Agency Leadership Podcast

David C. Baker recently published a fascinating thought experiment about what he’d do if starting an agency from scratch today—and it’s packed with provocative ideas worth serious consideration. His article offers a comprehensive blueprint covering everything from organizational structure to compensation philosophy, and much of it aligns with how Chip and Gini think about building sustainable agencies. But the most interesting conversations happen when smart people disagree, which is why this episode focuses on the handful of points where Chip and Gini see things differently. Not because Baker’s ideas are bad, but because they expose the tension between aspirational agency management and the messy realities of running a business with real budgets, real people, and real client demands. In this episode, Chip and Gini tackle mandatory one-month sabbaticals for every employee, open-book finances published on your website, 360-degree reviews, and incentive compensation structures. They dig into why ideas that sound compelling in theory often create unintended consequences in practice—like how retention-based bonuses can fuel scope creep, or why forced sabbaticals don’t actually solve the single-point-of-failure problem they’re designed to address. The conversation reveals thoughtful nuance on both sides. Gini shares her brutal experience with anonymous feedback that backfired when presented poorly. Chip explains why he sees most performance measurement systems as “performance theater” while still advocating for more financial transparency with teams. They discuss the logistical nightmares of scheduling multiple month-long absences and why backup systems for unexpected departures matter more than planned time off. Throughout, they return to a central theme: what works brilliantly at one stage of growth can be completely wrong at another. The goal isn’t to declare Baker’s ideas right or wrong, but to test assumptions and recognize that even the most well-intentioned frameworks deserve scrutiny before implementation. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “Really to deal with single points of failure, you need to be able to handle those unexpected absences, right? Someone has a family emergency, someone has a health issue. Those are the kinds of things that you wanna make sure you’ve handled.” Gini Dietrich: “When you’re constantly slacking or texting or calling while on vacation, and we don’t give you a response, it makes people angry. But what I’m trying to do is give you the time off because you deserve it and I want you to come back refreshed and ready to work.” Chip Griffin: “When you have incentive compensation, whether that is commissions or for hitting profit targets, the problem that you run into is people tend to focus on the thing that gets them the commission. It doesn’t mean that it’s good revenue. It doesn’t mean that it’s profitable.” Gini Dietrich: “I subscribe to give ongoing feedback. You get feedback consistently. And when we’re in a meeting and I see something that you did really great or I see something that could use some work, I tell you that immediately.” Turn Ideas Into Action Read Baker’s full article and identify your three favorites. Don’t just focus on the disagreements—pull out the ideas that resonate most with your vision for your agency and commit to implementing one of them this quarter. The value in thought experiments like this isn’t picking sides, but using them to clarify what you actually want to build. Spend 30 minutes reading, then schedule time to test one concept that genuinely excites you. Identify your true single points of failure. List every critical role in your agency, then honestly assess what would happen if that person disappeared tomorrow without warning. Focus on unexpected absences—not planned sabbaticals—because those expose the real vulnerabilities. For each critical role, document who could cover the basics for 1-2 weeks while you figure out a longer-term solution. This takes less than an hour and protects you better than mandatory vacation policies. Replace annual reviews with ongoing feedback. If you currently do annual or 360-degree reviews, shift to giving immediate feedback when you observe something—positive or negative. Make it a two-sentence conversation: “That client presentation was excellent because you anticipated their objections” or “When you miss that deadline without communication, it creates problems for the team.” Save annual conversations for compensation changes and goal-setting, not for dumping a year’s worth of stored-up feedback all at once. Resources David C. Baker’s article If I Started A New Firm, Now Related Starting your own agency Should you force employees to take time off? Setting your agency’s PTO, vacation, and leave policies Employee compensation essentials for agencies View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, we’re going back to a place that we’ve used for inspiration before. And no, I’m not talking about Reddit this time. Oh, I’m, I’m sorry. Dear listeners, this is not one of our Reddit episodes. Gini Dietrich: I, I’m always scared of the Reddit episodes. Chip Griffin: The Reddit episodes are always, they’re interesting. We’ll leave it at that. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I saw one the other day that I was like, oh boy, okay. In the real world… Chip Griffin: Sometimes I just, I read those posts in the, in the agency subreddit, and I just, I wonder if, if they’re actual, real people posting about real stuff, because some of it just seems so insane that it just couldn’t be real. Gini Dietrich: Yes. And some of it is very junior level entitled frustrations who don’t understand how a business operates. And so some of it you’re just like, Ugh. Okay. Chip Griffin: Yep. But I mean, we were all once those people sort of a little bit Gini Dietrich: Fair, true. Chip Griffin: At one point in time. Gini Dietrich: Yes. So absolutely. Chip Griffin: But that is not what this episode is. We are going to use another source of inspiration for us that we’ve used in the past, and that is David C. Baker. And, in this case, he had a post in his newsletter recently about what he would do if he was starting his own agency today. And it’s a lengthy article that walks through all of the different choices, that he would make strategically and tactically for the business. And there’s a lot of good food for thought in there. It’s, mm-hmm. It’s probably gonna inspire a few additional episodes, down the road as we dig deeper into some of the specific topics there. But, one of the things that I did on LinkedIn was I broke out into four buckets, my perspective on it, and broke it into things that I agree with, things that I agreed to disagree with. It depends because, hey, that’s our motto here, so why not? It does depend. Yes. Yep. And then of course, food for thought. So, there are far too many points for us to cover in a reasonably length podcast episode. So. I figured why not be controversial? Let’s deal with the disagrees that I had on my list and, use that as our jumping off point. And we’ll of course include a link to the article in the show notes that you can go read the full article as well as additional context around what we’re gonna talk about today because there is a lot to, to explore here. Gini Dietrich: And I think the buckets that you, you broke it into are really good. And for the most part I agree with how you’ve compartmentalized them all. But there are some interesting ones on the agree to disagree bucket. So let’s, let’s do that. Let’s start there. Chip Griffin: Alright. Do you have, do you have one that you would like to start with or do you want me to just start calling ones out? Gini Dietrich: Let’s see. Yeah, there’s, well, yes I do. That we require one month annual sabbatical to eliminate single points of failure. Sounds lovely. I would also like a one month sabbatical every year. Chip Griffin: It’s as, as I understood the article, and it is possible, I misunderstood the intent in the article, but as I understood it, he was suggesting that every year, every employee. Gini Dietrich: Everyone. Yes. Chip Griffin: Had to take a full one month sabbatical. Gini Dietrich: Yes. That’s how I read it as well. Chip Griffin: That is, I mean, it’s a nice idea. I think it is highly impractical for most organizations. And look, I think the, stated intent here is truly a good one, which is to avoid those single points of failure, over reliance on any individual team member. Yeah. ’cause this is a giant problem for agencies, honestly, of most sizes until you get to be giant. But it is something that, that you need to be conscious of. I don’t know that you need a full one month sabbatical for every employee every year in order to get there. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I mean, truth be told, like if you’re designing in the agency of the future and you’re starting from scratch today, I don’t know how you do that. I mean, to your point, even in a large organization, I don’t know that how, you do that because it costs a lot of money. Not just resources and time, but it costs money to have people out. And so, you know, if you’re a, you’re an agency of three people or you’re an agency of 50 people, or you’re an agency of hundreds of people, it still costs money. And so requiring that I think is a bit too much. And also, I will say that as somebody who has an extraordinary flexible and generous paid time off plan. There are people who take advantage of those things and you have to adjust to that, unfortunately. And I just don’t think it’s realistic. I don’t think it’s somethi

No more excuses. No more waiting to see how things play out. AI has moved past the experimental phase, and if you’re still treating it like a nice-to-have rather than a fundamental shift in how your agency operates, you’re already falling behind. In this episode, Chip comes out swinging with a wake-up call for the agency community: the ground is shifting faster than most are willing to admit, and the window for meaningful adaptation is closing. Gini backs him up with examples of how AI has progressed from an intern-level tool to something that can genuinely replace mid-level work—if agencies don’t evolve what they’re selling. They dig into the practical reality of training AI tools to work like team members, not just one-off prompt machines. Chip explains how he uses different platforms for different strengths—Claude for writing, Gemini for competitive intelligence, Perplexity for research, and ChatGPT as his strategic baseline. Gini shares how her 12-year-old daughter creates entire anime worlds through conversation with AI, demonstrating the power of treating these tools as collaborators rather than search engines. The conversation covers what clients actually want to pay for in 2026 (hint: it’s not social posts and press releases), how to build AI agents trained on your specific expertise, and why the process of training AI forces valuable clarity about your business. They emphasize that this isn’t about slapping the “AI-powered” label on your services—it’s about fundamentally rethinking what value you deliver and how you deliver it. If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines waiting for the AI dust to settle, this episode is your warning: there is no settling. There’s only evolution or extinction. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “If you do not change, it will replace you. It will take away your revenue. If you keep doing the same thing that you’re doing today, it absolutely will destroy you.” Gini Dietrich: “We are no longer relying on our agencies to do the work. We are relying on agencies to teach us what’s coming ’cause we don’t have the time.” Chip Griffin: “AI is not just changing how your business operates, it’s changing how other businesses operate. It’s changing how the media operates. And so it is truly a disruptive force that we need to be thinking about.” Gini Dietrich: “When somebody says to me, oh, I just can’t get it to output what I need, I’m like, user error. You haven’t taken the time to train it.” Turn ideas into action Train one AI tool this week like you’d train an employee. Pick the platform you use most (ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini) and spend 30 minutes having an actual conversation with it about your preferences—tone, structure, what you hate (like emojis), and what outcomes you need. Feed it examples of your best work and tell it explicitly when outputs miss the mark and why. The tool won’t improve with one-shot prompts; it needs training just like a new hire. Map what clients will actually pay for in 2026. Block one hour to list every service you currently bill for, then honestly assess which ones AI can now handle at a competent level. Don’t lie to yourself—if ChatGPT can draft solid social posts or press releases after reviewing past examples, that’s table stakes now. Identify what remains valuable: strategy, teaching clients to use these tools, implementing new processes, or solving problems AI can’t touch. This clarity will drive every business decision you make this year. Test AI on something personal before rolling it to client work. If you or your team are intimidated by AI, start with meal planning, fitness routines, managing schedules, or drafting birthday card messages. Use it for something low-stakes where you can experiment with conversation-style prompting without pressure. Once you see how it responds to feedback and training in a personal context, you’ll understand how to apply the same approach to agency work. Resources LinkedIn post by Vineet Mehra that Gini references Related Agencies succeed through consistency and evolution AI myths agencies must avoid View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, you know, we started the new year off on a note where we weren’t gonna yell at our audience, but I feel like it, it’s time to yell at our audience again. I’ve taken too much time off from being Mr. Nice guy. Gini Dietrich: Okay, well this shall be interesting. I can’t wait. Chip Griffin: I, and this is, it’s partly for our audience, but it’s really for the overall agency community, particularly PR and marketing, PR and communications generally, even outside the agency world. I’m just, I’ve become kind of wound up lately because I think that the industry as a whole, and perhaps even some of our listeners are not acting swiftly enough to understand just how much the ground is shifting beneath them. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: And how much serious evolution needs to take place. Really over the next year. I mean, I don’t think, I don’t think we’re on a long-term horizon here. I think that too many have waited to change too long in many ways, and AI is now becoming sort of the, the real trigger point for it, but it’s bigger than that. I think a lot of the, the PR space in general has lagged behind a lot of what’s going on in the business community, and AI is just the fist to the face that’s, that’s gonna separate out the people who are gonna survive. Gini Dietrich: The fist to the face. Wow. All right, then. Chip Griffin: I told you I was a little wound up on this one, so, Gini Dietrich: okay. So everybody’s gonna be punched in the face. Got it. Okay. Chip Griffin: If that’s what it takes to wake up and pay attention. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, no, I, yeah, I totally agree with you. And, you know, I have been gungho on AI for going on four years now. And it’s, it’s my second love for sure. But it is time to pay attention to how it is changing things and what it’s going to do to your business, to your teams, to how you deliver work, all those things. Chip Griffin: I mean, look, a lot of the PR world has been focused in recent years on figuring out how to keep their head above water and survive, and hang on to the old ways of doing things. And this predates the explosion of AI in recent years. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: But, what the explosion of AI has done is really, it has drawn the attention of particularly clients to the issue. It has drawn the attention of employees. It, and it is still being ignored. And I think we’ve hit that point where we can no longer ignore it. I think we’re at the point with a lot of these AI tools where they are now both accessible and reliable enough that there’s no reason not to accelerate your pace of change using AI as a tool to get there. And we’ve talked about this before, and I, and I’m not changing my point of view, AI is not the end in itself. The AI is just a way to get there. So don’t mistake what I’m saying here for saying that, you know, you just need to adopt AI for the sake of AI. You still need to find problems to solve first and AI will help you on a lot of them, but you need to be finding those problems. You need to be thinking ahead to what do clients really want from you? What is going to help them to get the results they’re looking for? It can’t be about how do I use AI to make myself a little bit more efficient in what I’m currently doing. Because everything is changing. And we need to be on top of that. Gini Dietrich: I read an article on LinkedIn probably in November, and I’ll see if I can find the link to include in show notes. But it, it was from a chief marketing officer at a Fortune 10 company, and what he said was this: if I were an agency wanting to work with clients in 2026, here are five things I would do. And I can’t remember all of them, but one of them was teach organizations, teach marketing and comms teams how to use AI to be more effective. Implement your process, whatever it happens to be. Because we are no longer relying on our agencies to do the work. We are relying on agencies to teach us what’s coming ’cause we don’t have the time. And that has stuck in my head because I think that’s right. I think that. Yeah, sure, agencies will always, or big companies, will always need arm extra arms and legs to do the work, but that’s not the work that most of us want to be doing. Right? We don’t wanna be writing the social posts and the news releases. We wanna be part of the strategic conversation. We wanna be part of the of helping to move an organization forward. And if we can do that by teaching our clients how to use AI to be more effective, to be more productive, to accelerate their work, and I know everybody’s worried it’s going to replace me, it’s going to, it’s going to reduce our number, our billable hours, whatever happens to be. I think there’s a huge opportunity here for you to reframe how you’re helping clients and using AI to be able to do that. Chip Griffin: Yeah, but I would be very direct with listeners. If you do not change, it will replace you. It will take away. Gini Dietrich: That’s fair. That’s totally fair. Chip Griffin: Your revenue. Gini Dietrich: Yes, it will. I totally agree with you. Yeah. Chip Griffin: So, you know when we say that you know that AI is not gonna destroy your agency, that’s only if you evolve. Gini Dietrich: That’s fair. Chip Griffin: If you keep doing the same thing that you’re doing today, it absolutely will destroy you. I don’t care whether you’re an employee or a business or whatever, if you are an employee and you think that AI isn’t gonna take your job in a year, it is If you d

