Build a Better Agency Podcast

What do you think of when you hear about Disney? Fireworks, castles, and happy families all probably came to mind for a moment. But you probably didn’t think of dishware — and we’re not talking about those cups from the 90s with Lion King characters on them that were in every family’s kitchen cabinets. Today’s guest, Alvaro Melendez, knows brands deeply in a way that most of us could never even imagine. If you think you know the core of what makes a brand who they are, think again. Alvaro has been developing and using machine learning to measure brand awareness or “Brand Love” for years to help companies, both big and small, understand what makes people connect with them. In this episode, we discuss how Alvaro uses technology to help brands reach a bigger audience. He speaks about how to advertise effectively, how DEI is imperative for brands, and how creativity and technology go hand-in-hand in brand innovation. And, if you’re still wondering why Disney is defined by dishware, you’ll just have to tune in to the podcast to get your answer. A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here. What You Will Learn in This Episode: How Alvaro and his team are using machine learning to make brands trackable Why organic social is the best way to advertise and promote your brand How machine learning has taught major brands things they never knew about themselves What the PPAI branding framework is, and how to use it to identify major brand metrics How smaller agencies can learn from the experimentation of big brands The importance of making DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) a huge part of your brand identity Why creativity and storytelling must still be people-centered and collaborative in an automated world

What makes an employee want to stick around at your agency? Every year since 2014, we’ve been doing the research and compiling it into our Agency Edge Research to help agency owners get to the bottom of how to maintain employee satisfaction. We expected certain things like financial compensation and work-from-home flexibility to be most important this year. Still, we were surprised to find many other desires shining through that have nothing to do with money. This year, Susan Baier returns to help me break down our findings. In our analysis, we’ll highlight three categories that most agency employees fall into and how their needs, wants, and levels of loyalty differ across the board. Each group has their own unique way of viewing their role in the agency, how they want to be cared for, and what’s missing that would make them want to stay. We’ll talk in-depth about each group and how we can best address their concerns to boost employee satisfaction. A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here. What You Will Learn in This Episode: What is the Agency Edge Research Series, and what agency-specific issues does it address? What questions do we ask agency employees when compiling the research? The three categories that most agency employees fall into when looking at employee satisfaction The most important things that employees feel are lacking in the agency culture Where millennials stood out more than other age groups in certain categories What are the driving reasons behind an employee choosing to leave an agency? How to build loyalty in your agency and take care of employees How to identify employees who might be at risk of leaving your agency or agency life altogether

Are you making yourself irrelevant in your agency? We’ve been talking a lot lately about how important it is to have systems and processes in place so you can work less and get back to doing the parts of agency ownership that you love. But if you or anyone in your agency becomes irreplaceable, you will be stuck in your 60-80 hour work weeks. This week, our guest Jesse Gilmore gives us a thorough breakdown of how to identify single points of failure in an agency—Hint: it’s often the agency owner—and how we can create a better flow that helps everyone work together more successfully. When we give our employees the tools they need to work effectively and delegate with other team members, our whole workflow improves no matter who’s out of the office that week. A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here. What You Will Learn in This Episode: How to identify single points of failure in your agency If you’re the single point of failure, how do you make yourself more irrelevant? Why removing single points of failure is vital for scaling your business How to create systems and processes that aren’t cookie-cutter solutions How to carve out time in your already busy schedule to put systems in place What is the difference between a bottleneck and a single point of failure? Timing out changes to your agency’s systems and processes How removing single points of failure can improve agency culture

If you’re in a creative role at your agency, you’re probably familiar with receiving creative briefs that just don’t measure up. Instead of getting inspired to do great work, you’re left wondering where to start or what the point of the project is. If you’ve ever created or pitched a brief, on the other hand, you’ve probably worked from a template or simply checked off the boxes of the bare minimum — it happens to the best of us! This week, I’m interviewing Tim Brunelle, a creative director with decades of experience in marketing and advertising. Over the years, he has seen hundreds of creative briefs that span the whole spectrum between gold and garbage. When our brief falls flat, it won’t inspire our creative minds to do great work. In this episode, Tim challenges us to think bigger and better rather than checking off the boxes and reading from a sheet of paper in our briefing meetings. When we think creatively about our creative briefs, we get a wealth of inspiration in return. A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here. What You Will Learn in This Episode: Why creative briefs often fall flat for creative teams Why brief-makers should care about the project just as much as the creative team they’re hiring The two core functions of creative briefs What the pipeline of the creative briefing process should look like How to mentor and inspire creativity across teams to collaborate on the briefing process Why location is important when discussing your vision Determining when a creative brief is necessary to inspire a team to do ground-breaking work

