real things. And Uber solved the human control capability. What they marketed on was the cheapness of it, and the cost of it, but actually what the problem they solved was, taking an existing market, and they just did it with more human control. Jenny  Amazing, I hadn't even thought of it like that. And, and actually now, that sort of technology of tracking how far something is away from you, it's actually becoming more mainstream, isn't it in different kind of instances? So I'm just wondering, like for, tell me a bit about who you're helping now, like you mentioned global brands. But you know, which sounds really impressive, but why were they attracted to you? Martin  I think the main thing is that we're giving them answers to questions that each of the individuals, particularly senior personnel, are frustrated about because their personnel or their suppliers, are giving them things that they know is not quite right but they don't know why. And we can answer those difficult 'why' questions? Why does our customer buy? We've even got an algorithm called the science of cool, that uses object mathematics, which sounds fancy, and it's the basis of psychoanalysis and therapy, it's the Freud method. And we've adapted that and said, right, what's the other dimensions about that pink umbrella, right? Martin's not interested in the pink umbrella. But we now know that he will never open an umbrella, he wants a dandy type of umbrella, with a little wooden monkey head on top, which is the one that I do have, right? Right, we find out all those dimensions about what that object means to people. And that's how we know how to communicate to different groups because the meaning is not just the physical product, it's the psychology, it's what it means to people, it could be an impulse product, we've got the mathematics of impulse, which fascinates me, like the average person in the UK spends £81 a week on impulse shopping. Right. And that means that the average person is going to spend that money on a Korean takeaway, on a McDonald's, on a pink umbrella or on a pair of six pairs of Armani jeans based on Costco. So the point is that it's not about how loyal they are to you, it's about whether they've got awareness that their impulse shopping should go into you. Right, because it could go into McDonald's, or it could go into jeans, or it could go into Trinny makeup. Right. It's all that kind of stuff, really? Jenny  And are you saying that this is something that only you can help with? I mean, who comes close to even helping because I can understand what you're saying there was the themes and the holes in the model? You know, how can we make sure that we have a really comprehensive approach to our messaging, our targeting or even how we then further optimise either a campaign or our messaging? You know, I can see that there are, and how do clients make decisions about what they're going to go with and what they don't? If we're kind of looking back at the market research and even questioning whether the right insight went into the development of any kind of messaging or so, who have you come across or what have you come across, that even comes close to doing this?  Martin  The, we haven't found anything where anyone's architected decision making or combined a bunch of different disciplines to understand that right. So we do know that I believe that we're in a very strong, unique position. You've obviously got a lot of people that do specialisms on e-commerce, on optimization and things like that, they tend to be more digital focused, and we work with some of them, because it helps improve the function. But again, what we're giving them is the here's the communication, here's the data, here's the strategy to actually use, and then they can do the technical toolmaking component of it. So I do say that like completely, honestly, that I've been hunting, for years to make sure that, that I'm not just tricking myself, right. But now we're starting to see that tipping point with the large brands, I think we've got the proof that, it's only us that can do it. it's just the question of getting the word out, I think. Jenny  I mean, I know that from what we've discussed in the past, you're pushing on an open door here because a lot of brands have been inviting you in and seeking you out. So I'm sure this is just the tip of the iceberg to how popular this services is but can you share some examples of some of the results you've had so far? Martin  Yeah, so if I was to run you through, so at the moment, we've got two global automotives. One's a car launch and one's like an entire region, re-strategization. One of the US's top retailers, one of the US has top bridal retailers, a lot of global companies like that. I'd love to have more fashion because that's why I started all of this in the first place, because that's what I'd love to do. But our mean average, across 56 case studies of big brands and things, is average save in the region of 26% on advertising and efficiencies, because if you know what people want, when they want it, you also know when not to bother them. So that's a big savings thing. Profit growth, with three to 21%. So 3% per billion dollar company with 62 million, right? So 3% is significant. And then metrics, we average 70 to 120% above industry for like, open rates, click through rates, that kind of stuff. Jenny  Wow, that's pretty impressive. And just explain Martin, like how, at what point brands tend to invite you in? Martin  One of two ways, what we've done is that we're obviously like everybody looking for long term partners and stuff. And if we implement our matrix software, that puts us right in the middle of being able to help them with a little bit of everything right and a little bit of automation. But we do an immediate paid test. So that because a lot of people are frustrated with having to sign up for something that they don't know whether it works or not. Right. And we're fighting against that by saying, well, let's just do an initial paid test and things like that, as well. And we find that that works super well for us as a point of engagement, you know? Jenny  And do you equally work just as well with agencies, because obviously, agencies are the conduit to working on several brands or, you know, multiple brands? And I would have thought that you're kind of like a bit of a secret weapon for an agency to, you know, partner with you in some way that they can then help their clients. So do you work in multiple ways like that? Martin  Yeah, I mean, what we do, when we find the right agency partners, we put our USPs to be their USPs. Like sometimes they'll say, we're working with Gap in the Matrix. And sometimes we just let them white label it we don't mind. When it works super well, when we're really locked in like we did one with a global pharmaceutical, did an addressable market model and a lot of psychology stuff like solving problems that they hadn't been able to solve for years. And it meant that the agency made a lot more money than what we did. We're totally fine with that. So agencies do the markup on our cost, but it generally leads to a lot more business for them. And think about what I said about the brands, the brand strategy or performance branding, right, you don't have to be