You built an agency you’re proud of. So why does your website still feature that glowing tribute to someone you wouldn’t recommend today, or explain services you stopped offering three years ago? In this episode, Chip and Gini tackle the unsexy but critical task of auditing your agency’s website content. They share practical approaches for identifying what needs updating, what deserves deletion, and how to prioritize your efforts when you’re staring down hundreds (or thousands) of outdated pages. The conversation covers everything from quick wins—like updating your homepage and key pages—to strategic decisions about high-traffic content that no longer serves your business. Gini shares her process for using tools like Screaming Frog to audit content systematically, while Chip emphasizes the importance of focusing on human users rather than chasing every algorithm change. They also dive into the balance between refreshing old content and creating new material, with specific guidance on when each approach makes sense. The episode wraps with a reminder that consistency matters more than perfection—especially when AI is increasingly using your bio and content to determine whether to recommend you. If your website is starting to feel like a liability rather than an asset, this episode offers a manageable roadmap to get it back on track without turning it into a year-long project. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “First and foremost, focus on the end user’s experience. And only after that, think about, okay, are there tweaks or additions I could make in order to help the search engines or the AI spiders or that kind of thing?” Gini Dietrich: “I would rather have accurate numbers so I know exactly what my pipeline looks like, my lead generation looks like, what my lead nurturing looks like, and be able to work it backwards.” Chip Griffin: “If you’re getting a lot of traffic to a page that either is not as relevant as it should be or not as accurate as it should be given the way the world has changed, you know, those are ones that you want to address.” Gini Dietrich: “AI notices inconsistencies. So if you are inconsistent across different websites, social media, all the places that you are online, you are not going to show up in AI answers no matter how good your content is.” Turn ideas into action Audit your homepage today. Open your website and read your homepage copy with fresh eyes—does it accurately reflect who you serve, what you do, and where your agency stands today? If not, block two hours this week to rewrite it. This is your most important page and the fastest way to stop misrepresenting your business. Check Google Analytics for your top 20 pages. Identify which pages drive the most traffic, then ask yourself if each one still serves your business or if you’re just attracting irrelevant visitors. Kill off pages that generate traffic but don’t support your current positioning—inflated vanity metrics aren’t worth the confusion. Ensure bio consistency across platforms. Compare your bio on your website, LinkedIn, and other platforms where you appear. Make them consistent (accounting for character limits) so AI can confidently present you as an option when people search for expertise in your area. Related Real talk about agency websites How to think about your agency’s website View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, I’m old. Gini Dietrich: Yes, you are. Chip Griffin: But you know what else is old? Gini Dietrich: What else? Chip Griffin: Some of the content on my website. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, sure. Mine too. Yeah. Chip Griffin: It’s, it’s one of the perils of having been around for a while. Gini Dietrich: Yes, indeed. Chip Griffin: Both as a human, as a business. And so we have a lot of content out there on the website that maybe isn’t as current as we’d like it to be. Some of it I haven’t looked at in many years, so I don’t even know if it’s up to date or not. Gini Dietrich: Sure. Chip Griffin: I’m sure that many of our listeners have content on their website or maybe entire websites that are old and out of date. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Chip Griffin: So my question to you is, how should we be thinking about this kind of, how do we deal with this problem? Or we, we can’t just spend, I mean, I, I don’t know about you, but my website’s got over a thousand different pieces of content on it. Oh yeah. Now I think most of our listeners probably don’t have websites with quite that much content on it, but some do, and even if you’ve only got a couple hundred, you know, that’s still a substantial body of content that you need to audit in some fashion. So what, what do you do about that? Gini Dietrich: You know, it’s funny, this conversation is happening right now because about a week ago, right after the holidays, I got an email from a friend that said, Hey, uh, I don’t know if you know this or not, but you have a blog post from, from 13 years ago, literally 13 years ago, praising Elon Musk. And I was like, well, let’s delete that! But like, I don’t know how she found that. She must have been searching on the site for something and found it. Right. So I think it’s important to do an audit and I did delete it. I moved it to the trash. But, I think it is important to do an audit. We have a client that said to us, we don’t think we need new content. We have plenty. And we went in and we’re like, okay, great. Let’s do an audit and see. And we audited it and they do have plenty of content, but the most recent is two and a half years old. So one of the things that we’re working on with them right now, well, twofold. One is going through the audit that we did to see what needs to stay with an update, a refresh, and what should be deleted. There are lots of, there’s lot, there’s lots of content on their site. And actually this will appeal to many of you listeners too. There’s content on their website that has some great SEO value. You know, showing up first in Google results and things like that. So you don’t wanna get rid of that content, but it probably needs a good update. It probably needs to be refreshed. It probably needs new quotes, new experts, new expertise, new statistics, whatever it happens to be. So that’s what I would do. It’s pretty easy. We use, Screaming Frog to do the audit, so it’ll, it will look at your entire website and then give you an Excel list of all of your links, and then you can go and you can tell it I want dates and topic and all that kind of stuff. And you can go through that fairly easily to say, this is old, we don’t need that. Move that to a different tab. This is good stuff. We don’t wanna lose it. And then I would compare that to what you’re keep, I would compare what you’re keeping to do a Google search. Are you show, are those links showing up in Google? And I would also ask AI. Are you showing, is AI showing that content in its answers. So you probably, I would venture to guess, like you and me, we, it would be a really big undertaking ’cause we have years and years of content. But for most agency owners, I would guess it’s probably a, I dunno… And you can use AI to help you, but it’s probably a two or three hour thing that you can split up over several weeks, right? To get it done. But 100% you should be, you should have an up update up to date website overall, and you should be updating content so that it’s refreshed, not necessarily the URL, but updating the content inside the article or the blog post or the page or whatever it happens to be. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And I, I think the advice to sort of just kind of, you know, go through a list of it is a really good starting point. Whether you use some third party tool, or frankly, if your website isn’t too huge, if you just go into WordPress and start scrolling back through the pages and posts. Mm-hmm. And just looking at the headlines, it at least, you know, things that are obviously in need of help will jump out at you. Yeah. Or you know, that you praise somebody that doesn’t make sense or whatever. And, and we have to keep in mind that, that sometimes that old content might be a year old, it might be 10 years old, right? It might still need some sort of an updating. The other thing that’s, that’s often helpful is just to go into, you know, something simple like your Google Analytics and just look at, you know, the top 20, 30, 40 pages in terms of traffic and just ask, are all of these pages the way I still want to present myself in whatever the current year is that you’re listening to us? Because, you know, that can be a really helpful way of prioritizing what you wanna address, what you wanna update. And particularly if you’re getting a lot of traffic to a page that either is not as relevant as it should be or not as accurate as it should be given the, the way the world has changed. You know, those are ones that you want to address. I, to me, one of the interesting cases is, you know what, and I’ve seen this a lot, and I, some of the organizations I’ve worked with have had this issue where you’ve got a page that gets a ton of traffic, but it’s frankly totally irrelevant to what they do today. Right. It’s still, it’s still an accurate bit of content, which is why it keeps getting traffic, you know, because it’s answering whatever question the searcher may have had, but it doesn’t really benefit the organization other than it does produce a fair amount of inbound traffic. So, to me, those are interesting cases. Trying to figure out what you do with those. And, if you talk to different SEO experts, you sometimes hear different bits of advice on this, right? Because some are like, well,

As agency owners settle into 2026, it’s easy to operate on autopilot—chasing the next tactic without reconnecting with what made the business work in the first place. In this episode, Chip and Gini make the case for looking backward before charging forward. Chip admits his first agency started because “consultant” sounded better than “unemployed.” But the real question isn’t just why you started—it’s why you decided to keep building. That motivation should be informing your strategy today. Gini shares how she once believed she wanted a large agency with hundreds of employees and global clients. When she hit 30+ people, she realized she’d built something she didn’t enjoy leading. She was buried in HR issues instead of doing the work that energized her. The Great Recession forced a reset, and she restructured the business around her strengths. Her advice: figure out what brings you joy in the business, and protect time to do more of it. Otherwise, you risk drifting into micromanagement or burnout. The episode also digs into practical growth tactics from the early days that still work. Gini recalls how she built her pipeline by developing relationships with business development leads at large agencies. When prospects came in below their fee threshold, they’d refer the work her way—a principle that remains just as relevant today. Both hosts encourage owners to revisit their “things I’d never do” list from when they started. It’s worth checking whether you’ve quietly drifted into those same patterns over time. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “Agency owners often ask me, what should I do next? And the answer is very different depending on what you’re trying to accomplish with the business.” Gini Dietrich: “We say this to clients all the time, go back to the basics. It works. And it works for your agency, too.” Chip Griffin: “You need to do what’s right for you. And so, I think that the key to that is really going back to your roots, understanding what motivated you to get started, what drove that success in the early days.” Gini Dietrich: “You want to focus on the things that you are great at, and the things that make you the happiest, and the things that are most motivating to you, because that’s how your business will grow.” Turn ideas into action Write down why you started your agency and what drove your early success. Block 30 minutes to identify patterns from those early days that you could leverage again for growth or business development today. Identify one thing that energizes you most about the work—then carve out time to do more of it. Even if it’s behind the scenes (like strategic brainstorming or quarterly client reviews), injecting that spark back into your role helps prevent burnout. Make a quick list of “things I swore I’d never do” when you started. Check whether you’ve drifted into any of those patterns on inertia—and decide if it’s a learned lesson or a habit worth breaking. Related Do you remember why you started your agency? Why one-size-fits-all advice doesn’t work for agencies View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I am Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, I’m thinking way, way back, way back decades now to why I started my agency. Gini Dietrich: Oooh. Decades, huh? Chip Griffin: And I can’t remember ’cause I’m too old now, so. No, Gini Dietrich: you can too remember. Chip Griffin: Well, I mean, the honest answer is that I started my first agency was because I was unemployed. And it was better to describe myself as a consultant than unemployed. Yeah. Sure. And then than accidentally started accumulating business. Yeah. But I, but I do think it, it is a helpful exercise for us to go back and, and think about why we started the businesses or, or maybe not, in some cases, like mine, because I was unemployed, is not the greatest explanation. So you know more why did I decide to, to, to build it into an actual business. Gini Dietrich: Why? To keep going. Yeah. I think that’s good, especially as we’re, we’re thinking about starting out the new year and remind ourselves, you know, of the reasons that we started this. Some of us do it because we’re, we’re unemployed. Some of us did it because we found a better, we, we think we had a better way of doing things. Some of us did it because we have a problem with authority. Some of us did it ’cause we’d make terrible employees. I mean, there are lots of different reasons, but I think reaching back into our archives in our brains and thinking about why we did it or why we, I think that you’re right, why we continue to do it is a, is a really good exercise. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I, and, and I’ve said over and over again over the years that, that I think too many agencies operate on inertia, as opposed to any kind of a, a fundamental strategy. And so, you know, it’s very easy to say as, as I’m sure many people ask you as they do me, well, what’s the, what’s my next step? Here’s where my agency is now, what, what should I do next? And the answer is very different depending on what you’re trying to accomplish with the business. So trying to think back to those early days and what motivated you to start the business. Evaluate it because it, that may have changed, right? You, you may have started it because it served a particular need in the moment, and maybe it’s different today, but thinking about that and thinking about what you really want from the business is usually a better way to come up with strategic decisions than it is to say, well, what do other agencies like mine do when they get to this stage of growth or to this challenge? It’s, you really need to to match it up because otherwise, what’s the point of taking on all of that risk and stress of being a business owner? Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I mean, a really good example of that is I really thought I wanted to build a great big agency with hundreds of employees and, and clients around the globe and all of the, all of the things. And as I started to grow and we got to about 30 ish, 33, 32 people, I realized that’s not what I wanna do. Right. It was not enjoyable. I had built a company that I was not thriving in, that I didn’t enjoy leading. You know, I was dealing mostly with HR issues and not doing the work. And so the, the Great Recession did afford me the opportunity, unfortunately and fortunately to kind of take a step back and, and think about what kind of business do I want to have? And what kind of business do I want to lead? And while we’re back up to that same size, it’s a different structured business that allows me to focus in on the things that I do best and do the things that I enjoy versus HR ’cause that is not something I enjoy at all. Chip Griffin: I, I think I’ve yet to meet an owner who likes, enjoys doing HR or accounting or those sorts of things. Not fun. There are some who do it well. But don’t enjoy it. But I, I don’t think I’ve found any that actually enjoy doing it. So, but, but I think that, you know, as you think back to those early days and you think about what motivated you, it can often help you to figure out, you know, what is, what is that spark that you need in the business for you to either continue enjoying it for a longer period of time or bring back some of that, that joy that you had in those early days. Because I know a lot of agency owners these days are, are frustrated and, you know, trying to figure out how to change things for the better. And I think part of the way you inform yourself of that is by thinking back to those early motivations and figuring out how you can inject more of that into your business today. Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s really important to do that. And I think there, you know, for me personally, I get really passionate and enjoy my job when I’m learning and doing new things. So artificial intelligence, of course, has been a great big thing for me because I’ve really enjoyed learning it and understanding it and implementing it into my business and then taking it to clients. You know, last month we launched the PESO operating system, AI edition, where the AI prompts you instead of you prompting it. So it will say, what are your business objectives? What are you trying to achieve? What are your audiences? What are your messaging? And then it builds a PESO program for you that’s fully integrated versus you saying I need you to act like a marketing director who can, who understands PESO and can build this and this. It’s that. So I like, those are the kinds of things that really get me excited. And building those kinds of things gets me excited and motivated. So it’s, it’s easy because I understand that about myself. It drives my team crazy ’cause they’re like, oh, she’s got something new. Or my, their favorite thing is, I had an idea. And they’re like, oh no, no, not again. But that’s what keeps me, yeah, that’s what keeps me motivated. So finding a way to understand what brings you joy in the business, I think is incredibly important. So that without exhausting your team, of course, but doing it in a way that keeps you motivated and, and not burned out. Chip Griffin: Yeah. One of the things that always used to, to drive my teams nuts was I would say, you know, over the weekend I was playing with this new thing. And, and you could just see the looks on their faces and they’re like, oh, this is a lot more work for me now. Gini Dietrich: This is gonna be fun. Yep. Chip Griffin: This is, yep. Yep. They, they never seemed to appreciate it the way that I had hoped they would when I came to them. Correct. With these, these brilliant brainstorms of mine. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Chip

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the importance of strategic planning for 2026. As they near the end of 2025, they emphasize the need for agencies to set themselves apart and adapt to the evolving landscape, particularly through the effective use of AI. Despite ongoing economic challenges, they highlight the potential for AI to enhance both efficiency and strategic thinking. Chip and Gini also stress the importance of refining the ideal client profile and taking calculated risks. They share their personal experiences with using AI to assist in planning and decision-making processes, pointing out both the benefits and limitations of current AI technology. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “I do think more than ever, continuing forward on the path that you’re on for the vast majority of agencies is not a good idea. I think most agencies require at least some modest course correction and some more than that.” Gini Dietrich: “Really think about how you can set yourself apart and get in front of prospects now and in January so that you can be doing the things that will help you scale and grow and be sustainable for the future. And some of it’s not gonna be fun.” Chip Griffin: “I think really refining that ideal client profile is something that most of us ought to be taking a very close look at for 2026 in our planning process.” Gini Dietrich: “Be willing to try some things and take some risks and see what works and see what doesn’t work, and then go move on to what works and try again.” Resources The Ragan article regarding upskilling and improving AI skills Related Planning for agency growth Using the AIM-GET Framework to drive your annual planning How to involve your team in annual planning for your agency and its clients Look to your track record as you define your agency’s ideal client View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, I’m, I’m flipping through the calendar here, you know, ’cause I still have a paper calendar. Of course. I mean, who doesn’t? Gini Dietrich: Of course. Right. Chip Griffin: And it looks like we’re almost to the end of 2025. Gini Dietrich: We, we are. Which is crazy. Crazy. Chip Griffin: Which, which means that 2026 is right around the corner. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Yes it is. Chip Griffin: And what do we usually do near the end of each year? Gini Dietrich: We plan for the following next year. Yeah. Chip Griffin: And, and we have an episode talking about that. So when we have no other good ideas to bring to the table, we turn to the trusted proven stuff from the past Gini Dietrich: 2026. I mean, we could talk about 2026 trends. We could talk about 2026 AI things, but I think planning for our business growth is good. Chip Griffin: Yeah. That all goes into planning, right? So, I, and, you know, I, I’m, as long as we don’t do predictions, I’m fine. I hate predictions. Gini Dietrich: Oh, shoot. Let’s do predictions next week then. Chip Griffin: No, no, no predictions. No, that’s, that drives me up a wall. Gini Dietrich: Note to self. Note to self. Chip Griffin: And I, and I know we are just, you know, probably days away from the flood of Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: Articles and Yep. And podcast episodes and videos with everybody making their predictions for the year ahead. Yep. Just stop it. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: So my prediction is we will see lots of predictions. Gini Dietrich: That is a good prediction. I think you’re probably going to be right. Chip Griffin: It seems pretty likely. Gini Dietrich: I’d bet on it in fact. Yeah. Chip Griffin: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Alright, so as we start thinking about 2026 planning, let’s look at it for through the, the lens of, of what, what we might do differently in thinking about 2026 than we typically do. Right? Because we, there’s plenty in our archive where people can go back and listen to us generally talk about planning. I’m sure we’ll touch on some of that in the next 20 minutes. I don’t wanna disappoint listeners. We, we will, you know, reach back to the things that we’ve talked about before, but I think it’s helpful to, to think about, you know, what’s, what’s different about 2026, and I think you’ve already hinted at one of the key things. Gini Dietrich: Oh, AI for sure. Yeah. I saw a really interesting post on LinkedIn from Parry Headrick who was talking about how he used to work for Shift and he was the VP of the San Francisco office, I think, and he said, you know, this was during the recession and I was… Anybody who was in business during the recession knows all of your business went away. It was not a fun time to be in business at all. And he talked about how he went to the office every single day for months on end, and he made cold calls to tech firms and he, he would say, we can do like a PR plan for you, a PR 101 like, and he said one out of every 100 calls accepted the offer. And then they went all out and created a really strategic, as much as it could be, plan for these companies. And gave it to them for free so that they had, they could generate some business. And he said that that was one of the things that kept the office going during that time and how miserable it was. Like he talked about it was boiling the frog, like it was miserable and it was not enjoyable. It’s not why he was doing that job, but they had to keep the office open. And I think that, I read that and I thought, you know, that’s really interesting as we think about 2026 because the last couple of years for agencies have been miserable. We have been slowly boiling the frog for sure. And you know, I have a lot of friends who have laid people off, some have gone out of business, some haven’t gone outta business, but don’t have any clients. Like, it has been rough. And I’m not sure that 26 is going to be much better. So I think one of the things that I will be advising people is, and, and for us too, is really think about how you can set yourself apart and get in front of prospects now and in January so that you can be doing the things that will help you scale and grow and be sustainable for the future. And some of it’s not gonna be fun. It’s not. Chip Griffin: Well, you’ve, uh, certainly taken this on a depressing turn here. Gini Dietrich: I mean, we can talk about AI too, but Chip Griffin: I mean No, I mean, we can, we can talk about how miserable and awful things are for everybody. Uh, that’s, Gini Dietrich: it’s been rough. It’s not like it hasn’t been rainbows and unicorns. It hasn’t. Chip Griffin: No, it, it has, it has not been rainbows and unicorns. But I, but I would also, I would, I would push back a bit. I, I don’t think we’re as bad as ’08 or ’09, or back in the early two thousands. I don’t think it’s, it is not as widespread as it was back then. I’m certainly in the agencies that I’m talking with, seeing a lot of agencies that are struggling, most, not catastrophically, most just kind of, you know, sort of malaise is, is the word I would use. Yeah. It’s good for it. And there are still some that are actually doing quite well and, and even growing. So that, to me, that is a little bit different than what we’ve seen in, you know, in  08 or ’09, or during the pandemic. Certainly. You know, where it was pretty much… I guess even in the pandemic, we had pockets, right? The, the digital firms did well because everybody had to transition from doing things in person to doing things electronically. But it, it’s just… so, I, I think we’re in that general period of malaise, you know, sort of in, in my mind, I’m old enough, I, I think Jimmy Carter, right? You know, you just sort of think, ehhh, you know, and, and how America of the late ’70’s was. And so there’s some of that, at least within the economy and, and certainly in, in the agency space. So I think that that part of the, the challenge here is that it is not as simple an explanation as to how you get out of it. Right. I mean, back in ’08, ’09, it’s like, okay, well the economy just has to come forward. And in this case, part of it’s the economy, but part of it is the, the shifting nature of the relationships between agencies and brands, and other organizations. And so I, I, I think that one of the reasons why some agencies are struggling is because they’re not taking a fresh look. At what they do, how they fit into that picture. And I think there needs to be a lot more creative thinking. And I think AI is a big driver of it, not necessarily in the, in the way that people think, though I don’t, I don’t see AI as taking away agency work. Mm-hmm. I see it as agencies just haven’t figured out how to capitalize on it effectively. And, I think that there is tremendous opportunity for those agencies who are willing to adapt their service offerings with and without AI. And moving forward in a way where they’ll leave behind a lot of of other agencies that are more committed to just plodding forward and doing the same old, same old, and, you know, sprinkling in a little bit of AI here and there. Gini Dietrich: I read a really interesting article a couple of weeks ago and I’ll see if I can find it so Jen can include it in the show notes. I’m sure it’s in my history somewhere, but it talked about how, you know, we’ve seen all of these layoffs at all these large companies in the last couple of months, you know, thousands and thousands of people. And they’re telling, most of these companies are telling the teams that remain. There are two things that you need to focus on: upskilling. So, you know, using AI to help improve you, you know, understanding your own professional development, taking charge

