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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: And Gini, I’d like to put on a pair of your shoes today.

Gini Dietrich: I don’t think they will fit.

Chip Griffin: I think it’s incredibly unlikely, that they will fit.

Gini Dietrich: They don’t even fit my kid.

Chip Griffin: I confess when we’ve met in person, I haven’t really looked at your feet that closely, but just based on our relative statures, I would be shocked if my feet fit into your shoes.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I don’t think they’ll fit.

Chip Griffin: No, no. I think that would, I’m not sure it’s my style either, really.

Gini Dietrich: Probably not. Probably not.

Chip Griffin: I’m such a fashionista. Yeah.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I mean, right now I’m wearing my UGG slippers. It’s so, but look at how small they are. That’s a size five. They’re not going to fit you.

Chip Griffin: Definitely not.

Definitely not. Well. We veered off the rails even before we started. You’re showing footwear to the audience. So, that was not where I thought this was going.

Gini Dietrich: Would you like to see my oranges and apples? Would you like to see my, I’m growing oranges and apples in my corner. Would you like to see that?

Chip Griffin: You’re, you’re growing citrus fruits in Chicago in the winter.

Gini Dietrich: Correct.

Chip Griffin: Makes total sense.

Gini Dietrich: Quite, quite pleased with myself.

Chip Griffin: I’m, I don’t even know what to say about that, so. It’s,

Gini Dietrich: it’s impressive.

Chip Griffin: How about we move on to the actual topic today. Before we really.

Gini Dietrich: Alright, fine. Fine, fine.

Chip Griffin: Crash into the ravine and end this show. So we are going to talk about shoes, but not in the way that we’ve done so far.

We’re going to talk about the importance of, as you’re an agency owner, putting yourself in the shoes of the other party in all of the conversations and activities that you’re engaged in. So putting yourself in the shoes of the client when you’re having a difficult conversation with them, or when you’re thinking about asking for something, putting yourself in the shoes of the prospect, as they look at what you’re proposing. Putting yourself in the shoes of your employees, as you’re offering them feedback or making decisions about different things.

And so I think all too often as owners, we hear this advice from folks like us, who tell you, you need to maximize profits. You need to manage scope creep. You need to make sure that you’re getting results for your clients and you need to press your team for them. You need to make sure that you’re telling your team what you need and what you expect and all of that, but we’re often leaving out the part of thinking about how does the other party perceive it?

What are they hearing when we’re saying these things? And I think that’s a really important thing to consider so that you can actually make sure that you’re getting what you need, but you’re also understanding what the other party needs that you can reach something that works for both of you.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s just like any other relationship, right?

You have to put yourself in the other person’s shoes in all your other relationships or your marriage, your friendships, all of those. So I think even with your kids, I think it’s really important to remember that. And you’re right. There are. Tend to be some challenging conversations we have to have sometimes with clients partly because we’re not doing the things that we should be to scope correctly and manage profitability and ensure that we’re doing the things that we need to, to make sure that we are making money.

And because we’re not doing that up on the upfront side, it makes it more challenging on the back end to have to have those conversations. So I think it’s, it’s a combination of both. It’s for sure putting yourself in the shoes of the other person, and it’s ensuring that you understand your financials and you understand how to make a profit and you understand how to scope and you’re tracking your time so you know how much things cost.

It’s a combination of all of those things.

Chip Griffin: And look, I mean, we know that the, the pressure on agencies is immense right now. There’s a lot of financial challenges that all agencies are facing. At the same time, we need to remember that most of our prospects and clients are feeling those same challenges.

Right. And it’s one of the reasons why we are in the agency community. But we need to think about those things, particularly because we’ve talked, we talk all the time about the need to raise prices, for example, as an agency and how if an agency owner starts to ask us a question, if they, if they’re charging enough, the default answer is no before we even hear any facts, because that’s just how it is.

At the same time, if you go to your, you know, and we know that inflation is hitting you right now as an agency. If you go to your clients and say, you know, we need 10 percent more next year for the same level of work, that may be correct for us and making sure that we’re balancing our books, but we need to think about how the client is hearing that. And what the client is hearing is, I have to find a way to come up with more money to pay you as an agency, even though my own budget hasn’t increased and is probably shrinking also.

