Agency Leadership Podcast

Hosted by Chip Griffin and Gini Dietrich

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Jun 2026

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Chip Griffin and Gini Dietrich help PR and marketing agency owners make better decisions about the businesses they run. With 300+ episodes, the Agency Leadership Podcast covers the topics owners deal with every week: pricing, profitability, hiring, client management, positioning, and what it takes to build an agency worth owning. Chip is the founder of SAGA Agency Growth Advisors and creator of the Build to Own approach. Gini is the founder of Spin Sucks and creator of the PESO Model.

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June 11, 202618 min

Is your agency easy to work with?

Most agency owners think their clients have it easy. But the gap between how you believe your agency operates and how clients and prospects actually experience it is often wider than you’d expect, and it’s usually the small, everyday frictions that do the most damage. In this episode, Chip and Gini ask if you were on the receiving end of your own agency’s processes, would you be happy? The answer, for a lot of agencies, is probably not. Their point isn’t that agencies should cave to every demand, but if you market yourself as a partner, act like one. The friction can start before someone even becomes a client. Contact forms loaded with qualifying questions scare people away. And back-and-forth emails to find a meeting time have no excuse in 2026. Use a scheduling tool, have a link ready, and make it especially easy for prospects. Once someone is ready to talk, the goal is to respond fast and remove every obstacle. When it comes to the handoff from prospect to client, agencies should have a standard proposal template so they can turn paperwork around in 24 hours, not days. Make invoicing and payments as easy on the client as you would want it to be if you were in their shoes. And when it comes to project management tools, if the client already has one they’re using, just use it. The tool matters less than having one. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “When someone is at a low point, that is not the time to try to extract stuff from them. It’s a time where if you believe half of your marketing BS that you put out there about they’re our partners, they’re not our clients, well, then act like one.” Gini Dietrich: “We have to think about scope creep, and we have to think about margins, and all of those are very real things. But let’s not cut our nose off to spite our face.” Chip Griffin: “Being easy to work with starts before they’re even a client. I am often befuddled by how difficult agencies make it to get in touch with them for a prospect.” Gini Dietrich: “There are some organizations that have a process that they put clients through, and it’s so rigid that it doesn’t meet the client where they are. And it’s impossible to work with them because of that.” Related How to onboard new agency clients How to do client collections right and get paid faster View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, I, I’m, I’m easy to work with, right? I mean, you know, I’m not too- Gini Dietrich: You’re super easy to work with. Chip Griffin: Well. Gini Dietrich: I mean, you’re a little cranky, but that’s why I love you. Chip Griffin: I, I, I think listeners know I’m, I’m cranky. They just… If you’ve listened to more than two or three episodes, you’ve probably heard me be cranky about something at someone. Gini Dietrich: Great. I love it. Chip Griffin: Yeah. Yeah. But we are gonna talk about whether or not you are actually easy to work with as an agency for your clients, and frankly for your prospects as well, because I think a lot of agencies believe that they are easy to work with, but their thoughts or their words maybe aren’t matched up with their actual actions. Gini Dietrich: Yes. And, you know, I will say that I learned this lesson when I started hiring agencies and solopreneurs. It’s not easy to work with other agencies. And you’re like, “Oh, that’s not… I thought that that was a good practice.” And then you realize when another agency puts you through it, not a good practice. Like for instance, making them, making you use their project management system when you have your own, bad idea. Sending emails with invoices that go into the void, bad idea. Like there are some practices that I’m like, “Nope, this does not work.” It’s not, you’re not making it easy on me. Chip Griffin: Yeah, and I, I think part of the problem comes from, I think part of the blame goes to people, people like us who are always preaching to agency owners the importance of protecting their time and their margins and- Gini Dietrich: Sure Chip Griffin: and all of that. Yep. And, and I think that, you know, some people listen to that, but they don’t think through, “Okay, well how does that look on the other end?” Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: Yep. And, and so yes, you absolutely need to, to make sure that you don’t have scope creep, and you need to make sure that you are protecting your time so you can get work done, and you’re not just getting eaten alive by meetings and calls and all of that. At the same time, you should think, “What does the other person on the other end think? How would I feel if I received this communication or if someone I hired acted in this way? How, would I be happy about it?” And I think if you start to do that, you’ll realize that some of your practices may not be as easy to work with as you think. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think you’re right. You know, I think about a couple of years ago, probably two or three years ago, it was a Saturday night and a client’s website went down, and the client called me, and the reason I remember this is Saturday night is ’cause I probably already had a glass of wine. And he called me and he’s like, “Hey, our website just went down and I can’t reach anybody.” And I was like, “What do you mean you can’t reach anybody?” He’s like, “I can’t reach anybody at the web firm. Can you help?” And I was like, “Of course.” So I called the web firm, and I finally got ahold of somebody, but I had to go through… I had to email three different email addresses, not a personal email address, and I had to go through their quote-unquote process. And I finally got somebody to call me and they said, “Well, keeping the website up and restoring a backup is not part of our scope of work, and so it’ll cost $2,000 an hour.” And I was like, “I’m sorry, what? But that’s not, that’s not a thing.” And they had taken this client’s… You know, they had… The client didn’t know, the client didn’t know what they were signing, and they did sign a scope of work that, that wasn’t included, and it was $2,000 an hour for emergency type stuff. And I was like, “No, absolutely not.” So their marketing manager and I got on with GoDaddy and we restored it ourselves, which it was not a fun process, but it worked, and that, that forced us to… I think they actually ended up firing the web firm, but which they should have. But, like, that kind of stuff I think is exactly to your point. They had put in a process. They had a contract. They did all the things, but they didn’t think through, like… restoring somebody’s website on a Saturday night is literally a click of a button. It’s not a $2,000 an hour emergency kind of thing. So, you know, yes, you should have a process. Yes, you should have a contract. Yes, you should protect your time, but also don’t do it at the risk of losing a client over something stupid like that. Chip Griffin: Right, and obviously there are some clients, as we know, who will abuse some of these things. So- Of course … there, there are certain times- Gini Dietrich: Of course, yes … Chip Griffin: where you have to be okay appearing to not be as easy as the client would want you to be. So this is not, this is not us preaching, “Say yes to everything that you’re asked to do.” It’s simply make some, make some good judgments here. Now, if this is, this is, the website disappears over the weekend, and it, you know, it’s not something that happens regularly, it’s not the, this client doesn’t generally abuse you, I mean, just get it done, and you can have a conversation after the fact and say, “Hey, that really wasn’t part of the scope of work. You, you know, we helped you as a show of good faith, but we need to, you know, we need to work this into the agreement going forward-” Right … or something like that. Gini Dietrich: Right, right. Chip Griffin: It, you know, when, when someone is, when someone is at a low point, that is not the time to try to extract stuff from them. It’s a time where if you truly want, you know, if you believe half of your marketing BS that you put out there about we’re our, they’re our partners, they’re not our clients, well, then, then act like one. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah. And I think the, I think, you know, we think, we have to think about scope creep, and we have to think about margins, and all of those are very real things. But to your point, let’s not cut our nose off to spite our face. Like, there are some times where you’re just like, “Okay, yeah, sure.” I mean, I didn’t charge the client extra for them calling me instead of somebody on their account team because it was a Saturday night and they knew they could get me. I didn’t charge them extra for that. We just fixed it, right? Like, and that, that creates more goodwill in your relationship and trust in your relationship than being like, “Well, let’s deal with this on Monday.” No. No. Chip Griffin: Yep. And I mean, and a lot of it, a lot of being easy to work with is really the small things. It’s not the, it’s not the big giant stuff. It’s the little bits of friction that just become annoying. So think about how easy is it for clients to book time with you or your team, right? Again, and we don’t want this to be abused, but at the same time, I’ve worked with a lot of agencies where they’re like, “Well, you know, I, I’ve got a half hour two weeks from now for you.” Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: Come on. I mean- … you know, if, if this is a client who’s constantly asking for time, okay, you know, maybe. But in general, you should be trying to find ways to make yourself available. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Chip Griffin: You should be doing things like making sure that your team is at least acknowledging emails within the business day. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Chip Griffin: Even if they can’t solve it, at least acknowledging it makes you easier to work with. Little things like how you handle billing. You alluded to that earlier, but make it easy to handle billing. Make sure you’re finding out early on who should these invoices go to? Do they need to be copied to multiple people? Don’t say, “Well, I’ve got this process and it only goes to one person or whatever.” Make the payment process easy. Make it so that people can pay online, make recurring payments. If they want to be able to change a credit card, let them do that. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Chip Griffin: I had a recent experience with someone- You did. … that I worked with for a long time and, and I wanted to change my, my business credit card number that was used for it, and I was told I had to call an operator to do that. I’m like, “That is total BS in 2026. I should be able to do that online. I should not have to get on a phone and read out my card number to a human.” That makes no sense whatsoever. Make it easy for people. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Crazy easy. Like you should make it easy. It’s, it’s funny you say that because about invoices, because we worked with an accounting firm who would mail their invoice, and we use a PO box because I don’t want mail coming to my home and sometimes we got it, sometimes we didn’t. Like I, and they would go, “Your invoice hasn’t been paid for 120 days.” And I’m like, “Dude, I don’t have an invoice from you.” And so I finally got them to email them. Like, this is ridiculous. Don’t mail me the invoice. It’s 2022, for heaven sakes. Chip Griffin: Well, if you want to talk about not easy to work with, the PO box is a perfect example. I had a PO box for almost 30 years that I used for business, and I finally ended up giving it up recently because the post office was becoming extraordinarily belligerent about wanting various bits of documentation. I’m like, I’ve, I’ve had this- Gini Dietrich: Yes … Chip Griffin: post office box for 30 years. Like well you have to show up in person to do this, and so I would show up in person. They’re like, “Oh, no, you don’t have the right stuff.” Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: And we don’t have the right people here today, so we’re gonna have to do it again.” No. Gini Dietrich: Yep, yep. Chip Griffin: No. Gini Dietrich: Yep, yes. Chip Griffin: Like- Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm … Chip Griffin: That’s, that is nonsense. There are so many ways to verify my identity, the identity of the business, what- like come on. Uh-huh. Also- Yeah … 30 years I had this box. Right. Like, and now you’ve just decided- Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm, uh-huh … Chip Griffin: that now is the time that you need to do this? Give me a break. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah, I think you’re right. Like the, it’s, I think exactly what you said at the beginning, which is you listen to people like us who say you have to protect your margins, you have to protect your time, you can’t have scope creep, you have to have a process, like all of those things, and those are important. But you also have to be willing to be flexible and nimble to the client’s need within that, right? Like, there are some organizations, agencies I will say, that have a process that they put clients through, and it’s so rigid that it doesn’t meet the client where they are. And it’s impossible to work with them because of that. And I’ve had that experience too as a business owner. Like, you have to be able to be flexible enough to meet the client where they are and still deliver in ways that you know are going to deliver the results you’ve, that they expect. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And being easy to work with starts before they’re even a client. I am often befuddled by how difficult agencies make it to get in touch with them for a prospect. I see these, these web forms that have like a gazillion questions on them. Like, do you have a problem that you have a wild number of contacts that you can’t handle screening them if you just get name, company, and email? I mean, do, do you really need to ask them a detailed set of questions in a form? Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah. Chip Griffin: I don’t, I really, that’s one I just do not understand, and I’ve talked with a few owners. I’m like, “Well, why do you do it?” “Well, just to make sure that we’re only getting qualified leads.” I’m like, “Do you, do you have a problem with this right now, though? Do you have… Are you flooded with so many that you can’t even just hit delete on the ones- Gini Dietrich: You can’t keep up, right, right … Chip Griffin: that don’t work out?”  Google to find out if this is someone legit or not? I, I just- Yeah … And the vast majority “No, no, no, no, we just wanna make sure that they’re qualified.” I’m like, “You understand you’re scaring people away.” Every single extra form, item that you put in there reduces your, the completion rate. Gini Dietrich: Yes, Chip Griffin: Don’t do that. Make it easy. Yeah. Make it easy to schedule that first conversation with you. Strike while the iron is hot. If someone reaches out and they wanna talk to you, bend over backwards. I have a different Calendly scheduling link for people who want to reach out to potentially work with me that opens up more blocks on my schedule. Because why not try to reach those people as quickly as you can? Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: And by the way, use a service like Calendly to book time. Stop it with these back-and-forth emails. I can meet between here and here, and this and that. That is, like, 10 years ago. We don’t need to do that anymore. Have a nice little Calendly link that someone can use, or whatever service you wanna use, that just makes it easy for someone to book time. You can always say to them as a polite thing, “If you’d rather just give me a range of times, you can.” But you know what? I’ve been doing this for years, and I have yet to have a single person say, “I’m not gonna click on that link” and instead say, “Well, I just wanna give you some windows.” Right. ‘Cause it’s harder for them. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, right. Chip Griffin: Make it easy. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Yeah, I totally agree. I think really understanding, like, think about it too from the, from your client or prospect’s perspective. If I were receiving this, how would I take it? And look at it through that lens to help you understand how you might improve things to make it easier for them. Chip Griffin: Yeah, and when you’ve got someone on the hook and they’re interested, make it easy for yourself to produce the statement of work and the contract, and get them out the door. Have a standard template. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: Don’t spend- I mean- Yep … a lot of agencies take a long time between when someone says, “Yeah, I wanna do this,” and when they actually start sending the paperwork. You should be able to get that over within 24 hours. Gini Dietrich: You absolutely should, and I think the problem with that is that people wanna write proposals that are, like, in-depth and strategic, and have tactics, and they’re really a plan. Don’t do that. That’s giving away stuff that you shouldn’t be giving away for free. You should absolutely have a standardized template. And truth be told, I put ours into AI, and I said, “Here are all the things that need to stay the same,” and it will pump that out, and then it will customize based on the conversation I had, and that’s it. And I always tell prospects, “You’ll get something from us in 48 hours,” and they get it within 24, and then they’re ecstatic, and they’re happy, and all the things. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And make it easy to complete. Make sure you’re sending it so they can get an electronic signature, so all they have to do is click, click. It’s done in five seconds. Yep. If you send it to them, and then they’ve gotta actually sign something, and figure out how to take a photo of it with their phone and email it to you, why are you doing that in 2026? E-signatures are a wonderful thing. You should be using those. And then once they’ve done that, make sure you have a templated process for onboarding so that you don’t say, “Oh, we’ve signed the agreement. You know, let me get the team together. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll get back to you in, you know-” Right, right. “… a couple of weeks when we’ve had the chance to figure this all out.” You should have an onboarding process so you hit the ground running. You don’t have to have every answer, but you have to be able to show them that you know what you’re doing. So it’s not just about being easy, it’s building their confidence in those early stages. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, for sure. And you know, one of the things that we find, too, is that, of course, because we have the PESO model, it, it is a very standardized process, right? But we find that clients, prospects come to us a lot with a problem. They think it’s a problem. And they all say things like, “We have a measurement problem. We don’t know how to measure.” And that, truth be told, like, that’s most comms teams, right? Most comms teams do have a measurement problem. They don’t know how to measure. And so we have a list of questions that we ask because that’s a symptom, and we’ve, we’ve discovered through all of our work that that’s a symptom. What’s really the problem? And we ask, you know, we start to dig in, and all of a sudden they go, “Oh, now it makes sense that we can’t measure,” right? So you can have a list of questions based on what the prospect tells you. It used to be that I, I haven’t gotten, had this conversation in a long time just because of the way we’ve shifted the business, but I used to hear all the time, “We’ve had four PR agencies, and they don’t do anything. They pitch a bunch of stuff, and nothing ever happens.” And so I had a list of questions based on that, and I– one of the questions was, “What other– Who, who else have you worked with?” Because I wanna know if you’re the problem or if they’re the problem, right? Have a list of questions that will help you understand so that then you can take all of that and throw it into your AI and say, “This is what I’ve diagnosed. These are what the problems are. Please fill out the template that you have,” and it helps you build a structure for your proposal really fast. Like, in two minutes versus two days. Chip Griffin: I mean, the great thing is being easy to work with tends to make your life easier, too. Gini Dietrich: So much easier. Chip Griffin: Most of these things will actually improve your existence. So, you know, rather than fighting it, rather than feeling like I have to just kind of, you know, push in my direction to get people to align with me, if you can find that middle ground, it will likely make things easier. And you opened by talking about project management, and so I think it’s a good place to, to wind down here as well. Project management tools are something that it certainly makes sense for you to recommend to a client if they don’t have something that they’re already using actively. Yes. You should definitely have one that you’re using and, and that is your default that you would like them to use. But if they say, “Hey, I’m already using something else, we need you to be part of that,” then go along with that, because ultimately it’s not which tool you’re using, it’s that you’ve got some way of keeping it all organized. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Chip Griffin: And if you can do that, you will make your life easier, you’ll make the client’s life easier, and you’ll produce better results. So, so don’t fight on that. Have it, so that if they don’t have anything, you’ve got a solution. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: You’re not like, “Well, you know, we need to think about it. Let’s try to figure out which one do you like? Should we try this? Do you want, do you want vanilla or chocolate?” Like, who cares? Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: Just pick one, use it, and move on. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yeah, totally. Yes. Chip Griffin: There I am being cranky just like you said. You’re welcome, everybody. You’re welcome, Gini. Gini Dietrich: Thanks. Chip Griffin: So with that, I think we will wrap up this episode, but, uh, hopefully we were easy to listen to at least. There we go. On that note, I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And it depends.