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the complexities of hiring in growing agencies. They highlight the challenges of finding skilled, reliable employees who align with agency values. Sharing personal experiences, Gini explains the pitfalls of hasty hiring and the benefits of thorough vetting and cultural fit. They stress the importance of a structured hiring process, including clear job roles, career paths, and appropriate compensation. They also underscore the value of meaningful interviews, proper candidate evaluations, and treating the hiring process as the start of a long-term relationship. Lastly, Chip and Gini emphasize learning from past mistakes to improve hiring effectiveness and employee retention. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “When we talk about retaining employees, it goes back to how the interviews went.” Gini Dietrich: “You’re gonna be working with this person eight hours a day. You should have a real meaningful conversation with them. Don’t ask if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?” Chip Griffin: “If you’re going to have members of your team interviewing, you need to make sure that you’re educating them on how to do it well. And how to do it without causing problems.” Gini Dietrich: “They say, hire slowly and fire fast for a reason, because you have to be really meticulous about who you hire. So that they do last. So they are a culture fit, so they don’t miss deadlines, so that they are getting the work done that you need done.” Related How to onboard new agency employees Get over your fear of hiring employees Hiring the best employees for your agency How to hire agency employees Setting honest expectations for your agency employees from the start Focus on agency employee retention View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, a few weeks ago, I think I fired you. Today, you’re hired, Gini Dietrich: You keep playing with my emotions. I don’t know how to do this anymore. I’m fired. I don’t get paid. Now you’re rehiring me. I don’t know what to do. Chip Griffin: Yeah, it’s difficult. Anyway. It is what it is. But no, we are gonna talk about hiring today because we are, you know, we can’t just talk about all the bad things. So, we’ll, we’ll spend some time talking about something that is overall more positive. Because if we’re hiring, hopefully that means that we are growing, or at least we have the need for additional resources, even if it’s replacing someone who has left. But it is something that is very challenging, so it can create its own problems along the way if you don’t do it right. So this is, something that comes from one of our favorite topic inspiration sources. Reddit. I know it’s a place that you live and breathe. Gini Dietrich: And by favorite, we’re using quotes “favorite”, scares the crap outta me. But ok. Chip Griffin: You are on Reddit all day every day. Just kind of combing around to see what conversations you can jump into. But this is one that was on there, probably a while ago honestly, it’s in our topic document. We didn’t date it, so I, I can’t tell you how long ago it was, but, what it says is, hiring the right people is harder than it looks. Finding skilled, reliable people who align with your values is a challenge. Early on, I rushed hires and paid for it in missed deadlines and miscommunication. Now I take more time to vet people and focus on cultural fit as much as skills. So I thought it would be helpful for us to have a conversation around how we approach the hiring process. How do we find the right fits? How do we vet those fits? And how do we frankly think about going from hiring them to, to beginning to on onboard them. We’re not gonna talk about the full onboarding process, but just sort of, you know, that, that evolution of saying, Hey, I need this role. Where do we go from there? Gini Dietrich: Yeah, it’s, it’s funny you say that this is our topic today. ’cause just the other day I was thinking about some of the very early hires I made that didn’t work out. And all of the mistakes I made in, in hiring them. And I will say that one of the biggest mistakes that I make is I meet somebody online who has the right skillset from a paper perspective, resume perspective, and I just hire them. I’m like, oh yeah, you, you look like you can do the job. And we may have a conversation, but there’s no, like, thought about it. There’s no interviewing for skills. It’s more just like a, a conversation to see if we, we might be able to work together. And every time I have done that, it has not worked out. So earlier this year I hired a chief learning officer to help with like certification and, you know, all the professional development things we do on the PESO model front. And about three or four months in, we both realized that, that that while she can do that job and she’s great at that job, she would be more valuable as a chief operating officer. So we switched her over. And let me tell you, being professionalized on the hiring front is phenomenal. I mean, she has set up interview guides, so like if you are an assistant account executive, and this would be somebody that you report to maybe two or three levels up, and we’re having you interview, you have a set of questions. If you’re the direct report, you have a set of questions. So we, like, she’s created all this. She’s created salary bands and like, you know, a career path for everybody where from where they start and she’s done, she’s done it in such a way that it isn’t bloat, but it’s just kind of professionalized the way that we do things. And you don’t have to hire a chief operating officer to do this, like I know you, you like to talk. Patrick is your go-to person from an HR perspective, someone like Patrick can help create these things so that you can professionalize it because as they say, hire slowly and fire fast. That quote is there for a reason, because you have to be really meticulous about who you hire. So that they do last. So they are a culture fit, so they don’t miss deadlines so that they are getting the, the work done that you need done and you’re not being, like, I have been in, in the last 20 years of just hiring people I like. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, and I, I mean, I think that, you know, you’ve touched on some important things here and, and you do have to have some sort of a process in place. It doesn’t need to turn you do into a bureaucratic circus, Gini Dietrich: You do, right. Chip Griffin: But at the same time, you need to have a process. And, and it really, to me, starts with being clear about what it is that you need. And who it is that you’re trying to hire. And, and too often when we’re trying to hire, it’s either because someone has left or because we’ve got a new client. And so our, our mindset is we need to get someone in here quick because we’ve gotta relieve this pain and this pressure. But that often leads to some of those bad decisions because you’re not really evaluating. Not even just the individual, but the role. Mm-hmm. And you need to think through, you know, what do you actually need at any given point in time? And it’s one of the reasons why I am a very strong advocate of only hiring, particularly in small agencies, only hiring one person at a time, one role at a time. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Yes. Chip Griffin: Because every time you add someone new to the mix, it changes a little bit what you think you might need in the next one. And if you hire two people simultaneously, it increases the odds that you don’t actually have the right mix of talent on board. So you’ve gotta be crystal clear with yourself about what you’re looking for, but to your point, you also need to have a process in place that helps to understand what are our salary bands, what are our titles? How does this fit in? What is their growth path? Because those are questions you will get during the interview process. And if you’re not clear about those things going in, you will either overpay or underpay or assign the wrong title. Or frankly, get the wrong person because you’re not thinking about it in the big picture. So put the thought process in upfront, and that is the, to me, the first step in making sure that you make as good a decision as possible. Accepting that frankly, a lot of hiring decisions are gonna be wrong. Right? Even of course, even, even the, of course, even the best organizations, of course with the, with robust HR teams and, and talent evaluation, they still have a lot of misfires, so you can’t beat yourself up over those. But you’ve gotta increase your odds by having the right thought process and structural process in place. Gini Dietrich: One of the things that, you know, early on I would do when I didn’t have a team who could interview people, I would ask my business coach, or I would ask, you know, friends that were in the industry, other agency owners, if they would participate in some interviewing, just to kind of get me out of the Gosh, I really like this person. I think we’ll work well together. And, rather than, gosh, I really like this person and I think they can do the job right. So just having different outside perspective helped me when I didn’t have a team that could also do the interviewing. So I think, you know, doing that kind of stuff too helps. And I also think that, you know, I, one of the biggest mistakes, and you touched on this that I’ve made, is not having that career path or clear career path. Because people come to work and even though you’re an entrepreneur and you’re the agency owner, and you kind of know in your head how things work, they need to know that because this is their career that y

In this episode, Chip and Gini tackle the difficult subject of firing an underperforming and problematic employee. They discuss a real-life scenario where an employee with a bad attitude refuses to do their work, causing frustration among team members. They advise against prolonging the inevitable firing decision, suggesting that acting swiftly can alleviate overall team stress. Both hosts share insights on why Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs) are largely ineffective, stressing the need for proper documentation and the guidance of an HR advisor during termination processes. Additionally, they highlight the importance of showing proactive steps to the remaining team to mitigate the workload burden and maintain morale. The episode emphasizes the critical role of leadership in making tough decisions for the greater good of the team and the business. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “When it comes to firing, I am much more a fan of just ripping that bandaid off and being done with it.” Gini Dietrich: “I’ve never seen a PIP work. It’s essentially a 30 day notice.” Chip Griffin: “Usually by the time that you’re even thinking about firing someone, you probably passed the point where you should have done it already.” Gini Dietrich: “Every single agency owner should have a bench of contractors that they have relationships with, that they’ve worked with before, that they can bring on and off the bench when necessary.” Related Building your agency’s bench ALP 22: How to fire agency employees Why Performance Improvement Plans don’t work View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini… Gini Dietrich: I’m so excited Chip Griffin: you’re fired. Gini Dietrich: I knew you were going to fire me. Chip Griffin: Maybe not, because if I fire you, then I have to just talk all by myself, so that might be too much work for me. So maybe I’ll put you on a PIP instead and we’ll just think about it and then we’ll come back and figure out if it makes sense. No, I don’t know about that either. I just don’t know what to do. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Hmm. Well. I guess you could find a replacement. Do you have a replacement? Chip Griffin: I don’t, Gini Dietrich: well start there. Chip Griffin: I don’t know that anybody else would, would wanna put up with having to do this with me every week, so that could be a problem. Gini Dietrich: Truth be told, it is kind of fun, so people would be missing out, but I don’t wanna be fired. Chip Griffin: Okay. Well. I’m fine. I won’t fire you. You’re unfired. Gini Dietrich:  Okay, great. Woohoo. Chip Griffin: So we are gonna talk about firing, but I, it’s not about firing either one of us, it’s about firing employees. And I guess I’ll let you set this one up, but it, it’s a, a question that showed up in an online forum about an underperforming employee. I think that’s fair to say. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: And an owner trying to figure out what to do about it. Gini Dietrich: I mean, yeah. The, the gist of it is that there’s an over an underperforming employee, with a terrible attitude who refuses to do work. She gives it back to her manager regularly. She doesn’t share information. She hoards stuff. But my friend was like this is a problem. She needs to be fired, but we don’t have an immediate replacement and it will put her work on others. And I was like, okay. She’s already, other people are already doing her work, especially if she’s giving it back to her manager. Other people are already doing her work. And the, the way I look about the, at these kinds of things is the team is already frustrated by the time it gets to you. The team is super frustrated with this human being. They don’t wanna do their work anymore. They’re tired of, of standing out for them. They’re tired of helping out. And so they’re looking to you to be the leader. They’re looking to you to make the tough decision. And when you waffle like this, they lose respect and trust in you because you’re not able to make that decision. So trust me when I say that, they would much rather you fire them and take the extra work than to keep going in this manner. Chip Griffin: Yeah, and I, I mean, I’m, as we say at the end of every episode, it depends, you know, I, I think there are things you need to, to think about here. And there have certainly been occasions where I’ve held on to employees until I had a replacement because I, I needed the bandwidth, right? Sure. But there’s a difference in what you’re describing here or what your friend describes where I, I think of this as a diseased employee, if you will. Yes. Right. Because they, they have a bad attitude, which in almost all cases affects the rest of the team. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: And so it’s not that they’re just not as productive as they could be, but still get along well and, you know, kind of try their best. We’ve all had team members, I’m sure over the years that fall into that category where you’d like to replace them, but they’re not, they’re not doing harm. They’re just not, they’re not living up to the potential that you would like to see. Those are cases where I think it can make sense to, to make sure you have a replacement lined up before you take action. Sure. But in a case like this where you have someone who is actively contributing in a negative way to the business. I’m, I am much more a fan of just rip that bandaid off and be done with it. Because to your point, your team is already looking at you and saying, why aren’t you doing something about this? Gini Dietrich: That’s right. Yep. They are. And I think if you, you can’t do this from an HR perspective, but if you polled your team and said, what do you think? They’d all be like we don’t know why she’s still here. Like, come on. Chip Griffin: Yeah. Please do not treat this like Survivor. Do not take a vote of the team. Right. As to whether someone stays or goes. That’s that is Gini Dietrich: it’s a bad idea. Chip Griffin: It is derelict of duty. It may well be illegal or at least problematic. Just, no, don’t do that. Gini Dietrich: But if you did, they would all vote her off the island. Chip Griffin: Yes. More often than not, when you terminate an employee, the other team members that you have will be like, oh, finally. Gini Dietrich: Finally. Yeah. I also think you’re right that when you have somebody who’s negatively affecting the organization, they, you know, it’s the bad apple, but spoils the whole lot, right? So then they start to influence how other people feel. Correct. And maybe someone was feeling a little burned out, or maybe somebody was annoyed about something. Well, now they’re listening to this person go on and on and on all day long. And they start, that little annoyance becomes something bigger and all of a sudden you have a bigger cultural issue on your hands than just one terrible employee that you should just rip the bandaid off and get rid of. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t make it any more pleasant that, you know, to go through it, but it’s, it’s important and it will help your business overall. One of the other questions that I believe was asked in this particular scenario was, should there be a PIP? Please don’t do PIPs. Unless, unless your HR advisor tells you you need to do a PIP in order to lay the proper groundwork for whatever the particular scenario is, please don’t do them. Don’t, or let, let me put it this way, don’t do a PIP anticipating that it’s going to have any impact. Gini Dietrich: Yes,  it’s essentially, a 30 day notice. Chip Griffin: Because I can think of maybe one scenario over the course of my career work, a PIP actually worked to turn an employee around. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah. It’s essentially a 30 day notice. It’s like we’re giving you 30 days. You’re not going to be employed here anymore, is essentially what it’s, I agree with you. I’ve never seen it work. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And so if, if you’re doing it for HR protection, fine, go for it. You should absolutely. Anytime you’re looking at terminating an employee, you should always talk with an HR advisor, employment attorney, whoever it is that you work with, just to make sure that there’s not something that you’re overlooking, that there’s some possible claim there that you need to address carefully and make sure that you dot your T or dot your I’s cross your T’s, Gini Dietrich: dot your T’s. Cross your i’s Chip Griffin: dot your T’s too. I mean, you know, whatever it takes. So you absolutely wanna make sure that you’re, you’re doing those things correctly and appropriately for the rules and regulations that apply in that particular scenario. But if you are doing it because you think it’s gonna work, a PIP will not work. Gini Dietrich: Yep. 100%. I’ve literally never seen it work. You’re exactly right. So I, and I agree. You know, we have an HR leader on our team, and she, she has us do PIPs, but it, it is too just, she’s super, super risk averse and super conservative. So it’s, you know, very much to protect the business. And I’ll say that she has gotten me in a good practice of documenting everything, which as a business owner I was not very good at before. But she has definitely gotten me. So even if you don’t have, even if you’re not gonna do a PIP, I think it’s really important to document, document, you know, conversations that you’ve had where you’ve provided critical feedback or, you know, things like that. Just document, because those are the kinds of things that’ll save you in the long run, especially from a risk perspective. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, and look, I mean, ult