a branding agency to take positive control of an entire client. And that's what we do is just do the little segments with it. So our testing becomes their testing. And so it tends to work quite well. But, the agency world it's a little bit of shaky ground so I find this is kind of based on trust. So somebody shows us a little bit of leg and we did that in return, and it works out well, then we build a proper partnership. And if we don't, then we don't, we've got a rule inside myself, my two business partners that we don't work on back money. What we mean by that is that, I wouldn't say we're all long enough in the tooth, but probably enough wisdom from failure, which is how I define wisdom, right, the experience of mucking stuff up. If we're not comfortable, or we don't believe that the opportunity is authentic, then we'll just back out of it. Jenny  I totally understand that very, very, yeah, having people that are aligned with your values is so key to business, I think, especially nowadays. Tell me if there's an agency listening thinking, well, I've got both B2B brands that I'm working with and B2C, I mean, as you said, 95% of decision making is emotional. Would you say that, you work with both, either and it works the same? Martin  It works. I mean, we do have more on the B2C side. Right. And that's deliberately part of our strategy. But my three previous businesses have all been B2B. We've deliberately designed our model, particularly the 296 part problem solving to be about B2B as well. So the moment we are doing some account based marketing, a lot of lead generation stuff, a lot of sales meets marketing type activity for  B2B . So it's a very, it's a very open door. It just depends on what type of B2B it is. Jenny  Okay, perfect. And as you said before, I think that, you know, people can invite you in as early as as product idea stage right, to make sure that their strategy is solid from the beginning? Martin  Yeah, we've got them, on our board there's Noelle Dye and Noelle, she's pretty much the godmother of design thinking like she invented it, but it's never been a field that's been credited to a person but she's done so many innovation projects, and she's just got a beautiful mind, you know, somebody that just knows so much but can say things in such a succinct way. And she invented the Swiffer for P&G, which is a half billion a year product. Um, so we've got we've got that range and capability about pre design. And the reason why we created The Science of Cool, which is an offshoot of the algebra we've built, it's called The Rational Mathematics, and the Science of Cool actually allows you to know, don't create this product because you might be able to sell it but it's actually going to be really low in profitable and it's going to push other people away. So if you think about some of your favourite fashion brands, how often do they just have some really dross stuff. And the average for a retailer based on RRP, they should be selling for 83%, average, right. That's how the profit's driven, and a lot of brands are now dropping down to 67%. So you know how it feels like there's a sale on all the time, that's started to manifest itself in people's bottom line. So actually, knowing what to produce and what not to produce is obviously a very, very powerful thing, because we're moving into more of a profit driven world rather than just a revenue driven one, I think. Jenny  On that point, you mentioned a couple of times, He psychology and She psychology? Yeah. Can you explain a little bit about that? Because I think it's a fascinating sort of interpretation of how you've seen the changes over the last few years. Martin  So just to give a bit of background, we've looked at every variable that affects how people think. Right? And a lot of this is unconscious, right? So do we know that if you take, so we've done the culture of every country in the world, right, so there's one of the variables about how people think, so the reason why British people for non British people are difficult to deal with, is that we've got a really high individualism score and we actually map very similar to the United States. However, consciously, we think that we're conservative, and we say that we're conservative, but our actions don't match what we say. And this is why people find it difficult to deal with British people, right? That's one example of these conditions that we're not aware of. Why would we know that right? And He versus She psychology is very much a big brand issue. So we're not talking about gender, we're talking about a thinking model. Right, and He psychology is defined as lacking emotion, tends to be quite practical, trends be quite numbers focused, right? She psychology, again a thinking model, not just the gender, She psychology is more emotional intelligence, the relationship between things connecting the dots. She psychology is storytelling, is the golden age of advertising. And yet the vast majority of brands are caught in He psychology model - car, metal engine, car metal engine, right? Practical, numbers oriented, lacks emotion, right, until you get to the TV that makes people feel happy, even though they don't want to buy the car. So when we talk about equality in the world, She psychology is naturally more present in women, but it's not an absolute. And I'm really careful about how I say that, because previous things that I've done, I've actually been, I've had some negative messages from women talking about this type of stuff. And I'm actually I mean it, it's the opportunity for how brands should be behaving as a thinking model. For women that have naturally have emotional intelligence and men, you're good storytellers. And that's what the brands should be doing. We need to go back to the past with a little bit of influence, and using technology and digital in the correct ways. But it's a She psychology driven world, it always will be, we just lost touch with that a little bit. And I think it's, you know, a little bit too much capitalism. I'm all for money. But if you make that your most dominant object, you're not going to win. Jenny  No, thank you for explaining that. This really, I had never come across that until I heard you talk about it on another on another podcast. So, Martin, I mean, what needs to change now, for brands? I mean, what would you advise? I mean, there's agencies listening to this thinking, Oh, my goodness, sounds like something that I would really, you know, I need to know more about or, but in the future, what what do you think needs to change, with the way that we are operating? Martin  I think that, I think it's about how we think about what we do. I think it's for any agency personnel to just take them back to what their, what their dreams were, you know, when they first started out, when they had that initial success when it wasn't just about awards  or trying to be more than what they wanted to be. I think it's about understanding your customers. And what does that actually mean? If you understand your customers, you understand the decision making. And you can learn who your customers are through language, through dialect, through accent, you can speak to them clearly more directly. Think about every touchpoint that you've got with them. Rather than