June 4, 202621 min

Using AI to extend your agency’s PESO Model expertise

Most owner-led agencies know they should be doing more than media relations. One barrier has always been capability: you can’t execute paid media if nobody on your team knows paid media. AI is removing that barrier, and Chip and Gini dig into exactly how. Gini built a PESO model operating system AI that prompts you instead of you prompting it. Many agencies are strong in one or two media types and need scaffolding to think through the rest. The tool can be used to help agencies execute unfamiliar disciplines step by step. Chip frames this as an opportunity to do things that were theoretically possible two years ago but practically out of reach. A paid campaign to amplify a blog post no longer requires hiring a specialist. Beyond drafting, both hosts made a case for AI as a learning tool instead of merely a content machine. Gini tested this directly by vibe-coding a PESO model diagnostic, working through multiple versions with AI troubleshooting each step. The practical upshot is that you can use AI to build separate knowledge-rich agents for each media type, loaded with client messaging and context, and treat them as thought partners for areas where your team lacks depth. It won’t eliminate the need for people or strategic thinking, but capability is no longer a credible excuse for staying stuck at one letter of PESO. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “AI is a great opportunity for all of the things that you wished you could have done two years ago that now become much more feasible for you to do without having to go out and bring in-house new expertise.” Gini Dietrich: “I have built my entire organization using agents. It doesn’t replace anybody. I still need people to do the work, and I still need people to do the strategic thinking, and I still need people to service the client work. It makes us smarter, it makes us faster, it makes us more productive, but it doesn’t replace anyone.” Chip Griffin: “It doesn’t have to do it for you, it can help educate you… You can make it tell you at whatever level of knowledge you need in order to become comfortable with it, and then you actually start to learn it.” Gini Dietrich: “If you don’t have shared or owned and paid expertise internally, you can use those agents to help you build those things.” Related The PESO Model evolves for the AI era (and why your website isn’t dead) Has the PESO Model become a necessity for modern agencies? Agencies need the PESO model now more than ever How to allocate your client’s PESO budget View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, I think we’re gonna let AI do our jobs today. I know we don’t ever talk about AI on this show. Gini Dietrich: We don’t. We don’t like it at all. Chip Griffin: But I think AI is gonna let us do so much more here. Awesome. Maybe even, maybe we can even implement the PESO model as part of the show. Gini Dietrich: Beautiful. Let’s do it. Chip Griffin: I’ve, I’ve heard that the PESO model is something that’s really important that we should- … we should focus on. So why not let AI help us with it? Gini Dietrich: Oh, I love it. Maybe we could use NotebookLM and have it create its, our voices too. We’ll just be done. We don’t have to do anything. Chip Griffin: That’s a great idea. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, let’s do it. Chip Griffin: So then, you and I could just connect and just do our gossiping and chit-chat. Gini Dietrich: Right. Yes. Chip Griffin: And we’d still get an episode even without having to take the time to record. Gini Dietrich: Yes. I like it. Let’s do it. Chip Griffin: I like it. I like that. That would be- That would be fun. Gini Dietrich: We don’t gossip. What do you mean? Chip Griffin: Gossip, talk about world events. Whatever, however you want. I mean- Gini Dietrich: Yes. It’s kind of good that those aren’t recorded. Ah. Chip Griffin: It is. I suspect we would get a lot of listeners, but we’d lose a lot at the same time, so. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Chip Griffin: In any event, we are going to talk about AI again because it is top of mind for all of us, and so we all ought to be thinking about it. And we are gonna talk about the PESO model because we just happen to have somebody here who knows a little bit about the PESO model. So let me explain it to you… Oh, no, I didn’t. Oh. I wasn’t talking about me. With the founder of the PESO model as one of the co-hosts. It, we’ve talked about the PESO model before, but I think, you know, one of the things that, that has occurred to me in recent times, and I’m sure it has occurred to you as well, is that AI can help more PR agencies go deeper into the PESO model, particularly in areas where they maybe don’t have as much in-house expertise. And, and one- Yep … of the things we’ve talked about with agencies a lot is that the PESO model touches a lot of different things, and it’s difficult for any small agency to have all of the skillsets needed to fully execute PESO properly. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yeah. Chip Griffin: AI seems to open the door to more of that. Gini Dietrich: For sure, it does. One of the things that we did late last year is I built a PESO operating system AI. And instead of you prompting it, it prompts you. So it’s built to do exactly that, so that you can say, “Okay, well, we’re really good at media relations, but we don’t have any expertise in shared, owned, or paid,” or, “We’re really great at owned and shared, but we don’t have any expertise in earned and paid.” Whatever it happens to be, right? And so it will h- it will prompt you with questions to help you think through, “Okay, if we’re great at owned and shared, but we don’t have the E and the P, here are the things you need to be thinking about.” And it will help you either figure out how to execute it on your own with step-by-step instructions, or it will give you a creative brief that then you could hand off to a partner. So it, it’s built to do that, but the point is, is that- I mean, would I prefer you use the PESO OS AI that I built? For sure, but really any AI could do that. I think if you,you have to prompt it. It’s not gonna prompt you. But I think any AI based on information that’s out there in the, on the web that we’ve created around PESO, it will be able to take all of that and say, “Here are some things you should be thinking about.” And I think it’s really good at helping you think through things that you’re just not an expert at. And it’s really good at helping you think through, gosh, we should be using paid to amplify our content, for instance, but I don’t have any idea. Do– should I do it on LinkedIn? Should I do it on Instagram? Should I do it on TikTok? Should I do it on Google? Like, I have no idea. So AI is a really good thought partner from that perspective. Chip Griffin: Well, and I think that’s the, that’s the key point is that it allows you to, certainly you can look at it in, at a 30,000-foot level, you know, with your specialized OS that allows you to really think the whole big picture through. Yep. But you can also use it in a very granular way to say “Hey, look, I know I want to amplify this content. Let’s, let’s look at the various ways that we can do it, and help educate me about how we do that most effectively.” Yep. And, you know, to me, AI is a great opportunity for all of the things that you wished you could have done two years ago Gini Dietrich: Yeah Chip Griffin: That now become much more feasible for you to do without having to go out and bring in-house new expertise, or hiring someone if it’s, particularly when it’s focused, right? If it, it really is just, “I need a paid campaign to amplify this blog post.” That is a whole lot easier to do with AI, frankly, than it is to go hire somebody in-house- Yeah … and a lot cheaper. Gini Dietrich: Absolutely, yes. And it will give you the step-by, literal step-by-step instructions if you wanna do it yourself. Right. And if you don’t wanna do it yourself, you say, “Help me create a project brief or a creative brief that will, that I can hand off to a partner,” and it does that for you too. So one of the things that we do is, you know, I have a paid media expert in, on our marketing team, but then we hire out, depending on what we need, we’ll hire out sort of the day-to-day minutia piece of it. ‘Cause, you know, especially in paid media, you have to be in there every day and testing and tweaking and all that kind of stuff. And AI’s great at saying, “Eh, pay attention to this,” but not great at actually pushing the buttons. And so it has helped our paid media team even just outsource some of that stuff too. So it’s, I think it’s really great from that perspective. You know, it’s still, you, like, I think some, especially PR professionals, are using it for, like, list development and media pitching and things like that, which is fine, but it’s still not… it’s still a good first draft. You still have to add your personalization. You still have to do those kinds of things. One of the things that we were kind of struggling with, actually not struggling with, we were arguing over internally, was our outbound sales campaigns and what those said. And I felt like they were way too long. Our chief revenue officer felt like the calls to action weren’t right, and so we put it into AI, and we were like, “This is where we’re struggling. We’re not agreeing on these five points.” And it pumped out some stuff that we were like Okay, that’s– I– All right, let’s try that. So, you know, I don’t know yet if it’s gonna work ’cause we haven’t launched it, but it helped us think about things a little bit differently than we had just the three of us shooting the shit around a Zoom conversation. Chip Griffin: Well, and to your point, it’s a great jumping-off point. It’s not necessarily a final draft of everything, but, I mean, let’s say you, you know, you’re– you don’t consider your team very adept at creating social posts on their own, but you want to use PESO to amplify content. You can take that piece of content and say, you know, “Give me three to five drafts that I can look at.” Yep, yep. And you can pick the one that, that resonates most with you, and then, you know, hone that and use that as your post. So again, it just, it allows you to do things that either would’ve taken much longer a number of years ago or just you wouldn’t have been able to do without hiring someone new in-house or that sort of thing. And so having those opportunities means that you can adopt a lot more of the PESO model as an agency, which certainly benefits your clients, but it benefits your business as well. Because as we’ve talked about, pure PR agencies, despite the renaissance of the importance of earned media as a result of LLMs and all of that, you know, you still, I still think it is very difficult to have a media relations only agency in 2026. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: It’s not impossible. There are certain niches where it works and certain setups that work, but for the vast majority of old time traditional PR agencies, they need to be getting into more of the PESO model, even if it’s not all four letters. Even if you get into two of the letters- Gini Dietrich: Yeah Chip Griffin: that’s gonna help you a lot. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yeah, for sure. And it does– definitely helps you, like I think I’ve mentioned before that I have several different agents, AI agents, and one is my co-CEO, and my co-CEO, like, it will argue with me, and it will tell me, like last week it said, “That’s a stupid idea.” And I was like, “Ah, well, screw you, too.” But it helps you think through those things. So you say, “Okay, what if I want to build an agency that is focused around the PESO model, and I’m gonna go through the certification so that I can create an agency that’s focused on it. What am I missing? What do I need to hire for? What can I use you, my AI, for? What can I…” Like it helps you think through all of those things. “Help me build a plan to be able to do this over the next two years. I want to create some intellectual property based on what you know about me and how I’ve used you in the past. What is some intellectual property that we might be able to create as an agency?” It can help you with all sorts of things. Chip Griffin: It can, and it, it also, you can calibrate it to your own knowledge level or your team’s knowledge level, so you can have it just help you with some, some drafts. You can have it just teach you how to do things. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: And I think that’s an often overlooked use of AI. Yes. Absolutely. It doesn’t have to do it for you, it can help educate you. Yep. And part of that is just communicating with it and say, “Treat me like I’m an absolute idiot.” Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: “And give me out- actual step-by-step instructions. Assume I don’t even know how to click the mouse. Like, tell me to put downward pressure on the button in the middle of the…” Like, you can make it tell you at whatever level of knowledge you need in order to become comfortable with it, and then you actually start to learn it. I mean, I think we, we all think of AI as something that, that’s, you know, can just replace us, but it can also help us learn so that we develop our own skills, and maybe we don’t need the AI for what we need it for today, but instead we can use AI to take us to the next level because we’ve already built in that knowledge from having worked with AI previously. It should be viewed as a growth opportunity, not as just, you know, the lazy way out. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I, absolutely. I love that because, you know, I kept hearing about this vibe coding thing, and everybody was talking about vibe coding. I was like, “Okay, I wanna try vibe coding. What do I want to vibe code?” And so I actually asked my AI boyfriend, “If you were me, what are some things you would vibe code just to test it out?” And it said, “You should do a PESO model diagnostic so that people understand where they sit on the PESO model maturity ladder.” And I was like, “Okay.” So I went into lovable.ai, and I built a PESO model visibility assessment is what I built first, and it was a really good first draft. And then I went through it and I had some friends take it, and I had my team go through it and got all of that feedback, and then I built the PESO model diagnostic from there. So it probably took– I probably had five or six versions before I was ready to take it public. Then I was like, Okay, now I have to figure out how somebody gets their results, and then how do I attach it to ActiveCampaign, which is our software, our email software, so that they can have their results emailed to them? It’s a little bit harder than it sounds. Chip Griffin: I, I think that’s, that’s part of the thing with vibe coding. People- Gini Dietrich: It’s absolute, yeah, a little bit harder. Yeah. But it did exactly what you said. Yeah. I was like, “I am lost.” Yeah. And I actually said, “I think this is above my pay grade.” And, and it said, “Okay, let me help you.” And so it broke it down step by step by step. We finally got it figured out, but then it wasn’t, it was doing everything that we needed it to do, but it wasn’t emailing. So I had all the tokens in the email, so like, “Hi, first name, here’s your…” Like, I had all those tokens, but it wasn’t triggering that. And so it helped me figure out, it like, it helped me troubleshoot and figure out why. And I, there’s no way on earth, not in a zillion years, I could have done that on my own two years ago. Absolutely not. Chip Griffin: Yep. And it really, it really is amazing how it can help you with some of those things. Now, it can also send you down some rabbit holes that are- Gini Dietrich: Yes, it did that too … Chip Griffin: not the right ones, and, and then- Gini Dietrich: Correct. I was like, “No, that’s not right.” Chip Griffin: And then it says, “Oops. Yeah, sorry. That’s, I, I didn’t mean to do… You’re right- Yep, you’re right. Mm-hmm … that I should’ve gone a different direction.” Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yes, it does do that. Chip Griffin: And so, you know, that is always one of the challenges of vibe coding, is it opens a lot of doors, but it can lead to a lot of frustration, and you have to be ready to handle that. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: And particularly for someone like you, who has not been steeped in development in the past. Gini Dietrich: At all. Chip Griffin: You know, it probably takes more effort to get past that frustration than- Yeah … say, for someone like me, where I can spot early on that it’s going in the wrong direction, ’cause I’ve written code, and I’d be like- “Mm, I don’t- That does seem wrong, too … I don’t know if we really wanna do that.” Yeah. Yeah. And, but, but you can also ask it a lot of questions, and part- you know, I use Claude Code personally, and so, you know, it will often give options, or you can ask for options and say, you know, “Let’s go through the pros and cons of these different paths that we can do before we build out a whole product around something that we’re like, ‘Eh, that’s not gonna work.'” Gini Dietrich: Yep, yep. Chip Griffin: And you can think them through. You can think through what, what are the maintenance costs? What are the actual hard costs of it? Yep. And there are times where the tools will suggest something to you that, that costs something, and they’ll, it, it’s sort of like, you know, Waze. Waze sometimes likes to avoid tolls. I’m like, “Don’t, I don’t wanna avoid a toll. I wanna get there faster.” Gini Dietrich: I wanna get there faster, right. Chip Griffin: Like, to, to me, I don’t- Gini Dietrich: Yeah … Chip Griffin: don’t put me on all these weird side streets so I don’t pay a toll. Same thing with these tools. They often default to the free option, and sometimes you’re like, “Well, I’m willing to pay $5 a month to get this email sent to me correctly, and, and not have to, like- Right … go down to the command line and configure- Yeah … all this stuff. Yes. And then my computer’s always gotta be on, and all that kind of stuff. So, but the, the point is that that a lot of these tools open up the doors for the things that you can do, which then, again, expands that capability so that you are moving beyond just being one of the four letters and moving into at least two, if not all four, of PESO. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And I would say also that if you, if you want to do this, it’s not a small undertaking, but if you want to do this, you can, there are lots of ways that you can do this, but I’ll make it super, super simple. Using Claude, you can create projects. And the projects can be focused on, okay, we’re gonna have one for earned, we’re gonna have one for paid, we’re gonna have one for shared, we’re gonna have one for owned. And in those specific projects, you build files, knowledge files that teach it what you wanna do from an earned media perspective. These are our clients. This is what we talk about. These are their messaging. Like all– Here’s our media list. All that kind of stuff goes into the knowledge files. You give it some instructions, and then it becomes your earned media thought partner, or same with your other media types. So if you don’t have, you know, shared or owned and paid expertise internally, you can use those agents to help you build those things. I will say, though, that, you know, people keep talking about how AI is going to replace us, and I have gone way down the rabbit hole from an agent perspective, and I have built my entire organization using agents. It doesn’t replace anybody. I still need people to do the work, and I still need people to do the strategic thinking, and I still need people to service the client work. Like, it makes us smarter, it makes us faster, it makes us more productive, but it doesn’t replace anyone. And so I say that because I want you– I don’t want you to be afraid of, oh my gosh, if we use this and we use this, I use it to help me think through the other media types that we aren’t doing, that it’s going to replace us, or the clients aren’t gonna wanna work with us. That’s not the case at all, at least not in my experience. So I would say test it out, play with it, get really good at it, because it will help you achieve some of the goals that you want to achieve a lot faster than you can do it on your own. Chip Griffin: Oh, absolutely. And, and it doesn’t even require you to know even the general direction. You can simply go in there and say, “Hey, look, you know, I’ve got this blog post. It’s not getting much traction, but I feel like it should. Help me to understand why it’s not.” And, and- Yep … so it’ll help, it’ll analyze the structure and content and maybe make some suggestions there. But then in the conversation you can say, “Well, you know, it doesn’t seem to be generating much in the way of inbound traffic from social. Help me think that through. How can I do that better or differently?” And it, it allows you to do a lot more, and I think particularly for those agencies who are doing any form of video, AI can be a really good tool for helping you to expand the use of that video into other things, right? I mean, the obvious that we’ve had for years is the automatic transcription, right? So you start from a point of you’ve got a transcription and so you’ve got, you know, more content that’s out there that’s more easily indexable by more tools. You know, some of the LLMs, you know, quote-unquote “watch video,” some only can use transcripts, so you wanna give both ideally. Yep. But you can go well beyond that. I mean, a lot of people are just kind of slapping stuff up on YouTube without any kind of a good description if they’re doing video. Use AI. Let it, let it give you a quick first draft and you can do that correctly. Let it start drafting social posts so you can get it out there. Make sure that you’re turning every video into a blog post. There are so many things that you can do from that one nugget. It’s one of the reasons why I love video so much, is because it can spiral out into these other formats so easily. But all of that then helps to fuel your efforts on the PESO model, and all of it can be done in an organization without all of the things that you would have needed five or 10 years ago. You don’t need a dedicated video producer or a high-end external video, you can use something like we’re using right here today with Riverside, where you can just- free plug there. We’re not, we’re not sponsored by them, but- … you know, we, we use it, and it, it does a nice job of cutting this up. If you’re watching this on YouTube, it switches camera angles. I don’t do anything except click a little button that says, “Do this,” and I get to choose how aggressive the, the camera switching is. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: That’s fantastic, right? But it will also then clip things that you can use for social media. And if I’m a traditional PR agency, I don’t know anything about any of that kind of stuff, but it’s all valuable to furthering the PESO model for my clients. So why wouldn’t I be taking advantage of AI to help me go down that path? Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And I would say if you are a traditional PR agency, even things like, “This pitch isn’t landing. Tell me what you think.” Sure. “How would I… Like, I’m trying to reach this, this, and this reporter with this pitch. Analyze it for me.” Like, that kind of stuff you should be doing every single day. Chip Griffin: Right, ’cause the PESO model isn’t just about ticking boxes. It’s about doing all those things well, right? Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: You, you can have a nice little report card that says, “Check. I did the P. I did the E. I did the S. I did the O.” But are you doing all of those well? And, and- Right … maybe even what your agency is, is built around, whichever letter is the core of your personal expertise, there are certainly ways that you can use AI to improve even on that- Absolutely … even before you go down the other avenues. Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. Yeah. And one of the things that we’ve been, you know, when we, we evolved the model for AI into an operating system, and that is because all of the media types build on one another, right? So it will help you figure that out. So I can say PESO model’s now an operating system, and I’m sure you’re like, “I don’t know what the freak that means.” And it, it will help you figure out what that means and how you can apply that to your business. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, operating system may be one of the most overused product descriptions these days, but- Gini Dietrich: It works in an enterprise. Chip Griffin: everybody’s got an operating… you know, you read anything AI-related, everybody’s got an operating system. Gini Dietrich: Works in an, in an enterprise really well. Chip Griffin: It, it … Oh, I mean, I, I’m not arguing that. It’s just, it’s kind of, it, it’s kind of like 30 years ago where everybody used the word paradigm. Gini Dietrich: Oh, fair. Chip Griffin: Like, okay. Gini Dietrich: Really? PESO model paradigm. Chip Griffin: I gotta, gotta hear about- There, I like that. That’s nice … OS again. Ugh. Ugh. Of course- Ooh … I’m old enough to remember actual OSs back in the day. You know. MS-DOS, for example. Way, way long time ago. Gini Dietrich: That’s right. Chip Griffin: On that note, before I go down memory lane and really bore everybody, we’ll wrap this episode up. But use the PESO model, and use the AI to help you get there more effectively- Yes … faster. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Yes. Chip Griffin: Grow your business, help your clients. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Make lots of money. Chip Griffin: Make lots of money. On that note, I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And it depends.