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the growing concerns surrounding AI in the agency world. They highlight the irrational fears and cyclical nature of technological disruptions, drawing comparisons to social media and content marketing trends of the past. The hosts argue against the notion that agencies should discount services due to AI efficiencies, emphasizing that AI should be seen as a tool to enhance productivity and strategic value rather than a cost-cutting measure. They stress that agencies should focus on delivering more value and maintaining regular client communication instead of simply protecting existing revenue. The discussion also touches on the importance of transparency in AI use without oversharing minute details. Finally, they underscore the benefit of quarterly planning to align agency efforts with client business goals, thus fostering stronger client relationships and ensuring mutual success. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “Take ourselves out of the mindset that the AI is coming in and so we need to protect what we have. Instead, we should be thinking about how can we elevate, how can we produce more and better results for our clients?” Gini Dietrich: “Just because you’re faster at some mundane, laborious task does not mean that you should reduce your fees.” Chip Griffin: “Getting into the nitty gritty of your AI usage is sort of like explaining to a client whether you’re using a landline or a mobile phone to reach out to reporters. It doesn’t matter.” Gini Dietrich: “The strategy stays the same. The best practices stay the same. The tools have changed and the tools continue to change.” Related AI should be your agency’s friend, not foe Agencies succeed through consistency and evolution Setting AI policies for your agency View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I am Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini I, I think that AI is making people crazy. They’re losing their minds and acting irrationally. Gini Dietrich: Yes, yes. I completely agree. Some of the stuff I see online, I’m like, you guys, Chip Griffin: take a deep breath. Gini Dietrich: Breath, everyone. Take a deep breath. Stop clutching your pearls. It’s okay. Chip Griffin: Well, maybe the AI really has become sentinent and – sentient – and the, the robot overlords are doing this intentionally to make us go crazy and eat each other alive. Gini Dietrich: Maybe, maybe. Although this happened with social media, it happened with content marketing. It happened with blogging. Here we are with AI. Everybody’s freaking out. Like, this is cyclical. Everyone’s gonna calm down. It will be okay. Chip Griffin: I don’t know if they’ll calm down, but eventually they’ll, they’ll come to the realization that perhaps it isn’t what they thought it, it was, and that it is, it is important. It is useful. It is valuable. It is not something that upends absolutely everything we do every moment of the day and we need to orbit around it. I mean, it just, it really does remind me of those early days of social media where, you know, you’d see these, these articles and posts about, oh my God, CEOs, they need to be blogging and they need to be blogging every day. And I don’t care how big your company is, the CEO needs to write those blog posts themselves. Ghost writing is an evil thing and we shall not do it. And if we do have it ghost written, we must disclose on that blog post or article that this was ghost written and not actually written by the CEO. Because we all believe that CEOs write their own darn stuff. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Yes. That’s why I say it’s all cyclical. Everyone calmed down. It’s going to be okay. That said, I happened upon the LinkedIn post by a second connection, who’s a chief marketing officer, and it essentially said, I’m trying to figure out how to manage my agencies who are using AI and how to ask what kind of discount and how to ask for a discount, because I know they’re using AI. and I was just like, there is no discount because you’re, they’re using AI. They’re able to focus on other things because of that, and they’re able to be more strategic in some areas because of it, but they, they should not be giving you a discount, just like the surgeon doesn’t give you a discount. Because the imaging is faster. You shouldn’t like the same. You’re not. Just because you’re faster at some mundane, laborious task does not mean that you should reduce your fees ever. Drives me freaking nuts. Chip Griffin: Yep. And I would absolutely agree with that, with the asterisk that if, for example, you are being hired to do writing and the AI does all the writing and you don’t edit and you don’t do anything else, and so you know you’re spending 10 minutes on it instead of 10 hours. You absolutely should be either figuring out how you can do more for the client, correct. Or you should be reducing your rates. Yes. Because it is, you know, I love all the talk about, you know, value-based pricing, which we talk about all the time, and certainly there are a lot of people who say, well, it doesn’t matter if I use AI to do it. They’re getting the same value out of it. Well, they are and they aren’t because they could do the work themselves if they wanted to in less time with less cost. And so. You’re not really creating that value anymore if the AI is doing it totally on its own and it doesn’t have anything to do with the prompts that you’re writing or, or the management of the whole process. And all of those things do take time, by the way. Mm-hmm. So we shouldn’t, we shouldn’t forget about that. Right. Particularly when we’re thinking about our own agencies and how we can be more efficient, the time it takes to manage the AI matters. We’ve talked about this recently. You cannot allow those things to, to be forgotten about. And so all of that does go into it. But the, I mean the comments on this post were just other worldly and there was another AI post recently as well that I saw and, and I mean, so we’ve got people out there who are like… CMOs want agencies to reduce their fees because they’re using AI. We’ve got a whole discussion around, well, we need to be transparent and tell every possible use of AI that we have and be really clear about it with our clients. This is how we’re using it exactly. And this is, and, and people say you can’t do hourly billing anymore because of AI, and so you must go to value-based pricing. And I mean, just all of this stuff. Take a breath, folks. Take Gini Dietrich: Yes. It’s a breath. Okay. Chip Griffin: Again, it is a tool, it is a valuable tool, but it is a tool. Gini Dietrich: That’s right. Chip Griffin: And it doesn’t mean that you just throw everything out and start over on either side of the agency client relationship. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Yeah, that’s absolutely right. I, I say this all the time, you know, like in other podcasts that I’m being interviewed on or webinars, whatever, the strategy stays the same. The best practices stay the same. The tools have changed and the tools continue to change. The tools have changed dramatically in the last 15 years. Use the tools to make you more effective and more productive. But like I said, the surgeon is still going to charge you what they charge you for brain surgery. Regardless of how fast the imaging is, regardless of how fast you get your MRI results back, like the, it doesn’t matter. Your expertise is over here in the surgeon bucket, not in the imaging bucket. So remember that. Like the, the stuff that you can do just because you’re faster at creating drafts or you’re faster at predicting outcomes or you’re faster at results reporting does not mean that the real value in what you provide in strategy, the creativity, the innovation, the ideas, all of that is what they’re paying for. They’re not paying for the output over here. Chip Griffin: And we need to take ourselves out of the mindset that, that the AI is coming in and so we need to protect what we have. Instead, we should be thinking about how can we elevate, how can we produce more and better results for our clients? How can we be more effective, not just how do we protect our piece of the pie? Keep doing things the way we always have. If you wanna keep doing things the way you always have, yes, you will suffer in this new environment. Absolutely. You absolutely have to grow and adapt and figure out how this helps you. But that’s no different than, as we’ve said before, you know back 30 years ago when we shifted from faxes to emails. Right, right. That made you more efficient in being able to communicate with other people. Yes. You didn’t have to be on the phone. You didn’t have to send a fax. Yes. Or a telegram or any of these kinds of things. And yes, I’m old enough to have received telegrams, so in fact, when I worked on Capitol Hill, we would get a delivery of telegrams on a regular basis. Gini Dietrich: For real? Chip Griffin: For real. For real. It was still a way. In the early 1990s, that was still a way that people communicated with Congress. They would send telegrams to express their opinions. Gini Dietrich: All right. Chip Griffin: You know, I don’t know why, but Gini Dietrich: I hate you. Stop. Please vote differently. Stop. Chip Griffin: I mean, the thing is, today if you, if you mention a telegram, people are like, what is that? They don’t. Gini Dietrich: Right. Right. Chip Griffin: They don’t, they, they, they’ve never even heard of it, you know? Yeah. Fax machine, they can at least maybe kind of halfway visualize. Yeah. I was watching a conversation on TV and there were some young people and, and someone mentioned a modem and, and that was compl

In this episode, inspired by a newsletter from David C. Baker, Chip and Gini discuss the authentic motivations and realities behind agency mission statements and values. They emphasize that many agencies publish values that are either not reflective of their true operations or are overly broad and similar to others. The hosts stress the importance of being honest about the core purpose of a business and aligning public statements with actual behavior. They argue that values should stem from the owner’s true beliefs and actions rather than aspirational ideals. They also caution against spending too much time wordsmithing values for marketing purposes, as clients are more interested in results. The conversation touches on the impact of leadership behavior on agency culture and the pitfalls of misrepresenting agency values. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “The reality is for most agency owners, your mission is to make money for yourself as the owner, to give yourself flexibility to do what you want, when you want. And all of the other things are side benefits of it. You are not running a not-for-profit.” Gini Dietrich: “It’s okay for you to make money. It’s okay for you to be profitable.” Chip Griffin: “Your values are not something that you establish. They’re something that come from your behavior and the behavior of your team and the activities and the clients that you take on.” Gini Dietrich: “You can’t say it because that’s what you want or that’s what you aspire to. You have to be living it.” Resources David C. Baker’s article We’re Better than this Value Washing Related Be an agency leader that people want to work for View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And, you know, I wanna talk about the, the mission of this podcast and Okay. What we’re trying to achieve. Gini Dietrich: Okay. Our values, talk about values Chip Griffin: and all of the values that I hold, hold dear that I’m sure you do as well. Mm-hmm. That, that we want to embrace. Mm-hmm. As podcast hosts and purely doing this entirely out of the goodness of our hearts for our community, there’s no marketing benefit to us. There’s no thought leadership benefit. It’s all about you, the listener, and how much free stuff we can give you. Gini Dietrich: I mean, some of it is, but yes, we do get value from it. Chip Griffin: I mean the, the reality is I probably would just come on and talk anyway, even if I wasn’t doing what I’m doing for a business. ’cause it’s just fun. Gini Dietrich: It’s fun. I agree. Chip Griffin: But the reality is, I mean, you, you gotta have some real motivation behind it and it, and for this podcast, it’s marketing our respective brands, both personal and business, and sharing our insights. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Chip Griffin: As an agency you also have mission, values, and purpose. Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm. Chip Griffin: But I can pretty much guarantee you that it’s not aligned with what you’re publishing and sharing with prospects, putting on your website, including in your proposals and all this kind of stuff. And this, this discussion is inspired by an article in David c Baker’s newsletter where he talked about value washing and, and he touched on a, a bit of this, you know, agencies and, and how they present their values. But I want to go further than that because I’m particularly cantankerous today. And I just, I, I kind of get sick to my stomach when I see these, you know, missions and value statements and all that kind of stuff that agencies just love to put out there. Because the reality is for most agency owners, your mission is to make money for yourself as the owner, to give yourself flexibility to do what you want, when you want, from a time commitment standpoint. And all of the other things are side benefits of it. You are not running a not-for-profit. Unless you are a nepo baby with a trust fund, you’re not sitting there purely doing good for others. You have to do good for yourself too. But I gotta tell you, I have yet to see a mission statement for an agency that says anything about that. Gini Dietrich: I’ll share mine ’cause it does. Chip Griffin: Do you publish it publicly though? Gini Dietrich: No, I was gonna say now it’s not public, it’s not on the website, but like internally, everybody, especially on the leadership team, they know exactly what we’re driving toward. They know exactly, and it is not, I mean sure like ethical PR and cri, like doing good from a reputation standpoint and those things for sure. But our mission is to become the best and biggest consulting firm that implements PESO. Well, truth be told, the only one, ’cause nobody else can do it, right? Because we own the copyright. But that, that is our mission. Like that’s what we’re working to achieve. And so, and, and we wanna work with the best and the brightest organizations in the world to do that. That’s our mission. Is it published on our website? Absolutely not. Do our, does our internal team know? Yes. Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, look, I, I think the problem is that we need to start by being honest with ourselves as agency leaders about why we exist and what we’re doing. And it’s fine to want to do some of the nice stuff as part of it. Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. Yes. Chip Griffin: But, but it has to start with an acknowledgement of what the core purpose of the business is. And when you start pretending that it’s that that’s not what it is, that’s where I start to have an issue. And then we start looking at what’s actually said publicly by most agencies about their mission and purpose and all of that. And most of it is so broad, so vanilla, so similar to what everybody else is saying, that it, it’s, it doesn’t really serve a purpose. And I know I’ve, I’ve been part of, of agency conversations where there are, are deep, thoughtful, ongoing conversations about mission, values and purpose. Why? Why? And none of that means that you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t have, you know, a general ambition, an ethical framework, all of those kinds of things. Sure. Yes. But you don’t need to burn a lot of time on it. Gini Dietrich: No. Chip Griffin: And you don’t need to work on wordsmithing it to share with prospects, because I’m gonna let you in on a little secret, your prospects don’t care. Gini Dietrich: They don’t care. Chip Griffin: They are not hiring you because of all of these things that you say, they, they don’t really care. They care about the results you’re getting and how much it costs them. Gini Dietrich: That’s right. Chip Griffin: That’s the only two things they care about. Gini Dietrich: Yes. I just had this very conversation Chip Griffin: and as side benefit that you’re decent to work with. Gini Dietrich: Sure. Of course. That they like that you have chemistry and they like working with you. Yeah. Like they wanna show up, be able to show up to meetings with you and humans like other humans, you know? Right, right. I just had this very conversation with a client because she was stressing about her clients and some changes, and I was like, listen, they don’t care. They don’t care. As long as the work gets done, they’re still getting the same results or better. They don’t care. So. Let’s, I, I understand you’re worried about it. I understand you’re stress, but let’s put that stress somewhere else because this bucket, they don’t care about. As long as you communicate it, the work still gets done. They’re still getting the results that they expect. You’re fine. Let’s put the stress somewhere else. So, as an aside, but I agree with you, like, most of us go into business for ourselves because we know there’s a better way to do it and we wanna make more money. And for me, I have a problem with authority. So. And there may be others that, that feel that as well. Chip Griffin: I think, I think a lot of, of business owners and entrepreneurs are unemployable for that very reason. Gini Dietrich: Correct. Yes. So that that’s why we own businesses and there’s nothing wrong with that. For now, we live in a capitalist country where you can actually make money and it’s okay. It’s okay for you to make money. It’s okay for you to be profitable. It’s okay. Chip Griffin: And, and I mean, profit itself is not a dirty word. Gini Dietrich: No, it’s a great word. I love it. Chip Griffin: There’s a fair argument to be had about is there, is there a point where the profit is too much? Where the compensation is too much? That it, it, it’s a, it’s a worthy debate to have at some point, but I can guarantee you that 99.999999999% of small agency owners don’t need to worry about that. Gini Dietrich: And don’t have enough profit, Chip Griffin: probably a hundred percent, but I’m just being holding open the possibility that there’s just some small agency out there that you know is, is really just rolling in it. Gini Dietrich: And I will add that you probably 99.9999999999% of agencies don’t make enough profit. 5% profit is not enough. Break even is not enough. 10% is not enough. Chip Griffin: Well, particularly when that profit doesn’t even include the owner’s compensation. But that’s an argument that, Gini Dietrich: right. Chip Griffin: That we’ve had ad nauseum on, on this show and that I have ad nauseum with clients as well who, who like to count the profit while paying themselves zero zero. Right. And your profit margin, that does not count. That does not count. But I mean, you know, I, I think we also need to be mindful of the fact that a lot of the, the missions, values, and purpose kind of things that I see out there do not conform to how the agency even operates. S

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss a Reddit post about an agency leader going MIA and the repercussions for the team. They elaborate on the importance of communication, perception, and flexibility for agency owners. The conversation includes personal anecdotes from both hosts, highlighting the need for frequent touchpoints, setting clear expectations, and maintaining a balance between taking personal time and being present for the team. They also stress the significance of transparency during challenging times and the benefits of empowering employees to reduce bottlenecks. Key takeaways Gini Dietrich: “As an owner, I think that you absolutely should be taking time to do things that you’re passionate about. But not at the expense of the business, or of your employees.” Chip Griffin: “If it’s industry events that are causing you to be absent, make sure that the team understands why and how that fits into the bigger picture.” Gini Dietrich: “If you’re consistently having weekly one-to-one meetings, if you’re consistently communicating with them, these things will be mitigated just by the mere fact that you’re talking to your team.” Chip Griffin: “And just as important as talking with your team, you’ve got to listen to them.” Related Weekly 1:1 meetings make a big difference for your agency Building trust and letting your team shine View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. What is happening? Chip Griffin: That effect really only works if you’re watching this. Gini Dietrich: I don’t know what just happened. Chip Griffin: I, I slid off screen. I went MIA. Gini Dietrich: Oh my gosh. So I don’t even, that was, that was, I think, the best, the best intro we’ve ever had. You just left the screen. And even though I knew what the topic was, I was like, what is happening right now? Chip Griffin: So it’s just, it’s my way of encouraging listeners to become viewers because. It just, it completely loses the impact of, if you only listened to that portion of it. I, I don’t know how much impact you have, but from watching it either, but, you know, at least it’s, at least you understand what’s going on. Gini Dietrich: He literally just left the screen. Chip Griffin: I left the screen. But no, we are, we are, we were inspired by a Reddit post and we haven’t gone to the Reddit well for quite some time. Gini Dietrich: We haven’t, no. Yeah. Chip Griffin: So we decided to go back to Reddit and see what people were talking about. And so there is a relatively recent thread there where an agency employee says the principle of their firm has gone completely MIA, leaving them to do all of the work and feeling abandoned by the owner. That seems like a worthy topic to be discussing. Gini Dietrich: I feel like the answer is don’t. Don’t do that. Don’t ghost your business or your employees. Chip Griffin: Don’t ghost your business. And here we go, we’re done. Thanks for listening. Gini Dietrich: The end. Don’t do that. Chip Griffin: No, but I, I think it’s, it is, as owners, we sometimes overlook how our actions can be perceived by those who work for us. So it’s, it’s not necessarily being completely MIA, which obviously we would discourage. But your general availability, for example, can play into your team’s perceptions or your client’s perceptions of what your business is like. Absolutely, and we all, we certainly encourage owners to take all of the, the freedom that comes with being a business owner, don’t just take on all of the risk and stress. And so you need to have flexibility. And you shouldn’t feel compelled to, to necessarily, you know, work 9 to 5 every day exactly. You should absolutely build some flexibility in to what you do because that is honestly one of the perks of being an owner. and absolutely, increasingly a perk of being an employee these days. But, you know, that’s a conversation for a separate day. You know, so, but we also have to be mindful of how this can be perceived, particularly by our team members, but also our clients. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think you, you’re absolutely right, like taking advantage of the flexibility that you can build in for yourself is one of those things. And I think there are lots of agency owners who do things like maybe they’re giving back to the industry by teaching, or perhaps they’re volunteering for PRSA or IABC or one of those, right? Or, you know, doing something like that that may be tangentially related to what we do, but not taking, taking you away from the business. And I think that those are things are good. I think that you absolutely, those are things that you’re passionate about, that you should absolutely be doing those things. But not at the expense of the business or, or of your employees. Because if, if your employees are feeling like they’re running the agency and they can’t get you to make decisions or to have one-to-ones or be present, that’s a problem. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And look, I mean, this is something that I have struggled with a lot over the years. Not because I just go off and sit in the mountains and, you know, hike and relax and all that kind of stuff. It’s, it’s because I’ve often been running more than one business. Mm-hmm. And so, inevitably one of them will typically get busier than another. And so those involved in the ones that are less busy at the moment may feel abandoned at times, by me. And so I, it’s something I’ve had to be particularly aware of and making sure that, that I’m safeguarding against being too absent from a particular business. Sometimes you’ve got a business in, in my case, I would’ve, businesses that were running really well and smoothly and the team was executing and so I didn’t feel like I needed to be there. But the perception can be very different from the team side, right? Where they feel like, well, why are you ignoring us? Right? And the answer might be, because you’re doing such a great job, I don’t really need, I don’t need, yeah. To be there and I’m not adding the value. But unless you’re communicating that to them, they don’t know that. So I think there’s, there’s two things you need to be mindful of here. One is the perception, and two is your communication strategy around what you’re doing. If it’s industry events and things like that that are causing you to be absent, make sure that the team understands why and how that fits into the, the bigger picture. Because that makes it easier for them to understand and less likely for them to think, oh, well, Chip’s just on another junket. Here he goes, you know, he, he’s off to San Diego or Miami and you know, it’s the middle of the winter. Of course he is. Why not? And, and, those are things that are, that are important to factor in because it can have a meaningful impact on your team’s performance. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when I was on book tour both times, I was absent from the business every week. I mean, one, I think 2014 I traveled 50 weeks out of the year. So it was extremely hard for me to be on book tour and speaking and business development while also running the business. And my employees. I am fairly confident, felt the, felt the brunt of that. And I don’t think I probably handled it the best way either. I probably shouldn’t have taken on that much travel. It helped the business grow significantly for sure, because I was also doing business development as part of it, but they definitely felt abandoned in that they were running the agency in my absence. And that I was just off traveling the world and having a great time and Right. That was their perception. Right. So I think you do, I think communicating that is right and there are certain things that you still have to do. Like I should have, continued with one-to-ones. And because I was traveling and I was speaking and all that, I just sort of let those slide. I should have continued with all team meetings at least biweekly, if not weekly. So I, I let those things slide because I was traveling and I was exhausted and you know, in many cases I was around the world and so time zones were, were crappy too. But I think that’s right. I think that’s the right approach is that you still have to do certain things. If, if you’re quote unquote, abandoning your agency because you’re doing something else that may or may not be helpful for the agency, or be because you want you, you’re taking advantage of flexibility, which is fine too. Communicate that, but also continue sort of the process things like one-to-one, right, so that people feel like you’re still involved. Chip Griffin: Yeah. I think that’s key is, is putting in that bit of additional effort to show some sense of normalcy to the rest of the team when you’re, you’re doing those kinds of things. And you know, I suspect that if, if we talked to the owner of, of this person’s agency, they probably wouldn’t describe themselves as MIA. They would probably describe themselves as busy with a variety of different things, some of which may be beneficial to the agency directly or indirectly or, or what have you. Or, or they may say, as I did, You’ve got this, I don’t need to be there. Mm-hmm. But making sure that you have those regular touch points with your team can certainly help. I think the other thing to keep in mind is that, and we’ve talked about this before, is that you do have to lead by example. And that means also understanding how the example you are setting is received by your team. So for example, if part of your perception of being MIA is that, that you disappear a couple afternoons a week for your kids’ sporting events. If you are not enabling your team to do that, maybe not with