And so, so now I have to give you a, an even larger piece of the pie just to keep going with what we’re doing. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be raising prices, but you need to be sensitive to the way that they’re looking at it and figure out how you can come up with messaging to help sell what you’re doing, but also are there other alternatives you can come up with?

Can you reduce your scope while keeping the fee the same so that you’re not taking a bigger piece of the pie or at least not any bigger?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think, I think that’s exactly right is finding creative ways to work around it, because we actually have an agency client that in September wanted to send an email saying they were raising prices and the email they wrote was interesting.

And I was like, um, I don’t think you should send this email. Let’s maybe think about other ways to, to handle this. Because they’re in, they’re in a commodities, commodity business. And so they do need to raise prices and it happens across the industry. So it wouldn’t be a big surprise, but it’s in the messaging and how they were delivering it.

And I think that’s the same, same thing we have to think about is, you know, are there things that we can do? And I, I personally love the idea of reducing the scope and saying to them, listen, things just like they do for you, things cost more. It sucks. Here’s what we’ve been thinking about. We’ve been doing this, this and this all year.

And this one isn’t quite as effective as we thought. We’d like to remove that from the scope so that we can continue working on these two things that are doing extraordinarily well and put more power behind them. That’s a different conversation than saying, we’re going to raise your prices by 10 percent for the same amount of work.

Completely different conversation.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. And it doesn’t mean that they’ll accept it, but it means that you’re starting from a better position and you’re demonstrating to them that you’re thinking about them and their budget at the same time. And it’s not just all about me, me, me.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: I think you need to think about this in terms of scope creep too.

We always tell you if something’s out of scope, you need to draw the line sooner rather than later because the more scope creep you allow, the, the tougher it gets to fix it later. At the same time, if you keep saying to your client, no, that’s out of scope, no, this is out of scope, this is going to cost more, this is going to cost more.

Put yourself in the client’s shoes. That sounds awfully damn annoying to hear every single week. And so what I hear is someone who is being an obstacle rather than a solution. And so my suggestion to you on things like that is. Maybe if you can say, well, that’s not within scope, but what if we took this thing away, that’s not as effective and we swap this in instead.

So try to come up with those same creative solutions, even when it comes to scope creep, so that it doesn’t just become that constant stream of no’s or you need to pay more. Or those kinds of things. You need to find ways to understand what the client needs and is looking for and how you can solve it rather than simply saying no.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I think this is a really easy one for you to put yourself in the other person’s shoes because it’s probably happened to you before. A really good example of this is we, a couple of years ago, inherited a web firm with a new client. They were a brand new client at the time. And about two months into the relationship over Thanksgiving week, the web firm updated all the plugins and everything, and it completely took the website down because of some thing that they had used, that the web firm had used, it was no longer being supported, completely took the website down.

And so I’m, preparing – my team’s all off right, because we closed the the office between for the week of Thanksgiving and it was the night before Thanksgiving. i have 30 people coming to my house I’m preparing you know my in laws are here, like I have a whole house full of people And the web firm is saying to me, well, we need 1, 500 to fix it.

And I was like, but you broke it. Right. And so then I’m having to field calls from the client, the CEO of the client’s office, and the president then calls me and like, we were having this conversation between the three of us trying to figure out what to do with this web firm who keeps saying, sorry, it’s 1500 bucks just to, just to have a conversation to fix it.

I was so frustrated because I felt like the client was being nickled and dimed. They were the ones who broke it and maybe it would have cost 1, 500 to fix it. That’s fine, but they wouldn’t even get on the phone without a credit card and paying the 1, 500 first. So I think you have to think about that, about it from all of those perspectives. Completely different conversation if they had said, Oh my gosh, we totally broke this. We’re so sorry. The theme is outdated. Whatever happens to be, we’re going to fix it. And then come back a couple hours later and say, we have to do this, this, and this, so it’s probably going to be 1, 500. Okay, we would have paid it. But instead, it was like, it’s a completely different conversation.

So you just think about it from that perspective. And I’m sure you’ve had experiences where you’ve been nickel and dimed like that. Maybe not in the professional life, but in your personal life. You have a plumber there, or at your house, or an electrician at your house, and it’s, it’s just like, oh my gosh.

