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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