just trying to shove product down our necks and price down our necks. The really ironic thing is that when we focus on price and product, it ends up costing us profit and product sales. Do you think that's the kind of either needs? So I encourage any agency personnel apart from obviously hiring us, is just to go back to that, a little bit of dream state with a little bit more accuracy about who is your customer and how you're going to serve them? Because bias is the biggest problem and in everything in life, I find that time and time again. Jenny  I presumed that that was a big part of your research, wasn't it, bias? Martin  Yeah, I mean, it's everywhere. Creative bias, assumptive bias bias within bias of research, bias within biases, sentiment analysis. You've got a lot of disciplines trying to prove that their thing is the absolute answer. And then it's picked up by the person at the brand or the agency, because that's their job, as the absolute answer. Right? And whenever you see some of the keywords like, this is likely to mean, that's when you're in trouble. Because it goes from this is likely to mean, to be in a fact, to be in a strategy. Jenny  Powerful stuff. Okay, so I'm thinking about now agencies and brand owners listening to this thinking, this all makes sense, I can see that there's an opportunity here for me to maybe look at what I'm doing to optimise. Who are the best people to contact you? And how can people contact you? Martin  So our rule with agencies is we want to speak to people that are either heads over C level, depending on the size of the agency. And that's just being direct because we deal with big ticket brands, and we know the decision making level that we need to speak at. So that's just the reality of life, right, and from lessons that we've learned, but I'm always up for any kind of problem as a discussion. But that's fun for me, what's your problem, what you're working on? Well, here we go. Here's some insights that will help you but we can't work with you, or this would be amazing, let's work together. Jenny  Fantastic. Well, Martin, honestly, I mean, is there anything else that you can share with the creative industry, or agencies in general, any piece of advice or pieces of advice or words of wisdom before we go? Martin  I think at the end of the day, forget about the word mathematics in front of it. And even psychology in itself, right? Philosophy is like the forefather, foremother of everything, right? It's always been about how do people think and how do we define the world around us? And that's what we need to return to. And it's difficult in the modern world. It's difficult for all of us, because we're being forced to do things quicker, faster, cheaper, right? What I'm saying is when you slow down, you get things to be better, faster and quicker, right? You've just got to slow down and give yourself a moment to think about who you're serving and what you do and don't know or what you're assuming that you know. Jenny  Nice parting words, Martin, honestly, this has been fantastic. Time has just whizzed by. I'm very conscious of your time, we've we've hit the hour. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. And no doubt I'm sure, you'll get some inquiries from agencies who want you in their corner. So thank you so much. Martin  Thanks for having me on Jenny.

Transcript: Jenny  So Nadine, welcome to the show. Would you mind spending a few minutes just talking about you what you do, how you help companies? Nadine  Thanks for having me. And yeah, Project Management On Demand is a project management consultancy. We work in the digital space. And we work on all sorts of different projects within agencies, ad agencies, but also client side. The type of projects can vary from content management systems to e-learning to augmented reality to apps, so anything online digital displays also some above the line work as well. The four core areas of project management on demand are on demand project management help. So somebody may say we have a project, we've got three days a week in the budget to service that project. And then we service it Monday to Friday, nine to five, but within that budget, and then if we don't use the time, we don't bill it. Full Time project management, obviously, we also coach and mentor project managers or groups around project managers. So as I said to you previously, sometimes account managers who may be on smaller projects, but need to have an understanding of those fundamentals around running a project successfully. And we also do process consultancy where we come into businesses, and we look at how they currently run and manage their projects with regards to systems, the team, the team structure, processes, type of project, type of clients, and then we can help work with those businesses to create a roadmap to then go in and then help them over time, better run and manage projects. And for me, the core thing about that is a happy team, but also better, bigger margins within the agency.  Jenny  I think it's fantastic, and such a comprehensive range of services that you offer. And I'm so glad that we found each other. And I'm very grateful to Lucy Snell for introducing us because people do come to me and say, do you do project management training? And or, do you know, any project managers? So I always kind of send them your way. And what would you say is the biggest problem that companies come to you to fix? Nadine  It's not always a fix. I mean, sometimes we do get flown into crisis projects. So we just have to dive straight in and rescue which is always fun. But it's different things. It may be that it's a smaller agency, and they don't actually have any project managers. So they might kind of go, we've got big projects come in, have you got somebody that can help and just come in and sort of start helping us? And then obviously, the other thing is about process. And I think we can talk about that a bit later, what with everything that's happened recently, in the last year, people are having to work a bit smarter in different ways, but not in the office kind of going right, I'll finish that in a minute, I'll hand it over. So everybody has to be a bit smarter on the systems and processes. So a lot more of that work is coming in these days, Jenny  I can imagine I know how busy you are. And tell me because I know your background is in project management, obviously, that's why you're so skilled and proficient in what you do now. But tell me what you think are the the core skills of a really great project manager? Nadine  Well obviously to be organised is a fantastic thing. To be a really good communicator, that obviously really helps. And that's with your internal team, and with all levels within that team. And then obviously client side with stakeholders and senior management people. But also that level of just actually liking people and getting on with people. Because if you're not that sort of people person, then you're not going to be able to get the best out of your team when running a project. Good under pressure is obviously you know, a key as well. Negotiation skills that obviously come with, you know, the more years under your belt that you have, and financial acumen as well. Jenny  It's a lot. It's a big ask, actually