In this episode, Chip and Gini address a listener’s question about the opportunities for growing an agency through outbound sales. They discuss the challenges of outbound sales, particularly in a small agency environment, and highlight the importance of building relationships and a strong brand. Both suggest that agency owners focus on networking and proactive relationship-building rather than traditional cold calling. They emphasize a multi-faceted approach to business development that includes content marketing, warm introductions, and maintaining an active online presence. Ultimately, they advocate for a shift in mindset from outbound sales to relationship cultivation to achieve sustainable agency growth. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “It’s sort of the dream that you can just go hire somebody and they’ll bring prospects in and as the owner, you’ll close them. But I cannot think of a single situation that I’ve seen that work for a small agency.” Gini Dietrich: “When you run a small agency, you are the salesperson.” Chip Griffin: “I think far too often we don’t do enough as agency leaders to share our viewpoints using the various platforms that we have. That’s a huge missed opportunity because that is how you set yourself apart from others.” Gini Dietrich: “Instead of it being about outbound sales, which I think is scary to a lot of us, think about it as networking and building relationships and being top of mind.” Related Content, consistency, and conversions for agency biz dev (featuring Lee McKnight Jr.) Business development mistakes agencies make and how to solve them (featuring Jody Sutter) Getting agency business development right (featuring Dan Englander) Business development for agency owners who hate sales View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, today we have a question from a listener that we thought we would answer. Gini Dietrich: Woohoo listener questions. I love it. Chip Griffin: We like it when people listen to us and we like it when people ask us questions, so Gini Dietrich: that is true. Chip Griffin: We’ll cater to that today. Gini Dietrich: Shall I read said question? Chip Griffin: You shall read, said question. Gini Dietrich: Maybe I’ve just missed it when you’re covering this in your podcast, but what opportunity do you see for growing an agency through outbound sales? When I’ve listened to your podcast, I get the impression that you’re more in line of thinking that in the agency world, it’s more about becoming known and then they will contact you when they have a need. It’s super good question. Chip Griffin: First of all, I appreciate the very dramatic reading of that question. Welcome that you just gave us. Gini Dietrich: You’re welcome. Thank you. I practiced. Chip Griffin: You practiced. Gini Dietrich: Practiced. I did. Chip Griffin: In your head, because we just saw that question a short time ago. Gini Dietrich: I read it out loud once before this. Chip Griffin: You did, you read it out loud one time and I said that sounds like a good question to address and so we shall. So outbound sales, what do we think about that, Gini? Gini Dietrich: Well, I will say. In my experience, it is challenging to do that. I’ve hired, and maybe, maybe we should separate this into two pieces, which is hiring people to do outbound sales for your agency versus you. And then whether or not it works. But I’ll say it, it is challenging and I have found that it’s… That you have to be top of mind and you have to build a brand, and you have to build relationships, and you have to network so that when there is a need, they come to you first, right? Because not everybody’s going to have a need. All the time, every month or every week to hire an agency. So I have found that inbound marketing and you know, all of the things that you’re doing to build your brand and network and, and be top of mind are the things that work the best. That’s not to say outbound sales doesn’t help with that, but it is more challenging I think for what we do for a living than just, you know, other businesses that can hire sales teams that just make cold calls. Chip Griffin: Yeah, and I, I think that that part of this, as you suggest, does come down to, to how we’re defining what outbound sales is, because there’s what outbound sales is, there’s who is doing it. I, I think the, the either outsourced outbound sales or the hired outbound salesperson. I, I really haven’t ever seen that work in a small agency environment. It’s sort of the dream that you can just go hire somebody and they’ll, you know, they’ll, they’ll bring people in and you’ll just, as the owner, you’ll close them. But I, I, I cannot think of a single situation that I’ve seen that work in for a small agency. I’m sure it has. So, I’m, I’m, and I’m sure that, that some listener is gonna say, well, it worked for me. Great. It, there are certainly those cases, but it is, it is uncommon that you can have someone else who’s doing your sales and it is all outbound and it actually has results. So let’s, let’s dismiss that piece of it. But you as the owner, I think there is a role for outbound sales, depending on how you describe it. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: And, and to me it’s less about outbound sales and it’s more about outbound building of new relationships. Mm-hmm. And I think that there is absolutely a case to be made for you to be proactively trying to generate relationships. With new people as opposed to just waiting for them to come to you based off of the content that you’re putting out on social or your blog or your email or that kind of thing. But to me it’s, it’s not, I don’t think of that necessarily as sales in the purest sense, because to me, I think when you talk about outbound sales, that really is trying to go to someone and try to, to generate the need for a conversation around sales. And that shouldn’t be what it is because that is rarely to your point, the case because timing isn’t right many of the times. Gini Dietrich: Right. Yeah, I think, I think you’re right. I think it depends. Like if you told me I had to sit down and make cold calls to our target audience, it, it would just never happen. I would never do that. That’s considered outbound sales. Like I have a niece. Sure. That’s what she does. She works for an agency. A large, large agency and they have in-house sales reps that call. Constantly. That’s what they do. That’s what she does, and she’s fairly successful at it. But that is not, never, never anything that I would do myself, right? Just because I’m not comfortable with it and it’s never the structure that I would place inside my agency. So that is what I would consider outbound sales. I don’t consider networking and building relationships and ensuring that we are top of mind when they’re ready to make a decision or when they’re ready to hire outbound sales, even though, I guess technically it is. I would consider that more networking and relationship building, right? So I think you’re right that you have to define what that means, but all of those things have to happen. And when you run a small agency, you are the salesperson. Yes. Whether or not you have somebody helping you, you are, you are the salesperson, and my CFO says this to me all the time. He’s like, your job, you have two things to do. Build the brand. Direct the revenue. Build the brand, direct the revenue, build the brand, direct the revenue. And I’m always like, so anytime I go to do something, he’s like, is that building the brand or directing revenue? And if it’s neither of those two things, I have to delegate it. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And I mean that’s a, that is a reasonable viewpoint to have. Mm-hmm. And I think that… I mean, look, I think cold calling is for, even for large agencies, I wouldn’t generally encourage it, but I suppose at some point you’re large enough that you can just throw dollars at it and it doesn’t even matter. Right. And you know, you’ve got enough of a brand reputation to begin with that, you know, perhaps that will shake some things loose. But you know, anytime you’re doing outbound, I would always prefer it to be more targeted than traditional cold calling. You know, not just getting a list out of some list broker and just working from top to bottom. Instead, you, you wanna reach out with personalized outreach to folks and, and leverage that. And I think if you’re doing that kind of outbound and it’s, and it’s designed to build new relationships either for people who can refer a business to you or who might become a client at some point. I think that’s a, a useful portion of your business development mix. I don’t think it should simply be throw content out there and wait for the phone to ring, because that can work. But, you know, doing more to fuel it yourself is beneficial. I, it, to me, that’s just not, that is not classic outbound sales in the way that most people would think of it. And if you went and hired someone to do outbound sales for you, they would likely be thinking of it. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. Yeah, I think it’s, if you can be thinking about how do I build relationships. How do I get introductions, warm introductions to people that I want to meet? How do I nurture those leads through content and through speaking engagements and webinars and things like that? And how do I stay top of mind? That’s from an agency perspective, I think those are the right things to focus on. Chip Griffin: Yeah, and to the extent you’re doing any kind of outbound, whether it’s outbound sales, outbound networking, whatever you w

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the impact of AI on small agencies, focusing on the high expectations and possible disappointments it poses. They reference a recent article from The Atlantic, which highlights a study showing that AI can sometimes decrease efficiency. They caution against overhauling business models based solely on AI’s current capabilities, stressing that while AI can assist with tasks and improve efficiency, it cannot fully replace human judgment and creativity. The conversation extends to the challenges of integrating AI without sacrificing the development of new talent and ensuring that the evolving role of AI adds value rather than causing disruption. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “It’s not about AI being either the panacea or evil, it’s that we may be adjusting our models too much too quickly.” Gini Dietrich: “AI is great for some things but it cannot replace human beings yet.” Chip Griffin: “It is incredibly likely that all of the providers of AI are going to start ratcheting up the prices. And so what looks today like a huge cost savings likely may not be in just a few short years.” Gini Dietrich: “How do we bring new college graduates into the workforce, and what are we teaching them?” Resources Just How Bad Would an AI Bubble Be? (The Atlantic) Related Should AI upend your agency business model today? Using AI the right way for agency biz dev CWC 10: Neville Hobson on AI and machine learning in PR View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I am Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, I think, you know, I think AI is gonna solve all of my problems. We’ve said this before, but I, I really, I’m gonna change my whole business model around it. Gini Dietrich: I think you should fire everybody. You could fire me as your co-host. AI can just do it for you. Chip Griffin: You know, I mean, I wonder if the AI would talk back less. Gini Dietrich: Probably, although if I program it, I’ll program it for you so that it, it talks back a sufficient amount. Chip Griffin: Excellent, excellent. Just, just what I need. Gini Dietrich: You’re welcome. Chip Griffin: Oh, at least, you know, maybe, maybe the AI wouldn’t yawn at me like you did just before we started recording, so Gini Dietrich: I shouldn’t even be tired either. I got nine hours of sleep last night. I don’t know what my problem is, Chip Griffin: I assume you were expressing your boredom with me. Gini Dietrich: No. Prior to the start of the show. No. Chip Griffin: I mean, usually it takes a couple minutes for most of our listeners to get that bored with me. So Gini Dietrich: no, I’m not bored with you. Chip Griffin: Okay. Gini Dietrich: Just sleepy. Chip Griffin: Just sleepy. Well, I’m with you on that. Alright. But we are gonna talk about AI and in particular, there was a good article in the Atlantic recently, that is consistent with some of the things that I’ve been saying and talking with clients and, and I think it’s, it’s helpful to think about. And that is whether or not there is an AI bubble and what it means. And it’s not, in my view, it’s not so much about a macro AI bubble, sort of like we think about, you know, the, the internet bubble in the early 2000s and, and I think there is certainly some of that, but that’s really more about investing in some of the businesses and infrastructure and that kind of thing. But I think for small agencies, there is the potential for an AI bubble that comes about because we all get too focused on either what kind of threat AI is or what kind of opportunity AI is. And we’ve said before on this, we’ve talked about AI a lot, so I, I was a little reluctant to come back to it, but I think that thinking about it in in these terms may be helpful. Because it’s not, it’s not about AI being either the panacea or evil, it’s that we may be adjusting our models too much too quickly because some of these things may not quite be there. And in particular, the Atlantic had a great example and it was from a study that was done with some software developers. And the software developers were given AI to help them do their jobs. And the purpose of the study was to try to figure out was it a 20% efficiency improvement, 40%, 60%, what was it? And ultimately what they discovered was it was actually, it decreased their efficiency. Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Chip Griffin: Because part of the challenge with AI, and I, I’m sure many of us have seen this, is when it works well, God, it works great. It just, and, and we’re impressed and we’re, we sit there and say, that’s amazing. But we, we don’t factor in the times it doesn’t work and the times we have to argue with it and fight. Right? And so if, if we’re go, and I, I mean I do this a lot with, I mean, maybe it shows something about me that I argue with the computer. I was trying out Gamma recently, which is a, a service that lets you build PowerPoint decks effectively. And I threw something in, just kind of randomly grabbed an outline, threw it in, and it actually did a really nice job of creating the first thing that I sent to it. And I’m like, that’s great. I’m like, okay, well can you make these modifications to it? And it just wouldn’t do it. It just, it, it kept, you know, I, I said, can we put, you know, my logo at the bottom of the slide, you know, in the footer. And so it puts it in, it’s like a quarter of the screen. I’m like, no, no. I said, can you make it smaller, Gini Dietrich: same size, just move it. Chip Griffin: And it’s like, great, that’s a great idea. Let’s make it smaller. And it gives it to me the exact same size. Oh. And it makes it completely unusable because obviously you don’t really want your company logo to take up a quarter of the slide. That’s just dumb. So I, I think we need to, to think about all of the effort that we’re putting into AI and factor that in when we’re thinking about our own efficiencies, because I’m afraid that some people may be changing their models too much, changing their pricing too much. Because they’re looking at the successful implementation of AI and not factoring in all of the challenges along the way. At least as it exists in September of 2025. Gini Dietrich: Gartner has their hype cycle, right? And so it looks at things from that perspective. And, you know, we get really excited. We’re human beings. We get really excited. There’s something. Coming. There’s like all this like, oh, that’s scary. We’re not gonna do anything. Then we get really excited about it. Then it dips down and then it comes back up before it’s like scalable and, and something that we use. The internet was one, email was one, social media was another, those kinds of things. Right. Well, in the hype cycle, AI is now in the trough of disappointment. So it’s in that section of the cycle where it’s like, oh. Maybe this isn’t gonna work so well. And you have companies like Salesforce who just laid off 30,000 people. Because they think AI is going to replace those human beings. And what they’re going to find in the trough of disappointment is that that’s not the case. And I think that we have to think about that. As you know, we’re certainly, I’m not laying off 30,000 people. You’re not laying off 30,000 people. I would imagine most of our listeners are not laying off 30,000 people. But you have to think about it from that kind of perspective of AI is great for some things. It cannot replace human beings yet. So when you think about how you’re using it, those are the kinds of things you have to consider. One of the things I say to my team all the time, I, I’ll get something from a team member and I’ll be like, did you use AI for this? And my favorite is when they’re like, oh, just to outline. I’m like, really? ’cause on the third page, the sixth bullet point, it’s definitely AI. And I know that because you didn’t, it’s, it’s talking to you, right? And you didn’t edit it. So it can’t replace people yet. And I think though, that’s what I continue to tell my team is you can absolutely use it, but you have to use your brain and you have to edit the work that you’re getting because as a first draft, it’s crap. It’s not good. So we have to like take all of this with a grain of salt and make sure that we’re using it effectively. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, and I think that, you know, part of the challenge is if, if we say, okay, well because of this we can now, you know, churn out social or blog posts or graphics or whatever that much faster and all that and, we’re building our models, we’re building our staffing models around it. We’re building our pricing models around it. It becomes a problem. Yeah. Yep. When we realize that it’s not quite as efficient, it’s still good. It’s still helpful. We still ought to be using it and some of this stuff will continue to get better. Most of it will continue to get better, and so at some point it will get there. It’s sort of like during that, that first wave of the internet bubble in the early 2000s, there were plenty of businesses that came out, got a lot of attention, and then failed miserably only to see 10 or 15 years later an almost identical business come up and blossom because now it was time for it. The technology was there, the market was there, and so, so some of these things, it’s not that they’re not a good idea, it’s just that they’re not quite fully baked yet. And as, as particularly as small businesses, we need to be careful about how heavily we lean into some of these things without understanding what the risk of that is and, and understanding whether it is truly everything that we believe it is in our, in our happiest moment. And, and, you