When you’re running an agency, you know you will not have it forever. While your goal could be to sell it eventually, you must consider retirement, career pivots, or plain old ownership fatigue as part of your succession planning strategy. Most of us aren’t thinking about what’s happening 3, 5, or even 10 years down the road in day-to-day agency operations. But, it’s very important to understand how your decisions today could impact the future value of your business. Today’s solocast covers everything you need to know about what you should focus on to increase your valuation and why it matters to start thinking about your succession planning strategy right now. For 30+ years, Drew McLellan has been in the advertising industry. He started his career at Y&R, worked in boutique-sized agencies, and then started his own (which he still owns and runs) agency in 1995. Additionally, Drew owns and leads the Agency Management Institute, which advises hundreds of small to mid-sized agencies on how to grow their agency and its profitability through agency owner peer groups, consulting, coaching, workshops and more. A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here. What You Will Learn in This Episode: Why your agency isn’t as valuable as you might think The importance of thinking toward the future when making current agency decisions The recipe to increase your agency’s valuation when it’s time to sell Why profitability and where it’s coming from matters Why you should be making yourself irrelevant as your agency grows How agency culture plays a role in your succession planning strategy Why you should avoid “gorilla clients” that make up too much of your AGI Where else you should invest your money outside of the agency

The guest on this podcast is Juliana Marulanda, an expert in creating systems and processes for agencies. They discuss how to scale agencies, get unstuck from productivity bottlenecks, reduce chaos, and increase profits. Juliana shares her 20+ years of knowledge and helps agency owners free up at least 30 hours per week. Topics include freeing up space for creativity, creating systems for remote work, and the power of processes in agencies.

When running an agency, efficiency is key. While we would probably prefer to focus on any other task, establishing effective systems and processes is imperative to our agency operations. The systems we create and teach our team members will ultimately define our day-to-day, client satisfaction, and employee retention. This week, Marquis Murray of Ditto will share his knowledge on implementing agency operations adjustments into our team culture. Whether it’s project management software, a well-organized Excel sheet, or simply improving team communication across the board, Marquis knows exactly how to work with agencies to identify where they have the most room for improvement. When everyone gets on the same page and knows exactly where they belong and what is expected of them, the whole team can focus less on who’s doing what and more on what’s important to their specific role. It doesn’t need to be complicated or high-tech, but it does need to be sustainable, scalable, and repeatable so your team members can do what they do best, effectively. Marquis Murray is the CEO and Founder of Ditto, a systems and processes consultancy for organizations who need help creating clarity around the work done inside their companies. Partnering with companies like Asana, HubSpot, PandaDoc, LogicGate, and Kanbanize allows him to offer some of the best in class solutions for clients. His goal is to eliminate team burnout for good so that teams can focus more on the work they do without the stress of not knowing where or how the work is happening. A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here. What You Will Learn in This Episode: Why it’s so important to implement and codify SOPs in your agency, especially if your team is growing Identifying where your agency has room for improvement and how to start making changes How to set boundaries around SOPs to get your employees to adopt the same agency operations strategies Why having agency owners and leaders on board with systems adjustments matters The bumps in the road agencies often face when switching up agency operations How to make the changes stick beyond the 45-60 day adjustment window The most broken areas of systems and processes and what you can do to improve on them Everything you need to know about project management tools—which ones are right for your agency, how to get started using them, and how to vet these tools within your team