May 28, 202624 min

What to do when a client “fires” your agency

Losing a client is never fun, even when you saw the writing on the wall. The only question is how you choose to handle it. In this episode, Chip and Gini cover the practical and emotional side of client departures, from the moment you get the news to the lessons you take away. Gini points out that there are plenty of reasons a client could terminate the relationship, which may have nothing to do with your work. Strategy changes, budget cuts, and leadership turnover all end client relationships that were otherwise going fine. Chip’s advice is to not react immediately. Ask for a couple of days to review the agreement and put together a transition plan. That space lets you get the emotion out before you say something you’ll regret. Once you have your bearings, focus on making the exit clean. Read your actual contract, confirm the notice terms, and hand over everything the client needs: documents, passwords, contacts, work in progress. Chip is blunt about agencies that fight clients on the way out — it accomplishes nothing and just guarantees a bad final impression. Don’t burn any bridges and you just might see those clients come back or send you referrals. Finally, be honest with your team about what the loss means for the business. If there are financial implications, say so before people start drawing their own conclusions. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “You never want to react immediately to the news in such a way that you perhaps compound a difficult situation, or at the very least you don’t make it as easy as it should be.” Gini Dietrich: “I always say that you’re remembered by how you left an organization versus the work that you did. And so you never want to burn a bridge, even if you’re caught by surprise, even if you wanted to fire the client and you’re happy about it.” Chip Griffin: “If the client is coming to you and canceling because they’re having financial issues, you’re probably not going to get the money anyway. So rather than fighting for something that probably isn’t there, why don’t you try to make it as painless as possible and get whatever you can so that you’ve built some goodwill potentially for the future?” Gini Dietrich: “Be honest and open with your team because I think they will come with solutions that you may not have thought of or that you may have assumed they’re not willing to do.” Related Why do agencies lose clients? Agency client cancellation policies Agency owners need to put themselves in other people’s shoes How to protect yourself from an unexpected client breakup View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. 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, as a famous American once said, “You’re fired.” Gini Dietrich: Oh, no. Chip Griffin: Okay. Maybe … pack your knives and go. Um- Oh … what would you like to go with instead? Gini Dietrich: Yeah, let’s, maybe we’ll do that one. I like that. Chip Griffin: Pack your knives and go. Top Chef is a great show. Gini Dietrich: I love Top Chef. Chip Griffin: Not as good as it was in the early days, but- Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I agree. Yeah … Chip Griffin: it’s still, it’s still kind of fun occasionally, and I, I still- Yeah … do watch part of each season. Yeah. From Restaurant Wars on. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I did love, I did love a little Top Chef. I agree. Chip Griffin: Jen and one of my kids watch it up until Restaurant Wars, then they let me know, and I come in and I watch Restaurant Wars through the end. Gini Dietrich: That’s funny. They’re like, “Okay, your turn.” Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, that’s where it starts to get interesting, so. Gini Dietrich: That’s funny. Yeah. Chip Griffin: Anyway, no, we are gonna talk about getting fired. Not fired as an owner. We’re, we’re not at that point yet. We don’t have boards that are gonna fire us, most of us at least. Gini Dietrich: Right, right. Chip Griffin: But clients do fire us from time to time, and we’ve had conversations in the past about firing clients ourselves and, and those sorts of things. But, what happens, what do you do when a client calls you up or, worse, sends you an email and says, “We’re done. We’re out”? Yeah, you know, it’s- What are things you should be thinking about at that point? Gini Dietrich: I think so. The, I think there’s a couple of things here. One is that the word, using the word “fired” makes it sound so bad. Sometimes it’s because there’s been a strategy change, there’s been a budget reallocation, maybe leadership has changed, maybe there’s a new VP of marketing or a CCO. Like, there are lots of reasons, right, that have nothing to do with you or the agency or your work. And so saying that you got fired is, I, I just don’t like that term. Now that I have that off my chest, I’ll step down off my soapbox and say, like, there, I think we should always be prepared for the eventual loss of a client. And because we don’t know, right? We don’t- Uh-huh … we can kind of guess, you know, if there are big changes at a leadership level, or if there’s been a reorg, or if the company has sold or things like that, we can guess. Like, we’re probably not gonna be working with that client much longer. We could also sort of read the tea leaves from the perspective of they’ve been ghosting us, and we haven’t been able to get any work done. They’ve been declining meetings or not showing up for meetings. Like, there are lots of reasons that you can kind of read those tea leaves. And so I always think it’s, it’s really good to be prepared. It should never come as a surprise when you lose a client, and you should be prepared. You should have, you should know what you’re going to say, you should know how, what a transition looks like, and you should have a full pipeline that will replace that client fairly quickly, even in a chaotic world that we’re living in right now, so that you’re not caught off guard. Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, I think the, you know, the first step when you get this news is, probably 95% of the time you’re gonna be annoyed, upset, unhappy. Gini Dietrich: Sure. Absolutely. Chip Griffin: Some negative emotion. A small percentage of the time you’ll be like, “Oh, thank God, I just- … I, I really wanted to get rid of them anyway.” Yeah. You know? So. Gini Dietrich: Blessing in disguise, yep. Right. Chip Griffin: So, so sometimes that’ll be your reaction, but most of the time it’s not gonna be a happy reaction that you have. And so I think the, the first thing is to just, whether it’s on a call with them or you get it by email or, you know, carrier pigeon or whatever, take a deep breath. Yes. Right? Yes … you, you don’t ever want to react immediately to the news in such a way that you perhaps compound a difficult situation, or at the very least you don’t make it as easy as it could or should be. And I think your advice to, to be prepared for this, certainly if you see the signs on the wall you need to be even more prepared. But sometimes these things are, you know, in retrospect they won’t be a surprise, but you might feel surprised in the moment because you didn’t pick up on all of the little signals along the way and, and that then becomes a learning experience. And I think that’s… to me, that’s one of the most valuable things when you lose a client for whatever reason, is taking advantage of that to learn for the future. Learn the signs to look for. Yep. Learn what you could do differently potentially to maintain the relationship, retain the client. Learn to target better ideal clients, whatever it is. But I, I always like to turn these things into a learning experience as much as possible. But you also have the logistics to actually handle the end of the client relationship, so why don’t we talk about that for a little bit. What, you know, it, it’s not just about the learnings that you can take for the future, it’s how do you handle that immediately? How do you transition the client out? Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I think, you know, I always say that you’re always remembered by how you left an organization versus the work that you did. And so you never wanna burn a bridge, even if you’re caught by surprise, even if you wanted to fire the client and you’re happy about it, you should never burn a bridge because you just never know, right? So understanding what contract they signed and what the terms of agreement are, you know? We had a situation where I was working with a girlfriend and, she lost a big, big, big, big client. It came out of the blue, that she was not expecting it because she’d had a conversation a week prior that everything was fine. And so she works with several contractors, and we had to say like, “We’re really sorry. We know that we thought you were gonna be doing work in May and June,” and, like, we go, “The client’s gone.” So, and she had one person come back to her and say, like, “We have a 30-day agreement,” blah, blah, blah. They didn’t have a 30-day agreement, but in her mind they had a 30-day agreement. Sure. In the paperwork, there was no 30-day agreement. So I use that as an example because in your mind you may have a 30 or 60 or 90-day termination clause that may not have made it to the final piece. Maybe you have it for some clients and not others. Like, you have to really do your research to, and go back and read the executed agreement so you know what those terms are. And then spend that time ensuring that there’s a seamless transition, that they’re getting all the documents that you’ve created, that they understand where things are, that they understand where the passwords are, where you, what you have access to, all of those kinds of things. ‘Cause I will tell you, there have been situations where we’ve lost a client and we’re still in their Google Analytics. We’re still the admin on their Facebook page. Like, stuff like that, I’m like, “You guys, we’re not gonna do anything bad, but you really need to take us off.” Chip Griffin: Right, right. I mean, I’ve had former clients where, where I have had admin level access to a lot of their stuff- Yes … for as much as a decade afterwards. Gini Dietrich: Yes, yes. Chip Griffin: Even when I flag it for them and say, “Hey, guys- Gini Dietrich: Yes … Chip Griffin: you might wanna take me out.” Gini Dietrich: Yes, yes. Chip Griffin: It, it’s kind of amazing at times that- It, it is, yeah … the things that, that people don’t pay attention to. But, I mean, I think that that’s great advice to, you know, to understand what your agreements say, and to really just focus on how do you make it as smooth a transition as possible. No matter how frustrated you are, you need to try to think through how do we make this as pain-free for everybody? Because you can make it difficult for them, but that’s really just gonna make it difficult for you. Yep. And to your point, that’s how you’re gonna be remembered, as the person who made it difficult. And so, you know, if you get it on a, if you get the information on a call, you know, certainly say, “Hey, look, you know, let’s, let’s put together a wind-down plan or transition plan,” or however you wanna frame it. Part of that will depend on how sudden it is. You know, are, are they saying, “We’re not gonna renew in, you know, three months,” or is it, you know, “We’re giving you as short a notice as possible”? That will affect the timelines- Sure … and those sorts of things. Yep, yep. But, but it doesn’t affect the fact that you want to try to make sure that you are making it smooth and clean and painless. And don’t hesitate to say, “Hey, let me, let me think about this and come back to you with a plan-” Right “for how we do it.” Right, right. You don’t have to have every answer in the moment, and, and giving yourself that time to step back and absorb it may allow you to come forward with a more productive plan all the way around. Because your goal has to be to make sure that you’re fulfilling your contract, while at the same time trying to get them to fulfill their end of it. Right. And, and the more that you fight, the less likely you are to even get what you are due under the agreement. And so, you know, you wanna try to make it as, as friendly as possible in, in how you wind it down to make sure that you do get those payments that you are still owed. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I think, you know, if it comes as a surprise, I think you’re absolutely right that saying things like, “You know, gosh, I’m really sorry to hear this. I’ve really enjoyed working with you. Let me take a couple of days to craft a transition plan.” That gives you time. They, from their perspective, they’re like, “Okay, they’re being thoughtful about this and, you know, strategic about it, and they’re gonna be helpful.” And that gives you time to settle yourself and, you know, be, get all the emotion out of it and actually create something productive. Chip Griffin: Right. And it can be a, particularly if it’s done over the phone, it gives you that opportunity to sit down and take a look at the contract and see- Yeah … what it says. Yeah. Because then you can, you can go back to them and say, “Okay, you know, in order to make sure we do this the right way, you know, we’ll need the notification in writing so that, you know, we can memorialize this properly to protect both of us.” And I think you always wanna use that kind of language when you’re dealing with contract stuff. This is for both of our benefit, even if really maybe it’s more for you- Yeah … than for them, but you wanna stress the, the for both of us. And that’s also your opportunity to then look at other clauses in there that, that maybe are to your benefit, like the notification period, that maybe you didn’t bring up on the call. You know, you can say, “Hey, you know, we need to make sure we get this in writing, and of course, as, as you know from this agreement, you have 30, 60, 90, whatever the notification period is. So, you know, we’ll work to that, as we wind this down.” Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And I think, you know, there are, we, and we’ve talked about this before too, like our contracts say 90 days, and there are some clients where I’m like, “I don’t need to hold you to that. We’re good.” Like some- Right. Right? And then there are situations- Chip Griffin: How about, how about 90 minutes? How about 90 minutes? Can we, can we just be- 90 seconds? 90 seconds? We can be done now. We’re just, I’m out. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I’m good. Yep. Good. Yep. See ya. Yep. But then there are also situations, you know, we had the Great Recession, we had COVID. There are some situations where you’re just like, you just be, you can be understanding and be like, “Gosh, I’m really, yeah, I’m really sorry to hear business sucks, and we have a 90-day termination clause, but let me, let me waive that for you, and let’s do this instead.” And you’re always seen in good light when you do those things. Yep. And in fact, every time I have done that, either that business has come back or they’ve referred business to us. So you don’t wanna do that in every situation, and you don’t wanna hurt your cash flow, you know, if it’s, if it’s gonna be detrimental. But there are situations where you can be a little more understanding and use, use that kind of language so that they understand that you’re doing them a favor, ’cause you’re, you really are doing them a favor in some cases. Chip Griffin: Well, more to the point, if the client is coming to you and canceling because they’re having financial issues, whether it’s because of a global pandemic or there’s just something specific to their business, you’re probably not gonna get the money anyway. Gini Dietrich: Fair. Chip Griffin: Right? So, so rather than fighting for something that probably isn’t there anyway, why don’t you try to make it as painless as possible and get whatever you can so that you’ve built some goodwill potentially for the future? Because you also have to keep in mind that most of the time we’re not working with the actual owner of the business. Most of the time, even in a mid-sized business, we’re working with someone at least a step or two removed from that level. And so why are we making their life more difficult when it’s not, you know, it may not even be their ability to make a decision, particularly if it’s financially related. So, you know, think about that, and put yourself in their shoes if you were in a position. If you’ve got contractors, think about, you know, you want to react to them the same way you want your contractors to react to you. Gini Dietrich: Right. Yep. Chip Griffin: And, you don’t want your contractors coming at you, right? Yeah, yep. And you wanna try to work something out amicably. You should be doing the same thing upstream from you in the relationship as well. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I just, I think your earlier point about taking some time, and just, you know, it’s, it usually comes as a shock. Even if, even if we’ve read the tea leaves, it still is surprising. It still is stressful. It still has some risk involved. And so just take a beat and use the language of, you know, “Give me a couple of days to put together a transition plan.” And I think that helps you process it all, get the emotion out, and then start to salvage the relationship as best you can so that there is referral business later, or maybe they do come back later, or whatever happens to be. Chip Griffin: Right. I mean, time is your friend on these things in order to, you know, to formulate a better response. And most of the time when we react too quickly, it’s when we end up regretting it somewhere down the road. So- you know, buy yourself the time to avoid that future regret. Gini Dietrich: I will, I will tell you that 100 years ago when I started my agency, the first client I lost, I cried. And the client felt really, really bad, and I was mortified, but I cried. Chip Griffin: Oh, you, you cried when the client told you? Oh, wow. Gini Dietrich: I did. Uh-huh. Okay. So I will say that, you know, you learn and you grow, and you understand that sometimes it’s just not personal. I took it very personally because it was the first time it had ever happened. Like, I’d, I’d never been fired from a job. I’d never like … it was the first time it had ever happened. So I, I did. I’ve matured since then, but there are, you know, there are things that you’re just like, it’s an emotional time. Chip Griffin: Sure. I mean, nobody would ever enjoy that kind of- Gini Dietrich: Yeah Chip Griffin: experience. Mm-mm. Yeah. I, I mean, certainly any time I’ve ever had a contract end, I, I haven’t been like, “Yay!” Gini Dietrich: Right? Chip Griffin: I mean- Gini Dietrich: Woo-hoo! … Chip Griffin: it, it sucks. Yeah. I can’t say that I’ve ever cried when I’ve gotten that news, but may have hung up the phone and had a few choice words for the atmosphere around me or something like that. But, you know, it is what it is. So okay, so, you know, we’re, we’re thinking through the actual communications with the client who has fired us. Sorry, terminated the agreement- Let us go … or shared the decision. Mm, right. Whatever. Yeah. Whatever language you wanna use. I’m, I’m still a fan of firing because that’s kinda what it is. So now we need to think about two things, I think immediately. One is how do we communicate it to our team, whether that’s contractors or employees, and as a corollary to that, how are we going to act as a client for the remainder of the relationship that we have? So not the technical details of working out the trip, but the, you know, how do we continue to service them in that moment? And those two are related because as soon as you tell your team, you know, “Hey, this, this agreement is ending,” they’re probably gonna start mentally checking out of that relationship just as you have. Gini Dietrich: Of course. Yep. Chip Griffin: And I think we need to really fight that urge. Yep. Because, because it, uh, as you say, it is how you exit that people remember you, and a lot of that comes down to if you had, particularly if you have a longer notice period, right? If you’ve got a, you know, say a 60 or 90-day notice period, you can’t just, you know, put pens down unless they, the client is like, “No, we just, we’re, we’re done. We’ll just keep paying you, but we’re not.” Sometimes that does happen- It sure does, yep … where they treat it as sort of severance for the agency. It’s not super common, but it does happen. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: But it needs to be on them to reduce your workload, not on you to say, “Eh, we don’t care anymore.” Gini Dietrich: Right. And I think, you know, if you’re doing things like media relations, it’s ensuring that those, the stories that are in progress or the things that are in progress, the pitches that are in progress, those get transferred over. If you, like we said, if you hold the keys to anything, you have to make sure that those are transferred over. All of the things that you have in progress, understand, you know, to your point, that it may be like they just want you to stop work immediately and hand everything over, or they may want you to continue, finish, they want you to finish things that are in progress. But understand what that is so that you can ensure that. And one of the things I always say to my team, and I repeat that, repeat what I said at the beginning, which is, you know, you’re always remembered how, by how you left. It is our job to transition smoothly and make sure that nothing falls through the cracks. Yep. And I understand that you’re checked out. I’m checked out. I’m surprised by this. It’s not, you know, this, this is gonna be a little bit of a painful process, but we have to be professional, and we have to ensure that we’re transitioning cleanly. Chip Griffin: Yeah, and please do not fight them. It’s, I mean, ’cause that’s even worse than-you know, we, we just kinda give up. But I’ve seen many agencies where they basically fight clients on the way out the door, and the client will say, “Can I have this? Can I have the latest draft of this even though it’s not finished?” And they’ll be like, “Well, no, because, you know, we’re not gonna be working with you anymore, and so, you know, you don’t get the draft. You only get the final version.” No. Gini Dietrich: Absolutely not. No. No. Yeah. Chip Griffin: If you’re doing media relations and they wanna know who you’ve reached out to about a press release- Yes … just tell them. Gini Dietrich: Just tell them, yes. Chip Griffin: Do not fight them on this. I agree. I, I, for the life of me, I do not understand- Gini Dietrich: Yep. I totally agree with that Chip Griffin: the, the way, particularly the PR agencies seem to be particularly guilty of this in my view, where they just will not share with the client anything that they’re doing in terms of detail around outreach or those kinds of things because, well, then they can do it on their own. Okay, fine. Let them, right? They’ll figure out it’s not that easy. It’s not just having the spreadsheet of what contacts you’ve made. Yeah. I’m not saying you need to give them your whole database with all of your personal notations about, you know, stuff that you do across other clients. But if it’s pitch work that you’ve done for this client, give them the information. Come on, man. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, yeah. I mean, especially if it’s in progress and there’s, like- Yes … something’s happening, like, there’s no reason on Earth not to give them that information. Chip Griffin: No, no reason. And, look, if all you’re good for is, is a spreadsheet, it probably wasn’t worth hiring you anyway. Yeah. So, you know, you, you’ve got to be realistic about these kinds of things. But as you’re communicating with your team, you want them to understand that, that they need to have this same mentality of being helpful and making sure they finish strong. I think the other thing is to, to make sure that, that you’re communicating clearly with your contractors and employees about what this means. Hopefully, what it means is you’ve got a strong pipeline, and so, you know, it’s a bump in the road, but it’s not a big deal. But if it is a big deal, don’t try to hide that fact, right? I mean, you don’t have to like terrify them. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: But, but if it does, if you’ve got a contractor and it’s probably gonna mean that you’re gonna have to cut them altogether or partially, if you think it’s, you know, a giant client and it might lead to layoffs, be honest with people sooner rather than later. Because the more you put this off, the harder it is to deal with. Yeah. And again, it’s a balancing act, ’cause you can’t, you can’t just be, you know, like panicking them, which is again another argument for taking a deep breath, absorbing the information, figuring out your plan. You don’t have to hang up the phone and then immediately call up all your team and say, “Oh my God, we just lost Acme Pharmaceuticals,” right? I mean, that doesn’t help anybody. Take the time, think it through, think through the questions you’re likely to get so that you can communicate confidently, but also honestly. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I would say If you have access to an HR team or person, if you have access to a legal team or an attorney, reach out to them as well because as you’re crafting this plan because they’re gonna have a different… They’re gonna look at it through a different lens. They’re gonna have a different perspective, especially if you have a team, getting HR involved in that to say, “Okay, here’s scenarios A, B, and C” to help you plan so that when an employee asks, you have a response, and it’s not just shot from the hip a little bit. Right. And I, I know I’ve told this story before, but during the Great Recession, you know, we had 95% of our clients left between Christmas and New Year’s of 2008, 2009, and I had to go back to the office and lay everybody off. And the biggest mistake I made, I made two big mistakes in that. One is that everybody was talking about the economy and the Great Recession and all this stuff for a year, but I didn’t pay any attention. I didn’t… Like, I wouldn’t, I wasn’t mature enough. I wasn’t experienced enough, and so I just kind of put my blinders on and was like, “Everything’s great. We’re growing.” You know? Yeah. And so I didn’t plan. And the second thing I did, mistake I made is I didn’t let the team know ahead of time, and I didn’t think I could. And I’ll never forget this as long as I live. One of my employees came up to me after I let everybody know, and she said, “I wish you had told us because I would’ve been happy to go part-time.” And I was like, ohhh. Chip Griffin: Right. Gini Dietrich: You know? Like, yeah. Chip Griffin: Yeah. Gini Dietrich: So be honest and open because I think they will come with solutions too that you may not have thought of or that you may have assumed they’re not willing to do when they are. Chip Griffin: Right. Absolutely. So then I think that takes us to that, that final piece, as we’re wrapping up here, and, and that is to take lessons away from it. Because there’s something to be learned from the end of every relationship, whether it’s because it was a project and it just, it naturally ran its course, or because you were on a retainer and they decided to end it or what have you. Yep. There are always lessons to be learned, and I think it’s, it’s really helpful to sit down with your team, not just at the end, but at key milestone points as well and say, “Okay, you know, what, what have we learned from this? What could we have done differently? What should we do differently, not just with this client but with others in the future?” And make sure that you treat as much of what you’re doing as a learning experience as possible because that’s how you really grow- both individually and as a business. If you just keep doing the same old, same old, you might do okay, but you’re not gonna do as well as you could if you’re actually studying what you’ve done in the past. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I mean, that’s the example I just gave is a great example of that. Yeah. Now I know. Chip Griffin: Yeah. Gini Dietrich: That’s a great lesson. Chip Griffin: It’s why, again, I watch all of these episodes back so that I can sit there and say, “Okay, you know, what would I do differently next time?” Maybe I’ll lower the microphone a little bit, raise my voice a little bit, talk a little bit less so that we can actually hear from Gini, and I don’t just monopolize all the time. You don’t monopolize the time. And have Jen tell me what percentage of time I’ve spoken versus… I do talk a lot. I understand that. But it’s, it’s something I consciously work on every podcast that I’m on because I know that I have a tendency to talk a lot. Gini Dietrich: Okay. I don’t think you monopolize the time here. No. Chip Griffin: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Gini Dietrich: You’re welcome. Chip Griffin: So, I guess we’re not gonna monopolize any more of your time as a listener, so we will wrap up today’s episode, but hopefully we’ve given you a few things to think about the next time that you get that dreaded call or email from a client who is not firing you, but ending the relationship in whatever fashion we wanna call it, so. Gini Dietrich: It’s not always being fired. Chip Griffin: Okay. Gini Dietrich: Fired, fired means that you did a bad job. Chip Griffin: Okay. On that note, I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And it depends.

May 21, 202622 min

What the Agency AI Survey results mean for PR and marketing firms

The SAGA Agency AI Survey results are in, and small agency owners are feeling great about AI. Maybe too great. In this episode, Chip and Gini dig into the numbers and find the gap between how owners think they’re using AI and the reality of what’s happening inside their businesses. The headline figures look impressive: 89% of respondents report regular or widespread AI use, 74% use it daily, and 88% say they’ve seen productivity gains. But Chip isn’t buying it. He questions whether the sample skews toward early adopters, or more likely, whether agency owners simply don’t have a clear enough picture of what “good” AI use looks like elsewhere. When 53% say they’re ahead of their peers but only 13% say they’re behind, the math doesn’t work. As Gini puts it, they’re probably grading themselves on usage habits, not operational depth. Next, Chip and Gini look at what agencies are actually doing with AI. Most activity falls squarely into what Chip calls “generative AI 101” — drafting emails, writing social posts, generating blog content. The more interesting stuff is largely absent. AI-assisted design work barely registers. Only 74% are even using AI to revise or edit content, a number both hosts find inexplicable given how easy and useful that is. Gini’s own example of running an article through an AP style agent before sending it to a notoriously precise editor at PR Daily illustrates exactly the kind of practical, low-friction habit that should be universal by now. Another data point they discuss is the disconnect between productivity gains and revenue. Agencies report getting faster, but their top-line numbers are flat or down. Gini’s read is that AI efficiency is getting absorbed into existing scope rather than converted into new value. Agencies are over-servicing clients at the same fees, filling freed time with more of the same work instead of building something new. On the pricing side, almost no one reported clients pushing for discounts tied to AI use. Instead of a reduction in cost, the larger enterprise clients are asking about data governance, usage policies, and procurement compliance. Chip advises unless your agency has the infrastructure to manage those requirements consistently, that’s a market best left to someone else. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “There’s nothing in this data that suggests that there is widespread innovative use of it, widespread use of it for internal operations or for business development or any of those things.” Gini Dietrich: “AI is being absorbed into the existing scope. There’s silent commoditization so that clients are getting more for the same fees.” Chip Griffin: “Now is the time to experiment and figure out what works and what doesn’t when the cost of failure is much lower.” Gini Dietrich: “I don’t believe that AI is going to replace us. I believe that people who know how to use AI effectively are what’s going to replace you.” Resources Survey shows most owner-led agencies think they’re ahead on AI. Most aren’t. Related How agency owners can use AI as an always-on thought partner How AI impacts PR agencies and solos (featuring Karen Swim and Michelle Kane) Focus on AI value, not cost View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. 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, as, as we sit here on a Monday and record this, I am truly optimistic. I have published my planned photo schedule for the evenings this week, and despite the fact that- … it says it’s gonna rain Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, I still have games on that calendar, and I am optimistic that we will actually get those games in even though they don’t generally play baseball and softball in the rain. Gini Dietrich: I don’t know if that’s optimistic or masochistic. Chip Griffin: Oh. No, masochistic would be they were lacrosse games and I know they’re gonna be played in the rain, and I’m still looking forward to getting wet while I take the photos. Gini Dietrich: And you’re still looking forward to it. Chip Griffin: No, I suspect if the forecast is what it is, I think it is highly unlikely that any of those games will be played. Gini Dietrich: Well, good, then you can be optimistic that you don’t have to go and shoot photos. Chip Griffin: There you go. Yeah. I can be optimistic to have some, some evenings to catch up on, on real work instead of- Gini Dietrich: That’s right. That’s right … Chip Griffin: photography. But- That’s right … optimism is kind of the theme of the day here though, because we have recently completed the SAGA Agency AI Survey, and it, it turns out that agency owners, to nobody’s surprise, are eternally optimistic, and they are astoundingly optimistic about AI, and how they’re using it and what it means for their businesses. Gini Dietrich: Yes, indeed. So I looked at the results, and that is my takeaway as well, is that they’re extremely optimistic. 89% have regular or widespread use, 74% use it every day, 89% expect AI use to grow over the next 12 months. And so, yes, it is very optimistic. 88% report productivity gains, and 79% report quality gains. Chip Griffin: It is amazing how much work AI is doing for agencies today. It is, it is frankly unbelievable, and I mean that literally. Gini Dietrich: Literally, yes. Chip Griffin: I do not believe it. Yeah. I have either stumbled across a sample of the earliest adopters who are most interested in AI and have really taken it the furthest, or more likely, people don’t really understand what’s out there and so therefore think they are further ahead than they are. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I think it’s… Well, I mean, I will, I will say that the head of, the ahead of peers piece of it, so the data said that 53% believe that they’re somewhat or further ahead than their peers, and only 13% think they’re behind. That’s mathematically impossible. And so I think my take on it, and I’d love your take as well, is that they’re grading themselves on their usage and not on the operational depth of it. So for instance, they’re using ChatGPT every day as a habit, but they’re not operationalizing AI as a business model, and I think that 53% are confusing the two. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I, I think it’s probably a multitude of factors. I think part of it is that agency owners visualize a very low bar for their peers when it comes to AI. Gini Dietrich: Okay. Chip Griffin: And I, I think part of that is that people aren’t hearing a lot of examples of how agency, other agencies are using- Gini Dietrich: Sure … Chip Griffin: AI. They’re not as active as some of us may be in going out and seeing how other industries, similar industries are using AI and really testing the limits and understanding what’s possible. So I think part of it is that they don’t have an appropriate baseline to know whether they are indeed ahead or not because they’ve set the bar so low in their own minds. And I think that part of it is, you know, this point that if they’re just using it at all, they think that puts them ahead. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think that that’s what’s going on. I think that they’re, that they’re saying, “Well yeah, I use it every day.” And that’s, and that’s what makes them think that they’re ahead. Chip Griffin: Right. But I, I think as we dig in deeper and we look at how they’re actually using it, it’s pretty obvious that, that most of the usage by these owners is what I would call generative AI 101. Draft me an email. Yep. Help me create a blog post or a social post. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: It is– There’s nothing in this data that suggests that there is widespread innovative use of it, widespread use of it for internal operations or for business development or any of those things. It really appears to be sort of the basics, sort of the things that people were talking about a year or two ago in terms of generative AI, and that seems to be where most of the activity and most of the stated value is. But even in those areas, there’s a good swath of agencies that aren’t even doing that. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: I think the, if I recall correctly, the number was only like 74% are using AI to help revise or edit content. It’s mind-boggling to me that that’s not almost 100%. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I agree. Yes. Chip Griffin: Because it’s the easiest way to improve the quality of your content. Gini Dietrich: Yes, it is. Yes. Chip Griffin: So I just, I can’t even imagine not just saying, “Hey, take a quick look at this.” I mean, even if it’s just to proof it. Just take a look through- Right … make, make sure I haven’t- Right … missed anything obvious here, and you know. Right. Because anytime I run it through, it tends to find something. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: So why aren’t you at least doing that? Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I mean, it’s funny you say that because we just submitted an article to PR Daily, and I know that Allison Carter is a huge, huge, huge, huge stickler for AP style. So I have an AP style agent, and I ran it through there, and it, I think it got five or six different things that I had missed. I was like, “Thank heaven.” Like, ’cause she, she will send it back. She’ll be like, “Nope.” I mean, huge stickler. So, and like, yes, to your point, like you should be using it for that, 100%. Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, that’s just– to, to me that’s a very basic use, but there are so many great things that you can do with it. I mean, the, the tiny percentage of people that are using it for anything design related- Gini Dietrich: Right. Yeah … was- It was almost 0%. Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was shocking to me- It was shocking, yep … Chip Griffin: that such a small percentage seem to be using it for that, at all. I mean, we didn’t say you’re using it for every image or every video or those kinds of… But if you’re not even experimenting with it- Gini Dietrich: Yeah … Chip Griffin: you’re missing a real opportunity because there’s a lot that you can do with it. Now, I don’t– you know, one of the things that, that I don’t know is, you know, what percentage of these people may not do this because they have the ethical concern, right? And I’ve, I’ve been at a few events recently and watched a few talks online where, you know, there, there’s, there is an, what I consider an unnatural resistance to AI because of use of electricity or- Gini Dietrich: Yeah Chip Griffin: or because of- Data centers and, yeah … concerns over copyright and that kind of stuff. And so it causes people to swear off the platforms and tools altogether, rather than saying, “Let’s try to find solutions to all of these things.” And l- and let’s face it, there are solutions being sought for all of it, whether it’s the electricity angle, whether it’s the copyright angle. There’s a lot of work being done in that area, and for individuals to just say, “No, I’m just, I’m not even gonna do this,” is extraordinarily shortsighted in my view. Gini Dietrich: Oh, 100%, yeah. I, I mean, I think we’ve both talked about this ad nauseam, that you should… I don’t believe that AI is going to replace us. I believe that people who know how to use AI effectively are, is what’s gonna replace you. So if you’re putting your head in the sand, you are, you will be replaced for sure. Chip Griffin: Yeah, absolutely. I, I think the other place that was interesting, and you flagged this in, in your pre-show notes, is that they’re reporting largely productivity gains, and yet revenue seems to be flat or declining. Doesn’t really match up. Gini Dietrich: Nope. Again, doesn’t work. AI’s making everyone faster at work, but it’s not growing the business. That is not what we’re trying to do. So what it tells us, right, is that AI is being absorbed into the existing scope There’s silent commoditization so that clients are getting more for the same less, for, for the same fees, so we’re, we’re over-servicing. We’re filling our freed hours with admin, more client servicing or more meetings, and more billable work on undifferentiated services rather than building anything scalable. So that’s what I think is happening, is all of the work, all of the AI that… All the work that AI is doing is being absorbed into existing services, into existing fees, and we’re over-servicing rather than building new product lines or new service lines. Chip Griffin: Yeah, and there are so many opportunities for agencies to truly be innovative and to find these new things that it seems to me that, that any agency owner should be thinking about that and not so much just, you know, “How can we incrementally improve productivity? How can we make sure that we’re claiming we’re ahead of the rest of the pack?” How can you actually make a difference for your business for the long term? Because there is, there is huge runway to be had here, and now is the time to be experimenting when costs are much more reasonable than they are likely to be in the not-too-distant future. I can’t put a particular timeline on it- Yep but it is, is blatantly obvious that the cost of all of these tools is going to go up. Gini Dietrich: Yep … Chip Griffin: as it has with everything else. I mean, I remember the early days of the land grab of Google Ads, and I built an entire business on the back of really cheap Google ads in the early days. And those same ads that I got for pennies back twenty-five now are twenty dollars or more per click for the exact same search terms. And so the, these costs are going to increase. Now is the time to experiment and figure out what works and what doesn’t when the cost of failure is much lower. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I mean, I think you’re right. Like, the cost of failure is lower. The risk to failure is lower. Like, it’s… And it’s actually fun. You know, I did an, a webinar for IABC last week, and I showed them the PESO Model diagnostic that we just launched, and people were like, “How did you do this?” And I’m like, “I vibe coded it.” Like, I did it. Right. I was like, “Here’s what I want. Here’s what I want it to do,” and it took two or three iterations for me to get it exactly right, and there will be a version two because now that I’m seeing people take it, I’m like, “Oh, okay, we should change that question or move this around.” Like, right? But I launched a version one out there just to see, and we’re getting data from it. I get all of the data, which is fantastic. I can see where people sit in the PESO Model maturity ladder. You don’t have to have a copyright like I have with the PESO Model. You can absolutely do… Like, we just vibe coded an ROI calculator for our lead nurturing program for, you know, prospects. Here’s an ROI calculator. Here’s the four things that we hear prospects say they have challenges with. Here’s how much we think it… Like, and you can move the numbers around, and you can toggle things. We vibe coded that. Right. We didn’t have to hire a developer for it. We did it internally, and it was super fun to work on as a team. So there’s so many things that you can do. Chip Griffin: That really there’s no shortage, and there are plenty of people out there who are sharing different ideas- Yes … and so the inspiration that you can take- Gini Dietrich: Yes. Yes … Chip Griffin: from others is immense. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Chip Griffin: But I, but I do worry that, you know, that this survey sort of reinforces what you and I have talked about which is that, that there’s not enough awareness and incentive apparently amongst agency owners to be pursuing these paths, and it does seem to be much more of a complacent attitude towards the use of AI in their businesses. I will say, it, I mean, at least it is… I was encouraged by the fact that agencies do not seem to be seeing clients calling up and saying, “Hey, we wanna cut your fee.” So that’s- Yep. Yeah, that’s good. Yep … that’s, that’s been a widespread fear- Yep … but it was- Yep … the, the data was quite clear that that is not something that is happening at least at the moment. We obviously don’t know whether clients are just deciding to do things on their own internally, and so, you know, maybe agencies are losing renewals or pitches to internal use of AI. Didn’t ask that question in particular. Maybe for a follow-up on somewhere down the road, that would be a good follow-up question. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. But honestly, I was a little surprised that, that there didn’t seem to be any direct pricing pressure, at least from AI from clients. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I will, I mean, focus group of one, I will agree with that. One of the things that we are seeing is not pricing pressure, but we work with big companies, and going through procurement, which is always fun, the questions that we’re getting are, “How are you using AI? What environments do you use? How are you protecting our data? You know, how will you use this specific data?” So they, they ask those really specific questions, and we have to outline exactly what we’re going to do, and we can’t stray from that. So if something comes along six months from now that will improve it or make it better, we have to go back and revise sort of the AI policy that we’ve created with them with procurement. But that’s what we’re seeing so that it’s less about you should charge us less and more about we wanna know exactly what you’re doing with our information so that we can protect it, and we can firewall it and do all of the things that we need to do to make sure that it stays safe. Chip Griffin: Yeah, and the largest enterprise clients are always more worried about that stuff than anybody else. Of course. And so if- Of course … you know, as, as we’ve talked about before, if that’s a market you’re gonna play in, then you need to understand the impact not just on AI but other things. You need to price accordingly for that headache. And more importantly to your point about, you know, making sure that you don’t make a change six months from now that, that it violates the agreement, that, you know, it’s, it’s important that you have the infrastructure in place to manage those kinds of accounts. Which is, you know, these are all just more reasons why I would encourage most smaller agencies to steer clear of these because while they, they sound like great opportunities- … they come with a whole lot of extra headaches- Oh, yes … that you’re probably not- Gini Dietrich: Yes … Chip Griffin: thinking about. And if you’ve never had to experience it directly yourself, you have a, a real good chance of stepping in something somewhere along the way because you, you didn’t set up and you didn’t make sure that everything you do gets vetted by somebody who is familiar with the contract terms. Yeah. Which in a small agency is probably you, the owner, and do you- Yeah … really wanna be- Yep … filtering all of that kind of stuff? Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah. Chip Griffin: Go ahead. Gini Dietrich: Oh, I was just gonna say, there’s also the, which we started to talk about, but 99, 98% are using AI in client work, 13% put it in contracts, 15% charge for it, 61% have no plans to charge, and you mentioned that 88% haven’t had a client ask for a discount. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I guess this is an area where I had less concern, honestly, because, I think that I, I’m not sure I would agree that agencies should be charging for AI explicitly. I think it should be creating new value that you can charge for. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Yes. Chip Griffin: But I, you know, one of the reasons why I put that question in there was because I was actually a little concerned that agencies might be explicitly trying to charge- Gini Dietrich: Interesting Chip Griffin: for some of these AI tools, and I, and I think that you shouldn’t because to me that’s like, you know, charging specifically for a freelancer or something like that. You, you need to be in a position where you’re focused on what are you producing in terms of deliverables, results, et cetera, for the client, and not the mechanics of how you get there. Because if you get into the, the space where you’re charging for the tools or for the use of AI, it takes away some of your flexibility in the future- Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm … Chip Griffin: to either earn a greater profit or shift how you’re just doing things operationally or any of those kinds of things. So I’m actually not a fan of calling it out specifically, but it should create additional value for you- Yeah that you can charge for that. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Chip Griffin: I, I don’t- my guess is that people looked at it as a more direct are you charging for AI itself, and- Yeah … and so I was actually happy that there wasn’t a lot of that. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I would agree with that. You know, I think if you think about using AI to create new service lines, to create new opportunities- And really, I’m, I’m sure that every single person listening to this has a list of things they’ve always wanted to do. Our ROI calculator’s a great example of that. The PESO model diagnostic is another one. Like, I have probably four pages in my notebook of things that I would love to try at some point. This makes it accessible. You can do it yourself. You don’t have to wait until you can hire a developer. You don’t have to wait if you wanna build an app. You don’t have to wait until you can afford to hire an app developer. You can actually do this on your own. Will it be perfect? Will it be, you know, as great as, as if you hired a developer? No. But taking it out there as a beta test or a version one, absolutely you can do that, and test it out and see if it works, see if your idea has legs and has merit. And then use that to generate some income that then eventually you would hire a professional to help you repackage it and make it beautiful. Chip Griffin: Yeah, because I mean, you know, a lot of people are vibe coding apps and that kind of thing, and, and it is, it’s great that it gets you there, and it’s great that it, it’s causing you to expand your horizons. I think people do need to keep in mind that maintaining these applications over time- Yeah … requires a little bit more effort than- Yeah … than I think some people realize. Yeah … I’ve seen plenty of people vibe code these apps and be like, “Oh, cool. We’re all done.” Well, yeah, but if you’re gonna have a lot of users on it over time, there are gonna be hiccups. People are gonna do things that, that you don’t imagine. So if it’s something simple- Gini Dietrich: And I saw on Reddit yesterday that somebody had vibe coded an app and, and took it to, like, 40 people to beta test it, and it worked so well that it was costing him a significant amount of money- Yeah … to keep it going and he was like, “I don’t know what to do.” So there are those pieces of it, too, but I think just experimenting with some of your ideas, AI can help you do that for sure. Chip Griffin: Yeah, and if you can get to the proof of concept stage, that at least opens the door- Yeah … for you to, to begin to think through a rational business model for it. But you know, you, if you don’t even experiment, then you’re never gonna have that opportunity. And that brings us to the last point that I wanted to raise from the survey, which is this, the disconnect between how owners perceive their own capabilities with AI and their team’s capabilities- Mm-hmm … with AI. Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Chip Griffin: And owners, their optimism, extends very much to themselves, and they see them as at the – themselves as at the leading edge of AI, with their teams lagging behind. Not incompetent or inept or anything like that, but it was, I think it was 84% of owners rated themselves as moderately or very knowledgeable about AI, and 61% of their team as the same. So obviously a meaningful difference between those two. I think that, that 84% is extraordinarily generous scoring for the owners in terms of their knowledge of AI because I have conversations with a lot of owners. I would describe very, very few as very knowledgeable- And a small percentage as moderately knowledgeable. I think slightly knowledgeable is where I would put more- Gini Dietrich: Yes, I would agree with that … Chip Griffin: at least if we’re not grading on a curve. If we’re, if we’re grading on, you know, comparison to other similar professionals, I, I just don’t see small agencies as a place where AI today, at least, is thriving. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I totally agree with that, and like you, I mean, I’m not so much in the coaching business anymore, but I have lots and lots and lots of friends who run agencies, and same thing. Like, it’s… I would say it’s slightly knowledgeable. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, but I do agree that probably many of their teams lag behind them because the teams don’t have the time. The owner isn’t making the investment in them in terms of time- Yep … or products or services. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: And so if you want to see that change in your agency, you know, you do need to drive that. You do need to encourage your team to be using more of these things. I mean, I… One of the numbers that did concern me was, I think half of the owners said that one of their biggest concerns with AI was their team’s over-reliance on AI. I am not seeing any evidence anywhere of over-reliance on AI by any agency employee. Gini Dietrich: Oh, I do. Chip Griffin: Over-reliance? Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm. Chip Griffin: Okay. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: Do tell. Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm. My own team. Sometimes I’m like, you guys- Chip Griffin: And I suppose part of this is how you define over-reliance. Gini Dietrich: Let’s not use AI for everything. You gotta actually use your brain. Chip Griffin: Fair enough. Mm-hmm. I guess, yeah, I, I guess to me, in the use cases that I see, with most agencies, it’s not relying on the AI enough and less so over-reliance, but I’m sure there are cases. Gini Dietrich: It is over-reliance in my organization for sure. Chip Griffin: Okay. That is good to know. So in any case, lots of room for agencies to continue to improve on AI, but happy that, that there is this optimism. I, I much prefer this to… I, you know, I when I put this survey out, I wasn’t sure if it was gonna be just all fear and doom and gloom and oh my God, you know- Yeah, sure … what is AI gonna do to my business? Yeah. ‘Cause you hear a lot of that- Mm-hmm … you know, when you’re talking with- Mm-hmm … agency owners. But for the most part, it doesn’t seem to be the case. It, it does… I think there are certainly pockets of over-optimism to a degree that, that needs to be addressed, and there needs to be more experimentation, more innovation, more investment and all of those things if agencies are really going to thrive with AI in the future. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I totally agree. Chip Griffin: So with that, that will wrap up this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And it depends.