So, when you, when you can understand that kind of frustration, I think it’s really easy for you to understand how the client might feel, even if you’re right. Even if it is out of scope, and they are asking for things that you shouldn’t be doing, or they’re not paying for, fine, but let’s find a different way to communicate that.

Chip Griffin: And, and billing is a perfect place to put yourself in the shoes of a client, because it is easy for someone to feel nickel and dimed, even if maybe they’re not. And I think back to my very earliest days in the agency world, and we’ve talked about this before, where it was very common for agencies to charge you by the page for a fax or a copy.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Right.

Chip Griffin: You know, those kinds of things. And, and I got to tell you that when I was hiring agencies in the nineties, it drove me nuts to get these invoices that would have the, and every time I saw the fax machine in my office come on and start spitting out pages, I’m sitting there thinking, this agency is charging me a dollar per page for all of the junk coming through.

And so instead of looking at it as they’re providing me good information, I need this. I looked at it as, Oh my God, the cost is being run up there. And, and, and recently I was reading a LinkedIn post where someone was talking about a lawyer and their first bill from this lawyer. And it included time spent for writing the engagement agreement, preparing the initial invoice, those kinds of things.

And people were saying, well, of course he needs to get paid for that. Sure. Roll it into the rest of your stuff. Don’t itemize it. Don’t put down on the invoice that you’re being charged for the invoice. I know a lot of agencies like to put in a specific project management fee because, and they’ll say things like project management is such an important part of the engagement.

We’re going to charge you for it directly. No. Wrap it into others. Because if I sit there and I see project management, I think, Oh my God. This is just, you’re just eating up my time on silly stuff. Not true. You need project management. It absolutely makes for a more successful relationship. Roll it into other things.

Don’t draw my eye to it. Think about all of these things and how the recipient is perceiving it because it will make a big difference for very little effort on your part.

Gini Dietrich: We actually used to do it very, very early in my agency life. So early. And partly because I came from a big agency where we charged a dollar per page for faxes.

But we did a 10 percent expense fee, which, which covered things like phone calls and at that time your cell phone bill and things like that. And, and GE was one of our clients and finally they said to us, can you just roll that into your fee? And I was like, what?

Chip Griffin: Right.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Because same thing. It drove them crazy.

And I didn’t realize that that was driving them crazy because that’s what we did at Fleishman Hillard. You charged for all that stuff. You charged for going out to dinner with them. You, you, like, you charged for all of it. If you even thought about the client, you charged for it. So it’s just really important to understand that and to say to yourself, if I received this, how would, how would I perceive it?

What would be my reaction?

Chip Griffin: And sometimes the, the client’s perception may not be because of something that you do, but of something that you don’t do. We all know that as agency client relationships go on. We sort of get into that mode where we just want to be protective of the relationship. We want to make sure that they stick around.

We don’t want to do anything that might rock the boat. So, yeah, we want to be careful. We’re mindful that they don’t want to hear no to scope creep. So we, and we’re mindful that they don’t want to spend more money. So what do we do? We turtle. And we, we try to just have the minimum amount of contact with the client in order to keep things moving because we don’t want to be in a situation where we have to say no to that request because it’s scope creep.

We don’t want to be throwing out new ideas because we know they’re going to get shot down or they’re simply going to try to get us to do it within the existing fee. And so we’re afraid to suggest new stuff. From the client’s perspective though, when we start to do that, we start to look non responsive.

We start to, that one of the biggest reasons that clients give when they leave an agency is they, they stopped being creative. They stopped coming to me with ideas. Well, the reason why is because they were being shot down most of the time on those things. But you need to understand that once you turtle, it turns into something where the client is now perceiving you as not a real partner in things.

So while you’re, you may be not rocking the boat and you may buy a little bit more time in the relationship, you’re definitely souring it much more so than by having an honest conversation with the client.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I think there’s opportunity for you as well to sort of meet in the middle.

And, you know, there have been times where we’ve been completely over, over scope, and we’ve spent way more budget than we should have, and I’ve paid my team way more than they should have gotten for, for certain things. And I haven’t said anything. And there have been times where we’ve been way over scope and we’ve, we’re way over budget.