for this role, isn't it? Because they are the linchpins of the agency. They're kind of the engine room, aren't they? They're making sure that everything happens. And where do you think I mean, you have agencies approaching you all the time and companies approaching you all the time. Where do you think companies get it wrong with project management? What do you kind of typically see, and you think, oh, here we go again, like what are some of the things? Nadine  Well, some some bad scoping. I mean bad scoping is an absolute typical one. I think it always circles background to what is your process? What's your process so if you're going in to, if you have a requirement in and they say we need this, you will probably,  should do discovery phase to understand exactly what this is before we then go into your full scoping. Because there's always going to be things coming up that you're understanding the clients understanding might be different that could be out of the blue, or what we thought you were doing the copywriting, and you know, you think we're doing the copywriting. So scoping is fundamental. Not being firm with your clients can also cause you a bit of a cropper, of course, you have to be fair and build that relationship. And that's where we'll talk about later about how the project management and the account manager can work nicely together. And change control management. So having the experience to understand where your team is, where the project is, going back to your statement of work, which says this is what we're doing, to then say to the client, this is out of scope, now we can do it for you, but we need to make addendums to that document, and then we need to charge you more money. So that's really key, I think a lot of the time, that's about confidence as well, because the client might say we've got fixed budget. So, okay, so we've costed it to this, say we might have some contingency in it. So I think it's really key to, I mean, obviously, you have to have the experience to do that. And you have to have the competence to do that. But that's one of the really key things that needs to be kept on top as a project manager, but you would, and you should work very closely with your account manager on that. Jenny  You said one of the key things is process. And I'm sure, like myself, you work with all different types of agencies, for example, from small just starting up to big established, and everything in between. I think process, like you say is really key, isn't it? What do you advise smaller agencies that are perhaps, you know, 2,3,4,5,6 people that are just on that growth trajectory? And they are looking to establish process like how important, is it? And maybe I'm putting you on the spot a little bit here. But if they're looking for recommendations for a good project management system, do you have like, go to systems that you say, this one, Nadine  So, a couple of questions there. So with regards to process, every agency has a process, no matter how small or how large you are, it's just at the beginning stages, when you're 5,6,7 you might not physically written it down. But you're such a tight team, that you all know what's going on and who's doing what, when even whether you may not have a project plan or you know, but you will, you will know how you work. The key thing about process and implementing it is when that team is going to grow larger, also, because then there's too many people to just kind of say, right, I finished that, and then I send it over, I'll be ready for the next bit. But the other thing is that also, as you grow larger, you'll be taking people in who've been in other work environments and agencies, and they all have their way of doing it. So they'll kind of think that their way is the right way, or the way that it should be done. So that can then cause problems. So if you can then have you know, your playbook as such, for when people join the agency today, this is how we work. This is what we do. This is our culture, this is our process, these are the systems, then you're on the way to being able to manage projects in a more successful way without things falling down somewhat. Jenny   Yeah. Nadine  Regards systems, it's, the thing is, there's so many systems out there, I got asked by a client, I think she emailed, she always emails me at the weekends, and she said, you know, we're thinking about monday.com what you think? And so we've had conflicting comments that monday.com some say it'sbrilliant, some say it's not so brilliant. And the same with all of the other programmes and systems that are out there. And it really is. I advised her to take three projects, trial that system for a month, have one key person who was going to, you know, look after that and lead it, to actually upload the information you need, start pulling reports and then to manage the team around that. And then after a month, you know, sit down what's good, what's not good, what worked, what didn't work, and then move on to the next one to see. Because different people in different agencies want different types of reports and they want different things. They want to forecast differently. They want to project differently, they want different project information out of those systems. So we do go into businesses and work with them on the how are we working, what's good, what's bad, what do you need, and then we can like help, you know, identify a system that will work. Of course then a lot of people go off and try and create their own system sometimes which is, because then they can tailor it exactly to what they want. Jenny  I can imagine that it's sort of, you know, it's dependent on the agency itself and how they want to work exactly. I mean, you mentioned as well... Nadine  I mean, because, you know, for smaller agency, it's just six, an Excel spreadsheet's going to be fine for you, you know, but then if you want to scale and then there's 50 of you, there's no way that's going to work. So it's, it's all the different variables.  Jenny  Well, that's interesting that you can offer advice in that area. I mean, you mentioned monday.com, I've heard monday.com sort of bandied around a lot. What are the other kind of top three systems that you hear a lot, that agencies tend to use, particularly ones that are thinking about scaling fast, and they want to set themselves up from the beginning for success? Nadine  I'd like so there's so many I wouldn't want to just say, I mean, a lot of my clients, they use JIRA, workflowmax. Asana, obviously, loads of people who work in a bit more of an agile fashion are using Trello. There's just so many out there that it's just it's, I wouldn't recommend one over the other, because they fit differently to each business. Jenny  You're right, actually, I mean, even as a consultant myself, I started off using Asana, and couldn't quite really get the hang of it. But we've moved over to Trello and I'm running it really easy. So, I suppose it's down to the individual as well. And you mentioned before about the difference between the am and the pm role, I'd love to kind of dive in to this with you, because it's something that I've been reflecting on a lot recently, because I have a lot of account managers coming through my training programmes, most of whom actually