Somehow we got Tracey Halvorsen to join the podcast again! Tracey is the CEO at Adeo (https://helloadeo.com/) and shares her thoughts on a lifetime of client services experience, her thoughts on value pricing, the value of relationships, and the secret to a long and successful career: You gotta listen to learn more!

Warren Wilansky is founder and President of Plank, our favorite Montreal web design and dev agency, and he joins us this week to explain how to grow an agency over 25 years. 25 years!!! It's super simple, it's all about relationships. Don't think about leads or accounts or marketing or sales. Cultivate authentic relationships and BOOM you're an overnight 25-year-long success story. Warren unpacks mentorship among team members, planning for a post-Warren & Steve Plank, baseball as biz dev, LinkedIn buttsniffing and more.

Ryan Irelan reminded me of this quote he heard on Julia Luis Dreyfus's podcast Wiser Than Me when she interviewed Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird, who attributed it to Teddy Roosevelt. That's how information works these days btw. Comparison shopping and Keeping Up With the Jones focuses on outcomes instead of on the journey. This week we talk about ways to mitigate the risks of comparing your accomplishments to others, and instead learn to focus on the journey and the lessons to be learned along the way. Also a good joke about zombie apocalypses!

From embracing outdoor life to navigating the messiness of business, this podcast explores various topics such as transitioning a distributed company back to an office setting, the complexity of systems, adapting in business development, and turning vulnerabilities into benefits for success. With insights on flexibility, continuous learning, and the value of deep inquiry, listeners are encouraged to evolve and innovate in dynamic environments.

How do you grow your most valuable accounts? Is that the PM's job? Do you need account managers? What can we learn from an ad agency's account strategy playbook? This episode we go HARD into account leadership. We share recommendations and best practices. Start here: Establishing process is an act of generosity, and when it comes to defining process first dog to the bowl wins. To kick off the episode, with EightShapes closing doors, Richard and Joe discuss the life expectancy of agencies against the back drop of their 18 year run. Would owners be happier and make better decisions if they embrace the idea that client services are finite businesses that end? A services business is fulfilling, and exhausting. Ending an agency doesn't have to be a failure if owner's embrace a business lifespan attitude from the beginning. Let's get into it.

Exploring sales strategies in various contexts, evolving and adapting through tactical approaches, innovating with playfulness and creativity to outshine competitors, engaging stakeholders like partners, and utilizing pre-meeting intelligence for strategic conversations.

Exploring the challenges of unintentionally hybrid teams, the podcast dives into remedies for identity friction, the need for early action, and dispelling myths. Topics include transitioning to hybrid/distributed teams post-COVID, navigating frustration and self-reflection, revitalizing workspaces, aligning work preferences, fostering value in hybrid environments, and embracing vulnerability in business.

Building out from Richard's Extreme Agency Playbook we dive into the issue of co-located and distributed teams. More accurately we really dig into the current state of many teams: Unintentionally Hybrid. COVID created an industry of unintentionally hybrid teams and we're only starting to deal with the aftermath. While enterprises are forcing a Return To Office policy agency owners can't convince, beg, or bribe staff to come back into the office. The moral of the story is in-person interaction is worth fighting for. You may need to manufacture it more deliberately if you're a distributed team, but the value remains irreplaceable. How can your remote team draw on the benefits of in-person interactions? What experiments can we conduct to test the viability of different team structures? What is the underlying danger teams that were once co-located, but now distributed need to be scared of? Let's do it.

How to run an agency? Richard has notes. Colocation over distributed. 12 year strategies. Apprenticeships. No bonuses, no profit share, no exits. Suburban campuses over city offices. This episode packs a lot of heat. We're kicking off a miniseries within the podcast this week. Over the next few weeks Richard will share his playbook for the ideal agency, and how teams can make incremental progress towards his optimal state. This week we're starting with the optimal, no-constraints, 10/10 agency playbook to have an idea our conversations are aimed at. Over the next few weeks we'll explore ways to map towards this optimal agency, but it starts here with Team, Business Models, and Incentives.

Richard meets his new best friend Jay Fanelli in this episode of You Can't Lose! Jay is an agency owner, e-commerce company owner, and enterprise design leader with a unique perspective on how teams and businesses grow and evolve. A self described "vibes" over "numbers" manager, the vibes are strong in this episode with Jay this week. What was it like living through 2021's most successful IPO to date? What did Jay learn along the way? Design leadership with a splash of F1 talk? Let's go!