May 14, 202616 min

How agency owners can use AI as an always-on thought partner

Most agency owners know AI can write a first draft or clean up copy. Far fewer have figured out how to use it as the strategic sounding board they’ve always needed. In this episode, Chip and Gini explore how to use AI tools as a thought partner, not just a content machine. Gini’s example is a client who asked her to map what a PESO model maturity ladder would look like for an organization. She described the situation and constraints to Chat GPT, and keep pushing the conversation forward. Six weeks of iterative back-and-forth surfaced ideas she wouldn’t have reached on her own, including finding the gaps when the AI was willing to poke holes in her thinking. Chip points out that for owner-led agencies, that 8pm Friday idea you don’t want to dump on your team now has somewhere to go. The tool doesn’t care what time it is, and it has no stake in whether your idea succeeds or embarrasses you. Both hosts advise to direct the AI to ask you questions rather than just answer them. It takes some coaching to get a tool that genuinely engages rather than validates everything you propose, but once you’re there, you start getting real value. One warning they have is that these tools are not always consistent. The same AI that helped you build a strategy three weeks ago might question it today with equally compelling reasoning. Stay in the driver’s seat, and treat AI-generated recommendations as input, not conclusions. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “You now have this always-on thought partner that, when that idea comes to you when you’re watching some Law & Order rerun or whatever, you can ask, ‘Hey, I just had this idea and what do you think of it?'” Gini Dietrich: “AI has really helped me just kind of think through some things that I hadn’t considered, some things I probably wouldn’t have considered, and it also helped poke some holes.” Chip Griffin: “The gap analysis is something that the AI tools do exceptionally well. And part of it is just making yourself vulnerable to it and it’s not judging you, because it doesn’t care.” Gini Dietrich: “The AI knows it can’t get fired. So it doesn’t have the same experience as one of your employees.” View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. 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 think we need to talk to the robots today. Gini Dietrich: Yes, I love talking to the robots. Let’s do that. Chip Griffin: It’s a robot future, and we just, we need to, we need to figure out, I don’t know, some new ideas or something like that. Maybe we should have a conversation with our friendly neighborhood robot. Gini Dietrich: I like it. Let’s do that. You- Chip Griffin: Actually, that would be a, that would be a good episode at some point to actually- Gini Dietrich: It would be a, yeah … Chip Griffin: to, you know, we could have our first guest. We could have, like, Claude as our first guest on the show. Gini Dietrich: I love it. We should do that. That’s a good idea. Chip Griffin: And, and, and see how that goes. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, let’s. Chip Griffin: I don’t know. Maybe that’s not a good idea. Who knows? Anyway, we are going to talk about AI today, ’cause we haven’t talked about AI at all lately. Nope. And we won’t be talking about it soon when we have the Saga AI survey results to talk about, hopefully on the next episode. But we thought we would talk today about AI in more practical terms because we’ve done a lot of talking about AI in, in sort of high-level strategic ways and how important it is to agencies and how we need to be thinking about it and integrating it and thinking about the costs of it and all of that kind of stuff. But I think it’s helpful for us to have some conversations with and for our listeners about some practical uses of AI that, that we’ve used, that we’ve come across, that we use ourselves- Yep … in order to, to get the maximum value out of this new technology. And, a good place to start is how do you use whatever platform of choice you have, or maybe multiple platforms of choice, to help you as a thought partner to not just, you know, write things and spew stuff out more quickly or something like that, but really to hone ideas, to get advice, to have someone to bounce things off of. And I mean someone in quotes here because, yes, I know it’s not human, okay? So don’t- … don’t send me notes about how, “You know these things aren’t real.” I know that, okay? Gini Dietrich: I do know that. I got it. Yes. I am aware. Chip Griffin: So- Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s such a… First of all, it’s a good topic, and I think it’s something that’s fun for the two of us to talk about because I think we’re both, like, full-on in. For me, when I realized it could be a thought partner for me, it was two and a half years ago, and a client came to me, and they came to me specifically, and they said, “We would really like to understand what the PESO model maturity ladder looks like, especially inside an organization like ours.” And, at the time, I had an idea of what the maturity model looked like just generally, right? But being able to apply it to a really specific situation and a really specific organization and really specific brands, I hadn’t thought through yet. And of course, I can’t put the client’s information in there, right? But I can think about, I could… I, at the time I was like, “Okay, so how do I start to think about this with the constraints that I know they have and sort of how they run PESO now, which isn’t in a true operating system, but more sort of pick and choose tactics.” So I went into, at the time, ChatGPT, and I think Claude does a better work of this now, but I went into ChatGPT and I started asking questions. “So if you had to create… First of all, if you had to create a PESO model maturity ladder based on these seven sort of levels that I had already thought through, how would you do that?” And we just went back and forth, and we asked each other questions. And it would, it, it came up with some things where I was like, “Huh, hadn’t considered that.” So then I would sort of put those over to the side and we would continue. And then I said, “Okay, great. Now here are some some constraints, right? We know, we know it has these, the organization has these constraints. We know that it takes, you know, six, six to eight months to be able to do anything, like all of this stuff. How would you change it based on that?” And so we went back and forth on that. Now, granted, it took probably six weeks for me to get something usable to be able to take to the client, but I wouldn’t have been able to come up with that on my own. And I don’t think that even conversations with my team, we would’ve been able to come up with the, all of that on our own. And so it really helped me just kind of think through some things that I hadn’t considered, some things I probably wouldn’t have considered, and it also helped poke some holes. So then I said, “Okay, great. Here’s what I’m thinking. Poke holes in it.” And it was like, “This doesn’t work, this doesn’t work, this doesn’t work.” And so it just helps you… It was at that point, which I think was two and a half years ago, it was, it’ll be three years in August, really think it, think through sort of beginning to end that I wouldn’t have been able to do on my own. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a great discussion of your evolution on that, and in my case, I was, I was later to the AI party in terms of In-depth use of it. Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm Chip Griffin: I, I was very early on to kick the tires, which may have been to my detriment, right? Because the very early incarnations of a lot of these tools was not the best. Gini Dietrich: Not good. Chip Griffin: And, so I, you know, I certainly was, you know, spending a fair bit of time using it for, you know, the basics. You know, some basic writing and editing, some basic image creation. Certainly, you know, transcription, speech-to-text, those kinds of things. But a lot of that, but not really as much in the in-depth strategic areas- Gini Dietrich: Sure, sure … Chip Griffin: until probably a little over a year ago when I started to realize that there had been this shift and that it, it was, at least to me, a lot more usable. And, really just, you know, opening my mind up to what you could actually do with the tools beyond the simple use cases. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: And I think the more time you spend with it, the more you realize just how helpful it can be. And, and particularly in, you know, small owner-led agencies, the… You know, we’ve all sat there and we’ve had an idea at, you know, 8 o’clock on a Friday night or over the weekend, and we’re like, “God, we, I wish we could…You know, I can’t bother the team with this right now though.” Yep, yep. “But I kinda, I kinda wanna continue thinking this through.” Yep. And so you now have this- Yep … you know- Thought partner … always on thought partner- Yep … that, you know, when that idea comes to you, when you’re watching some Law & Order rerun or whatever, you’re like, “Hey, you know, I just had this idea and, you know, what do you think of it?” And, it feels weird the first few times you do it, this, to sit there and say to, you know, the chatbot, “Hey, what, what do you think of this idea?” And, but you learn so much from it because it is, it is able to ask questions, to poke holes, to find gaps. And so if you really treat it as, I don’t wanna say an equal because it’s not quite an equal with you. I mean, you still are the decision maker and you need to remember that you’re always retaining that. But someone who can hold their own in a conversation with you. Yep. Once you accept that, you can get so much from these tools. And it’s not like, you know, two years ago, three years ago when it said, you know, everything is, “Oh, we love you, Chip. This is… You’re brilliant.” I mean, there’s still, there’s still a little bit too much of that for my taste in there, although I’ve coached it into, you know, all of the tools have instructions for me to, you know, knock that off as much as possible. You know, you don’t want it to be fully contrarian where it just disagrees with everything, ’cause you can easily turn your chatbot into basically it just will say the opposite if you, if you go too hard with your instructions to, to not say nice things. But you want to get that, to that point where you’re able to just bounce these things around and say, “Okay, here’s my plan. What am I missing?” And that gap analysis is something that the AI tools do exceptionally well. And part of it is just, you know, making yourself vulnerable to it and allowing you… I mean, and you have to remember that, I mean, that is the best thing about these tools. It’s not human. It’s not judging you ’cause it doesn’t care. Right. It does not care. You know, this is not like having a conversation with one of your team members and they just sit there and they’re like, “Oh, no. Oh, Chip just really doesn’t get it. Why is he, why is he asking me this question?” Because the tools, they really don’t care. And so it is a great place to make yourself more vulnerable and throw some things out there and see what works or what doesn’t. And, and there’s really no limit to what you can ask of it. You obviously have to judge everything that comes back. Not everything is going to be useful or correct. But then, but push back and then say, “Okay, well, you know, I hear what you’re saying, but here’s why that doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.” And sometimes, in my experience, the tools will say, “Yep, okay, you’ve got a good point there,” or it’ll say, “No, I, you know, here’s why you should, you know, reconsider your point of view on it.” And if you’re not seeing that, then you probably need to adjust the instructions that you’re giving to make sure- Yes … that it is open to having a bit more of a substantive dialogue with you. But once you do that, you really have something here that can help you to navigate client strategy, business strategy. It can help you with how to handle HR issues. It’s not a substitute for legal advice or proper HR consultants and all that kind of stuff at this point, but it can help get you a lot of the way there if you’re willing to turn to it and say, Hey, you know, this should be my first port of call in a lot of cases and not the last resort. You know, the other, the other way that you can use it as a thought partner on some of those things too is say, “Okay, you know, here’s, here’s what I’m thinking about or here’s what I need to solve. Ask me questions.” Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: And, and you know, we all think of this as we’re asking questions of the AI tools to give us the answers, but it’s also very good at asking you questions and- Yes … and drawing things out. Now, it, it does often need to be encouraged to ask questions. Gini Dietrich: It does, yeah. Chip Griffin: The, they are… The, most of the platforms are starting to get better at having the, their tools pause and ask questions for clarification, but that’s not quite as good as actually saying, “Hey, you know, ask me questions about this so that you can, you can help me think this through.” And it will do that for you and then do follow-up questions and that sort of thing if, again, as long as you’re telling it that’s what you want. And that can help as well because, you know, we’re,.. Even with our own teams, a lot of them won’t ask us questions, right? If you’ve got an employee- ’cause they know you sign the paycheck, and we’ve talked about this many times on the show. It’s really hard to get candid – not just candid advice, but candid questions. They’re not gonna push you in the same way- Yep … the tool will. ‘Cause again, the tool doesn’t care. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: It doesn’t care- Yep … if it hurts your feelings. Gini Dietrich: Yep. And it knows it, it can’t get fired. Like – right? So- Right … it doesn’t have the same experience. I mean, it’s not a sentient being, so it’s not it does, just doesn’t care, and it doesn’t judge you. I think that’s the other thing too. So I think there are so many different opportunities here for you to use it as a thought partner. I mean, the way that I have mine all set up is to do those kinds of things, and it’s to say, Okay- Well, wait a sec, I was thinking about it this way, what do you think about that? Or how do you think about this? Or, you know. And again, ask me questions because trying to figure this out. And I put all sorts of things in there, all sorts of things. I’ll say, “There’s something about this document that bothers me, and I can’t quite put my finger on it.” And it’ll say, “It bothers you because this, this, and this.” And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s right.” Or, you know, one of the things I think we’re starting to find is that the design work you can get from the AI is pretty darn good. But you have to be… With a human, you don’t have to be ultra specific about what you’re looking for because they’re creative. But with the AI, you have to be ultra specific about what you’re looking for. So I will say, “Here’s what I’m trying to accomplish. Here’s, here are our brand colors,” blah, blah, blah. “This is the vision. How do I describe that in a creative brief?” And I almost have it write its own creative brief, and then I feed that back to it and say, and make some changes, and then say, “Here’s what I’m trying to do.” And I get far better creative design from it when I do it that way, and it’s created its own creative brief. So I think there are lots of ways that you can use it in interesting ways that you’re probably not considering right now. Chip Griffin: Absolutely. And, and I think, you know, maybe a future episode’s a good time to talk about, you know, the specifics of how you use planning and context and providing information to get better results, because I think that’s, that’s an area where a lot of people haven’t invested enough and don’t invest enough, and it’s really just kinda fire and forget. And, and that tends- Yeah … to be where you get the worst results. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Chip Griffin: And, to your point, if you’re, if you’re sitting there and providing it with the information that it needs, I mean, simple things like what are my brand colors? What’s my brand philosophy? Yep. You know, what, what’s my own personal risk tolerance? I mean, you- Yep … you wanna make sure that you’re stockpiling that kind of information because otherwise you’re not gonna get useful feedback or useful questions from it if it’s assuming that you are one way and you are not. It’s the same as anybody else. If you… I mean, we’ve talked about this before, you really have to sort of start to act like these tools are human- Yep in that you can’t just expect them to run from a standing start and have a good result. Yeah. They really do need good guidance from you. Yes. I think the other thing we do, we do always need to be careful about with these tools is that, that they are, they do somewhat, you know, uh, float with the winds, if you will. And so they are not always consistent- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm … in what they might recommend. And so- Yep … so you do have to accept a little bit of that, that it’s, it’s kind of like having that employee who, you know, one day they’re very cheery and thinks this is the right direction, and the next day they’re kind of like, “Eh, nah.” So, you always need to keep yourself in the driver’s seat when you’re using it as a thought partner. And I know I’ve certainly had situations where, you know, I’ve fed it some things, and it’s come back with a recommended strategy, and then a couple of weeks later I, you know, I ask something about the strategy as if I’ve adopted it, and they say, “Well, I don’t think that’s a good strategy.” Ah. But it was, it was crafted by you. Gini Dietrich: It was your idea. Yes. Chip Griffin: But, so then when you dig into it, you can sit there and say, “Okay, well, I, you know, I see why it said it the first time because it backed it up, and I can see why it’s saying it this time. And so now my job is to reconcile that and decide which one I want to lean into- Yep … more than the other. Yep. I, I mean, you… And, and whenever you’re using it as a thought partner, it’s always a good idea to ask for supporting information for whatever it’s suggesting. Not to… And, usually they’re pretty good. I mean, actually my issue used to be that it provided too much, that particularly ChatGPT just loved to just spit out like a whole research paper for it. Right, right. Like, ” I think that your brand color should be green,” and then it’s like- Right … 200,000 words on why green is the right choice. Yes. I’m like- I don’t- … “Dude, just tell me green.” Yeah, yes. Okay? Like- Yes … if I want that detail- 100% … I’ll ask for it. Yes. So they are certainly more balanced than they used to be. But they will still generally provide backup. But if not, ask why, and that’s when it will start to provide, you know, either citations or facts or at least something around the reasoning of it so that you can then judge, “Okay, that does really make sense to me,” or, “No, that, that doesn’t really fit for what I want because…” Yep. And then always tell it back to it. Like, you can’t just, you can’t just get something back and say, “Oh, I don’t like this,” and then move on, close the chat, and go to another one. You’ve got to have that back and forth- Yeah … so that the tools can learn from what you are thinking and, and what you are feeling from the responses that they’re giving. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I mean, there have been times where it’s late at night, and I’m still going, and finally I’m like, “I can’t…” I will literally say to it, “I’m about to die. My eyes hurt because I’m so tired. I have to go to bed.” It’ll be like, “Okay, good night, Gini. Sleep tight.” Chip Griffin: I can’t claim to be having conversations quite like that with the tools. That’s not quite my style. But to each their own. All right, well, I think with that we probably should say good night to our listeners now, and we will draw this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast to a close. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And it depends.

