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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 today, another expert in agency land, Steve Guberman of Agency Outsight. Welcome to the show, Steve.

Steve Guberman: Thanks Chip. Great to be here. Great to see you.

Chip Griffin: It is great to have you here. I’ve been a guest on your show, enjoyed it. And now we have a chance to flip the table around so I get to, to grill you and, and put you under the microscope. No, no, we’re just going to,

Steve Guberman: I haven’t been on this side of Riverside. So it’s pretty interesting.

Chip Griffin: Turns out it looks pretty much the same from, from both ends.

Steve Guberman: No surprises here.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. But, in any case, so Steve, why don’t you, before we jump into the conversation, why don’t you just share a little bit about yourself and Agency Outsight?

Steve Guberman: Yeah, I launched Agency Outsight, right before COVID. Just timing was actually pretty darn good, but.

 I’ve been in the agency space for 25 years. I owned my own agency, have been on both sides of, you know, an acquisition, grew my agency through an acquisition, exited through a sale, spent five years with the acquiring agency and so. Been through the rigmarole of all things agency life, more on the smaller side, I’ve never been part of the holding company, you know, life or anything like that.

 And now I help agency owners try and figure out what their goals are, what their challenges are, and how they can make their agency work better for them, get more out of their agency. And I do that through one on one coaching and group coaching and some kind of curriculum based programs here and there.

 So yeah, it’s, for me, it was born out of, I never want to have employees again, and, as much as I love the deliverable and the creative work and the process there, I just kind of felt like I needed a massive shift in what I was doing and how I can be more of service in my professional life, as I am in my personal life.

And full transparency, cause I’m a pretty open book. My family had kind of just gone through a really tragic experience right before COVID. I lost my daughter, unfortunately, very suddenly. And so came through, you know, the first part of that grief process, like I can’t be accountable for a job, but I know being of service is, is very cathartic.

And how can I help other people with whatever their challenges are? And so what I know so intimately and so well is running a business and running an agency and, you know, things like that. And so it kind of found my path back to revisiting life again, through that grief process in building a business.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, it, it is, and it’s certainly something that agency owners need, right? We know that from the conversations we have, they, they don’t have a lot of knowledge around running businesses. And, and so those of us who have been through the trenches before and, and have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly, you know, I always say that, that we can share.

 The wisdom of, of our success and, and the, the lessons from our failures so that hopefully they don’t repeat the exact same ones in the exact same way that we did them.

Steve Guberman: Yeah, they can kind of sidestep some of those landmines, but maybe they’ll find their own along the way and build their own experiences to share with others.

And, and you’re right. I think most creative professionals are accidental business owners. You know, they went to school for art or marketing or design or whatever. And now I find myself running a business and I don’t have a clue how to do that. And that was my experience also. So,

Chip Griffin: yeah. And I think, I think, you know, what you brought to the table here and explaining how you came to start your current business, I think that’s applicable to a lot of other agency owners as well, because, you know, everybody’s got their story and why they got started.

And so it, it might be that they don’t want to have employees anymore. They don’t want to be an employee anymore. It might be, you know, because of a, a personal situation of some kind. But whatever it is, there’s usually a driving force. And I always find that it’s helpful to understand what the motivations of the owners are to help them make better decisions for them.

Because at the end of the day, it’s your business. And if it’s not giving you what you need, then what’s the point? There’s a lot of other ways to be stressed out in this world. Yeah. Apart from running a business that you don’t like.

Steve Guberman: Yeah. Why are you doing it? And what are you hoping to get out of it? And how do you, how do you personalize that vision?

I think so many owners kind of do these copycat goals where it’s like, Oh, I saw this video and if I’m not making 30 K MMR, you know, I’m, I’m a failure or whatever. And it’s like, yeah, you really d