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss how to handle situations when the problems affecting an agency’s client relationship stem from external contacts like procurement, IT, or the sales team. They emphasize treating client contacts as allies and not enemies, and provide strategies to navigate bureaucratic hurdles and internal politics. The discussion covers creative problem-solving techniques such as using MSAs, having biweekly calls with VPs of Sales, and understanding cultural differences. The importance of having a collaborative approach and pre-building relationships to effectively manage challenges is also highlighted. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “Treat your client contact as an ally, not the enemy.” Gini Dietrich: “We have several clients who have procurement done in another country, and English is not their first language. And so we find that some of the barriers to success are not because of the things that we assume.” Chip Griffin: “When you run up against an obstacle, try to figure out is there a creative way that we can get from here to there?” Gini Dietrich: “We always ask what the threshold is for financial amounts because there’s usually an amount of money that your client contact can approve without it going to procurement or to their boss or whatever happens to be.” Related How agencies should handle procurement and legal How to onboard new agency clients Getting agency-client contracts done right View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, I’ve got this, this invisible guy over here, and he’s telling me what we need to do for this show today. And, and we have to follow it to the letter if we wanna record. Gini Dietrich: Oh, who is it? Chip Griffin: I dunno, but if someone, someone is telling me that we need to, to record an episode about what to do when your problem isn’t the client contact for your agency, but it’s someone else, someone off screen who’s telling them what they have to do and it’s causing problems for your relationship. Gini Dietrich: Oh, someone like procurement or IT? Chip Griffin: Someone like procurement. Mm-hmm. IT, the sales team. Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm. Chip Griffin: The CEO. Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm. Chip Griffin: All sorts of people who may not be involved in any of the day-to-day work that our client contacts are doing, but they are just involved enough that they can cause trouble. Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm. Kind of like me having to tell a client’s VP of sales the other day that we’re not their local Kinkos. Chip Griffin: Yes. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I actually used those words. Chip Griffin: I mean, to be fair, FedEx Kinko’s now, so you’re, you’re dating yourself, but Gini Dietrich: I, fair, yes, you’re right. But also it got the point across. Chip Griffin: Yes, it got the point across, but, but did it resolve the situation or did they just say Gini Dietrich: It did resolve the situation. Okay, good. Good. I think it made him mad, but he understood that we’re not here to just print the brochures for him. Chip Griffin: Yeah. No, that is, that is not the role of an agency. But no, a lot of times we do have these, these pressures or our, or really it’s our client contacts who feel the immediate pressure, right? They get, they get told by procurement that they have to, to find a way to cut the budget with their agency. They get told by IT that, you know, you can’t do this with email or that with your website or those kinds of things, or there are all these extra hoops to jump through and there’s no budget to pay for all those extra hoops or, I mean, just any number of different things that, that we see as agencies that we have to find some way to deal with. And it’s tough because when it’s our client contact, we can at least have a direct conversation. But when it’s someone who is, who is literally off screen, for most of us, since we’re doing these conversations typically by Zoom these days. Someone offscreen meddling is a lot harder to deal with. So, so what is your advice to an agency owner who says, look, I’ve, I’ve got these challenges and, and my client contact agrees with me, but, but how can I help them to get this across the goal line the way we need to? Gini Dietrich: Yeah, it depends on what it is for sure. I mean, we’ve had the situation where procurement, of course, has wanted us to reduce fees. So then it’s a conversation with the client contact to say, Hey, listen, this is what they’re asking us for. That means we’re gonna have to take this, this, and this out of this scope of work. Typically the client contact can influence that and go down and talk to procurement or send an email or do a support ticket or whatever it happens to be, to be able to influence that. And sometimes they can even elevate it or escalate it above to their supervisor or their supervisor’s supervisor. It just depends. But that’s usually where, usually where we start is saying If we do this, this is what it, this is how it will affect the work that we’re going to do together. And this is what you can expect. And typically they’ll, they’ll go to bat for you. So I would start there for sure. Chip Griffin: Right. I mean, I think that that fundamentally what you’re describing is, is treating your client contact as an ally, not the enemy. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: And, and it is tough because sometimes when we, when we hear these things, it’s, it’s often, you know, we often put ourselves in the position of wanting to shoot the messenger because that’s who we’re, we’re talking to our client contact on a daily basis. And when they tell us, you know, these are the rules or these are the things we need to do, you know, we, we can get frustrated with them, but we need to remember. Most of the time or many of the times, it’s not them. They, they have the same view we do. And so we need to try to figure out how we can work together to overcome their internal obstacle. And it, and it does mean that, you know, we may need to make some compromises ourself. We may need to, to invest a little bit more time and energy into helping things done. And some of that may be uncompensated time. If needed in order to, to try to, to clear these hurdles. But they are necessary hurdles to clear. Otherwise we may not be able to achieve the results or we may have to, to eliminate some of our profit margin or any number of different problems that we may run into if we’re not willing to invest in the short term in overcoming those difficulties. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And I would say most of the time people are pretty reasonable. You can, you can say, and usually your client contact is gonna be like, Ugh, this is so frustrating. I can’t have you reduce the scope, right? Because we need to do these things and I’m held accountable to those results. And so, you know, so it, so the…It, it rolls downhill for sure. So usually they will go to bat for you and we’ve had a couple of examples where they’ve had to go to their supervisor and say, Hey, I need you to help me push this through. But for the most part, I think you’re right. If you can use your client contact as the ally, you can usually get things done the way you need it to, to be done. Chip Griffin: And I think the other thing we need to do is, is remind ourselves that, that these unseen actors are by and large, not bad people either. They’re just, they’re, they’re doing their job in the way that they think is best. So, so even procurement, and we all love to dump on procurement. Fairly in my view, because a lot of them are looking just at the numbers and not really, Gini Dietrich: it’s a little challenging. Yeah, yeah. Chip Griffin: So, but, but we need to remember that, that they are people. And so, you know, our first instinct as, as we usually advise on this show, is to treat other people like humans. And, and if you can, try to relate to them. If you can try to, I mean, one of the things I always advise is try to get them in the conversation. Don’t, don’t play a game of telephone because a game of telephone is hard to win. You, you can’t because you know, now you’re just trying to coach up your client contact on, on what they need to say. But you’re not part of the conversation. You’re not, you’re not sure if, if something is getting lost in translation in either direction, frankly. Right, right. And so you really want to try to get to a place where you can get in the same room with whoever, whatever that external force is that’s causing difficulty for your relationship. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, for sure. And I, I think that’s really good advice. I think it’s sometimes I have the tendency to wanna go directly to the source, and you also have to be careful that, that may, from a political standpoint, may not be the right thing. So again, start with your client contact. Say, Hey, I’m happy to help you with this. Or, you know, wanna schedule a Teams call for all three of us, whatever happens to be, but… I’ve also gotten in trouble for going straight directly to the source to say, Hey, like how can we do this? So I would say, bring your client contact in as much as you can until they say, I’m happy for you to take this on, or let me schedule a call, or whatever happens to be. Chip Griffin: Right. Or, or, I mean, I would say just the, the flip side to that is if you get all of you in a room, and I agree, that’s where you should start. If you read that room and there’s some friction between your internal contact and whoever you’re really trying to deal with, then I would try to extract your client contact sooner rather than later. Yes, absolutely. Yes, because sometimes there’s intern

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the common practice of providing free proposals and baseline ideas to clients. They argue that professional service providers should charge for these services as doing so adds value and ensures a thorough diagnosis before providing solutions. They share personal experiences and compare the situation to doctors who would never prescribe treatment without proper tests. They emphasize the importance of understanding a client’s business through a paid discovery phase and making adjustments along the way to deliver effective results. Additionally, they discuss the risks of providing overly detailed plans in early stages, the benefits of quarterly assessments, and the importance of maintaining clear communication and trust with clients. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “You should not be in a position of having one phone call with a client or prospect and saying, yep, know what that problem is. Here’s how we’ll fix that, and here’s what it costs.” Gini Dietrich: “Quarterly planning helps build trust because it allows the client to be involved in the planning decisions and discussions and measurement to understand what’s working and what’s not.” Chip Griffin: “If you ever feel that you are in a position where your expertise is either not valued or you don’t feel comfortable delivering it, then you are in the wrong relationship and need to look elsewhere.” Gini Dietrich: “We have to create a prescription exactly for you and your business so that we can have success. And we can’t do that without spending 30 or 60 days with you and getting to know and understand your business.” Related What if agencies abandoned proposals and posted transparent pricing? The pros and cons of RFP’s for agencies Understanding the cost of agency business development Common mistakes agencies make when pursuing new business View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: Gini, you got me all wound up for today’s topic. And so I’m sort of frothing at the mouth here. And, I’m gonna try to control myself, but I, I’m not trying to do a funny opening ’cause I just got too amped up in the leadup. Gini Dietrich: Oh, okay, well good. Chip Griffin: And I was afraid, I was afraid of what I might say. Gini Dietrich: I like amped up Chip. That’s good. That’s good. Yeah. Chip Griffin: I’m trying, I’m trying to dial it down to keep it at a level where we don’t get kicked off of any of the platforms we’re on and my hate mail is limited to a minimum and all of that kind of stuff. Gini Dietrich: That doesn’t happen. Chip Griffin: No, that’s true. I don’t, I don’t get that. No. But Gini Dietrich: yeah, Chip Griffin: I’m surprised. I mean, I, I would think with some of the things that you and I say on this show, we would get some people who are like, I cannot believe you said that. Gini Dietrich: Maybe we do, and they just don’t report it to us. To the podcast platform. Chip Griffin: That’s true. Or maybe they include it one of the inane podcast pitches that we get that I just hit delete without actually reading. Gini Dietrich: Jeez Louise. It’s so bad. My favorite is when they pitch the FIR network and Shel Holtz forwards emails to the two of us and he is like, oh, here’s another prize. Chip Griffin: Yep. I mean, I can tell, I can tell most of them when they’re, when they’re really poorly targeted, because those usually come into my iCloud email address. Gini Dietrich: Oh, interesting. Chip Griffin: Which is what I’ve registered the podcast with for Apple Podcasts. Gini Dietrich: Got it. Chip Griffin: And, but it’s literally the only email I ever get on that account, so. Huh. So I know as soon as it comes in that they have not done any research because that email address is not published anywhere. I don’t use it for anything. Gini Dietrich: So how would they get it? Through one of the systems or through one of the platforms? Chip Griffin: I think so. It’s probably in the metadata somewhere. Yeah. Who knows? But Gini Dietrich: fascinating. Chip Griffin: Yeah. Yeah. Not, not a lot of smart podcast pitchers out there, unfortunately. Gini Dietrich: Well, unfortunately there’s not a lot of smart pitchers generally just based on my inbox and based on some of the private communities I’m in. Chip Griffin: Well, I mean, yes, and, and I do get, because of my various blogs and because I used to to have a political newsletter, I get an an insane number of actual pitches for people who think that I am proper media. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: But, but they are wildly, poorly targeted. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah. Chip Griffin: And I’m tempted to say, look, I, I haven’t done food and beverage reporting for 15 years now, so… I still get a lot of political pitches. Gini Dietrich: Do you? Chip Griffin: I have not had a political newsletter since 2015. Wow. So stop. Just stop. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I get a lot of Chicago area stuff, which is fine, because I’m like, oh, well that’s cool, but I’ve literally never covered Chicago. Chip Griffin: Correct. Oh yeah. I get, I get all the New Hampshire stuff and like, oh, so and so got a grant. I don’t care. I mean, that’s Okay. Gini Dietrich: Great. Awesome. Chip Griffin: Thank you. Congratulations to them. But I don’t know what I’m gonna do with this information, so, right. Maybe go get a different list. Anyway. Alright, well now that we’ve ranted about things that have nothing to do, that have nothing to do Gini Dietrich: with, right, Chip Griffin: with, with our actual topic, what are we going to rant about today? Gini? Gini Dietrich: There was an interesting conversation in one of the groups I belong to, and it was essentially this. Have you considered charging for your proposal and baseline ideas? Most professional service providers charge to assess the situation. After all these years, we still provide the outline of an actual plan and sometimes a campaign concept absolutely free of charge. Stop doing that. The discovery part of our process generally takes time. Yes. And then the proposal is written and fine tuned, and then there’s a presentation. We do close two out of three engagements we pursue. Still, I can’t imagine a CPA or a law firm doing this kind of work. Why do we? Well, we shouldn’t. Let’s not do that. Chip Griffin: Yeah. So it is incredibly common for agencies to try to provide fairly robust plans as part of proposals, or worse as part of RFP processes. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: There is way too much detail included in almost all of these. And I’ll be honest, my issue is not that you’re doing it for free, not that you’re not charging for it. It’s that you’re being stupid. Because you are submitting a prescription for how to solve a problem before you really have much information. We’ve said time and time again that as part of the sales process, you have maybe a couple of hours of conversation with a prospect. That is not nearly enough time to really understand what the right approach to solving that problem is. You may know in broad brush strokes what is likely to be the case, but you don’t know enough to put together a detailed plan. So whether you’re paid for it or not, stop doing that. Gini Dietrich: Yes, please. I 100% agree with this. We stopped doing it many years ago, but I love your analogy on this, so I’m gonna let you take it because it works perfectly here. Chip Griffin: So this is, putting together a detailed proposal that includes the outline of a plan would be pretty much the same as if you walked into your doctor’s office and said, Hey, doc, I’m not feeling well today. And the doctor looks at you once and says, you know what? I’ve got the prescription for you. And they immediately write you a prescription or schedule a surgery or something like that. They can’t do that because they don’t have enough information. Right. Even when, based on their experience, they have a pretty good idea what it is. They still order tests, they do blood work. They, they do other tests. They take x-rays, whatever it may be, to confirm that what they suspect is actually what they need to treat you for. That’s right. You need to view your clients and prospects the same way. You should not be in a position of having one phone call with a client or prospect and saying, yep, know what that is. Here’s how we’ll fix that, and here’s what it costs. Gini Dietrich: And I think saying to the prospect if they’re expecting a plan or you know, detail like that, I think it’s really important for us to say, Like, we just don’t know yet. We need to, we need to know your business. Like we can, we can do some discovery and learn about you. What’s online for sure, but that’s not enough. We have to actually dig into your business and understand how the business is run. Do we have experience in your industry? Of course we do. Do we know kind of the approach we might take? Of course we do, but we have to create a prescription to write exactly for you and your business so that we can have success. And we can’t do that without spending, you know, 30 or 60 days with you and, and getting to understand, getting to know and understand your business. Chip Griffin: Right. So if we don’t think that you should be putting together these detailed plans as part of your proposals, what should you do instead? Gini Dietrich: I mean, probably, gosh, 10 years ago we started doing sort of, we have sort of a three phased approach. And the first phase is for lack of a better term, discovery. So the client is paying us to learn their business, understand their business, talk to their stak

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss how agency owners should handle employees with physical and mental health concerns. They cover the increased openness around mental health and self-care, sharing personal experiences and business challenges. They highlight the importance of individualized management approaches, legal considerations, and quick professional advice. The hosts also emphasize compassionate handling of employee health issues, the need for flexible scheduling, and the impact on small businesses. Gini shares insights on providing support for team members and owners, such as disability insurance, to cover long-term absences. They conclude by underlining the importance of empathetic leadership and offering flexibility. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “You have to learn how to manage each employee individually. Because there’s no one-size-fits-all management technique.” Gini Dietrich: “Now we, and especially the younger generations, do a nice job of being really open about the things that we are dealing with and how our employers can help.” Chip Griffin: “As an owner, you get to pick: you can either keep working with that individual and work with them in the way that suits them best, or you can do it your way, and either lose the employee or lose their productivity.” Gini Dietrich: “Just be an empathetic human being because we all go through things, we all have personal things we have to deal with.” Related How to support your team in times of stress (featuring Patrick Rogan) Managing small agency employees to maximize performance Building an agency culture where everyone can take time off Agencies need to adapt to effectively manage Gen Z employees How to make conversations with your agency employees less difficult (featuring Allyns Melendez) View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, I, I, I think I might have broken my foot. I we’re not gonna be able to record today. I gotta go see the doctor and find out Gini Dietrich: because you broke your foot. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And I just, I got frustrated, you know, you know, in our past conversation that we were having, and I just kicked something and I, I think that it’s maybe broken. So I’m, I’m in remarkably little pain though, apparently, because I’m still smiling. Gini Dietrich: It’s like two, three weeks later. Yeah. And you’re, Chip Griffin: yeah. Gini Dietrich: And you’re, yeah. Here, right. Chip Griffin: But no, in, in all seriousness, , we are going to talk today about how agency owners should handle it when they have employees who have physical health concerns, mental health concerns. They might be one-offs, they might be ongoing. And this is something that a, a lot of the, the owners that I’ve been talking with this year seem to have… At least they feel like they have more instances of this that they have to deal with. I suspect that’s not the case. It’s just recency bias, on things. But I can certainly tell you that over the years I’ve had a lot of these issues, to deal with, with team members. And it’s run the whole spectrum. It’s been everything from, you know, extreme mental health issues to extreme health issues, and you know, you gotta try to figure out how to navigate those and, and as an owner. Particularly in a small business of any kind, that can be a real difficulty. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I, and I would say, I mean, I feel like it’s more prevalent now as well, and come, some of that could be recency bias, but I also think we’re much more open, especially on the mental health side of things about that and about self-care and ensuring that you’re going to a therapist and things like that. And the first time this actually hit my business was about five years ago when our younger employees would say things like, oh, I can’t make that meeting. I’m, I have a, an appointment with my therapist. And I’d be like…. During the day? Okay. And I remember at the time, and it was during the pandemic, so everything was kind of a shit show, but I remember at the time thinking, really, you’re making appointments with your therapist during the day? And now I’m to a point where I’m like, okay, if that’s what you need to do. And that’s when they, you can get in and go. But, I do think that some of it is because we, especially the younger generations, do a really nice job of being really open about these are the things that I’m dealing with. These are the things that I’m working on, and here’s how you as my employer can help. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I think that’s a, that’s a great point. And, and it’s also, I think there’s a broader awareness of these yes issues, particularly on the mental health side, but I think on both the mental and physical health side, people are much more open about these things than they were when we were coming up. In the workforce. Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Chip Griffin: You know, when, when I was first starting out, you know, you, most people, if they were seeing a therapist would never admit to it. Most wouldn’t even indicate, they might say they were going to the doctor, but usually that meant job interview. Right. And if they were actually going to the doctor, they probably didn’t even mention it. And, and instead they found some other way to work it into the schedule. So, yes. So I think part of it is that, that, you know, particularly for agency owners who are, you know, more of our generation. It’s just that people never talked about this before. So you hear people talking about it. That didn’t mean that those challenges didn’t exist before, but you weren’t certain about it. You, you’d be sitting there kind of guessing. And I certainly had a number of those 20 years ago where I’d have an employee was clearly having something going on, but it wasn’t really clear what. You know, I, I think it is helpful now because with employees being more open, at least you know what you’re dealing with. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Chip Griffin: And you’re not guessing wrong where someone’s just kind of, you know, disappearing for stretches of time and, and you’re not sure why. I had one who I thought had a, a very serious health issue of some kind, and it turned out to be a, a personal relationship issue, that was being dealt with. Wildly different things. Right. And, and causes me to, to have wildly different concerns. Correct. But back then you didn’t talk about them. Gini Dietrich: Not at all. Yeah. You didn’t talk about it at all. And I think you’re right that you sort of had to guess. And I’ll say that, you know, in the last five years I’ve done a lot of work myself as a business owner to understand how to support different types of both mental and physical health challenges so that I can be, be a better employer. But it’s been a learning curve. And it’s been a lot of coaching that I’ve had to get on my own to understand like, if you have a person who’s dealing with this, this is the, and you know, I think the big ones are ADHD, right? How, how do you deal with somebody in the workforce who has ADHD or ADD? How do you deal with somebody who is on the spectrum? You know, how do you, how do you handle other types of, of mental health issues like, bipolar or things like that. So I’ve spent a lot of time as an, as an employer understanding how to manage and lead those types of the, the people who have those types of things. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And I would throw anxiety into the mix is a, is a big one. Yep. Depression, that, that rears its head in the professional world. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: And, and so I, I think a lot of this goes back to things we’ve talked about in the past. You know, where you have to, to learn how to manage each employee individually. Mm-hmm. ’cause they not every there’s no one size fits all management technique. Certainly there are some general principles that you can follow, but you really do have to customize the plan to the individual and what they respond to. Because some of them, if you, if you raise any kind of constructive feedback, they may freak out, right? Yep. And just be like, oh, I, I can’t, I can’t handle that. And so you may have to, to find ways to, to gently tread into that territory. And I’ve had owners say, well, I don’t want to, I just need to be able to tell them what I need. Okay. That’s what you need. And, and if, if that works for you, that’s great, but if it doesn’t… If it doesn’t get what you want from that team member, who cares whether it’s the way that you want to do it or not, right? You get to pick, you can either keep working with that individual and, and work with them in the way that suits them best, or you can do it your way and, and either lose the employee or lose their productivity. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think one of the things that we’ve always done really well is, you know, personality tests, especially when somebody starts, give them a personality test so you understand sort of where they fit in the bigger scheme. And I think adding in this other piece of it is really important now so that you understand not just the personality, but how, how they deal with things. And if there’s anything that’s gonna cause them to, you know, we, we had, I had an employee for a while who, if you gave her direct feedback, she would spiral. And, and even if it was like, We just, I want you to be thinking about this or want you, like it wasn’t cons, it wasn’t criticism, it was just feedback. She would completely spiral and she couldn’t function, so I had to find different ways to provide feedback that she was able to accept it and not spiral into this mound of depression whe