And I have said something. And both of those, in both of those instances, it has not ended well for us. So you have to find a way to meet in the middle as well. And say, hey listen, we’re over budget and we’re over scope because of this, this and this. So let’s take a look at what we have planned for the rest of the year and really think through what we need to do.

And I will tell you, a few years ago, probably right around the pandemic, we started doing something that has been incredibly successful. We do, you and I have talked about, you don’t really have annual contracts, you’re month to month or maybe 60 days depending on what your termination clause is. We never, no longer have annual plans.

We do them by quarter. And we do, we, we set OKRs, objectives and keys, key results for our clients, just like we do for our own business. And every quarter we review them with the senior leadership at our clients’ businesses. And we say, we do a SWOT analysis. We say, this is, this worked really well. We have some big opportunities here.

This sucked and here’s why. And because this sucked, we’d like to not continue doing this and probably bring in something else. And every time we have that quarterly conversation, not only do we get a budget increase, but we get a scope increase as well, every quarter without fail. And it’s because we’re willing to have that really hard conversation and even be honest to say, you know, we tried this and it didn’t really work and here’s why.

Right. And it becomes a partnership so that now you’re having conversations instead of when something big happens and you’re over budget or you’re over scope and you have to have this hard, hard conversation. Because it’s been a year or it’s been eight months and you haven’t done anything about it. Now you’re having those conversations consistently and it’s part of your partnership and it doesn’t become this big conflict conversation that you have to have, which is, I think, why we turtle because we don’t, we don’t, we want to avoid the conflict and we don’t want to have the conversation.

Chip Griffin: Right. And the reality is, as you’re saying, the more frequent and regular your communication is, the better it is. And if you can do that, you can deal with the stuff that comes up, but the longer you let things fester on either side, the worse it gets. And the harder it is to resolve it.

But I also want to talk about not just clients. I think this is important to put yourself in the shoes of your employees.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: Because, you know, these days, most agencies are trying to get by with fewer staff than before, because it’s been tough the last couple of years financially for most agencies, whether they’ve seen a decrease or just kind of holding steady.

Most agencies are not growing like gangbusters. So they’re not adding a lot of team members. We’ve seen in the SAGA owner surveys that people are not planning to add employees anytime soon. So we’re asking for more from our teams. And so we need to think about how the things that we’re doing and saying to them is being perceived by the teams that we have in place.

I think some, some little things are, can get magnified really easily. I think back to my dad who owned a law firm, when I was a kid. And he would always have the employees at his firm have to pick between the day after Thanksgiving or the day after Christmas to take off.

Gini Dietrich: Oh, geez.

Are you serious?

Chip Griffin: Yes. And, and in fairness, the courthouses were open those days. So there was, there was a rationale for it because

Gini Dietrich: Okay.

Chip Griffin: Potentially they were doing more, and, and things honestly were different in the 70s and 80s. Fair. Fair. And how things like that were perceived. But, but even then, that just struck me as silly.

And, and I think today, if you were to, to offer your employees that same choice, it would be really negatively received. And most agencies aren’t doing that specific thing today, but there are plenty of things like that, that you might be doing where you feel like you’re giving the employee a choice, but they may not be looking at it that way.

They may be looking at it as sort of like, you know, which kid do I have to sacrifice? And, and so you don’t want people to perceive things in that way. But I think the most important thing with employees is how you’re giving feedback. And I think this is an area where most small agency owners, or at least a lot of them, are falling down on the job because we have a certain expectation for how things should be done.

And we really want to impress upon our team that we want it done that way. And so what that comes across to as the employee, though, typically is that we’re micromanaging them. That we don’t trust them. And so, so we really need to think about whether we’re editing a document or an email or providing feedback on a conversation.

Think about what’s absolutely necessary to convey. And think about how the employee is perceiving all of the other stuff that you’re communicating along the way. Because you may be making things worse rather than better. Or at the very least, you may be diminishing morale, even if you’re increasing performance in the short term.

Gini Dietrich: I think that’s such a good lesson because I had a situation where I was working inside an agency a few years ago to help their owner. And she treated me that way. She edited everything I did. She questioned every recommendation I made. And I was like, I’m sorry, I have more experience than you do. Like what?

