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Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Chats with Chip. I’m your host, Chip Griffin, the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance. And I am delighted to have with me one of my most regular guests and a very interesting one at that, Lee McKnight Jr. Otherwise known as Lima Nightmare.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: Correct. How are you, sir?

It’s been too long.

Chip Griffin: It has been way too long.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: If people are watching. Oh, oh, oh.

Chip Griffin: Yes, if you are watching this on video,

Lee McKnight, Jr.: The best.

Chip Griffin: My condolences, first of all, for having to look at us for, at least at me, for the next 20 minutes or so. But Lee was holding up his Lima Nightmare t shirt because I guess there’s a number of years ago, the automated transcription for one of the shows that he was on with me, came out with his name being Lima Nightmare.

And so my wife and I call him Lima Nightmare from there on out.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: And were kind enough to send me the shirt.

Chip Griffin: Well, I mean, you have to, I mean, when it’s, when it’s a cool name like that, you just, you can’t help, but.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: I will tell you, and this is not why I’m here, but quickly, I, play in a cover band here in town and I wore this shirt.

I should send you pictures. Someone asked me at one of the breaks, like, like in Lima, Ohio, you’re like a nightmare. And I’m like, well, that’s not actually what it is, but I see where you’re okay. It’s fair. I should have gone with it. Yes, I’m a professional wrestler. I’m from Lima and that’s what they call me.

Chip Griffin: I mean, or, or, I mean, just wait if I told you the story of what happened in Lima that one night, you know, in any case, so that we can bring this a little bit back onto the rails, I suppose we should, because as much entertainment as it would be for us to go down this path for the next 20 minutes, it’s probably not what you’ve tuned in for, but we’re going to talk about a number of things from an agency business development front, because obviously that is Lee’s particular area of expertise.

And so, I mean, I, I thought I’d kick it off by just, you know, talking about what are you seeing and what are you hearing as far as the outlook for agencies in the next year?

Lee McKnight, Jr.: Yeah. Yeah It’ll be interesting because I know we both had survey reports that we’ve released and this one we had last month was a little bit new for us because we put our new year outlook survey out in January agency new business survey, which we actually just I’m finishing as we speak, which will be out here in about two weeks, but we decided to drop one in the middle and follow up from where agencies were beginning of the year to now.

And generally speaking, there was a certain level of optimism around this back half of ’24, which are obviously already in, you know, but one of the things that we saw last, or I should say the beginning of ’24 coming out of ’23. Certain levels of frustration, I think, from a business development standpoint, the two things for sure, and it’s, it’s, They’ve not gone away, but it is sales cycles.

And I feel like we talked about this the last time, but you have no sales cycles that just were taking longer even signing contracts and well, we got to kick this can down the road. Sorry. And then budgets not being as robust as they have been. What we’re seeing is those two things still in play, unfortunately, but have gotten better.

 You know, in terms of percentage, something for us, I think it was around in terms of just overall optimism for this back half, it’s interesting because we were just talking about these stats. I think ours was close to like 52, 48 percent of agencies in terms of what they’re, what they think is going to be happening in that back half, which feels like we’re leading there, but, pretty higher level than I would have expected.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And in our case, we looked at the next 12 months and this is research that, that concluded in early August. So, so that may account for some of the differences because you’re looking at the back half of the year, but our, our group was extremely optimistic that their revenue would grow over the following 12 months.

About 68 percent of the respondents anticipated that they were predicted that their revenue would grow. A similar number suggested that profits would grow. Unfortunately, only about a third thought that their head count would grow. So, that suggests one of two, either they are way overstaffed today, which I know a lot of agencies are because, agencies are typically