The talent we hire is often one of our greatest assets as agencies. Building our talent pool and promoting connectedness is integral to agency culture, and we spend a lot of time finding the perfect fit for our team. On one hand, you want a team that can come together, easily collaborate on tasks, and understands one another closely. On the other hand, casting a wider net can find you more people who are good at helping get specific jobs done independently. How do we marry these two ideas together? Noel Andrews of Jobrack has some answers for us. This week, we’re talking with him about what he does best—helping agencies hire remote talent who want to be part of a team and can do great work at a lower cost. It’s truly a win-win, and we can all have this. In this episode, he will teach us how to build a remote team, how to create a positive agency culture, and what to look for when hiring remote workers. Noel Andrews bought Jobrack in 2018 after 10 years of building and leading large teams in the corporate tech world. Since then, he has helped businesses all over the world hire more than 1,000 remote team members from Eastern Europe. A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here. What You Will Learn in This Episode: How do you make workers physically distant from one another feel like they’re part of the team? What do you need to do as an agency owner to hire remote workers successfully? Why you should reconsider doing a standard interview to vet remote talent and instead assess their skills directly How to take the stress out of hiring by leveraging the talent you already have in your agency Changing our thoughts around remote workers as only “task-doers” Why it’s essential for agency culture to make remote hires feel like they belong to the team How to manage and build a remote team across multiple time zones How to build agency culture and promote connectedness around remote teams How to set expectations and compensate your remote teams well for their skills

For many of us, agency ownership means that most of our time and energy goes into our work. Even when trying to sleep, we’re replaying a frustrating conversation we had earlier that day, doomscrolling, or even dreaming about everything on our to-do lists. When we can’t turn off our minds at the end of a long day, we set ourselves up for occupational burnout. As some of you know, I learned the hard way that staying overly connected to our work can have severe consequences. I brought Dr. Gerry Farris on the podcast today to talk about how we can take care of ourselves to feel better daily, stay mentally strong and healthy, and why taking breaks is so important. With many years as a physician and working with patients who have experienced occupational burnout, Dr. Farris is the perfect person to educate us on how to be smarter about living our overly-connected lives. Dr. Gerry Farris has been an Emergency physician for 30 years and a Functional Medicine physician for 10 years. His current practice focuses on healthy living and age management and he is a former triathlete who competed for 31 years. His goal is to help patients and persons be healthy, mitigate disease and aging, and live well for a long time. He is a double Board Certified physician with a wealth of experience and knowledge. He is practicing the “Medicine of Tomorrow, Today!” A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here. What You Will Learn in This Episode: How to know if you’re experiencing occupational burnout or heading in that direction How information overload leads to hypervigilance and why it happens The effects that elevated cortisol levels have on our brains and bodies How to build resilience against neuroinflammation and bodily dysregulation What does burnout recovery look like? Why sleep is one of the most essential things for recovery and burnout prevention What 37 minutes a day can do to improve your overall health How to make healthy lifestyle changes that you can stick to

Some of the most significant innovations have been born out of the most challenging hardships, and agency innovations are no different. For the past two years, agency owners have been through the wringer. Some of you have even wondered if it’s time to shut your doors and move on to something different. You’re all. Just. Exhausted. I often use the analogy that your agency is a ship, and you are the captain. It’s your responsibility to make sure that the ship doesn’t sink. For the past 24 months, this meant finding shelter and waiting out the storm. But we must rethink that analogy for the new times we’re finding ourselves in. With pandemic days easing up, I’m now telling you it’s time to head back into open waters. While things haven’t completely settled down yet, this is our time to shine. We’ve spent the past two years adapting, changing the game plan, and moving through a figurative storm of hardship. But that has primed us for greatness and equipped us to move forward into a new renaissance of ideas and agency innovation. It’s time to relinquish control, take new risks, and see that these hard times have made you and your agency stronger and ready for brand new ventures. A big thank you to our podcast’s presenting sponsor, White Label IQ. They’re an amazing resource for agencies who want to outsource their design, dev, or PPC work at wholesale prices. Check out their special offer (10 free hours!) for podcast listeners here. What You Will Learn in This Episode: I made a mistake in overemphasizing the importance of finding a safe harbor to get us through the pandemic. We need to rethink this. Where your focus should be turning now to drive your agency innovations Why control and leading with a type-A personality was suitable for the pandemic but might not be as supportive now Why creativity and agency innovation is so important right at this moment How taking risks will push your agency forward into the new era What past tragedies and renaissances can teach us about where we’re heading in the future That your only choice as an agency owner right now is to leave safe harbor no matter whether you’re ready to close up shop or move forward as an agency The questions you should be asking yourself as an agency owner to be a renaissance leader