May 7, 202619 min

Stop making sacrifices your agency doesn’t need you to make

Most agency owners think they’re doing their team a favor when they quietly absorb the painful, tedious, or time-consuming work. They’re likely not. In this episode, Chip Griffin and Gini Dietrich look at the sacrifices owners make on behalf of their teams and why those sacrifices often create more problems than they solve. This isn’t about the occasional tactical sacrifice, it’s about the systemic ones: the conscious decisions to absorb entire categories of work because you’ve decided your team would find them too difficult, too unpleasant, or too much of a burden. Gini admits she’s guilty of it herself, sharing that a new COO sat her down with a list of tasks she’d been handling and told her she shouldn’t be doing any of them. The jobs weren’t glamorous, but they weren’t the owner’s job either. Chip extends this into two areas where owner sacrifice tends to do the most damage: new business development, where owners keep proposals and pitches entirely to themselves thinking they’re protecting team time, and org chart design, where flat structures are usually not a deliberate choice but the result of owners absorbing management responsibilities no one else wanted. Both patterns block team growth and overload the owner at the same time. Gini describes a practice she returns to every quarter, sorting her task list into three buckets — things only she can do, things she enjoys but probably doesn’t need to do, and things she absolutely should not be doing. The third list gets delegated immediately. Chip puts it like this: for everything on your plate, ask yourself why you are the one doing it. If there isn’t a good answer, stop doing it. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “The number of sacrifices that many owners make is extreme and poorly thought out. They solve problems for today, but create problems for the future.” Gini Dietrich: “On a new business front, if you bring team members in, even though you might feel guilty about it not being non-billable work, they have the ability to become engaged with the prospect early on, understand the work that you’re doing, and give a different perspective.” Chip Griffin: “If most people are reporting into the owner, it’s usually because either they’re a control freak or because they feel like they don’t want to burden people with management.” Gini Dietrich: “I sit down with my task list and I split it into three groups. Things that are on my list that only I can do. Things that are on my list that I enjoy doing, but I probably don’t need to do. And things that are on my list that I absolutely should not be doing. The last list needs to be delegated immediately.” Related The one hand rule: you probably have too many direct reports Letting go as an agency owner Preparing for your agency’s group presentations and pitches View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. 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, you know, I think I need to make some sacrifices for this show. I think that, Gini Dietrich: oh, goodie, Chip Griffin: that I need to make my life more painful so that yours is better. Gini Dietrich: Oh, even better. Yes. Okay, great. I have a whole list of things you can do. Chip Griffin: I, I have no doubt. A few of them might even relate to the show, right? Gini Dietrich: Probably not. Like laundry, laundry’s on the list, meal planning’s on the list, all sorts of things. Chip Griffin: Oh, meal planning. Gini Dietrich: Oh, sure. Laundry. Yeah. Chip Griffin: Yeah, that. Good luck with that. In any case, before I dig any kind of a hole for myself here, beyond what I already have, the real topic is the sacrifices that owners make for their businesses for reasons that aren’t always good and don’t make a lot of sense if you’re building an actual business that you want to own. Gini Dietrich: I have no idea what you’re talking about. Chip Griffin: We’ve all look, we’ve all done it. We’ve all done it. But I think we do need to make a mindset shift. It’s so hard and we need to, we need to stop saying things like, I don’t wanna ask my team to do this, so I’m gonna do it myself. Or my team, they would struggle with this, so I’ll just handle it. Or the worst one, and the one that’s most common is, I need to make sure I’m paying my team fairly. I don’t really have enough, so I’m, I’m gonna just, you know, underpay myself. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: The number of sacrifices that many owners make is extreme and poorly thought out. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: They solve problems for today, but create problems for the future. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I will even say like I am super, super guilty of that. Not the money one, I’ve learned that lesson and I pay myself a living wage, but the rest of it I’m very guilty of. And I spend most of my weekends getting caught up on work. And just today, today we’re recording. It’s a Monday. I sat down at my desk and I’m like, I’m already exhausted. Like just brain capacity wise. That’s not good. If I’m starting Monday off like that, it’s not good. So I think it’s, it’s a lesson I continue to have to learn. And sometimes we do podcast episodes so that I can hear myself give advice that I need to take. And this is one of them. Chip Griffin: Do you, do you listen to yourself afterwards? Gini Dietrich: Sometimes. Chip Griffin: I listen to every episode. It’s like a, it’s like a, it’s like a, a ballplayer don’t watching game tapes. Oh, I do. Gini Dietrich: No you don’t. You do? You do not. Do you really? Chip Griffin: I absolutely do. I watch every single episode. Gini Dietrich: For real? Chip Griffin: A hundred percent for real. Gini Dietrich: I did not know you did that. Chip Griffin: I do. Yeah. No, it’s, it’s like, it really is like game tape to me. So I, I always want to try to figure out what I can do, you know, better or different. Plus, honestly, I do love the sound of my own voice. I, I know that that makes me sound like an egomaniac, but I actually, I do actually enjoy it. I find my voice, my own voice soothing. Gini Dietrich: I don’t enjoy that. So. Chip Griffin: Yeah. But anyway, before we really just jump off the rails here, I, I mean, I do think that it is, it is a valuable thing for owners to sit down and look at, you know, what are the sacrifices that you’re making and why are you making it? There are some sacrifices that we all need to make at some point in our business. I’m not saying that you should never make a sacrifice on behalf of your business, but you need to understand why you’re doing it and make sure that it really is a rational decision. And not because you’re, you’re putting off a more difficult conversation or decision that you might need to make, or because you are more worried about other people than yourself. You really do need to be a bit selfish as an owner. You are taking on a lot of risk and stress and all of that. And if you’re not doing it for your own benefit, why? Sure. You can go be miserable somewhere else and probably get paid more to do it. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, two things for me. It’s because I… I am so busy and I spend most of my days in meetings. And so because I spend most of my days in meetings, I like, I use, I have a running log of things that need to get done, and sometimes I don’t get to that running log in time to delegate it to somebody. So it just needs to get done. And that, that for me is the cycle that’s hard for me to break because I’m not, I’m just not gonna say to somebody at six o’clock on a Friday night, Hey, I need this by Monday, I’m just not gonna do that. Sure. I would rather. Right. So for me, the, I have to figure out a different way of working so that I can properly delegate and give people enough time. That’s, that’s the cycle for me. But you know, I work with lot, I have lots of friends who own agencies, I work with agency owners and I see the cycle is less that and more control and thinking that I’m the only one who can do this work, and when in fact that’s not true. Maybe you’re the only one who will do it a certain way, but you have to be able to delegate and you can’t grow a business if you don’t do those things effectively. Chip Griffin: Right. And, and they are, I mean, these are definitely interrelated problems where you either you want the control because you feel like you can do it better, faster or whatever. But then there is also the, the sacrifice piece of it, which is you’re doing it because you… not so much because you think you could do it better than somebody else, but because you don’t want to burden them with that. And in, in your case, you know, where you’re saying, I, I don’t want to give someone something at six o’clock on a Friday that I need for Monday morning. That, yes, that is making a sacrifice. But there are, as you say, there are reasons that, you know, you didn’t get to something soon enough in order to pass it along. So I, I’m really more looking at the the systemic sacrifices that you’re making. Yep. Where you make just a conscious decision that this, this group of tasks, I’m not comfortable asking someone else to do. Not because I can necessarily do it better, but because it would be painful for them to undertake. They would, they would not enjoy it. They would stress out about it. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna relieve them of that burden. That is not really your role. If it’s not work that’s appropriately sitting on your desk as an owner, if it’s, if it’s painful or difficult for someone, you need to figure out why. Figure out if there’s something that can be changed or just figure out if it’s something that has, that they have to just suck it up and do. We all have that at various points. Yes. Nobody loves every aspect of their job. Gini Dietrich: You have to sometimes suck it up. Chip Griffin: And your job is not to make people feel like they’re living at a spa and enjoying every minute of employment. You’re going to have some things that just need to be done. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, for sure. So let’s talk about some examples, like, I’m trying to think of an example that, that would fit in that I wouldn’t want, wanna ask somebody else to do. Chip Griffin: I mean, you know, there are, there are a lot of administrative tasks, right? Particularly in a small agency where you’re like, well, you know, I, I don’t really want to ask so and so to do, ’cause this, this really isn’t their job. It’s not really your job either though. So, you know, you need to figure out what makes more sense. Is it more impactful to have Joe do this because he’s, you know, more junior, costs less, all of that kind of thing? Or does it make more sense for you as the owner using time that is irreplaceable Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: To do. And nine times how to 10, it probably makes more sense to have Joe do it. Gini Dietrich: For sure. Yeah. And I think giving them the opportunity to learn and, you know, even saying this sucks. This job sucks. I’m sorry to have to ask. We just need to get it done. Can you help me out? That usually goes a long way. It’s funny you say that because I hired a chief operating officer about a year and a half ago, and within the first 90 days she came to me with a list of things she saw me doing and was like, you shouldn’t be doing these things. And I was like, yeah, but there’re administrative and there isn’t anybody else. And she’s like, I’m the chief operating officer. I will figure it out for you. And she literally took them off my plate and I was like, oh. Okay. But it didn’t even occur to me because we don’t have an admin person. It didn’t occur to me to have to, to take those off of my plate. She’s like, okay, but if I’m leading the operations team, the admin work comes to my team. And I was like, okay, but then you have to do it ’cause you don’t have an operations team yet. And she’s like, yes, but I’m cheaper than you are. Clients don’t ask for my time. Like she gave me all the reasons and I was like, okay, fine. So now she, her team handles all of it. But it, it took her coming to me literally with a list of things saying, I see that you’re doing this, this, this, this, and this, and you should not be doing those things. And like they were sucky jobs. Nobody wants to do ’em, but she was very good about taking them from me. So, if you don’t have an operations person, you probably have to do that work yourself. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And it doesn’t always have to be, you know, pure, you know, grunt work, administrative, it can be things like writing proposals. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: I know a lot of owners who are like, you know, I, I don’t want to ask so and so to write this proposal. It’s gonna, it’s gonna take a lot of work and, and it’s gonna be, I, I’ll just do this myself. That’s the ideal thing you should be having someone else do, and frankly, you’ll get a different perspective if you’ve got more people helping you on things like proposals. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: But definitely not the kind of thing that you should take on simply because you feel like you’re helping your team. When we talk about this, when we talk about business development all the time, where, you know, we talk about owners taking it all on themselves and not asking for help, not inviting people to meetings because they don’t wanna waste their time on it. That’s, that doesn’t make sense. So you, you can’t be sacrificing yourself for the team in that way, you need to involve them. Because you’ll actually get an added benefit from bringing them in, not just keeping stuff off of your plate. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I think we talked last week or the week before about how, especially on a new business front, if you bring them in, even though you might feel guilty about it not being non-billable work or blah, blah, blah, they have the ability to, A, become engaged with the prospect early on. B, understand the work that you’re doing, and C, to your point, giving a different perspective. So I think there’s a big opportunity there for us to be able to say, okay, everybody loves this work, but it’s gonna help us. It’s gonna help the business. It’s gonna help you in your career. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, the other place where I see a lot of sacrifices being made by owners is when it comes to org charts reporting structure. So a lot of times I see owners who will say, well, you know, I’ve got so and so, and geez, you know, I can’t really find somewhere in the organization for them to report, so I’m just gonna have them report into me. I’ll take care of that so that someone else doesn’t have to. To figure out how to deal with so and so, either because so-and-so’s maybe really talented, but also maybe difficult to manage. Or maybe they, they work on stuff that doesn’t really fit with any of your existing managers. So you’re like, I don’t really want to give, you know, design to my writing team or whatever. But sometimes it just makes sense because you shouldn’t be expanding the number of direct reports that you have, particularly junior direct reports. Anytime I see junior direct reports to the owner themselves, it’s usually because they’re in their minds making some kind of sacrifice to help the team by having those people report to them. And that’s really dangerous because it encourages a very flat org chart. And people are like, oh, flat org charts. That’s great. No. Flat org charts are bad. I agree. You don’t need 17 layers in a small organization. Right. But if you have, if everybody is reporting into the owner or most people are reporting into the owner, it’s usually because either they’re a control freak or because they feel like they don’t wanna burden people with management. And the truth is, if you’re going to grow your team, they have to be burdened by those things in order to learn and grow themselves. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I think there might be a rule of thumb on how many direct reports you have. It’s five. Chip Griffin: One hand Gini Dietrich: I have five and it’s a lot. Chip Griffin: So it’s a rule of hand. Gini Dietrich: It’s a lot. I have, I have five direct reports and it’s a lot. That’s a lot of people. Yeah. And it’s a lot of different personalities and like all of those things. So you, I think you have to think about that too. Like if you have an agency of eight and they all report to you, that’s way too many. You cannot manage that many people. Chip Griffin: And, again, you think that you’re sacrificing by and helping out by taking on that management load. And you are, but it’s not helping anybody. Right? Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: Because the reality is those people on your team, you’ve, you no doubt got some of those people who have real potential and they’re going to have to learn to manage at some point. In an ideal world, they would come into your organization with excellent management, training, and experience. That doesn’t happen in the agency world. Gini Dietrich: No, it does not. Chip Griffin: And in small agencies, you generally can’t afford to hire that kind of talent that’s coming in and having that good management training. But if they come from other agencies, they probably don’t have good management training anyway. Gini Dietrich: Yep. 100%. Yes. Yeah. Although I will say that my life changed when I could start to afford to hire people with experience. Chip Griffin: Sure. But there’s a difference between just having experience and being, having management training as part of that. Gini Dietrich: Well, that’s what I meant is yeah, Chip Griffin: because agencies are just miserable about trying to teach anybody basic management skills. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I’m, I know I told this story just a couple weeks ago about how I was trained in leadership, quote unquote. Chip Griffin: Yes. Yeah. Gini Dietrich: By putting them, putting me in charge of someone who was on a pip. That is not leadership training, that is not management training, that is none of those things, but that’s how they quote unquote train. Not effective at all. Chip Griffin: No. Obviously. Someday I will share some of my management training stories. They are, they are brutal. They are, they make no sense. As I look back on ’em, I’m like, really? Someone thought that was a good idea? Gini Dietrich: Okay. All right. Right. Chip Griffin: But I mean, it, it did help me get to where I am. So I guess I should be grateful, but not how I would ever advise people. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: To do on-the-job training for management. In any case, You know, so I, I think we just, we need to be mindful of the sacrifices that we’re making and think them through in such a way that we say, look, this isn’t, I’m not just solving a today problem. Right, and so you need to be looking at it over that longer term and saying, you know, what are the potential consequences to me making this sacrifice? It’s not just about the relief that you’re giving your team in the short term. It’s, does it set them up for success for the future? Does it set you up for success for the future? Does it set the business up for success? Is it making you happy about the business that you are running? And I know I always come back to this, but you have to get satisfaction out of it. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Chip Griffin: Not that every minute has to be joyful and fun and ooh. That’s not me. However, you need to be getting what you want from it, and that is probably not torturing yourself by taking on all of these tasks that you think are too awful to give to somebody else. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: Think about that for a minute. It’s so bad. You don’t want someone who you are paying to do it, so you’ll do it yourself. Where is the logic? Gini Dietrich: Very, very good point. There is no logic in that. And I think you’re right, and I, I think we all have, we all tend to do this, myself included, and it is a cycle that needs to break. I know I’ve talked about this before, but one of the things that I do every quarter is I, I sit down with my task list and I split it into three groups. Things that are on my list that only I can do. Things that are on my list that I enjoy doing, but I probably don’t need to do. And things that are on my list that I absolutely should not be doing. The last list needs to be delegated immediately. Sure. And things just get there, right? Like throughout the quarter, like things just get there and without me paying attention. And so I delegate those immediately. The middle one usually includes things like blog writing. I’m not gonna give that up. Yep. Do I need to be doing it? Probably not. But it’s something I enjoy and I’m passionate about it, and so I’m not gonna give that up. So that will continue to stay on my middle list. But then there are things that I shouldn’t be do that I may enjoy doing but shouldn’t be doing. So I delegate that. But it’s something I have to constantly do and I have to do it every quarter. And that’s how you start to understand, oh gosh, this got on my list. And for whatever reason, because I didn’t wanna, sorry, I didn’t wanna burden somebody with it. I didn’t have time to delegate it. Whatever reason, it’s on your list. Get it off of there. Every quarter. Yeah. Do that. Chip Griffin: In fact, it, it’s probably a good exercise to just walk through and look at all of the things that you do, in groups, not Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: You know, individually. And just ask yourself why you are the one doing it. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yep. Yes. Chip Griffin: Because I think that would then help you to build the list that you’re talking about. But that simple, that simple question why, it really can help you in a lot of different ways in how you run the business. That’s why there’s a whole book I think about that. You need to understand those things and once you do, then you’ll sit there a lot of times and say, oh, well that doesn’t really make any sense. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, Chip Griffin: Maybe I should do it differently. Gini Dietrich: Well, this was very good for me because over the weekend I didn’t wanna ask our web firm to create a landing page template for us because it takes them forever to respond. And so I decided I was gonna do it myself, and I broke the whole website and had to ask the web firm for help anyway. So there you go. Yep. Mm-hmm. It’s really great. Well done. Thank you. Well done very much. Yep. Thank you. Mm-hmm. Chip Griffin: I’m sure everybody appreciated that sacrifice that you made. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Especially me.  Yeah. So do as I say, not as I do. Chip Griffin: I was gonna say, we shoulda have a whole episode on the do as I say, not as I do, because there’s any number of things that we have talked about over the years that I’m fairly sure you and I do not practice. Gini Dietrich: Oh, for sure. Yes. I do have one-to-ones though, every week. Chip Griffin: Excellent. Gini Dietrich: Yes, Chip Griffin: I’ve always been religious about well, at least in modern history, I’ve been religious about it. In modern history. I do feel so strongly about it. Gini Dietrich: Yes, I agree. Chip Griffin: So, alright, well on that note, you know, glad we could help you out here. I’ll send you a bill for, you know, having an episode that helps you run your own business. Gini Dietrich: Appreciate it Chip Griffin: more effectively. Gini Dietrich: I appreciate it. Chip Griffin: And, and do go back and listen to this episode. Because you, it’s good to watch the game tape. Gini Dietrich: No, not gonna do it. Chip Griffin: On that note this, this will wrap up this episode. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich Chip Griffin: and it depends.

