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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 iss