work in that hybrid role. They're trying to manage projects and grow accounts as the traditional account management role. And I think there's upsides and downsides for both. So I'd love to kind of get your perspective on maybe differences, similarities, what's the overlap? How do they work together? You know, what, what's your experience Nadine? Nadine  I mean, I think over the years, working in, you know, ad agencies over the years and digital agencies, I think there's, there's always a big trend of, let's get rid of all project managers, we just have account managers now, then and then it's, let's get rid of all the account managers and let's have project managers now, oh let's try the two together. So and it's a, it's a trend over the years that we tend to see, isn't it? For me, I feel that an account manager and a  project manager should really work together. And they should have a really good partnership together, because the account manager doesn't want to be getting involved in all the nitty gritty of the project. But at the same time, they're there to, you know, stroke the client be, you know, upsell with the client. Instead, they need, they do need to have that project understanding, but it's, it doesn't, I've seen it before, it doesn't work. And I think a client knows as well, if an account manager and project manager don't get on. And they fundamentally should be partnering up on on working on an account. Likewise, as I said earlier, you know, a good project manager should be able to with their team, be able to look at a project, maybe a developer would go crumbs, we could do that. That'd be amazing. I'm the project manager, if you've got a good relationship with the client could go back and go through all of this, you know, what do you think? Or, depending on how its structured, go back to the account manager with a bit of a brief and kind of a look, with all of this, you know, can you take it to the client? So, all round, it's about giving a really good client service. But it's definitely, definitely for me about working hand in hand together. Jenny  And from what you've said, like the skill set, you're kind of assuming that those roles are different, you know, the project manager role and the account manager role, which I agree is the ideal scenario. It's just that still I find agencies have this account manager that's expected to do both. And, you know, I don't know about you, but I found that you either have a leaning towards one skill set or another.  Nadine  Yes.  Jenny  You know, but I haven't fully formed my views on this, but I'm starting to feel quite strongly about it. And I'm quite, it's difficult when I'm training account managers that also have to do the day to day delivery, and all of that, that entails. I'm teaching them a skill to, you know, ways to understand the client's business more, to you know, see where the opportunities is to add more value. But that feels like an extra thing for them to do because quite frankly, they're just in the fire, in the weeds of projects. It's not always the case, but it can be that kind of fact. Nadine  It depends on the agency doesn't it and it depends on the size. And also it depends, all of a sudden if a project comes in and the project manager hasn't got capacity, somebody's got to run it. So maybe if it's a small one, then the account manager can run it. But sometimes, where that then becomes a problem is with an account manager is looking after that relationship, and the project manager is looking after that project, they can, you know, if a problem happens within the project, and the account manager is managing it and got to sort of flag that, and then trying to, you know, keep that relationship, brilliant, the two can butt slightly. So this is a tricky one, it is a tricky one. I mean, we do work with some agencies where we work with account managers to just give them a bit of sort of project management background and sort of training and mentoring just so they can fit in with the agency and do what they need to do properly. But, they are two different skill sets. And they are two different hats. And so I don't think all account managers even want to be project managers.  Jenny  Have you seen any trends? Like when when you said earlier, I was laughing to myself, because you're right, like there are these different trends? I was approached by an agency in the last few months saying that they didn't agree with account managers. And, they they used to have these brilliant accounts, but they kind of over time lost them. And the two things, you know, and so they were looking at reinstating account management, again, as a function. So I just do think that there are trends and ebbs and flows. And do we really need these people on what really, what's the value that they're bringing? So I mean, I know that's a big topic in itself. But it's really interesting to hear your thoughts on this just another question, because a lot of the account managers are starting to separate the role. So what advice would you give to an account manager that might feel a little bit threatened by the fact that well, I've always owned the client relationship. And now I've got a project manager that's come on the scene, because we're splitting the roles, you know, yay, for me, but actually, I feel a bit threatened by the fact that are we both going to contact the client, how does that kind of work? Nadine  No, and again, that needs to be defined. And that should be good job descriptions, and all of that kind of thing. But I think an account manager needs to understand that, number one, a project manager will be moved from account to account to account to account, probably on working on all sorts of different projects with different clients, and unless you're in a massive ad agency, and you know, you're assigned to that account, and that's who you work with. But the roles and responsibilities are very different. You know, the project manager is managing the risks log, managing a shedule, managing resourcing, doing progress reports, and, you know, creating a statement of work. So in all of those things an account manager wouldn't want to do and has no interest in doing, a project manager doesn't take client out for lunch, the account manager does! Jenny  We get to do the great stuff. I think it's a really big topic. And and I'm going to be speaking to a few people on the podcast about this. And I've just, it is a great topic for me just through observing, you know, the struggles, the fors, the against of this hybrid versus separation. And I don't know whether, you know, the separation is more, it was more traditional in digital agencies anyway. But the more traditional sort of offline agencies that are now fully digital, it's they're making that transition. And that's why they're suddenly separating the two. Nadine  A panel would be good, you could do a panel of account managers and see that and see where, get the opinions from both sides and sort of have a bit of a debate about it.  