April 30, 202623 min

Preparing for your agency’s group presentations and pitches

In this episode, Chip and Gini open with the analogy of Canadian doubles, the tennis format where two players face one. If your team outnumbers the prospect, you don’t project strength, you project awkwardness. But the conversation goes well beyond headcount. A little preparation goes a long way in making sure every seat on your side is justified. You’ll want to match expertise to whoever the prospect brought, which requires actually knowing who’s coming. Gini described a recent pitch where she reverse-engineered her attendee list based entirely on who was showing up from the prospect’s side. That’s not logistics, it’s strategy. And whoever is in the room during the pitch needs to be the person doing the work after the contract is signed — not a handoff to a team with no context and no ownership. Both Chip and Gini are emphatic that the meeting itself should not feel rehearsed like a school play. Agency owners who show up prepared to have a real conversation before pitching solutions will stand out. Harder for many owners is knowing when to keep quiet. Interjecting while a team member gives an imperfect answer undermines their confidence, signals to the prospect they can’t be trusted, and makes them rely on you. The debrief after the meeting is where the coaching happens. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “You can’t do the bait and switch. You’ve gotta make sure that whoever they’re getting to know during the prospecting phase, that that’s who they’re going to be working with.” Gini Dietrich: “I would go to the meetings. I would create the proposal. I would sell it, I would close it, and then I would hand it off. And my team was like, they weren’t bought in. They didn’t understand…The client always felt like, well, I wanna work with you because you were in the room and that’s who we bought.” Chip Griffin: “The more you talk, it does three things. It undermines the confidence of your team member. It undermines the confidence of the client in your team. And it also puts you in a position where you are putting yourself as more necessary to the ongoing success of the relationship. And none of those things are good.” Gini Dietrich: “One of the things I think that sets a small agency apart from a large one is being able to diagnose the problem, being able to ask the questions and really have a conversation instead of doing a dog and pony show. It’s gonna be so much more appreciated because now you’re treating yourselves like their partner instead of their vendor.” View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. 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 today we’re gonna play Canadian Doubles. No, we’re not. For those of you who are not familiar, Canadian Doubles is a version of tennis where you have two players on one side of the net and one player on the other side. Did you know that? Gini Dietrich: I have so many, I have so many questions. Chip Griffin: I don’t know why they do that. And the only reason I even know about it is because of discussions that we’ve had, in the past, or that I had, you know, 30 years ago with some business partners was how you, what the dynamics are of meeting with teams, particularly from a prospect when you’re pitching them on things. And so we always said, you know, we wanna avoid playing Canadian doubles, basically where you’re outnumbering your opponent or prospect in this case. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think that’s really smart because you, you probably want to at least balance it, if not come just a little bit under, because when you have more people from your team than the client has, it tends to overpower them and become a little bit overwhelming for ’em, which is not what you want. That’s not the impression you want to leave. Chip Griffin: No. I mean, it’s, uh, you know, any time that, that you, you are in a position where you are confronted by a larger number of people, whether that’s, you know, in combat, in sales, in whatever. You know, you, you don’t like that you, you kind of want even numbers, right? But that’s, we’re gonna go beyond that, folks. So just so you know, we’re not talking just about the numbers of people. Gini Dietrich: The end. Chip Griffin: But really, you know, I thought it would be helpful for us to have a conversation about how you handle group presentations with prospects or even potentially with clients or those sorts of things, because it’s something that many of us, even in small agencies often do where we’ll have more than one person in the room or on a call, pitching to a client, talking them through things. So there’s a lot of things that go into that. How many people, how do you split up the presentation time? How do you make sure that everybody looks like they’re contributing in a meaningful way? How do you manage the time when you’ve got multiple voices speaking and make sure that you’ve got a real dialogue? So. I think there’s a lot of things to consider anytime you’re doing group presentations and it’s something that since we often end up having to do it, it’s worth thinking about how to do it well. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I completely agree. It’s, you know, one of the things that we think about it all the time, especially we, not just with new business, but with clients too. You know, we had a meeting a couple of weeks ago with a client and they really wanted me in the room, but there were only two of them and there were five of us, and so we had to kind of decide is it really important for me to be in the room? Then, and that’s the case then who are we not going to have in the room from, you know, the client team perspective. And so we went back and forth about it to decide who, who needed to be there for sure, and who was sort of ancillary and who could just get updates later. But it’s definitely something we think about all the time, not just with prospects, both with clients too. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And when I’ve worked in larger agencies, I mean, there have been times where, you know, you feel like you’re in an international summit because, you know, one side’s got 10 people, the other side’s got, you know, 12 or 13. And, and I think those are just silly on both sides. I mean, I don’t understand the value of having that many people in the room for a pitch, really, at any point. So for most of our listeners, that’s not the size and scale that we’re talking about, but I do think it’s important to think through why every single person is in that conversation. From your side in particular. Obviously you can’t really control who the other side brings, although it is worth understanding who they’re bringing and maybe asking them questions about, you know, whether, you know, whether that’s the right mix. Do they need to add somebody? Does, does that person really need to be there for this conversation? You can do that diplomatically so that you have the right mix of people on both sides. But everybody on your side, at least the side you control, needs to have a clear purpose for being there. And you shouldn’t throw extra bodies in just to show Hey, we’ve got these smart people. ’cause I’ve been in plenty of those presentations where like, we don’t really need you for anything. We just want you to be here so that they know that you exist. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: And that’s an important temptation to resist because oftentimes the other side will walk out saying, well, why was that person there? That didn’t make any sense. Gini Dietrich: Right. Yes. I think too, if you do your due diligence to say, you know, who from your side is going to be there, then you can sort of match expertise, right? So we had a new business, a new business meeting last week, and from their side they had the VP of comms from two business lines. They had the chief communications officer and they had two data analytics people. So from my side, I ensured that we had at least two communications professionals, at least one data person, myself and our chief Revenue Officer were there. And so it sort of matched the same level of expertise. And everybody was able to have conversations with their peers to be able to understand, okay, this is what they’ll do and this is how they’ll help us. And it was really, really valuable from that perspective. You know, could I have handled the communications piece of it for probably three or four of them? Sure. But I also don’t, I’m not gonna be the point of contact from a day-to-day perspective. So I wanted to make sure that the people that were in the room also were gonna be the day-to-day point points of contact. So you, you can kind of massage that a little bit based on who’s in the room from the client’s perspective or the prospect’s perspective and really understanding, okay, You know, we have to think about it both from the perspective of do we have the expertise on our side to match that. And who will be the day-to-day contact on our side that they would be working with. So that they don’t feel like we’re doing a swap, you know, once the business is won that they’ve then now have to work with the lower class employees. Chip Griffin: Right. I mean, those are, those are two fantastic points. And, so I really wanna underscore those. The first is the simplest one, which is you can’t do the bait and switch. You’ve gotta make sure that whoever they’re getting to know during the prospecting phase, that that’s who they’re going to be working with. Maybe not every single person who’s in the room, but at least whoever they main contact is. If they become a client, absolutely needs to be there. And that’s, that’s important from the client’s perspective so that they get to know that person and it, they can make a, an intelligent, informed decision about whether they want to work with that person, right? So they don’t get surprised after the fact. But it’s just as important for your team as well because by having that person in the room, they can help make, they’ll have heard firsthand what the client is looking for. You don’t have to play a game of telephone with them. They’ll be up to speed from day one. They will also help you to better spec out the proposal and pricing. Yep. Because they will have heard it and, and they’re not having it forced down their throats. They can be in a position to help guide what do you make for promises in terms of results, deadlines, the amount of time involved, those kinds of things. So really important from that perspective. But the second one is equally important, which is that you match up expertise. Particularly from the perspective, I think of, part of it’s the ability to have conversations with peers, but part of it is making sure that if you see someone bringing an expertise on their side, who is likely to ask particular questions or have particular concerns, that you have somebody on your side who can address those questions and concerns. Whether that’s a true subject matter expert on it or whether it’s in your case you’re an owner, you, you happen to know enough about that area that you could handle it if you had to. Sometimes you need to make judgements, but you know, if you’re pitching a website redesign and they say they’re gonna have their IT security guy in the room, you better have somebody in that room who can address their IT security questions. Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm. Yes. Chip Griffin: Whether that’s you or somebody else. Yes. The fact that they’ve invited them to the meeting means it’s probably going to be a topic of conversation because you generally don’t invite your IT security guys just for Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: You know, content conversations. They’re there for a particular reason or concern. Gini Dietrich: We find that a lot with the clients that we work with. When they invite their compliance, somebody from their compliance team, you’re like, okay, all right. We’re gonna make sure that we, got it. You’re taking this seriously. Okay. There, there are gonna be questions that I cannot answer. Okay. We’re gonna make sure somebody from our side is. So same kind of thing. You just have to understand who from their side is invited so that you can match that expertise. Chip Griffin: Right. Or, or you happen to notice they’ve invited their IT security guy or something like that and you say, Hey, I, I noticed you’ve invited so and so. I don’t know if this is the right forum for that. Maybe we have a, you know, maybe we should set up a separate conversation so that the whole team doesn’t get bogged down in this. Because, and, and a lot of times the IT security guy will be just as receptive to that, that he doesn’t have to sit through a whole bunch of conversation that is boring to him. And, and it may work better from your side just to have the experts have that conversation as a sidebar instead of eating up valuable time in the group presentation. So certainly look at who’s being brought into the room so that you can maybe address some of those things in advance. And steer it in a direction that’s more likely to achieve the outcome that you are looking for. Again, whether it’s a prospective client or an existing client and you’re trying to steer a project in a certain direction. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s so smart, and I think you, what you said earlier about, you know, ensuring that the day-to-day contact is there is critical. You know, that’s one of the mistakes I made early, early on from my perspective, is I always felt like new business wasn’t billable and – well, not felt like – it wasn’t billable. And so I didn’t wanna ask my team to go to those meetings. And I was doing a lot in the beginning. Because it was, it would eat into their billable time. Right? And so I would leave them in the office and I would go to the meetings. But you’re right, like you miss the nuance. You miss the context. I would go to the meetings. I would create the proposal. I would sell it, I would close it, and then I would hand it off. And my team was like, they weren’t bought in. They didn’t understand. They may have had their own ideas that, you know, I hadn’t had on my own. The client always felt like, well, I wanna work with you because you were in the room and that’s who we bought, and now you’re having… So it was just like, it was a hard lesson for me to have to learn. But, you know, it’s, it’s a good lesson and I think if you can avoid some of those mistakes, that’s a good way to, to think about it. Because yes, it’s not billable and yes, your team still has to, if you’re, you know, tracking billable hours and capacity and all that, they still have to do that. But you can reduce their percentage that they have to get because they’re participating in new business and they will have ideas as well. Like I, I had a boss earlier in my career who was so smart, and he was a great idea guy. Like, he would go in and he could see a client’s problem or a prospect’s problem immediately, and he would say, okay, this is how you need to solve it. And he’d be like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And when I wasn’t in the room, he would sell all of that stuff. But we didn’t have the capability to do it. Chip Griffin: Yep. Gini Dietrich: And so once I sat in the room, I literally would kick him under the table if he started to sell something we couldn’t do because he would sell stuff that, yeah, it should have been done, but the agency didn’t have the internal capability to be able to do it. And so I started. I, I invited myself to new business meetings so that I could literally sit on, sit across from him and I would kick him underneath the table every time he started to, to sell something that we couldn’t do. And, you know, so all to say that there is an opportunity for your team to help, not just, not that you’re necessarily doing that, but for your team to help but also understand and be bought into the process. And from a client’s perspective, they’re buying the team. They’re buying the people, and a lot of it is chemistry. A lot of it is whether or not I can work with these people. So you wanna have those people in the room. Chip Griffin: It’s, it’s funny when you, when you talk about selling things that you don’t do and you kicking under the table, because I, I had a business partner who, he sort of, reveled in the ability to sell things that we didn’t currently have the capability to do. And then we would walk out of the meeting and he’d kind of have a twinkle in his eye and look over at me and say, do you like how I did that? He’s like, you can do that, right? I’m like, so I’ll be figuring it out now. Gini Dietrich: I mean, we’ll figure it out! Chip Griffin: Because I was the one who owned the figuring it out part. He was the one who leaned into the selling part. Gini Dietrich: Yes. Chip Griffin: So, it certainly made for some, some interesting times. But, but we always seemed to come out okay. Which unfortunately encouraged him to continue doing that. Gini Dietrich: Of course it did. Yes. Chip Griffin: You know, it is what it is. But okay, so, you know, we, we really thought through who we’ve got in the room. Now. Let’s think about how do we actually prepare the presentation or the, really the discussion, because I think we think of these things as presentations, but more often than not, I mean, this is not, you know, you’re not getting up and, and doing an audition on stage where you’ve got, you know, the director, producer, whatever, they’re taking notes and making a decision. It should be more of a dialogue in most cases. So. How do you think about preparing for these, setting the agenda for them, preparing your team for the conversation so that it doesn’t become just, you know, we’re gonna just, you know, do a death march through PowerPoint slides, split up over four people over the next, you know, 60 minutes and there’s no time for conversation at all. Gini Dietrich: Oh, yeah, no, that’s, we, we do not do that. So one of the things that we do is, is typically there is a relationship internally that somebody already has with the prospect. And so that person sort of leads the conversation, right? They make the introductions, they kind of set the agenda. They are the ones that sort of lead the agenda in the conversation. Our chief revenue officer has like a 12 minute, I’d say it’s 12 to 15 minute deck that he goes through that just introduces most, almost everybody knows PESO. So we just kind of give a high level… Like, and it’s a really, it’s a really nice, it’s not a dog and pony show. It’s not a capabilities presentation. It’s more like this is what we know about you and the pain points we see that you have, and here’s how PESO solves it kind of thing. And then we open it up for, for conversations. And so usually the point of contact, the day-to-day person that would be, their day-to-day manages that piece. So it’s a lot of us asking questions and, you know, really listening and taking notes and understanding. And then the person who has the relationship wraps it up at the end and does the follow up. So it’s usually, I would say it’s usually three to five of us, depending on how many on their side. And that’s typically how we set up the agenda is based on that. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I think it’s really smart to have whoever has the best relationship, be the person who is effectively managing the meeting, because that, that generally is gonna improve the comfort level on the other side of the table. And so, you know, you might as well lean into that unless for some reason it would be really weird, right? I mean, maybe it’s some super junior person who happens to just be, you know, friends with or used to work with someone. I mean, you know, maybe in those cases you don’t, but in the vast majority of cases where that relationship exists, you should take advantage of that. And, you know, certainly lean into that. I think the other important thing is to, to think through how you, you spread the conversation around so that everybody feels like there’s a reason for being there, both on your side and theirs, right? You don’t want someone on your side to feel like, well, what was the point? Why did I even have to waste my time coming here or showing up for the call, depending on what it is. But I, you know, so part of that is, is you as the leader, trying to think through how do you make sure that you don’t consume all the oxygen? Because I think there’s a real tendency on a lot of owner’s parts to just jump in because they probably do have an answer to most of the questions that would come up in these sessions. It’s gonna be rare in I think most cases that you couldn’t give that answer in that one hour session that you’ve probably got. But you have to, to find a way to make sure that you’re weaving your team in. And if you’ve brought in an expert in paid media or something like that, and a paid media question comes up, resist the urge to answer yourself Uhhuh and bring your paid expert in to talk about that. When you’re doing the overall presentation, spread it around and let them talk about their areas of expertise. But do make sure they understand what their limits are, because we all have those team members, and maybe it’s us, maybe it’s one of our team members, who just likes to keep going. Gini Dietrich: Uh-huh. Chip Griffin: We, I mean, I see this repeatedly where you get someone on one of these calls and you know you’ve told ’em they’ve got three minutes, 30 minutes later, they’re still going uhhuh because they’re just so excited about whatever they’re talking about. You’ve gotta manage that bit of it so that you have the right spread of discussion. Yes, and information dissemination in those meetings. Gini Dietrich: Yes. I know some of those, I’ll tell you that shutting up and letting your team answer questions is probably one of the hardest jobs you have. And they’re going to answer it in a way that you necessarily wouldn’t. Or sometimes the prospect will ask a question and they do like the runaround, and you can tell they don’t really know the answer and they’re waiting to be saved and you can’t really save them. But they don’t really answer the question, and so you have to figure out a way to sort of wrap it in a bow. It is literally one of the hardest things that you could do. And for those of you on video, I have a, a notebook full of notes where I sit in those meetings and I just, every time I want to interject, I just, and I just write down so that I can provide feedback later. But I’m telling you, it is so challenging, so challenging. Chip Griffin: And it, I would absolutely agree with you. It is one of the most difficult things that I had to learn as I was running teams. But I, I eventually did get to that point where I, I felt like I was pretty good at being able to decide, is this so important that it’s worth me interjecting, correcting, whatever it may be. Because there are times, I mean, you should never just completely zip it and, and let the wrong impression be left or something like that. If you, if you know that it needs clean up on aisle six, just a little yeah, clean up on aisle six, please. But it, but if it’s just not exactly the way you would do it or it’s really, it’s inconsequential to the outcome of the meeting, let it go. Because the more you talk, it does two things. First of all. Well, it does three things really. It undermines the confidence of your team member. Yep. It undermines the confidence of the client in your team. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: And it also puts you in a position where you are putting yourself as more necessary to the ongoing success of the relationship. And none of those things are good. Gini Dietrich: Not good at all. Yeah, it’s super, super challenging, but I think it’s one of the things that you have to work on. And so one of the things that we do after a meeting is we do a debrief. Right. And I will, I will say, this was great, this was great. This was great. I probably would’ve answered this a little bit differently, and here’s why. You know, and I, I give them the immediate feedback so that they can, and eventually what happens is you start to run like a well-oiled machine, right? But you have to be able to do those things, and every time you hire someone new and bring them into that process, you kind of have to build that well-oiled machine again. And so it’s a constant funnel of having to provide feedback and, you know, take really good notes. And of course AI can take notes for you, but you’ll see things that AI won’t, right? Yeah. That you just wanna jot down. And really providing that instant feedback so that you’re doing that debrief and you’re starting to build that really well oiled machines so that eventually there have been a couple of newbies, the business meetings where I’ve been like, why was I there? I was not needed. Right. And that’s what you wanna get to. Chip Griffin: Absolutely. And I, I think these, you know, having, having meetings afterwards are important. I think having meetings before, so don’t, don’t of course, yes. Throw everybody in. Gini Dietrich: Yes, yes. Yes. Hundred percent. Chip Griffin: There’s a happy balance there too. Yes, because I’ve, I’ve seen a lot of these prep sessions go off the rails because it turns into almost a skit and so, you know. There is a point of too much preparation and so you certainly need to have conversations beforehand. Who’s gonna do what, what are we generally gonna say? Are there any, you know, third rails that we should try to avoid here in this conversation? You know, share that information in advance, particularly for team members who may not be used to those kinds of conversations so that they kind of know, you know, what those guardrails are. But try to avoid scripting it out so heavily that it does come across like you’re doing a school play. Yeah. Because I have been part of those. Mm-hmm. I have seen, I’ve had those presentations made to me. They are mind numbing. It has to be, it has to feel like you’re having a human expert conversation. Yeah. And it should not feel like, you know, I’ve got three and a half minutes and I’ve timed it down exactly like that. And if anything comes up, I’m gonna be, you know, lost because now you’ve knocked me off of my course and I’m gonna hand it right over to you. I mean, treat it like a human conversation. And I think that’s gonna be the way you get the best result. Gini Dietrich: And I will end this by saying that is 100% accurate. We have several clients who are going through the agency of record interview process right now. And because we’re the PESO integrators, we’re part of that process. And, first of all, every large agency, every single one does exactly what you just said. They come in, they’re well rehearsed. They’re well practiced. They each have their part, they’ve memorized it all, and they spend an hour going through a capability stack. And it is mind numbing. Like you just, you’re just like, oh my gosh. They don’t ask questions. They don’t try to better understand what the opportunity is, none of that. And then when it gets to the q and a, they don’t have answers because they didn’t practice that part. And so one of the things I think that sets a small agency apart from a large one is being able to diagnose the problem, being able to ask the questions and really have a conversation. Instead of doing a dog and pony show. It’s gonna be so much more appreciated because now you’re treating yourselves like their partner instead of their vendor who’s just coming in and being like, wah wah wah wah wah. Chip Griffin: And, and it helps your team too because they’re, they’ll be in a better position to handle the questions if, if everybody is so prepared. Yes. It tends to make the q and a session really difficult because Gini Dietrich: it’s very difficult. Chip Griffin: People feel so locked in to what they’ve pre-prepared that anything outside of that they may not have the confidence to handle. So, yeah. Obviously every team is different. Every individual is different. You gotta figure out how to get the most from them, but in general, drive it towards actual human conversation. Not a school play. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, it works every single time. Chip Griffin: Indeed. So with that, hopefully we’ve given you some good tips for your next group presentation to a prospect, a client, or whomever. And, please do, tune into the next episode. In the meantime, I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich Chip Griffin: and it depends.