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss how to manage situations where clients want to terminate contracts early. Gini emphasizes the importance of having a strong contract with clear termination clauses, which can serve as leverage in negotiations. They share experiences and strategies for recovering outstanding invoices, including offering concessions and being flexible with payment arrangements. The duo also cautions against aggressive tactics like public shaming for non-payment and stresses the importance of maintaining professionalism to avoid burning bridges. They conclude with practical advice on managing accounts receivable and resolving disputes amicably. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “If you look at a contract as a tool rather than a rigid roadmap, I think that’s the most helpful way to think of legal agreements in the agency client context.” Gini Dietrich: “Overall, you don’t want to burn the bridge with clients.” Chip Griffin: “What you really have to do is figure out how can you get the best possible outcome at this point?” Gini Dietrich: “Keep in mind that these are people who are going to refer business to you.” Related Getting agency-client contracts done right How to protect yourself from an unexpected client breakup How to do client collections right and get paid faster 6 reasons why your agency needs client contracts The basics of agency-client contracts from a business perspective View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, we have one of your favorite topics today, but it’s one that, that we haven’t visited in a while, so it’s, it’s probably worth revisiting. Okay. And, and, and that is, how do you handle it when you have a client who wants to end their contract early? Gini Dietrich: Well. As we all know, I am a stickler for the details when it comes to this, and we have very specific language in our contracts. Our attorney helped me create something beautiful that is a 90 day termination clause. Almost never does somebody sign 90 days. They use, it’s usually a negotiation point, right? It’s, we get it to 30 or 60, whatever. I use it for negotiation. Sometimes the client signs the full 90 day contract. I have had a situation where a client called me at the end of the month and said, we are terminating the contract as of today. And I said, great. There are two outstanding invoices, and by the way, you have a 90 day termination clause. And they came back and said, and I said, but if you’ll pay the the outstanding invoices by the 15th of the month, then I will happily waive the 90 day termination clause because I know you’re, it’s cashflow and I know you’re having a tough time right now. They came back and said, no, that I’m not being a good partner. Chip Griffin: So to clarify, they don’t want to pay for services already rendered? Gini Dietrich: Correct. Chip Griffin: That seems unreasonable under any circumstances. Gini Dietrich: I agree. Chip Griffin: So I think that from my observations of having had these conversations with you now for what, seven or eight years now on this show, you’re being particularly reasonable.  Especially for me. Yes. That’s what I’m saying. You, you personally are being particularly reasonable Uhhuh, because usually you are much more hardcore than I am Gini Dietrich: Yes. Chip Griffin: On these things. Yes. I think that’s fair to say it is. But what you’ve described is. Is something that I would typically offer to a client. Settle your debts and we can just part ways amicably. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Chip Griffin: And you are also, I think, the only agency owner I know of who has ever sued a client. I’m sure there are others out there, but I don’t know them personally. Gini Dietrich: It’s the principal. Chip Griffin: Yeah. Yes. We, we know that you, that you thrive on making the point. Gini Dietrich: I do. Chip Griffin: So, so it’s Gini Dietrich: Fair is fair. Chip Griffin: So you’re clearly. Going soft. Gini Dietrich: I’m, I’ve, I’m getting older. I’m, I’m getting older, and I understand that this is not worth pursuing. I would like our past due invoices to be paid, and I will happily waive the 90 day clause. If, however, you don’t pay us by the middle of the month, then I’m not waiving the clause on the contract you signed. Chip Griffin: Right. So let’s, I mean, let’s extrapolate or not extrapolate, let’s, let’s step back and look at this at a higher level rather than your particular individual case. We can use that as an example. Sure. But I think that, that there are a few key points that come out of this that could help other owners. And, and I think the first one is the way that you are using the contract as a tool to get leverage to get a solution that you’re happy with, right? It’s not that you’re abiding by the contract. Right down to the last crossed T and the last dotted I, you are willing to make concessions, right? But by having a strong contract, it gives you the leverage in that negotiation to be able to trade something, the unpaid invoices for the lengthy notification period. Or not lengthy, but the the 90 day notification period. Gini Dietrich: Right, right. Yeah. I think that’s right. And I think having that leverage helps And you, you have, you have to find ways to be able to have that leverage. Like, you know, web forms won’t deliver a website until you’ve paid their last invoice. Same thing. Like what do some things, if a client’s not gonna give you any notice and they did not give us any notice, they called us on the last day of the month. If they’re not going to give you any notice, then what is your leverage to be able to get the invoices paid, in a timely manner? And you know, if they’re saying, well, we can’t pay for 60 or 90 days, or they’re saying We’re not gonna pay it all. There’s things that you need to have. So I think your point about having a contract that has that language in it that they have signed and agreed to, gives you some of that leverage. Withholding work product gives you some leverage. So there are some things that you can do, but you have to have that all set up. You know, you always talk about sort of the prenup. What happens if you get divorced from a client, right? What are the things that are gonna protect you in that, that situation? Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, and I think if you, if you look at a contract as a tool rather than a rigid roadmap, I, I think that’s, that’s the most helpful way to think of, of legal agreements, at least in the agency client context. There are obviously other places where it is that rigid roadmap and Sure. And you’re not gonna do anything about it. I mean, you try having a negotiation with, I don’t know, your car lender, you know, it’s probably not gonna happen. They’re probably just gonna sit there and say, you know, you signed the 27 page agreement. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: Pay up. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Chip Griffin: So, so you know, but in, in an agency client relationship, the, the contract is that tool to help resolve the challenge in some sort of a reasonable way. And I, and I do think that it is particularly unreasonable when clients call at the end of, of a time period and say, we’re ending immediately. I mean, that’s just – Regardless of what your contract says, that’s just it. It’s bad behavior. Yep. And, and I don’t appreciate seeing it. And it tells me a lot about either the individual or the organization or sometimes both. Yep. And, and so certainly not something you ever wanna see. Having a contract can help you find a resolution to that. Although, I will say at the same time, when you have people who engage in that kind of behavior, it sometimes ends up being a lost cause candidly. Because if, if someone is willing to do that, then they may have no issue at all just leaving invoices unpaid, and then your only recourse is to sue, which you can do. Sure. You’ve proved that. Yes. And, and yet most of the time it will cost you more time and money than you actually recover. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, for sure. Yes, I have. I have learned, I have grown. I have, and sometimes there are situations where I’m okay spending the money to prove my point. Chip Griffin: Well, and, and sometimes, and there are other options. You can sometimes turn, turn these over to collections groups who will take a percentage of whatever they are able to recover, you know, that. And they, they just turn into the obnoxious collections agent and just Yep, keep calling. You know, that’s not something I’ve ever pursued, but I know some, some owners who have gone down that route, with mixed success. So. You know that there are things that you can do, but generally speaking, your best bet in my experience is to try to work something out in as Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: As friendly a way as possible. Yeah. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: But it’s, it’s also a good reminder to, to stay on top of your accounts receivable. In your case, two months is, is not terrible. There are plenty of cases where I’ve worked with agencies who have much larger debts owed to them by clients. Yes. And, and what I always tell folks is, you know, whatever you have for outstanding invoices, you have to assume you’ll never get paid. Because there’s just, you know, particularly once they cancel, now you’ve got no leverage left, right? Because what are you gonna, the only thing you have at that point is a lawsuit. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: That’s not particularly helpful Gini Dietrich: right Chip Griffin: Now I have seen a lot of suggestions in places like candidly, the Spin Sucks community, where people h

In this episode, Chip and Gini explore the impact of AI on client expectations. They discuss how AI is perceived to speed up work, leading clients to have unrealistic expectations regarding turnaround times and pricing. The duo emphasizes the need for agencies to set realistic boundaries and manage expectations from the outset. They share stories about AI’s inconsistency, particularly in generating imagery and written content, and stress the importance of educating clients on the limitations and potential of AI. Ultimately, they advocate for leveraging AI’s efficiencies while maintaining transparency and setting clear guidelines with clients to avoid morale and operational issues within your agency. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “The advice that we always give that as soon as you spot unrealistic expectations, you need to call them out and adjust them, that becomes even more important now.” Gini Dietrich: “You can’t just input a prompt and expect that you’re going to get an output and then send it over to the client. That’s not how it works.” Chip Griffin: “Nothing has changed with AI. We still need to focus on education and expectations with our clients no matter what tools or technology we’re using.” Gini Dietrich: “Sometimes you might over deliver, getting things done sooner or things like that. But those should be like delight and surprise kinds of experiences, not an all the time kind of thing.” Related Setting expectations for agency clients What does ChatGPT and generative AI mean for PR agencies? View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini I, I used some AI and so we’re gonna conclude this podcast in just about a minute because we’ll get to all the key points that quickly because of the technology. Gini Dietrich: The instant output, are we getting? Chip Griffin: An instant output. Instant amazing, instant results. Amazing. And we can move on with our day. Gini Dietrich: Okay. But before we get to that Chip Griffin: mm-hmm. Gini Dietrich: Happy belated birthday. Chip Griffin: Thank you. I appreciate it. Gini Dietrich: You’re welcome. I didn’t get to wish you happy birthday last week because the coffee shop and the satellite office and the wifi, blah, blah, blah. So happy belated. Chip Griffin: Thank you. It is, it is nice to have you back in your home office so that we don’t, Gini Dietrich: it’s very nice to be back. Chip Griffin: We, we don’t have to, to figure out all the technical issues every week. Yes. And, and figure out can we record, can we not record? Yes. Yes. But I think, I think we only had two weeks where we couldn’t make it work, so Yeah, you’re right. That’s not, that’s not too bad given the challenges of recording in a coffee shop environment. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Summer school is over. Yay. Chip Griffin: Well, there you go. Alright. We are gonna talk about AI and we are gonna talk about AI making us faster, but perhaps the bigger problem is clients and prospects thinking that it would make us even faster. Than fast. Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm. Chip Griffin: And so it does tend to lead to unrealistic expectations about how much you can do, how fast you can do it, and of course what that means for pricing. And so these are all challenges that agencies are facing and, and we’re all excited about the technology around us and how we can leverage it. But, but how do we manage those expectations effectively with clients and, and how do we integrate it effectively with what we’re doing so that, that it adds to the, the results and, and doesn’t just give us a giant headache. Gini Dietrich: Part of the reason I like this topic for today is at six o’clock this morning, I saw a client in a Google Doc, a shared Google Doc making some changes, and then at 7:30 he emailed and said, have you updated it yet? And I was like… Chip Griffin: yep. Gini Dietrich: Uh, Chip Griffin: nope. Gini Dietrich: No. Nope. It’s not, not even 8:00 AM yet on a Monday. Let’s thanks for playing. Let’s settle down. Yep. So that’s part of the reason I like this topic is because I think that that’s exactly what’s happening, happening is everyone’s like, oh, well you can do it faster. So I expect it in minutes instead of hours or even days. Which may be the case in some, some things, but not the case in all. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And look, I mean, agencies are, are used to unrealistic client expectations. Fair. It’s something that that agencies have, have mm-hmm. Been dealing with for decades, certainly as long as I’ve been in the business and, and it is always something that you have to be mindful of. But I think to your point, AI is making it so that people think that all of these things can be done even faster than they really can. Or that AI alone can solve problems and create content or edit content, and there is no need for any human touch. And so that means in their minds that this can be truly instantaneous. But the reality is that AI still requires a level of management, a level of review. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Chip Griffin: And, and is, it is a tool to help us get there, but it, it’s not gonna take over and do its thing on its own. So, you know, a client can’t expect that you get things just as fast as you might from chat GPT when you ask a question. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. It’s not, it’s not that, I mean, everybody knows this. That’s not the case at all. Christopher Barger, who’s on my team, has a really good article coming out in a couple of weeks about how he used AI for his fantasy baseball draft. And part of the reason he did that, which he explains in the article, is that he wasn’t using AI at all and I was trying to encourage him to use it and said, Why don’t you see what it would tell you for your baseball draft? Just to like, get an idea of how to use it and what kinds of things. And one of the things he says in the article that he learned is that the, the output is only as good as what you give it. It’s only as good as what you’re training it with. So because, and because it’s a little bit delayed, you know, he was, he was getting information from it, from players that played two years ago instead of more current players. And so I think we, for tend to forget those things that the AI has to be trained, it has to be trained over time. It still has a delay. It still hallucinates. So no, you can’t just input a prompt and expect that you’re going to get an output and then send it over to the client. That’s just not how it works. And it’s unrealistic for them to think that. Chip Griffin: Yes, but as, as we know, you know, clients aren’t necessarily always grounded in reality, when it comes to expectations, and so, so honestly, it, it’s our job as, as agency leaders to help educate them. And to help them to understand what the technology can and cannot do, what is or is not unreasonable to expect of us and our teams. And so I think now more than ever, the advice that we always give that that as soon as you spot unrealistic expectations, you need to call them out and adjust them. I think that becomes even more important now. Absolutely. Because otherwise you’ll really put yourself in a difficult position if they assume that it’s quick and easy and cheap to do all of these things that they want you to do. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I remember, gosh, just a year ago, maybe even shorter than that, where agency owners were freaking out because they were afraid they were going to lose retainer budgets. Or have them shrink in size because clients are saying, well, you’re now using AI. It shouldn’t cost this much. I think that that concern has eased a little bit because clients understand that maybe they’re getting more for their retainer dollars, which is great. I think we all, all like to be able to do that for our clients. But I do think there is this idea that now we’ve gone from Oh, well, you can use AI for your job, so we shouldn’t, you shouldn’t charge me as much to, oh, you can use AI for your job and deliver all of these extra things today in the next 30 seconds or 30 minutes versus a week from now. And you’re right, you should be setting the expectation that it still takes time. We have other clients, even though we don’t like to let our clients know we have other clients, we do have other clients. There are fires that pop up. Clients have crises, clients have issues, like there are things you still have to deal with, with or without AI. So setting those expectations and realistic expectations is the right thing to do. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, and I mean certainly clients don’t like to hear that there are other clients. Right. But, but I think that makes it even more important for us to be clear from the get go that yeah, we do have other clients and, and that’s a good thing. Yeah. And, and part of the problem comes because agencies try to deceive people in the prospect process. Not necessarily out of any malicious intent, but, but we often try to, particularly as small agencies, we try to make clients think that we are bigger than we are. Gini Dietrich: Mm mm-hmm. Chip Griffin: We always try to make people feel like, you know, they are the only client that matters. Mm-hmm. Which in that moment, in that phone call ought to be true. Yes. You shouldn’t be thinking about or responding to emails to other clients while you’re dealing with, with another or a prospect. But, you can’t make them think that they are your, your only priority forever in the future. Because that’s, that’s just unrealistic. Right? And, and so we need to work to educate clients about these things and, and not try to allow them to believe that we