Jenny  That's a really good idea. Thank you. And I'd like to talk to you about the way agencies work. So I know Agile, Waterfall, you know, people there's a lot of debate about which one's better. And then Wagile, which is something that I didn't sort of I didn't even know that was a term, but I got you know, I can see what that means. But can you talk me through maybe the the fors and against for each of those kinds of ways of working. Nadine  So Agile, you know, software development, intuitive. Solutions evolve as you go on. It's really good. I mean, it works really well on product based projects. Very much the ideal is that you have a pot of money, and you're working towards products, you have your team and you just keep iterating, iterating to make this thing better, and then you can release and then come back, release and then come back. Waterfall is a bit more I suppose, old fashioned, whereas you have to do each stage at a time and you can't start one stage until you finish the next stage. I'm a bit old fashioned, but you know, all the more younger, trendy people in my team are way over in the Agile sort of camp. Wagile is where you do some of the stages of the project in a step order. So you might do your discovery phase, if say if it's a website you might do discovery phase first, where you do your initial wireframes, and then your design and then a tech spec, and then a functional spec. And then once all of those you've got, the client can sign all of those off and say, yes, that is what I want, you can then move into an Agile fashion for your field development and new testing, you know, pushing design in there doing two week sprints, or whatever it may be. I think a lot of agencies have have taken elements of it. So they'll do daily stand ups, they will have the boards where they move things along, they'll do it in two week sprints. So I think a lot of agencies have taken elements that suit them and suit their projects, which I think is the right way to go. The one thing sometimes is that clients don't understand how to work in an Agile fashion. So it may be that you work in an Agile fashion internally, but not outwardly to the clients. And also, a lot of the time, a client has got a fixed budget, fixed deadline and a fixed idea of what it is that they want. So you can work development and testing within your Agile phase and that really suits teams and you know, I think it's great. But at the end of the day, you've got that fixed thing that needs to be delivered. So hence Wagile. Jenny  Thank you for explaining that you've explained it so, so well. I was just thinking about like costing and your right that just as you were talking, I was thinking the client usually wants to know, right, I've got this in my budget that I've got approved from my C suite. And that's what I've got. And I was just wondering, how do you even cost Agile? Or, you know, how do you cost it up and, in your experience, if you found that one is kind of easier to kind of predict what the profitability is going to be on a certain project? Have you got any kind of view on that? Nadine  If you do a discovery phase beforehand, and you get all of those deliverables, so when it goes from sales into production, and you do you know, your wireframes safe, we just take a website, for the ease of it, of wireframes, your initial sort of design might do three designs, cut it down to one to two routes, then into one, then do your tech spec and func spec. You know, for the end of that, you should have a full idea of exactly what it is you're going to deliver. And then the basis of that when you then move into production, you do another statement of work. And then you can cost out, we know based on this design, on these amount of pages and on building those we know development wise, we're going to need this amount of time. And then there's a ratio that you then say, the amount of development days we've got here, we can do a percentage on testing and then we can put this sensitive project management. So it should be a bit clearer. I spoke to a new client the other day, I think he's probably about my age as well. So we were having exactly this conversation. And he said I keep going around and thinking is it because I'm old fashioned. It's just and I said what I just don't think that works for your agency for the projects you're running. So again, and that's why we go into places and do the process consultancy, because it's not one fits all it is based on who the people are within the agency. And if you've got a very development led agency, they will definitely want to work in a different way to a very design led agency. So it really can can change. No way's right. Jenny  No and just as you're talking there, I'm thinking that's a really good investment of time, isn't it? To get someone like yourself that can see the bigger picture that's experienced enough to see how it's worked in different agencies and different because as you say, every agency has a different nature of the types of projects they're running, different preferences, different sort of traditions in how they run. So that sounds like a no brainer to me. That's a really good use of time I would have thought. You mentioned you touched on this earlier Nadine about remote working. And funnily enough, I was going to tell you, I've got very good friend that is a project manager and freelance project manager. And I remember like we were quite close, we talked quite a lot. And she often said to me, because I say 'Oh, someone wants some work done. Are you free?' And inevitably she wasn't because she's so popular. But the distance from her was like she's in North London and it was in South London. And the agency said no, she's too far away. And this was only like, I don't know, obviously before last year, but now things have so changed because everyone's doing you know work remotely. So what have you seen in the world of project management in terms of everyone working remotely? What have been some of the advantages and challenges? Nadine  I know everybody's happy to not be spending the money on the train fare. And home at eight o'clock at night because we live in Brighton, but I think I mean, a lot of agencies are actually, you know, they were there anyway. So they'd have that hybrid of not everybody having to be in the office every day. So I think that was it was coming anyway. But what it did was it just slammed everybody into it, didn't it? I've been on another panel and talked about this, it's so difficult. Some people, me included, I'm really sociable, I love being in an office, I love to be with people, I love to go to the pub on a Friday afternoon, you know, all of that social interactions, really, you know, I love and yet I spoken to a lot of other people saying, I just love it, I don't want to go anywhere, you know, I'm really happy with this. So I think there's going to be a hybrid of a bit of both. And I think that's great. I think what's really come out of this and we've got busy, thankfully, because of it, is because it's been realised that you really need to be solid on your communications within your team, you really need to have systems and processes really set up and everybody needs to understand them because you're not together. So people just could be doing randomly different things without even knowing that the other person doesn't know that or should be doing that. So I think that's what's really come out of it is the need for really solid communication and a re-look in some in agencies, things to look at the processes and