Owning the Outcome

Etienne Turner, co-CEO of digitalJ2, has created a set of scorecards and dashboards to help his team stay on target with their top KPIs across operations, marketing, sales, HR, and client performance. In this episode, we talk about how he sets the agency’s goals, where granularity fits in, and how others can set and track their targets.

Bob and Verity Dearsley, the Chief Executive and Managing Director of B2B Marketing Lab, join us to talk about scale points: the times where you must invest, revamp, or pivot to properly scale your growing agency. Learn how to focus on the customer, invest in marketing, build an HR arm, and more.

Jani Aaltonen, Founder of Sales Communications, hosts a rolling calendar of small group workshops that have added a ton of force to his agency’s flywheel. Jani joins us to talk about the structure of his classroom training offering, the value in trust, the impact on revenue, and how others can get started.

John and Lucy, Directors of ESM Inbound, have built out a unique structure to their pricing, billing, and contracts: their services are productized and available a la carte and without any retainer commitments. Learn more about their motivations, successes, and lessons learned in making the pivot to productizing their services.

Gabriel Marguglio, CEO of Nextiny Marketing, joins us to discuss how he was able to maximize the opportunity around technology consultation. Learn how to embrace software, platform capabilities and become a platform consultancy agency.

Jessica Miller, VP and Managing Director of PR20/20, comes on the show to talk about artificial intelligence: how agencies can define what it is, how to talk about it with clients, how to identify real applications of it, and how it impacts service delivery.

Tyler Pigott, Principal of Lone Fir Creative, joins us to talk about a major agency recovery he lost 50% of the agency’s revenue in a 30 day period. We talk about sticking to a sales process, consolidating tool investments, building the right team, in other lessons learned in saving the agency.

Rich Wood, Managing Director of Six and Flow, joins us to talk about a merger attempt that ended in a breakup. While never easy, Rich walks us through why they opened up a merger discussion with another agency, how the team integration went, and what ultimately led to the split.

Carter and Cameron, Partners at Creative Cave, come on the show to discuss paid ads and how they fit into their agency’s overall inbound strategy for clients. They discuss why agencies shouldn’t see paid ads and inbound as two competing channels—instead, view paid ads as a powerful channel for inbound ROI.

Alison Leishman, cofounder of Spitfire Inbound, joins the show to talk about her team’s onboarding process. She teaches us about why defining and documenting a process is so important, how she customizes onboarding tracks by role and function, and how she ties a defined onboarding process to happy clients and positive results.