April 23, 202618 min

Rethink entry-level hiring to succeed in the AI era

The entry-level talent pipeline is being entirely restructured. If agency owners don’t figure out what role a young professional actually plays in an AI-assisted agency, they won’t just struggle to hire today. They’ll have no one to promote in five years. In this episode, Chip and Gini dig into what’s happening with entry-level hiring right now, and why the answer can’t be to stop hiring junior staff altogether. The conversation covers why the old model of routine work is gone, what needs to replace it, and why agencies that don’t solve this problem soon are setting themselves up for failure. The episode opens with an observation from Gini: every presentation she gives to college classes lately surfaces the same anxiety from students. Nobody’s hiring at the entry level because AI can handle the work those roles used to cover — news releases, media lists, social drafts, basic research. How can they find jobs today, and get the on-the-job training they need to move forward in their careers? Chip frames the problem as a junction of circumstances: the rise of AI, economic uncertainty, and a higher education system that hasn’t evolved with the workforce reality. Colleges discouraging AI use while their graduates are about to enter workplaces built around it is, as he puts it, the same mistake as banning calculators in math class. The students coming in aren’t unprepared because they’re less capable, they’re underprepared because the institutions that trained them weren’t keeping up with the times. Chip and Gini agree that entry-level hires aren’t obsolete, but the role must change. Instead of being the lowest rung of the ladder, new professionals need to come in already functioning like managers — just managing AI tools and processes instead of people. That requires more on-the-job training, better-documented processes and SOPs, and a genuine commitment to learning and development that most agencies still don’t have. There’s more than one upside, though. Better documentation and SOPs don’t just help entry-level hires do their jobs — they make your agency more efficient, reduce owner dependency, and, for those who want to sell someday, significantly improve the value of the business. Their closing argument is not to avoid entry-level hiring because the old version of the role is antiquated. Rethink what the role is, invest in the systems that support it, and get comfortable assigning junior people with responsibilities that would have felt premature five years ago. The alternative is a mid-level talent shortage that will be very hard to fix. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “Effectively everybody is starting out as a manager now. It just may be that instead of managing people, you’re managing AI agents or assistants. That’s still a management role.” Gini Dietrich: “If we don’t solve this now as agency leaders and as an industry, there will be nobody at the mid-level to take the jobs in five years. No one.” Chip Griffin: “Don’t decide that you’re not going to hire them and just use the AI for it. Rethink what the role of an entry level hire is in your business because that will allow you to build both for today and for the future.” Gini Dietrich: “I think providing and teaching the young professionals how to use critical thinking skills to orchestrate an army of AI bots is exactly where we should be training them.” Related Managing Gen Z agency employees (and anyone else with less experience than you) ALP 34: How to help junior agency employees grow AI no threat to agency employees learning fundamental skills View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. 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, you know, I’m thinking about just getting started in the workforce now, and, you know, I’ve, I’ve never had a job in my life and Gini Dietrich: Oh, yeah. Chip Griffin: You know, being so young and green, I, I need to figure out what I’m going to do. Gini Dietrich: You know, it’s funny because I do a lot of zoom in… I zoom into a lot of classes to talk about PESO, and one of the questions I always get, and especially right now is, you know, how am I, what job am I gonna do when I graduate? How am I gonna get a good job? The job market sucks. Then nobody’s hiring for entry level because of AI. Like, what am I gonna do? And that question, I would say, that question has come up. In every single presentation that I’ve done for the last two years. And kids are really concerned about it. And, you know, in Counselor’s Academy through PRSA, we’ve been having the conversation too with other agency owners about, you know, who’s hiring entry level, and if you are, what are you doing? And it’s crickets. Like nobody’s hiring entry level professionals right now, because everything that we would have someone do as a brand new professional or as an intern, AI can do and do it much more effectively. So, you know, news releases and blog posts, drafts and social media drafts and media lists and all that, like, it’s way more efficient to have AI do it. So one of the conversations we’ve been having here is it’s really important to me as an individual to continue to give back to the industry. So how do we create an intern program that’s less about that kind of work and more about giving them the critical skills that they need to be able to orchestrate prompts, integrate AI into their roles. And I think that, I think that’s the path that we are gonna probably go down. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, it, it’s an important topic. It is, I think there’s a confluence of events that are making it particularly challenging for entry-level workers today. So you’ve got the rise of AI along with economic and other uncertainty coming together. So, you know, there, there’s a number of forces that just make it really difficult. And I think it’s all layered on top of a higher education system that frankly is almost entirely broken. Yeah. And obviously that’s not really something we’re gonna solve here on, on this show, nor is it really the general domain of it. But I think it is, it’s a fundamental challenge that, that most higher education is not really oriented around helping students to find jobs afterwards. Right. That’s, that’s almost an afterthought. Yep. And I’m not saying that it needs to become vocational training. At the same time, you know, four years of pure academics, and discouraging the use of things like AI. A lot of, you know, colleges and universities say, oh no, no, you can’t use AI to complete your papers. Well, that’s not the reality that these students are about to embark upon. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: And so, you know, to me, that reminds me of, you know, years gone by where, oh, you can’t use Wikipedia, you can’t use the internet. You can’t use calculators. I mean, when I grew up, you can’t use a calculator in math class. I mean, these things just, it really is an antiquated system. So you’ve got that as their stepping stone into the workforce, and then they’ve got these headwinds of the economy and AI fighting against them. And so I do think it is, it’s a challenge for the industry, but ultimately it’s a challenge for individual agencies as well. Because even if you don’t want to give back, you have to think about how you’re going to staff your business, not just today, but for the longer term. And historically, agencies have promoted from within quite often, or hired somebody who was an entry level somewhere else. And so at some point, if we don’t figure out how to solve this entry level hire problem, we’re gonna be in a situation where there’s nobody out there for those mid-tier roles that we need to hire still. Gini Dietrich: Right. That’s exactly right. And that’s the, we continue to have that conversation in every single one of my leadership team meetings where there is a section where we’re talking about interns on the path for entry-level professionals. Because you’re exactly right, if we don’t solve this now as agency leaders and as an industry, there will be nobody at the mid-level to take the jobs in five years. No one. So we have to figure this out. Chip Griffin: And I think a lot of it is reimagining what that entry level role is. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: Which means as, as owners, as bosses, we need to think about how we structure those roles. But it also means that in preparation for this, you know, colleges, universities, intern programs also need to be thinking about what skills they’re sending people into the workforce with. And I think I’ve mentioned this previously on the show, I mean, effectively everybody is starting out as a manager now. It just may, may be that instead of managing people, you’re managing AI agents or assistants. That’s still a management role. Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm. Yep, yep. Chip Griffin: And so, you know, whereas we used to bring people in and, and they would be purely managed and just… They would be the, you know, the functionaries who did what we told them to do. They need to be in a position that they can actually direct resources right out of the gate. And so that, that requires a lot more training before the job, but really a lot more probably on the job training. And we’re awful at training managers at every level within our businesses, including most owners have just awful management skills. And so if we don’t have them at the higher levels, how do we get them to the entry level? Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think you’re right. I think we, this has been a challenge forever. I mean, the way I got quote unquote management skills is my boss came to me and said, so and so has just been put on a PIP, and she has 60 days to figure it out, and we’d like to manage you through that. Like, we’d like you to manage her through that process. And I was like…what? Okay. Guess what? She didn’t make it and it was a terrible experience for me, but that’s how they quote, unquote, gave me management training. Right? That’s not management training. That’s not leadership training. That’s like trying to, to figure out what you’re good at or what your strengths are by trying to help somebody who’s failing but doesn’t want the help and doesn’t wanna try to succeed. Terrible idea. All to say, I think you’re exactly right. And I think one of the big things that everyone in general is missing around AI is critical thinking. And I think we, we say, okay, like, oh, this is gonna make me so much faster and I’m gonna prompt it and I’m gonna get it what it needs. And then I forget about actually thinking through, is this right? Is it what I’m trying to accomplish? Is it strategic? Is it going to deliver results for the client? We don’t, we’ve, we sort of are in this world of, oh my gosh, this has made me so much more, so much faster and more productive. We’re losing that critical thinking piece.  And I think providing that and teaching the young professionals how to use critical thinking skills to orchestrate an army of AI bots is exactly where we should be training them. Chip Griffin: I mean, I think ultimately learning and development needs to be a much stronger piece of even the smallest agencies. Yep. And there needs to be a much greater emphasis on the mentorship and coaching and training of everybody at, again, at every level within the business, including yourself as the owner. Yep. And, and if you’re not committed to that, it’s going to be very difficult to successfully integrate new entry level hires of any kind in the future because they do need greater support than ever before. It’s not just, Hey, you know, go through this, you know, list and figure out, you know, which emails are bad or, you know, go find email addresses for these reporters. Right? Or, you know, the, the basic tasks that a lot of people may have been asked to do in the last 10 or 20 years, they’re gone. And so everything requires that higher level of judgment. And the only way that we can expect good results is if we’re providing the assistance from above. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I completely agree.You know, we do, I think we do a fairly good job of internal training because we have the PESO model. So you know, everybody on our team has to go through it and everybody on our team has to be certified and everybody on our team has to keep up with it. Everybody on our team has to understand what I’m producing from a content perspective every week. And you know, one of the things I say constantly to them is, you guys have to be ahead no matter what. You can’t have a client who knows more about it than you do. You can’t have a client who says, well, I saw this in or, I heard this on Gini’s podcast, and you don’t know what they’re talking about. Like you have to be ahead of all of them. And so because of that, we have twice a month internal learning. And I think taking that down a level, and honestly truly, I would actually say that the younger professionals are better at the PESO Model certification outputs than I would say some of the more senior level professionals. Because they don’t have preconceived notions, they don’t have, oh, this is the way I’ve always done things. Right. So they’re much more, they absorb the information better and they output the expected outputs much more effectively, I think. But you know, if you don’t have that kind of training internally, like, how are you teaching them intellectual property and how are you teaching them your processes? And like everybody has a different way of doing work for clients. How are you teaching that so that when they go into AI to get the output they need, they understand this is the output I’m trying to get and this is what it looks like. I think those are the things we have to be thinking about is our intellectual property, our unique way of doing things, and our process. That’s the kinds of things you can be teaching to young professionals. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And look to your point, I think that to the extent that agencies are doing, you know, training and development type things, most of it is focused on the how you do your job bit, right? Gini Dietrich: Yep, yep. Chip Griffin: So you know, how, how do you implement the PESO model? How do you communicate effectively with the press? How do you, you know, write effectively? Those are the kinds of things that most agencies have spent at least some time on. Maybe not enough, but at least some. But it’s, but as you back into the, the things that you’ve also mentioned, processes, you know, tho those are things that don’t get the same level of attention in the training and in the professional development. And then when you get back from that and you’re looking at things like project management or just basic human management, those are not things that have any amount of investment in the vast majority of agencies. And it’s, you know, it’s always shocking to me how many times I go into an agency, you know, for one of my Agency Business Checkups, and I sit there and I talk with them and I understand they’re not doing the regular one-on-one communications with direct reports. Wow. And I, and I know, I mean, this is, everybody knows, this is my pet peeve. Yes. But it is the fundamentals of management. How do you manage somebody if you’re not having regular, ongoing meetings with them? Right. It just, it doesn’t make any sense. But there’s, there’s no culture around that. There’s no culture around communications . And particularly as we’re moving into this era of AI, we need to be much better at documenting processes and, you know, all that because the more we document processes, the better results we can get from the technology, which makes the lives of all of the human employees better. And so we need to be focused on a lot of these things that maybe we could get by without doing in the past, and maybe it just, you know, it was a, a 10 or 15% efficiency hit or something like that. Now it just, it fundamentally just doesn’t work if you’re not focused on how to do these things effectively. So we really need to, again, at all levels, but particularly with those entry level hires, we need to groom them into the roles by providing them with those skill sets, providing them with the documentation around processes, and that’s how we’ll start to get better results more quickly. But that doesn’t really solve the question of how do we continue to hire entry level people at all? Why? Because there’s this big urge for people to say, look, that because AI is so good, we don’t even need entry level hires anymore. Yeah. And I mean, I am of the viewpoint that that is not accurate. That you can still hire people fresh outta college or with just a year or two of experience, but you’ve got to rethink what you’re thinking of them to do. Right. If you think of them in the old terms of doing just that routine, brute force labor. No, there is no role for that. But if you elevate it and you say, look, you know, these kids are coming in and they’ve got something to add, they’ve got value to offer. We just need to perhaps move them along faster in our minds than we might have otherwise. But in their world, they’re not, because they don’t, they didn’t grow up 30 years ago like we did in the industry, so you didn’t know what all of the photocopying and faxing was back then. So you’ve got to be open to putting them into roles that just blow your mind that this is an entry-level responsibility now. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And I think we have a responsibility as leaders to do that. Because to your point earlier, if we don’t, we’re not gonna have employees to hire at the mid-level and then at the senior level, and it’s going to be a disaster. So I think we have our responsibility as leaders to do that. Chip Griffin: Yeah, but we, I mean, yes, we have a responsibility, but ultimately we also need to do what’s right for the business today. Gini Dietrich: Sure, of course. Chip Griffin: And so, so what the, what I think people need to do is to figure out how to bridge that gap. So that you can do what’s right for the business today, while also helping you for the long term. Because as, as much as we all sit here and we want to say, well, we’re doing right for the industry, we’re doing right for our business in three to five years. That’s not a reality that works for most people, particularly on the tight numbers that most smaller agencies are operating with. So, you know, we do need to find a way to make sure that we are getting what we need today from these, and they’re not, I don’t wanna say charity hires, but they’re not, they’re not viewed solely as investments. They have to be something that has the more near term payoff as well. Gini Dietrich: Sure, of course. Yeah. I don’t disagree with that. Chip Griffin: I think that does require a mindset shift for a lot of us who would never dream of, of handing off some of the responsibility that we’re now in a position of needing to hand off to people who have very little experience. But the more that you’ve established proper SOPs and you’ve put together the right systems for checking, verification, approval, et cetera, all of those things, it, you’re in a much better position. And honestly, the use of AI makes it easier to entrust more junior employees. I think a lot of people sit here and say, oh, you know, it’s scary ’cause now we’ve got, you know, junior people with no experience running the AI. Yes. But if as long as you are overseeing the training of the AI, then the AI tends to remain within its lane. The problem you run into with AI is when you don’t give it any guidelines, when you don’t give it any context, when you don’t give it the structure, that’s where it does things like hallucinate and, you know, engage in crazy behavior. But otherwise it does a much better job than humans of remaining within its lane. And so it can actually help the juniors to do their jobs more effectively without the level of risk that some of us may be concerned about. Gini Dietrich: And I will add to that, with your SOPs and your process. Although we talk all the time about building a business that you love and that works for you, there are still going to be some of you who want to sell your business. And having those SOPs in the process really well-defined is going to help your sell price significantly. Yes. Because if you can just hand them the recipe and say, this is how we do things, and this is how we’ve done things for years and it works, and these are the kinds of results, that’s going to help your sell price. Chip Griffin: Yeah. One hundred percent because then you’ve got a buyer who’s looking at something and they’re not just, you know, buying a client roster or short term revenue or something like that. They’re actually, you know, buying something that has sustainable value to it. And particularly in the age of AI, where those SOPs can then become the guidelines and guardrails for the AI tools to utilize. It really is a big differentiator, not just for your sales price, but for today, right? Because if you’ve, if you built those things in there, then you can be a leaner operation. Because the reality is we are going to accomplish more with fewer human headcount. That’s just going to happen. Probably not as efficient as some people dream it might be, but still more efficient than we are today. And so it gives you a lot of flexibility if you are in a position to feed the information and SOPs into the AI tools to get you where you want to go. So it will take a lot of pressure off of you as the owner today, and that opens up possibilities for your future, whether you want to sell or not. Gini Dietrich: Yep, totally. I’m a big fan of SOPs. Chip Griffin: I always have been a big fan of SOPs and checklists and those sorts of things. I think they, they can save your bacon. But you know, today they’re just, you can’t live without them, right? No, totally agree. Totally. They were nice to have process improvements 20 years ago. Today, if you don’t have them, you are really holding yourself back because you can’t use most of these tools capably without them. Gini Dietrich: Yep. 100%. Chip Griffin: So you’ve got to, you can’t fly by the seat of your pants anymore. It really needs that structure. Entry level hires need that structure. AI needs that structure. And if you’re going to have a successful agency for the future, you need to solve for this today. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And truth be told, everyone in your agency needs that structured. Chip Griffin: Everybody. Absolutely. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, everyone does. Chip Griffin: Absolutely. So don’t be afraid of entry level hires. Don’t decide that you’re not gonna hire them and just use the AI for it. Rethink what the role of an entry level hire is in your business because that will allow you to build both for today and for the future. Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. Chip Griffin: So with that, we will wrap up this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And it depends.

April 9, 202621 min

Five words every agency owner needs to understand

Most agency owners spend a lot of time thinking about growth, clients, and revenue. Far fewer think carefully about the words that define how they actually operate their businesses. In this episode, Chip and Gini dig into five of those words: leadership, management, accountability, responsibility, and authority. Leadership and management aren’t the same thing. Leadership is about vision and getting people to follow you. Management is about making the work happen. Knowing which one you’re stronger at is the first step toward building a team that covers your gaps. Accountability is the wrong place to start when a team member isn’t delivering. You can’t hold someone accountable for something you never clearly assigned, and you can’t hold them accountable if you didn’t give them the authority to get it done. Gini offers a useful comparison: when a client hires you for your expertise and then second-guesses every decision, it’s demoralizing. That’s exactly how your team feels when you delegate the work but not the authority to do it. The episode closes with a simple reminder. If you want more freedom as an owner, you have to be willing to actually let go. And if your team isn’t capable of handling more responsibility, you should be asking yourself why you hired them. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “You can’t really have accountability without the other two things. You can’t go and hold an employee accountable for something that you never told them that they had to do to begin with.” Gini Dietrich: “I think we are all guilty of thinking that management is, oh, we get to boss people around and tell people what to do.” Chip Griffin: “If I want to hold an employee accountable for profitability on something, or for results on a client project, I actually need to give them the responsibility and authority to do what they need to do in order to get that.” Gini Dietrich: “When you try to control everything, when you don’t delegate effectively, when you don’t give your team the authority and responsibility to do their jobs effectively, you are creating an environment that’s not fun to work in.” Turn ideas into action Write down who owns what. Pick three ongoing projects or responsibilities in your agency and write one name next to each. If you can’t, or if the answer is “everyone,” that’s the problem to solve first. Audit one recent accountability failure. Think of the last time a team member didn’t deliver on something. Ask honestly: did they have clear responsibility for it, and did they have the authority to get it done without coming back to you for approvals? Identify the specific gap. Read Chip’s two-part newsletter series on these five words. They cover the concepts in more depth than a single conversation allows. Then write the five words on a post-it and put it somewhere you’ll actually see it. Related 5 words critical to agency management success (part 1) 5 words critical to agency management success (part 2) View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. 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, I’ve got, uh, I’ve got five words today, and that’s it. And then we’re outta here. Gini Dietrich: F…U… Chip Griffin: Words, not letters! No, we’ve already used more than five words, so. Gini Dietrich: Yep. No, Chip Griffin: I guess Gini Dietrich: you wrote about this. Chip Griffin: I guess we’re probably gonna need to come up with more than five words for this episode. Gini Dietrich: We’re, we should probably come up with several words for each of the five words, but you wrote about this and I thought it was really good. So we’re gonna talk about it. Chip Griffin: Yeah, last fall, as I was sitting there looking for inspiration for my newsletter, I started thinking about some of the language that I frequently use when I’m talking with agency owners. And so it became a two-part series in the SAGA newsletter, about five words that are critical to agency management success. And so, why not talk about them here? Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I think they’re really good. Chip Griffin: We’re always looking for ideas. Might as well pick something that we actually did a little work on. Gini Dietrich: Right. For a change. Chip Griffin: For a change. Gini Dietrich: We’ve got like four weeks in a row where we’ve done a little work. Chip Griffin: I mean, this is, I… dear listeners, please do not get used to this. We are not going to, you know, have actual prepared thoughts in advance of every episode. We just, we cannot handle that. A lot of it just needs to be off the cuff with us reacting to whatever randomly comes to mind in the seconds before I hit record. Gini Dietrich: That’s right. Chip Griffin: But this week we can tap into a little bit more depth. Last week, I mean, last week we did a lot of research for episode 300. Gini Dietrich: We did. We spent like days on that. It was a year’s worth of content. Chip Griffin: We did research, we brought AI into it. We started reading through past, I mean Gini Dietrich: mm-hmm. Yep. Chip Griffin: It was, it was truly exhausting, so Gini Dietrich: it was exhausting. I’m still recovering. Chip Griffin: Fortunately this is work that was already done. We’re just retapping into it. So, those five words that we’re going to be talking about today are leadership, management, accountability, responsibility, and authority. And we’re really looking at this through the lens of management of your business. So there’s a lot of other things that have to do with agencies where we can come up with other words perhaps, or other context for these words. But this is really about how you manage the business, how you work with your team, how you work with clients, and all that sort of thing. And that was really what I was trying to get at here when I was trying to drill into these particular concepts. Gini Dietrich: I think the first two leadership and management are really good ones because I think we are all guilty of thinking that management is, oh, we get to boss people around and tell people what to do and, you know, go on about our days. And, I think we also confuse leadership and management. And so I think a good place to start is definitely there, which you did too, because it’s part one of your series. Chip Griffin: I did, I thought those were, yeah, those were big important concepts to get squared away before you get into some of the ones that, you know, later on in the list are, are a little bit more nitty gritty. And really about the functional aspect of it. When you’re thinking about leadership and management, you really have to think about it in my view in, in a couple of different ways and, leadership is more getting people who are willing and interested in following you somewhere. Right? It is, it is defining a path and convincing people, whether that’s prospects that you’re trying to get to become clients or team members who you’re getting to work together. It really is, it’s more about, you know, the ideas and the communication around it and the motivation of people that comes together. Management then becomes more about resources and, you know, and more of the, in the management of it to… management’s more about management. How’s that for…there is a limit how much we prepare for these things. It’s not like I have clear talking points. Gini Dietrich: I would say management’s more in weeds. So like, if I were thinking about it from my, my agency’s perspective. I tend to be more of the leader, so I’m vision, visionary, I’m setting the stage, I’m talking about where we’re going. And then Shelly, who is our chief operating Officer, she’s doing like standard operating procedures. She’s creating process, she’s creating procedures. She’s created an intranet where you get where you get out. Like that stuff to me, I would shoot myself in the head if I had to do that stuff. But she’s really, really good at it and she’s really good at creating the process. Like these are the things, this is how we do our work. And so she allows me to focus on what I’m good at, and I, and then, and she in turn gets to focus on what she’s good at. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And that, and that CEO-COO split is, is a good, you know, sort of simple way of thinking about the difference in leadership and management. It’s not a hundred percent sure, but it’s, it gets you most of the way there in, in how you think it through. I do think that almost all managers at every level need a little bit of both. Yeah, you can’t totally, even if you are a relatively junior manager. If you’ve got anybody reporting to you or you’re managing a project, you still need to have some of the leadership there in addition to the management. So, but they are, they’re really important things to have. They are different things, but you need to be, in order to be successful as an agency business, you need to have both of these in robust amounts within the business. Otherwise, you’ll be rudderless, you’ll be profitless, and you probably won’t be generating results for your clients. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I think it’s, I mean, I personally believe that you’re, you have strengths in one or the other. You can probably do both. Like I can manage the business. I don’t love it, so I’m not great at it. I procrastinate, I can do it. But that’s why I hired somebody to manage those kinds of things. Because I know how important it is. And, but if you can’t, if you don’t, like for many, many years I couldn’t afford to hire a COO. Right? And the business wasn’t big enough to have a COO, right? So what we did instead is we made it part of everybody’s job where I said, okay. As you’re doing this work, I need you to create a standard operating procedure. I need you to jot down the process. And some were great at it and some not so great at it. So we had some that were good and some weren’t. But I will tell you, AI today helps immensely with that. We use Scribe now, I think Scribe now, or Scribe how? One of the two. And it like creates the SOP for you while you do the work, so you just let it capture your screen. So there are lots of ways that you can do both. You can both be a manager and a leader, even if it’s not one of those is not a strength. Chip Griffin: Well look, and at some level we’re all managers, right? Sure. Even if we are a solo and we don’t have any clients or we are just writing a book or something like that. Yep. And just kind of doing it in isolation. Hard to do. But if you, even if you were that, you still need to have a level of management in the activity that you, yourself are doing. So, you know, none of us can give up on that completely. I think it’s really more thinking about the layers of management, and how deep you go. So, you know, there are people who are, you know, pretty good at what I would call executive management. You know, figuring out big picture, what are the, what are the general things that we need to be working on and, you know, providing the rails within which you work and operate. Then there are other people who can make the trains run on time. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: I am very much the former, not the latter. If you want someone to make the trains run on time, I’m way too all over the place with too many different ideas in order to do that effectively. And so, you know, and you have to understand as an individual and as a manager, what are your strengths in these areas? Because if you don’t understand that you are a better leader than manager, you don’t know what to shore up in terms of the team or what things to work on yourself or what safeguards you need to put into place to make sure that you’re not ignoring the important stuff. So like for me, since I’m not great at making trains run on time, I use a lot of software to try to make sure that I record all the little things and put the deadlines in so that I don’t sit there a week later and say, oh, right, I was supposed to file my taxes last week. I guess I should have done that. Right. So you’ve gotta have the systems in place to buffer yourself against the things that you’re not particularly good at to begin with. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Which I think is a really nice lead to accountability, which was your third word. Like we have to…it’s sort of like, you know, people will say to me all the time, gosh, I wish I was as disciplined as you are about exercise. The reason I’m as disciplined as I am is because I have accountability partners. Like if I, there are plenty of mornings where the alarm goes off and I just wanna roll over and go back to sleep for an hour and a half. But I have somebody counting on me, either my coach or somebody that’s waiting for me at the gym or whatever it happens to be. I have the accountability and that’s part of the reason I’m so, so disciplined. And I think we have to take that into our business as well. So even if you don’t have a team that can hold you accountable, there are plenty of resources. You know, there’s Slack communities, the Solo PR Pro community, the Spin Sucks community, the SAGA community on Slack. I think you can hire a coach. Like there are lots of things that you can do to hold yourself accountable. But I think that to your point, is a really good lead-in from leadership and management. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, the reason why I ended up writing about this over two weeks in my newsletter was not just because it was getting long. It was. Gini Dietrich: It was, sure. Chip Griffin: But, also because leadership and management really do fit together. But then the other three, accountability, responsibility, and authority come together, in important ways. And, and one of the things that I have found with a lot of agency owners, when I talk to them about their teams, they’ll ask me, you know, how can I hold my team more accountable for the results that I need for them? And it usually then evolves into a conversation about accountability, responsibility, and authority. Because you can’t really have accountability without the other two things. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: And so they, they all are very much interconnected. And if you want to achieve results, particularly with your team, you need to think about how you mix these together. Because look, I mean, employees. Sometimes I say that employees and clients are a little bit like children as far as how you have to coach them and get them to move in a particular direction. But they’re different from kids and, I mean, you can’t just take an employee and put ’em in timeout or send them to their room. I mean, that’s Gini Dietrich: Unfortunately not, no. Chip Griffin: You know, you can try it. It’s, it’s not gonna work out. Gini Dietrich: It’s probably not gonna work. Yeah. Chip Griffin: So honestly, it doesn’t work all that well with kids either. But, you know, sometimes it makes you feel better. You know, my kids are way too old to be sent to their rooms now, so. It is what it is. But when they were little, you, you kind of liked doing that occasionally at least, but you knew it was really never gonna solve anything. It just got them outta your hair for a bit. So, but with employees, you need to think about this because usually accountability is the last place that you go to in order to solve a team problem. You really need to look at responsibility and authority first. Because you can only be accountable if you’ve been given responsibility for something, right? Right. So you can’t go and hold an employee accountable for something that you never told them that they had to do to begin with. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: And that doesn’t mean you need to tell ’em every little detail, right? But you, they’ve got to understand that this is a task or a project for which they are responsible. And one of the things I always say to people, and I’m not original in this, but you can’t have more than one person who is truly responsible for a task or project. Because as soon as two people share responsibility equally, it ain’t gonna happen. It’s just human nature, everybody kind of assumes someone else will pick up the slack. Gini Dietrich: It’s like a group project. Yep. Chip Griffin: So you’ve gotta be clear who has responsibility for this, who is walking outta this meeting with responsibility to get it done. So you start there and then you can start thinking about accountability. But, only if when you give them responsibility, you also give them authority, because this one I see all the time. You assign an employee something, you wanna hold them accountable. Because well, I, I, I told Sally that Sally was responsible for getting this done. But you didn’t give Sally the authority to go and get the resources she needed or to give the approvals herself. You kept all of that to yourself, and so Sally wasn’t able to actually get the job done because Sally was too dependent upon you. So if you want to hold somebody accountable, you’ve got to give them responsibility and authority to get the job done. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, 100%. You know, one of the things that we do internally here is objectives and key results. And so the leadership team will develop, we develop the company ones as a group, and then they develop their team ones. And then they are responsible for having their teams fill in their own. And so that practice alone has been really great from the perspective of helping everybody understand what they’re accountable for. So even if you’re a team of two people, you can still do that, right? Like it’s, and you don’t have to use OKRs, you can use KPIs, you can use whatever kinds of goal setting you prefer. But the practice of setting the goal and helping everybody understand who’s responsible for what, I think is a, it does that. Then of course you have to execute, right? But that’s where the accountability and responsibility comes in. But I think going through the practice of building those goals together really helps build that accountability. So people know, okay, this is what I’m responsible for. This is what so-and-so’s responsible for. This is what happens if I don’t do my job. And they won’t be able to do their part of the job. So it kind of helps them understand how all of the trains work together. Chip Griffin: Absolutely. And as agency leaders and managers, we think about this in client terms all the time, right? We sit there and we say, well, you know, the client wants us to do these things, but they haven’t given us the ability to make decisions around this. Or they haven’t given us the appropriate budget for something. Or they want us to have an impact on sales, but we can’t even talk to the sales team or whatever it might be. So we think about this naturally. All the time with our clients, and we chafe against the restrictions that our clients put in place, but we don’t think twice about putting those same handcuffs on our own employees. And so we need to be thoughtful about that and say, look, if I wanna hold an employee accountable for profitability on something, or for results on a client project, or for leads that they’re generating for the agency, then I actually need to give them the responsibility and authority to do what they need to do in order to get that. Otherwise, I have no business holding them accountable for something that I haven’t given them the flexibility to achieve. Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. I think it’s just such a good practice in general, to think about that. And, you’re right, like the shoemaker’s children don’t have shoes. You know, we don’t, we don’t have great websites. We don’t have great content. We don’t have great thought leadership. We don’t do any planning for ourselves. We sort of just wait for the phone to ring, to drive new business. All of the things that we would never do for our clients, like we plan for our clients. We set goals, we measure results, we do all those things. That practice has to make it to your business as well, because if it doesn’t, you don’t have all of these things. You don’t have accountability and responsibility and leadership and management. You don’t have the ability to run a well-functioning, profitable business. You have to do those kinds of things just like you do for your clients. Chip Griffin: Well, and the thing is, if we adhere to these various guidelines that these five words bring to mind, it improves not just the business of the agency, but generally the lives of the agency owner. And as we all know, I’m obsessed with trying to make owners happy in what they do and not just yes, you know, sitting there and feeling tortured by their own business that they decided to create. And so a lot of these things get things off of your plate. It shares the responsibility and accountability across your team. But only if you’re willing to let go, you have to be willing to let go. And we talk all the time about the value in delegating things and all that. But, it really comes down to thinking about not just that I’ve delegated something, but that I’ve done it in a way that sets that team member up for success. And if you’re delegating responsibility and authority, that should allow you to have more freedom and to spend your time differently. Now, if you assign those things, but you’re not really giving it and you’re just micromanaging. What’s the point? That doesn’t help the employee. It doesn’t help you. It doesn’t help the business. So really think about these concepts and how you can internalize them to what the way that you are managing your business, and you’re more likely to see the results that you’re looking for, that your team wants, and ultimately that the clients want as well. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. You know, one of the things that I think is really important for agency owners to understand is that when you try to control everything, when you don’t delegate effectively, when you don’t give your team the authority and responsibility to do their jobs effectively, you are creating an environment that’s not fun to work in. It’s not gonna be fun for your team, and it’s not gonna be fun for you. And one of the things I think that’s really easy for agency owners to, to understand is to put themselves in the shoes. So let’s say that you’re working with a client and they’ve hired you because of your expertise, and you’re really, really good at website development, let’s say. Like really good at it. You understand how AI visibility works. You understand how that fits with SEO, you understand how that works with user experience and website design, like you’re one of the best at this. But the client keeps saying, no, I think you’re wrong, or I don’t wanna do it that way, or, and they don’t take your advice and they don’t use your expertise. They keep talking over you. Or they say like, well, I asked AI and it told me this, and so you’re wrong. How does that make you feel? It doesn’t feel good. That’s how your team feels when you don’t delegate and give them the authority and the responsibility that they deserve to be able to help you grow the business. That’s how they feel, and I think we can all put ourselves in those shoes to understand that doesn’t feel very good at all. So if you’ve hired the right people and they have an expertise to be able to help you grow the business, let them do their jobs. Chip Griffin: And, if they still can’t, then you need to look at a different team, right? Correct. I mean that, yes. You know, because when I talk with owners, a lot of times says, well, so and so isn’t capable of it. Well, who hired so and so? Right? I mean, you did. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: You made that decision. Mm-hmm. You can undo that decision. You can make a better decision next time. Mm-hmm. But you can’t sit here and say that you need to micromanage them because they’re not up to the task. Either they are and you can let go or they’re not, and you need to find a different solution. And usually, if an owner is honest with themselves and they sit down, more often than not, they realize that they can let go more than they thought. Again, we’ve said before it, it may be that they don’t do it exactly the same way that you would do it. It may not be as perfect as you would do it. Not that we’re saying you’re perfect, but you know, you may think you are. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: And so if, if those are things that, that are getting in your way, figure out how to move past them. Because you, you really have to focus on making sure that you’re getting good enough and not perfection, not identical to the way you do it. Because if you do, you’ll never be able to hire anybody and you’ll never be able to delegate and you’ll never be able to live these five words. Because they really, when you think about the list that I put together, it starts from sort of the highest level, the 30,000 foot, the leadership, getting people to follow you, all the way down to that core level of the delegation of authority to get things done across your team. And you really need all of those elements to come together. Yep. If you wanna be sane, happy, and get the results that you want. Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. Yes. So I know Jen will link to both parts of this. I thought it was really, really well done. So you can read that as an accompaniment and have it as a reminder. Just put it on a post-it. Put those five words on a post-it note, stick ’em to your screen. Chip Griffin: Perfect. Excellent. Well, I hopefully these five words, we gave you more than five words, but we gave you five words… Gini Dietrich: Okay. That’s enough. Yeah. Chip Griffin: Okay. My usual, tortured ending. So. With that, I will delegate the authority to all of you to get on with your days. And, the responsibility to that was live these five words and Okay. We’re, we’re just gonna stop. Okay. With that. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich Chip Griffin: and it depends.