systems that they have and do what they did have, does that now work? Because it's not in all cases now. Jenny  And maybe did you, have you found that some agencies were relying too heavily on having people in the same room talking to each other and realise suddenly, gosh, you know, that the communication isn't as fluid and therefore, oops, the system's just falling down in some way? Nadine  Massively. Yes. I mean, I listened to a talk yesterday, and it was exactly about this. And there was a creative guy on there and he said, we just miss going into that room with all those post it notes and sticking things up and bouncing ideas off each other. And he said, they have found that difficult, so they will go back in to do those things. But I think also a lot of people have a lot of people have downsized on their office, because they realise they just don't need that space now. So it's a yeah, it's a great big topic of conversation, I find it really interesting how everything's gone at the moment. But definitely, there's a definite need to be really solid on on how projects run from project management perspective because if you're on your own and you're not communicating properly, things can quickly move out of control. Jenny  It has that kind of knock on effect about you know, availability as well, doesn't it? You know, at the beginning, I think some cultures, some agency cultures where there wasn't a high level of trust, maybe, or maybe the senior managers have never worked with people working from home all the time and it's so strange. It's like, well, how am I going to know they're working? Or, you know, and how am I going to know that you're available? And that there's all of that has had to be established hasn't it? And I think there's been a bit of a mindset change from a senior leadership point of view, that's what I've seen, is that my gosh, you know, we've actually made this work. And it's absolutely fine. I remember reading a book called Drive by Dan Pink years ago, have you ever read that book, don't know if you've heard of it? And at the time of reading, it was all about this new way of working, where you give the person the task and say, 'look, I don't care, where you work from, or how you get it done, it's just got to be done by this time', and someone just does it in their own time. And I remember thinking at the time, that's so future thinking, but actually, it's becoming more of a reality, I think. And talking about kind of the future of where it's going, what do you see changing or changes coming up for the world of project management? Nadine   I see us continuing on, to be honest with you. I mean, we've been going for 12 years now. The reason we're called Project Management On Demand is because initially, it was just me. I think, from a traditional standpoint, everybody used to think you need a project manager, you need one full time, but actually, hence the 'on demand', you don't always need a project manager full time. So from a cost effective way that's really good. And I think that could be said the same for account managers working in that way. And it's definitely the same for, say a designer because they may create a design it's then delivered and then the client has to review it for five days. So they've got five days free, if they're not, you know, within an agency, so they'll work on different things. So I think definitely flexibility. I think also, I think what a lot of this done, as well as made people realise that, you know, I know a lot of parents now that I like, I travelled all the time, every day, and I didn't see my kids and I didn't eat dinner with my wife, or, you know, my husband, whatever it may be. So I think there's a lot more flexibility and wanting of not just full on work, work, work work, you know. So I think that's, that's a really positive thing. Jenny  I agree with you, just as you were saying that, it struck me that when I was working full time, like I've been in the industry since the early 90s, I know you're a bit younger than me, I don't know if you've been anywhere, but lots of years. But I remember watching because I don't have kids, but I used to see some of my peers and my friends leaving the industry because they had children, and not being able to get back into the industry because it just wasn't acceptable to work part time, from home at all, and no flexibility. And I, I used to think how sad that was, because really experienced very, very good people were leaving the industry in droves, just because they'd hit that, you know, moment in time where they were gonna have a family. So I think that's a real positive. Nadine  Obviously, I set the business up because I had a child. So I was working in London in an ad agency, and I couldn't go back. So it's exactly that. And then today, I've got a lot of mums who don't want to work full time because, you know, looking after the house, they've got the school run, some of them have got, I've got some dads as well. So and then I've also got, I've got people who will really be quite entrepreneurial, so they're setting up their own businesses and they need two or three days a week to do that yet, they'll kind of say, 'Well, I need a bit of a plugin'. So then I'll say, 'Okay, well, I've got this on demand on and you could do that three days over the course of the week but still give you the time and flexibility to set up your business', or to only work part time but earn a reasonable rate, because a lot of those people like saying they've got all that experience. Yet they don't want to go into an office every day for full hours, it's just the whole thing is changing. And I love it. And I it's right. Jenny  I think so too. And I'm quite excited by the prospect because funnily enough, like at the end of last year I was setting my whole business up to run remotely, because I have a vision for me working three months of the year somewhere else. But there was always that doubt in the back of my mind that people were going to accept doing training remotely. You know, I know I've been using Zoom for years, and I've seen that you have that real intimacy, with what I do in the coaching and stuff. But there's always that thing about do you actually need someone in the room training everybody, you know, physically? So I had that doubt but this pandemic is just proof, as you said, we've just accelerated forward 10 years. So it can be done. And it has been done. Nadine  I think one of the people on this panel yesterday was talking, they were in a co-working, they own the co-working space in Brighton. And I know a lot of the agencies that we work with have let go of their offices, and they're using some of the co-working spaces, because they can either just have a smaller space in there, or they can, you know, meet in there for meetings and meet their clients in there. Well the co-working space is so good these days. So yeah, I'll just say the whole landscape's changed. And it's, it's exciting I think. Jenny  It is the flexibility and as you said earlier on about the overhead, you know, if you were investing in an office building, that now in the future doesn't have to be the case, you know, you can actually reduce your overhead. So, yeah, I know it's been tough, and it's still tough, but there are a lot of