In this episode, Chip and Gini focus on the issue of employees over-servicing clients. They discuss the reasons behind over-servicing, including fear of client dissatisfaction and insufficient initial project scopes. The hosts emphasize the importance of educating employees on the long-term negative impacts, both on agency profitability and client relationships. They advocate for involving employees in strategic planning and scoping processes to ensure accurate budgeting and foster accountability. Chip and Gini also highlight the benefits of regular communication and collaboration with team members to prevent recurring problems and enhance overall agency efficiency. Key takeaways Gini Dietrich: “Even though your employees think that they’re helping a client, in the long run it’s more upsetting to the client to find out that you’ve been over-servicing all this time.” Chip Griffin: “We need to be collaborating so that our team feels empowered. Because the more empowered they are, the more likely they are to produce the results that we want and our clients need.” Gini Dietrich: “Because they’re over-servicing, working more hours than they should, they’re not able to get to other clients that they should be working on.” Chip Griffin: “We need to listen to our team and accept that we might actually be wrong. It might be in our minds over-servicing because we were budgeting a certain amount of time, but maybe our time budget was wrong.” Related Hidden overservicing by agency employees The difference between over-delivering and over-servicing agency clients How agency owners can avoid scope creep (featuring Steve Guberman) View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, I don’t really have a, a cute opening to this one, so I’m just gonna dive right in, which I don’t, I don’t know, I just, in, in the 10 seconds that I had waiting to, you know, to start, I come up with, come up with anything that, okay. That was even halfway lame or useful or anything. So it is what it is. We’re gonna talk about over servicing, but not the way we’ve talked about it before. Because we’ve talked about over-servicing in terms of how big a deal it can be to the profitability of your agency. We’ve talked about how to identify over servicing. We’ve talked about how to, how important it is to show your employees when they’re over servicing. But we’re gonna talk today about how do you solve that with employees who understand that they’re over-servicing, maybe they understand that it’s a problem, but they continue to do it anyway. And it, it’s not out of malice. They’re not doing it because they want, you know, you to suffer from a profitability standpoint as an agency. They’re doing it because, as I think I’ve shared previously in my earliest role in an agency, I would overservice a client because I knew that they were gonna be unhappy with me if I didn’t do it. And, and so I didn’t want to be yelled at by the client. Mm-hmm. Other people might over-service because they’re afraid that if they don’t do something today, it’s just gonna cause more work for them in the future. And so in their minds, they’re making a rational decision for their own situation. But it may not be right for the business. So how do you handle that? I mean, other than just firing the employee who refuses to stop over-servicing? Because that’s, that’s not a great solution in most cases. No. Sometimes I, I imagine it might get there, but, but that’s what we’re gonna talk about. How do we, what strategies do we have for dealing with those employees who are over-servicing despite our best efforts? Gini Dietrich: I’m sure I’ve shared this story before, but I’m gonna repeat it for those who have not heard it. Um, I had an employee who was doing exactly that and was over-servicing and it was a really tiny client. It wasn’t a huge client. I think she really enjoyed working with the client and wanted to do more work for her, just because she enjoyed the work. She enjoyed the client. She didn’t want to have to tell the client no. And after, I think she was here probably six or seven years after she resigned, the client said to us, well, this person used to do this, this, this, and this. And we were like it’s not in the scope. She’s like, but she did it. And so we had to kind of back, I backpedal to say like, I understand that she did it. She was over-servicing. We’re really sorry, but we have to get this in line with the scope. If you want to change the scope or you want to add budget, we can do that. But like we can’t continue to do $20,000 worth of work for 5,000 a month, which is essentially what it was. And the client ended up, ended up leaving because of it. You know, to this day, I’m reminded that even though you think that your, your employees think that they’re helping a client in the long run, it’s more upsetting to them to find out that you’ve been over-servicing all this time. And they’re not, they, they’re not paying for those things. So I think it’s, it’s a double edged sword a little bit from that perspective of it’s not just that they’re you know, spending $15,000 more a month in time than the client is paying. But also on the client side, it’s really upsetting for them to discover that that’s been going on, especially when you, you have to have the conversation to scale things back. Chip Griffin: Right. And, and I think that, that if they understand the long-term damage they might be doing to the client relationship, that might help them to better understand it. So like a lot of things, you know, a good first step is more education and, helping the team members understand the consequences of that action beyond just it’s eating into our profitability. Right. Because I, I mean, I think that that’s the, that’s the most obvious thing that, that employees will Oh, sure. It’s, it’s eating into our profits, but we’re still doing the right thing. We’re still right. We’re still helping them out. And, and unfortunately it, it takes away the opportunity for the agency to solve things in a different way with the client. That’s right. If the solution is simply to continue over-servicing. And so, you know, it might be that you have to work with that team member rather than just saying, stop over-servicing. It’s, okay. Why are we over-servicing and how can we go about solving that problem. Because the over-servicing in, in many cases, particularly if it’s the, that you’re afraid the client will be unhappy. The real problem is not the over-servicing, the real problem is meeting expectations. You know, changing the scope of work. There are a lot of things that you can do to address it apart from just saying, Hey, stop doing that. Gini Dietrich: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. One of the things that we started doing, I think in, during the pandemic, I think it was during 2020, is we moved from annual planning and annual contracts to quarterly. And what that’s allowed us to do is get on top of the over servicing because we, we all, I mean we certainly, you know, set goals and KPIs and all that for a year, but then we break them down by quarter and we say, okay, with the client. These are the goals. These are the things that we’re going to do to achieve those goals. These are the kinds of results we expect. And then we get, we get to work. And in the next quarter we’re able to say, these are the things we worked on. These are the extra things that we’re doing because the teams are over servicing. These are the results. These are the things that we didn’t, that didn’t work as well as we thought they would. So we’d like to tweak. And you have that ongoing conversation with them. So that they are part of the decision to say, oh, I see if we do this and this, we’re gonna have to either scale back on this or we’re gonna have to add budget. And there it’s an ongoing conversation so it becomes less conflict ridden. So it doesn’t, it doesn’t feel like we’re having to go to the client and say, you know, if you add that we’re gonna have to scale back or, and, and it doesn’t make the team feel like they should just do the work because there’s this ongoing conversation where they’re part of it all of the time, and that has really helped us scale back on over servicing. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, and I think, you know, just as you want to avoid that, you know, creating those points of conflict with the client, I think that that owners, managers should be trying to avoid those points of conflict with the employee as well. And so it’s not simply about saying, Hey, stop over-servicing and instead you want to make them part of the solution. And so, you know, my suggestion is, as I often suggest with these problems. Ask them what they would do about it. Love it. Ask them, how could we scope this better in the future so that we make sure that we’re incorporating all of this work that we actually need to do in order to produce the results that the client is expecting. What could we change with our pricing? What other changes could we make internally in order to get there? Because if, if you start making them part of the solution as opposed to simply saying, stop doing that, right? You might have a better chance. Not always, but you might have a better chance of getting a successful outcome. So, try to make it less confrontational with the team member and try to involve them in the problem solving more than you probably are. Gini Dietrich: And I also think there’s something to be said for, you know, they probably, because they’re over-servicing, are working more hours than they should. They’re not able to get to other clients that they should be working on.

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the importance of having a clear vision for where an agency is headed while also acknowledging the need for strong operational skills. They explore different types of agency owners, from visionaries to those who excel in operational management, and emphasize the necessity of balancing these roles within a team. The duo highlights the importance of complementing one’s weaknesses by hiring the right people, whether it involves bringing in operational expertise or visionary ideas. They also share personal anecdotes and practical advice on maintaining this balance for the long-term success of an agency. Key takeaways Gini Dietrich: “You can’t be a visionary and an operations person, that’s pretty rare. So how do you bring in somebody to help you where you’re weak?” Chip Griffin: “Clients care about what’s the work you can do for me? What are the results it’s going to produce and how much does it cost?” Gini Dietrich: “I don’t think that you have to be a visionary as long as you have somebody who’s on your team, who’s willing to be out there, and who’s willing to be the face of the company.” Chip Griffin: “You’ve got to really balance the two in order to have success.” Related How agency leaders should handle big ideas View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, I’m having a vision. I see something. Gini Dietrich: What do you see? Dead people? Chip Griffin: No, I’m not that harsh today. No, I, that was not the greatest introduction probably, but you know, hey, that’s par for the course. But what we’re gonna talk about today is when you do or don’t have a vision for where your agency is headed and your vision for what you can do and all of that. And I think there are different kinds of agency owners, some who have a vision or idea, big ideas, that kind of thing. And, and others who are a little bit more, let’s say, workmanlike. And, you know, they can execute really well and, you know, they want to keep growing, but they don’t consider themselves a, a big picture, visionary type. And, and both can be successful, but I think there are things that both kinds of owners need to be aware of and thinking about. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I totally agree. And you know, I think we, I think there’s so much focus just generally on you need to be visionary. You need to be strategic. You need to think about, you know, where the, the business is going. And there’s something to be said for people who are operationally focused. I am not one of them, and that’s, it’s not my strong suit and I really wish that I had some of those skills because I think I, I would’ve grown my business a lot faster and a lot less expensively than I have if I had that skill set. So I think there’s something to be said for people who like know how to manage their business financially, know how to manage their balance, their balance sheet, know how to like run it like a tight ship versus people like me who are like, oh, what if we tried this? And there’s no process, there’s no standard operating procedure. I imagine I’m really hard to work for because of that. Chip Griffin: I, I would imagine. Mm-hmm. Yeah. But, but you, you are sort of, I mean, you are a, a visionary owner almost in the extreme, right. You, you created a whole new way of doing marketing and PR that the rest of the industry is following. Yeah. So, I mean, you can’t be much more of a visionary than that. And, but that said. Not every agency owner is that, nor do you actually need that, Gini Dietrich: nor should they be, Chip Griffin: in order to be successful, everybody has to kind of find their lane and figure out how to be successful. And, and to your point, you also recognize where your weaknesses are and that is on the operational side. And so I think, you know, regardless of what kind of owner you are, you need to try to augment that. And fill in the gaps that are left by your weaknesses. So you would obviously need people on your team who are much stronger on the operational side of things. If you are an owner who is a really good manager and, and business builder and those kinds of things, you may need someone who has at least enough vision for the, the client’s needs. Maybe not, you know, huge vision for, you know, where the industry is headed or something like that, but who can at least, you know, supplement the, you know, what you have for expertise. With a little bit more of that, you know, pushing the envelope on vision. So you’ve gotta really balance it in order to have success. Gini Dietrich: Right. I, before we started, we hit record on this. We were talking about how like in, in your businesses, you, you had somebody who was sort of the out there talking to people, salesperson, and then you are back in behind the scenes doing the work. I think you need that give and take a little bit because. Not, not everybody has the same, you can’t be a visionary and an operations person. It’s pretty rare, right? So how do you bring in somebody to help you where you’re, you’re, you’re weak. And I don’t necessarily know that it has to be a partner, a business partner. You know, I think I can think of lots of organizations. MarketingProfs is one, one where Ann Handley is the, the visionary. She’s the one out there. She’s the face, she’s the one building the brand and all that. But she’s not an owner. Of MarketingProfs. So, you know, thinking about those kinds of people who can supplement where you’re weak is a real, is a really smart thing to do. And to your point, I don’t think that you have to be a visionary as long as you have somebody who’s on your team, who’s willing to be out there, and who’s willing to be the face of the company. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I, I would agree. It absolutely does not have to be another owner. In fact, there’s, there’s benefits to it not being someone who has an ownership stake in the business because it, it gives you a little bit more flexibility, right? You can, yep. You can, it, it can work, work really well as it did for me with one of my businesses years ago where we did have that sort of, that balance in the partnership and, and how we approach things. But you know, I also, you know, later in my career, I sort of became the non-operational person and the, the person out there pushing the envelope. And, and I’ve had, you know, people who worked for me who were sort of, you know, in fact one of ’em described it as, as he was sort of the rubber band that kind of kept pulling me back so that I didn’t get too far, off center, if you will, with some of my ideas. I love it. And, and, I think that rubber band is actually a great analogy. Right. Gini Dietrich: That’s a great analogy. Chip Griffin: You know, you kind of, you, you wanna stretch a little bit in both directions, right? If you str- you know, stretch operationally. Then that helps you from a profitability standpoint and you know, and results standpoint because you can kind of be more repeatable in the results you’re producing. On the other hand, you want someone who’s pushing the envelope on figuring out, you know. Where are we headed? You know? Mm-hmm. What does AI mean for us? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. How is the, how is the world of PR and marketing changing and, and how can we apply new ideas and fresh thinking to that? So, so having both of those, but making sure that neither one gets too far away from the other. So that rubber band is really a great example because at some point’s that rubber band starts to pull you back in. That’s great. And if you push too hard, you snap the rubber brand and that’s not helpful. Gini Dietrich: Yep. That’s a really great analogy and a really great way of thinking about it. This reminds me of, when I left Fleischman Hillard, after doing PR for many years, I went to an ad agency to build their PR department. And I had, it was me and one other guy, and he was my boss. So he was like the PR director and, it was our job to build the PR department for this ad agency. And he and I would sit in meetings and he would come up with all of these great ideas for the client. He’d be like, and we can do this, and we can do this. And he would get to the point where he’d be saying great ideas. I mean, phenomenal ideas. He was a great idea person, but nothing that we could execute ’cause we didn’t have the resources, we didn’t have the capacity, we didn’t have the budgets, all that kinda stuff. So I would literally kick him under the table to make him that I was his rubber band. I was bringing him back to make him like, oh, that’s not something we could do. It’s to, to sort of bring him back and we would position ourselves at, in a conference room table and a, at a conference room table in a client’s office so that I had the ability to kick him. Where the client wouldn’t know that, so that I could bring him back to reality a little bit, because he would say stuff that we just couldn’t do. And then when we’d go back to the office and I’d be like, dude, we can’t do that. So, right. So I was his rubber band a little bit. So I, you know, there are, there ways that I think you can think about it to help you understand like… you can have a great idea person, but you also have to, to fill in, like within these parameters. Don’t come up with these great ideas that are gonna cost the client $20 million when you have a budget of 500,000. Right? So it was that kind of stuff. So I love that rubber band analogy. Because you can start, start to think about, all right, let’s pull in either direction to make it work. Chip Griffin: Yeah. See, I, I wish I had thought of the, the kicking approach with my bu

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the frequent occurrence of receiving offers to buy agencies and how to handle these communications. They share their own experiences of receiving such emails, including the prevalence of fraudulent or unserious offers. Gini describes her method of vetting these emails, such as examining URLs and LinkedIn profiles, and emphasizes the importance of legitimate connections within the industry. Chip provides further insights into the credibility of business brokers and the typical behaviors to watch out for. Both caution against making emotional decisions and underscore the necessity of due diligence, patient decision-making, and listening to one’s gut feelings. They conclude by highlighting the importance of proper advice and support for making sound decisions in the agency selling process. Key takeaways Gini Dietrich: “Just like you would hire people, you really should be looking for organizations that have experience in your industry and have a reputation already.” Chip Griffin: “If someone is legitimately reaching out to you for this kind of thing, it should be a very personalized email.” Gini Dietrich: “Just like you do when you’re selling or buying a home, you would never give the real estate agent money up front because you want them invested in getting you the very best price for your home.” Chip Griffin: “There are some really, really well regarded M&A firms that deal specifically with this space. I don’t know any of them that do cold outreach to drum up business.” Related Choosing the right exit strategy as an agency owner How to get ready to sell your agency Things to know before you consider selling your agency Are you thinking about selling your agency? Agency M&A basics View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to their episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, I’ve got a buyer for your agency. I’d like to have a conversation about it. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Okay. Chip Griffin: This is, this is an email that, that a lot of us get. Frankly, I’ve gotten it for all my business agencies, oh my gosh, software companies, everything. That steady flow. It’s, it’s sort of like, I dunno about you, but these days I get a steady stream of, of emails, trying to sell me janitorial services. I don’t really understand Gini Dietrich: janitorial services? Chip Griffin: Yeah. I don’t understand it because I don’t have any actual offices, so. Gini Dietrich: Right. What are they gonna janitor? Chip Griffin: So who knows? But in any case, it is very common for agency owners to receive emails from someone who says that they either have a buyer for their agency they’re interested in, in buying the agency. They have some, some potential opportunities to explore all these kinds of things. And, and I think that it would be helpful for us to have a conversation around this so that, that we can share our experiences and hopefully people can have some perspective on these when they come in. When should you reply? When shouldn’t you, how should you handle those conversations if you do decide to proceed with them? Because it, it certainly… Most agency owners I know have at least explored the idea in their own minds of selling someday. Sure, sure. And so it can be very appealing, particularly if it hits you on the right day when you have just that right level of frustration with clients or employees or whatever to say, ah, okay. Gini Dietrich: Alright. Yeah, yeah. Let’s do this. Chip Griffin: So what, what do you do when you get one of these emails? And I’m assuming that you get a lot of them. Gini Dietrich: I get so many. I usually just delete them. Every once in a while I’ll take the email address and just look up the website. And I would say a good majority of them are emailing from fake accounts. So the websites that they’re quote unquote emailing from don’t even exist. So I get a lot of 404s or that is for sale on Go Daddy or whatever it happens to be. A lot of them, and I’ve seen this in practice on the lead generation side where, you know, a lead gen company will say to you, oh, we can get you, and we’ve talked about this 15 to 20 qualified conversations every month. And what they do is they mirror your email platform and your, like spinsucks.com for us. They mirror it in a different platform for better software, for lack of a better term. And it’s not actually coming from spinsucks.com. It’s not actually coming from your URL, but it, it’s coming from this fake duplicate mirrored URL, right? So that when that happens, you can tell that it’s a lead generation company, that they’re just trying to, you know, mass emails to see who, who they can, that they can catch. So I always take the URL and I or the email, and I look at the URL and I look, I put it in to see, and I would say eight times out of 10 it’s a, it’s a URL that doesn’t exist. So then I just delete those. For the ones that look interesting, I’ll actually look the company up to see like, have they done other agencies? Are they legit? And I would say eight times out of 10, they’re not legit. So you kind of just, if you’re, if it hits you at the right time, just do your due diligence. You can find out pretty quickly if they’re legit or not. You know, there are probably five or six companies in the agency space that do really nice job with mergers and acquisitions and just like you would hire people, hire you based on your trust and how people feel about you and your reputations. I would say the same thing with our businesses, that we really should be looking for organizations that have experience in our industry and have a reputation already. Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, I think, I think all of those are good points. You know, certainly, like you, I’ve deleted most of the ones that I’ve seen over the years because they just, they don’t feel right. And I, and I would say if someone is, is legitimately reaching out to you for this kind of thing, it should be a very personalized email. If there’s no indication that they know anything at all about you. Probably a good reason to just hit delete. Yep. Because at, at that point it is probably just, you know, trying to see if the account’s alive or, you know, just some intern trying to, you know, generate leads for a business broker that’s trying to get you to pay a retainer or something like that. So, yep. So, so I think that’s a great reminder, to not worry, not think too much about them unless it, it really grabs your attention for some reason. If it does, I agree with you. Start by trying to find out whatever you can. That means looking up the domain of the email address. The other thing I will frequently do is put the person’s name until LinkedIn, and see, because if, if it doesn’t come up associated with that company assuming that the website is alive. You know, that tells me that, that they’re probably not legit. They’re probably, they’re an outsourced sales rep, and so therefore not a serious person for me to be having a conversation with. Sometimes you’ll do it and it turns out they are an intern. And it just says, intern on it. Okay, well, I’m not having a conversation with an intern about selling my business. If they’re really interested, they can find someone more senior to reach out to me. But let’s let, let’s assume that we clear these hurdles. Let’s assume we haven’t deleted it. We Google ’em, they look more or less legit. Let’s start with, they’re from a business brokerage kind of organization. I usually try to find out if they are focused on the agency space or if they are generic. There are a lot of business brokerages out there. You go to their website and they show 75 different industries that they quote unquote, specialize in. Manufacturing is very different from being a PR agency. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: The way you sell those businesses is wildly different. Gini Dietrich: Wildly different. Chip Griffin: Yes. Can one firm rep both? Yes. Is it likely to be the best experience? Not so much. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. You know, I will say this, that it’s flattering of course, to have people reach out to say that they’re interested in purchasing your business or rolling you up into a larger agency umbrella model or something like that. It’s flattering. And there are days, of course, that you feel like you don’t wanna do this anymore, and that would be nice. When I have sat on boards where we have sold the organization and I’ve done this many times. We’re always the ones that reach out first, and we have a short list of brokers that we would work with. And we base it on, you know, certainly the relationships that I’ve made over the years, because I’ve done this several times, and the relationships that the co-founder or founder has, and then the relationships that the other board members have, we do it based on that, and then we let the brokers come back to us with proposals. So just like a client would come to you and say, this is what we’re looking for, and you would write a proposal and come back to them. It’s the same kind of, I would say, business development way. So responding to somebody who’s emailing you is probably almost never going to work because to your point earlier, it’s usually the, if it’s, if they’re legit, it’s usually these business brokers who are gonna charge you 15, 20, a hundred grand to go find someone to buy, to buy your agency. They don’t usually have somebody in mind, and they don’t usually have somebody who has said to them, look at these agencies. We’re considering buying. Usually it’s just we’re trying to generate leads. Chip Griffin: Right. And, and as you said before, there are some, you know, really, reall