But it was, it wasn’t me. It was the way that she did it with everyone. And I finally had to say to her, you’re making me feel like shit. And if you make me feel like this, imagine what your team feels like. You can’t figure out why you’re losing people as fast as you are. Her turnover rate was every six months.

And she couldn’t figure it out. This is why. This is why it’s because you are micromanaging. It makes me feel terrible. It makes me feel like you don’t trust me. It makes me feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. And those things are not true. I actually do know what I’m doing. And if I feel this way, your people do for sure.

And it was a really good lesson because I think you have to really understand that. That, If somebody’s questioning your work and editing everything that you turn in and, and saying, Oh, I don’t know about this idea, or shooting down your ideas. How does that make you feel? Cause I guarantee your employees feel that times 10.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, absolutely. And I do, I hear owners all the time complaining about, you know, clients who micromanage and rewriting everything and all that. And, and, and yet they’re doing the same with their teams. And look, this is a lesson that I’ve had to learn and relearn over the years myself. Because I, you know,

I have a way I want things done. I completely fess up to that. And, and I have a tendency to say, okay, this is exactly, and so I’ll just sit there and I’ll rewrite something rather than providing feedback. When I had developers working for them, I said, well, I’ll just code it or do it exactly this way. Not well received.

I’m sure not. It’s possible that the way that I’m doing it was absolutely that much better. Honestly though, probably not. It was probably incrementally better. And so what I have, have learned over the years and have tried to do more of is to provide general feedback and guidance as opposed to actually getting in there and editing directly, et cetera.

And even with the general guidance, thinking through what’s really going to make a difference here? And, and not, not a 0. 1 percent difference, but you know, a meaningful difference. And, and so I try to control myself now so that if I’m providing feedback, it’s really only for those substantial things.

And I think if owners did that more, they would be being perceived better by their teams. And, and so we really need to think about how everything that comes out of our mouth, every email that we send, every policy decision that we have about what our hours are, what flexibility we’re going to give to our team.

Or how we’re going to push them to get a project done by a certain time. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do what’s right for the business, but we need to think about how it’s being perceived before we move forward and either accept that we’re okay with the potential negative consequences or change so that we don’t get them.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think it’s really, really good advice to always put yourself in the other person’s shoes. One lesson I had to learn early on was I couldn’t take negative feedback from a client and then email it to my team in the middle of the night. So you have to really, really think about those things. And if you aren’t sure, like there are tons of leadership resources on the web.

There are tons of really great leadership books. It’s leadership. It’s leadership of your team. It’s leadership of your clients, it’s leadership of your agency. And that’s what you should be aiming toward. Not management, but leading. Not, not managing, not micromanaging, not telling them unintentionally that you don’t trust them, but leading them the way that you want them to go.

Chip Griffin: And, and what you’ve addressed there, particularly feedback from clients and not sending them in the middle of the night, you also need to remember you’re, you should be a buffer as the owner. You don’t need to pass every bit of the feedback onto the employees. Pass on what’s useful, pass on what’s necessary. You don’t need to, if the client gives you a really raw feedback, you know, I really hate what Sally did on this thing.

It was just awful. We can’t do that again. You don’t need to go to Sally and tell Sally that. No, you don’t. You can come up with a more constructive way, which the client should have done in the first place. Correct. But if the client doesn’t do it, doesn’t do it, you should do it as you pass it along, because you need to think about how it’s perceived and what it means.

Gini Dietrich: And don’t do it in writing. Have a conversation.

Chip Griffin: Oh, so, so much shouldn’t be done in writing that, that gets done in writing. I…

Gini Dietrich: I know.

Chip Griffin: I, yeah, that’s a topic for another day, I suppose, but maybe that, maybe that’s the former investigator in me who, you know, loved having things in writing because it was…

Gini Dietrich: Never put anything in writing.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. All right. Well, this, this is not in writing. Well, I guess we’re going to have a transcript. So it is kind of in writing at the end of the day and we do have a video of it. So it’s hard for us to say we didn’t say any of these things, but in the end that will bring to a, to an end this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast.

I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.