upsides. Nadine  It was a massive key about, you know, getting everybody together, being face to face, you know, working as a team, you know, there's nothing that can replace that. Jenny  Yeah, people have missed that and we've all done in certain ways. I know that a lot of agencies that are listening to this have, you know, micro businesses, they're very small businesses, as I said before about looking to scale. At what point in the agency's growth, do you think it's essential to have a project manager? Nadine  Again, I was thinking about this question. It depends on the makeup of the agency. And it also depends on the type of the projects. Social agencies, you know, the guys that run those projects they sell, they self run and self manage. So you might not necessarily even need a project manager but for me in a sort of a smaller agency, anywhere between six to eight people that might be the pull point to start having a project manager in because you think you know, there could be five projects ongoing in an agency at that point of about 30K each, say, for example, and that's quite a lot for the team to run, if that person is also doing the design or doing the operations in the business, so it just gets to that stretch point where the other guy's are over capacity and they need that help they need that assistance. Jenny  I can imagine once you get a good project manager in place, it really makes a difference to everything, doesn't it? And actually, that's where your services step in, really, isn't it? Because if you are on that growth point, and as you said before, most agencies run by project by project basis, the agency of record is kind of diminishing more and more. So, you do have the ability to have someone on a interim basis to see how things go, what a difference it makes to everybody else, so that they can focus on what they do well, and then take it from there.  Nadine  So yeah, I mean, 10 years ago, I worked for a really cool agency they were an augmented reality agency, and I didn't know anything about augmented reality 10/11 years ago. And so they needed help. So I went into start working on the projects. And then naturally, that was, well, you haven't got a document for this, we can't run this without having that. And then that came to to well, we need to record this and we need a process for this, and we need a system for this. So I worked with them about three days a week over the course of the week and started running the projects, implementing the process. And then it was very obvious that they really liked having a project manager. So then I did a job ad for them, interviewed the first tranche of project managers for them, then said, this one is a good one, you know, you meet them now. And then the project manager started and then I handed over and I rolled myself out. And then if they were ever overcapacity, I'd go in and run the odd project here or there. But yeah, so it's a nice way of doing it because you, if you haven't taken on a project management before, you might not understand exactly what that role is, and how it's gonna benefit you. But if you can try it out, you know, that's the best way and then there's no risk to the business as such. Jenny  Fantastic. Honestly, I just think that's an absolute no brainer. Can you think of anything that we haven't covered Nadine that would be useful for anyone to know, like any tips or advice to help agencies run their projects more smoothly? Nadine  But for any of those smaller agencies? You know, I'm happy to have a chat with anybody anyway. But for any of those smaller agencies, who may not be doing documentation as they should be to cover them, then, you know, that is something really to consider. So the statement of work - What is the project?  Why I'm doing it? Who are the stakeholders? What's the cost? What are the risks? Progress reporting? I always bang on about that. I think it's really important. You know, what did we do last week? What are we doing this week? What are any blockers, what are any risks? I worked in an agency once and the client was a lawyer in a law firm, we're building a new website for them. And the chap in the law firm, was a bit of a junior, and I could see that he's struggling. And I kept saying to him, you know, I think we need to take this high, I think need help. And then in the end, it looked like everything had fallen down. And of course, it's my fault, isn't it as the project manager. So the account manager came knocking on the door? So I said, No. And they said, what's going on with this project. So I zipped up 20 weeks worth or 16 weeks worth of progress reports and said, this is what's going on. So that's why I'm an advocate for that and just fully, you know, need that time sheeting. Some agencies don't do it these days, I advocate that you should, how do you know whether you're hitting the budget we've put to it? How do you know how big your margin is? You know, where did you go wrong in that costing? And what could you do better next time, because the main key is you want to make a margin to make a profit, to be able to go on some nice holidays. So there's all of that. So we've also got a whole set of documentation. So all of those documents, we've got risk logs, and all of those kind of things, that for small agencies, it's not a system, you know, it's not a great big monday.com but it's a Word template, or it's an Excel spreadsheet. So if anybody wanted any of those, then I'm more than happy to send those over.  Jenny  Brilliant. I think that's a fantastic offer. And I can imagine that's lots of agencies listening, thinking, oh, yeah, we really need that. Nadine  So even if they if they have one, you know, you could just take the statement of work and compare one to the other. And we're going to put that in because that's really important.  Jenny  So, yes, the wording on some of this is really useful, isn't it? So let's compare what we've got and see if we've ticked all the boxes. Brilliant, Nadine. Well, thank you so much. Where can people get hold of you? How can people contact you and who are the best people to contact you? Nadine  So people reach me on my email, which is nadine@projectmanagementod.co.uk. And the website is Project Management OD.co.uk. I'm on LinkedIn, obviously, as Nadine Schofield. The people who should contact?  We work with, well, yesterday, I met with a chief technical officer because he needed a programme manager. So you know, he got in contact with me. Business owners, head of project management head of PMO. Project managers in general, I'm always looking for really good project managers. So I'm really keen if anybody wants to come on board, or if their circumstances change where they don't want to work full time, and then want to work on demand, and I'm always looking for good people as well. So the other end of it as well. Absolutely. And that includes Project Coordinators as well. Jenny  Great. Okay, well, we'll put all of those links in the show notes so that people can get hold of you quite quickly and easily. Honestly, Nadine, this has been absolutely fantastic. Thank you for sharing so many tips and advice for other agencies. And yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure. So thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it.