April 2, 202624 min

300 episodes in: what’s changed, what hasn’t, and what we got wrong

Eight years and 300 episodes later, Chip and Gini take stock of what the Agency Leadership Podcast has actually been about and where their thinking has shifted since they sat down for lunch outside Wrigley Field and decided to start a show. Chip shares an AI-generated analysis of the 10 most common themes across 300 episodes. Gini distills them into four she considers non-negotiable: communication fixes most problems, know your numbers, focus on particular wins, and the owner sets the temperature. Chip adds that communication doesn’t just solve problems, it prevents them. Ironic, given that probably everyone listening is in the communications business. On what’s changed, Gini has moved from annual retainer-focused planning to quarterly reviews that constantly show results and surface what’s working. She also notes that her advice for navigating a tough business environment now mirrors what worked during the pandemic: find the project work, start with an assessment, and build trust before building a retainer. The biggest evolution for Chip is his position on AI. While he was skeptical a few years ago about the timeline, now he thinks agencies are under-emphasizing it. He and Gini disagree on AI’s limits. Gini believes critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and crisis work still require human judgment. Chip is less certain those guardrails will hold. What they do agree on: AI is turning everyone into a manager, and that puts a premium on skills that were already in short supply. The episode closes with a lightning round covering worst advice agencies still believe, best scary decisions, and prospect red flags including unreasonable expectations and unwillingness to discuss budget. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “Communication doesn’t just solve problems. It prevents a lot of problems. And the irony is, we are all in communications in some fashion or another — and yet we often do a very poor job of it ourselves.” Gini Dietrich: “AI is not going to replace you, but people who know how to use AI effectively will. Those are the things that you have to be thinking about — how do you use it to enhance the work that you’re doing for clients and train your team to do the same.” Chip Griffin: “It’s turning everybody into managers. Even if you were not a manager before, you are now being forced to manage the AI effectively as an employee. And it puts a premium on management skills, which we know is a large area of weakness for most small agencies in general, even before the era of AI.” Gini Dietrich: “I’ve evolved on some things — like growth from more clients to better clients. From hiring the best to building systems and process. Eight years ago if you told me I had to build process, I would not have liked it, but now I understand the importance and value.” Related The six biggest PR business mistakes I’ve made Don’t repeat my biggest mistakes as an agency owner View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. 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 it turns out it’s not just another episode, Gini Dietrich: it’s not! Chip Griffin: Of this podcast. Gini Dietrich: It’s very exciting! Chip Griffin: Through the magic of counting, we believe as best, best we can tell Gini Dietrich: We believe, we think Chip Griffin: According to our producer, Jen, that this is episode 300. And so we’re going with it. We’re gonna stamp it and say, this is the 300th episode of this podcast. Gini Dietrich: A big accomplishment. Remember we sat across from at a restaurant across from Wrigley Field and talked about doing this, and here we are. Chip Griffin: I, yeah, that was what, seven, eight years ago now? Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Pre pandemic, for sure. Chip Griffin: Long, long time ago. Yeah. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: I had hair back. No, I didn’t have hair back then. Gini Dietrich: No, you did not. Chip Griffin: Still bald, but, but yeah. Who, who would’ve imagined it would still be going Yeah. This many years later. I mean, it’s crazy. You know, we’re no FIR, you know, we’re not up to episode 4,722 or whatever, whatever Shel and Neville are up to. But, nevertheless, it is an accomplishment. And so we thought we would recognize this milestone and maybe do a little bit of reflection on those 300 episodes. Gini Dietrich: So we were joking with one another that this is probably the most prepared we’ve ever come for one of these episodes. We actually put some, Chip Griffin: I’m fairly certain it is the most prepared. We’ve actually exchanged a few emails. We did a little research. Gini Dietrich: Yes, yes, yes. Chip Griffin: We’ve got Claude involved with it. I mean, we’ve, we’ve put some effort into this one. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. So I think what we both were looking at is a couple of things. One, sort of what has shifted over 300 episodes, which is several years. Right. And we have had many things happen during that time, including a complete shutdown. Where many agencies, if… Didn’t go out of business, got very, very close, myself included. It was a rough time. So a lot has changed. And so we wanna talk about that. We wanna talk about sort of where our own thinking has shifted over the years, especially around AI and some certain things. And then at the end, we’ll do a lightning round. Chip Griffin: Excellent. Well, maybe we can start with some of the things that we’ve talked about a lot over the course of those 300 episodes and, and being, you know, lazy, efficient, whatever you wanna call it, I decided to ask my Microchip assistant, which is backed in part by Claude to assess the episodes that we’ve already done and find the common themes that we talk about a lot. And so there were 10 common themes, and I’ll run through them quickly and then maybe we can react to a few of them, but, not surprisingly, the first one is the importance of good communications. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: I think we do talk about that one a lot. Um, Understanding your financials, obviously we beat that one to death. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: One-to-one meetings, obviously. That is, that is my, Gini Dietrich: yep. Chip Griffin: My pet project to try to get every manager to have one-on-ones with every single one of their direct reports every week. Pricing and positioning, obviously that’s a common topic, not just for us, but everybody in this space. So that one’s not particularly surprising. It always depends, right? That is how we sign off. That should have been top of the list though. It should have been number one. That’s, that’s my biggest issue with, with this Microchip analysis that, it depends, it doesn’t prioritize at top of the list. Build to own, obviously something that I talk about a lot in various forms. Well, haven’t done a good job of always, you know, branding it as such, but focused on that. Talking about the agency owner modeling behavior and that everybody takes their cues. When we talk about agency culture, it’s all about what the, the owner themselves does. Mm-hmm. So, that is important. We talk about the, the idea of having some kind of focus and saying no to things. Not just doing everything that you could, serving every client that you could, but really having a plan. We talk about learning from mistakes. We’ve made a lot of ’em over the course of our careers, but we try to learn from them. And that’s one of the, the big benefits of this show is that we’re able to share those experiences. So hopefully you don’t repeat the same things that we’ve done wrong over the years. And finally, focusing on collaboration instead of competition, not viewing all other agencies and agency owners as the competition or worse, the enemy. And instead trying to figure out what we can all learn. From each other. So those were the key themes that, that were identified, that’s a pretty fair representation of the things that have come up, quite often. But I didn’t know if there were things there in particular that you wanted to react to or perhaps things that you thought of that our friend Claude may have overlooked. Gini Dietrich: No, I don’t think he, I don’t think our friend Claude overlooked anything. I think there are four things, four areas that, of those 10 that I think are incredibly important and those are, you know, even, even as agency owners, we may hate these things. They still are true, so. Communication fixes most problems. So, that transparency, being able to have conversations with your team and with your clients. You know, not being conflict avoidant. Knowing your numbers, of course. So understanding what your revenue versus your gross margin versus your net profit, net margin. And all of those numbers mean. Focusing on particular wins. So again, saying no to some things. And then the owner sets the temperature. So that your team and your clients react to the way that you move things and that you do things and the way you set boundaries of all that. So I think those are the four sort of, to me, big themes that we’ve focused on in the last 300 episodes. Chip Griffin: I would agree with that. And I think that communication doesn’t just solve problems. It prevents a lot of problems. Mm-hmm. And I think that the irony is, we’ve said this before, we are all in communications in some fashion or another, probably if we’re listening to this show, whether you are in PR or marketing or whatever, it’s all about communication. And yet we often do a very poor job of it ourselves and our teams don’t necessarily do a good job of it. And so, you know, we need to really double down and focus on that as much as possible because it will help us to avoid problems or as you say, solve problems. So, I’m glad that that did come out on the top of the list in all seriousness. And not, it depends because I think that that is almost everything that we discuss here, there is at least some element of communications to it. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s exactly right. And, you know, we’ve talked over the years about certain things like being able to, because you are having constant communication with your clients, being able to, you know, for lack of a better term, upsell and extend retainers and get more out of things. And I think right now we’re in, I mean, everybody knows the world is on fire and it’s not good. And I’ve been having lots of conversations with lots of agency owners. Mostly who are friends, not necessarily clients about how their businesses are taking off a big hit. And so I’m sort of repeating the same things that I recommended, and I think you probably are doing the same in 2020 when we all took big hits, which is find the project work, do things that you can do. You know, for, not a retainer, but like small things. So do an assessment first for $5,000 and then build that into some, you know, specific projects sprinkled throughout the year. And then maybe next year you build that into a retainer. But really being open to the idea that you’re not necessarily gonna be able to build on retainer business right now, but you can do the, that project work. And you know, people still need to communicate. People still need to market their businesses. You just have to find creative ways to be able to help them. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, and I think that that’s great advice at all times. Yeah. And, if we think back to the start of this conversation that we had back in 2018, there’s a lot of things that have taken place over the last eight years that we would not have predicted while we were sitting there. No, over that, that, that lovely lunch there. Outside of Wrigley Field. we would never have anticipated a shutdown due to a virus. Most of us would not have imagined a war as widespread as what we’re dealing with now and all of the other things that came along the way too. Those are just two of the biggest things in the last eight years. Yep. And so I think that, you know, always being willing to adapt and be agile and, you know, just talk things through and understand, you know, what’s on the minds of your team? What’s on the minds of your clients and prospects, and trying to find how you can relate to them as, as best as possible and, find ways to solve their challenges, even if it means adapting to the approach that you would typically take. Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. I think that’s yes. And, you know, I keep being, I keep thinking about the quarterly review that we like to do inside my business, which is every quarter you’re having conversations that are advancing the next quarter. Right. So we, where I think eight years ago we talked about annual planning and retainers and things like that. And now my own thinking has shifted from that to quarterly planning and ensuring that we continue and truth be told, that has, that shift has provided us so much more opportunity for growth and for building the relationship inside our clients’ organizations because we’re constantly showing results. We’re constantly showing what’s worked. We’re constantly showing what hasn’t worked. And we’re constantly making recommendations for shifting things so that we can continue to grow. That has provided a much bigger opportunity and for me that has been a big shift that I’ve made in the last eight years for sure. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And I think, you know, some things haven’t shifted in the last eight years, right? I mean, some of the things that, that we talk about, you know, do hold up. The format of the show itself has, has held up. We have not made any substantial changes despite all of the, the entreaties we’ve gotten to have guests and all, all of the ridiculous pitches that we get from people. Oh, so and so would be a great guest on your show. You know, I listen all the time. No, you don’t. Gini Dietrich: No, you don’t. No. Chip Griffin: 300 episodes in. Zero guests. Gini Dietrich: Never a guest. Chip Griffin: We have never brought a guest on this show to talk with us. So it hasn’t changed. It’s just the two of us and I think that works out well. So, Gini Dietrich: yep. It’s never changed. Chip Griffin: At least it does for us. And you know, if it happens to work for you as a listener, that’s great too. But as we’ve said before, we kind of do this show more for us than, than anything else. Gini Dietrich: I think that, you just a couple of weeks ago, you had an idea to use AI to respond to those pitches, and I think you should do that. Chip Griffin: Well, actually, I, I, I believe that, that, well, yes, that was one idea. The other idea I had was to respond in sort of bro like fashion to them. Well, actually no, the, you’re right, the AI was for the pitches. Then the other one I was gonna do though was for all these people who pitch on, you know, you can get 300 new leads, leads this month, you know, and I was gonna give the, the, you know, that’s awesome, bro. Or something like that. Forget what, what my, I, I had some line that seemed… Gini Dietrich: Yes, please do that. Chip Griffin: Wacky and cool at the time. Gini Dietrich: Yes, I like it. Chip Griffin: But I hate all of these and I just, my inbox is terrible full of these things. I know. So stop it. Gini Dietrich: Stop it is right. Yes. Chip Griffin: Since all of you people pitching this podcast listen all the time. Listen to me. Don’t do it. Gini Dietrich: Please do not pitch this podcast. Chip Griffin: So I don’t know, have I gotten crankier over 300 episodes? I’m not sure. Gini Dietrich: I don’t think you’ve gotten crankier, but you know, one of the things that has been fun for me to watch personally about you and what you’ve changed your mind on is artificial intelligence itself. Chip Griffin: Yeah. That is certainly an area where I have, I prefer to call it evolved. And, you know, I, as a technologist, I have always been enthusiastic about the concept of AI. I was, I was skeptical a couple of years ago about how fast it would really be able to take hold, and I thought that frankly, a lot of agencies were overemphasizing AI a couple of years ago and being too optimistic about where things would be near term. And now the pendulum has swung, in part because the technology has improved so much, right? I mean, yeah. If, if you look at the various models and you, you run the ones that were ever present two or three years ago. They are nothing like, Gini Dietrich: right. Chip Griffin: What we have with Claude and chat GPT and that today. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: And I was reminded of that recently because I installed a local LLM on one of my machines just to sort of play around with it. And it did the wacky hallucinations because one of the things I always like to do is, as most of us do, I ask for information about myself. And it completely invented an entire narrative about me that had no bearing on reality whatsoever. But it said it really confidently, and I mean, it, it had a lot of detail, but it was just totally made up. And I said, this doesn’t sound right. And it came back with, oh yeah, you’re right. I made that up. Okay. Okay. And this is one of the, I forget which, it was one of the Quinn models, I think. Wow. Oh no, it was, uh, no, it was the… one of the Google ones. But anyway, it doesn’t matter what it was. The point is that it experienced the same problems that we saw a few years ago. And if I was still seeing that today from Claude, I, I would not believe as I do now that agencies are actually under emphasizing the impact Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: Of AI. And we’re seeing it evolve at such a rapid pace that I think you really do need to be coming along with it and not continuing to fight it. Which I still see way too much of, in the agency industry. And I think that’s, that is something that, that really hasn’t changed over 300 years. Uh, 300 years. Gini Dietrich: 300 years. Geez. We are older than dirt. Chip Griffin: 300 episodes. I mean, if we, if we look back to 2018, there was a lot of resistance to change in the agency community. Mm-hmm. Back then. It’s just what the change is is has changed. But that general mindset, that has always worried me about the agency community, continues to be there and people getting too excited about the wrong kind of change. We had an episode recently where we mocked the holding companies for, you know, inventing subscriptions. So, you know, the, there are, there are things that have changed, there are things that haven’t changed, but AI is certainly at the top of my list for where my thinking has evolved over the years. Gini Dietrich: And I think you’re right. Like the, I mean, you know, since 2022 I have been all in on AI because I think it’s pretty phenomenal. And I think part of the challenge that we’re seeing right now is that people are being told that their jobs are going to be replaced. And agency owners and agency employees are being told by clients that their AI can do what they can do. And, and truthfully, it can, it can do your news releases, you can do your blog posts, it can do all of those things, right? And it’s actually pretty good. What it can’t do though is critical thinking and emotional intelligence and, you know, ethics and crisis and reputation and those kinds of things. So I believe that AI is not going to replace you, but people who know how to use AI effectively will. So those are the things that you have to be thinking about is how do you use it to enhance the work that you’re doing for clients and train your team to do the same. So that you are continuing to stay abreast and advanced versus getting replaced by an agent, an AI agent, in a year or two. Chip Griffin: See, I guess the pendulum has swung so far for me that I actually disagree with you on most of the things that you had on your list that AI can’t do, um, including the things that people tend to put at the top of their list. Uh, emotional intelligence. If you look at, I mean, there are a lot of people who are effectively using these chatbots as their therapist because it is good. Gini Dietrich: It’s so dangerous. Chip Griffin: Perhaps, however, that’s the reality, right? And so people are perceiving it to be more emotionally intelligent because it’s responding in a way that a lot of our, you know, human friends and acquaintances might not, for whatever reason, right? Because a lot of people, you know, even if you have good emotional intelligence, it’s different than how you actually communicate with somebody about that. Right? So I think that there are, there are a lot of areas where the AI, if not today, in the very near future, is going to be able to do it just as well as most of us in our jobs. And so we need to think about how do we do more? How do we apply that extra human bit on top of it? And I’m not intending to turn this into a whole AI show again. We’ve done a couple of those. I’m sure we’ll do quite a few more. But, you know, I, I think that the fundamentals remain. And when we think about the importance of communication, that is still a piece that at least for now, we have the human touch that we can apply to it, that the AI can’t. And so, you know, we want to make sure that we’re finding ways to weave that in. But a lot of the strategy and details, I mean, that… AI is absolutely coming for your job on that. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I don’t know if I necessarily agree at a strategic level. I think that the… I think that you’re right if the inputs that you’re, you are giving it are correct and strategic and smart, like I’ll give you a really good example. We finished the PESO Model certification a month ago. And it took me a really, it took me about six hours for every lesson and there were, there are 10 to 12 lessons in every module. So it was a significant amount of content creation and thinking for me. And I used AI for some of it. I used it to help me organize it and to help me outline and those kinds of things. But I did the actual work, right? Fast forward to today. I’m working on the recertification, so I took all of the scripts and videos from 2020. I took all of the scripts and videos from 2024 when we did a refresh, and then I took all the scripts and the videos from this new one and I put them all into a folder, and then I use Claude Cowork and I said, here’s what I’m trying to do. I want to show, because the 2026 version has changed so much. I don’t necessarily want people who got certified between 2020 and 2025 to have to go through the whole certification again. But they do have to understand what all these changes have. So I, I prompted it and I, it probably took me about 90 minutes to prompt it the way I wanted it. But the output, because it has so much content, is so good that it’s taking me about an hour a lesson now instead of six. Mm-hmm. So I agree with you that I think it can do those things, but I think it still needs us to provide the correct inputs to understand what kind of output we’re looking for, and really to understand strategy. Because if you don’t understand those things, it’s still gonna give you slop. Regardless. Chip Griffin: Right, right. I mean, effectively, as we alluded to on a recent show, it’s turning everybody into managers, right? Yes. So, even if you were not a manager before, you, now you are being forced to manage the AI effectively as an employee. And, so you need to understand how to do that. Yes. And so it makes, it puts a premium on management skills, which we know is a large area of weakness for most small agencies in general, even before the era of AI. So, before we run out of time, I know that you also had an idea for a, a lightning round. And as I said in our pre-show conversation, I mean that, that basically is what all of our shows are. It’s just a, it’s just a lightning round because we come up with a topic 30 seconds before we hit record. Gini Dietrich: Right, right. Chip Griffin: And neither you nor I have. Any idea, I don’t even know what my opening is going to be. Right. As is painfully obvious on some of the shows. I certainly don’t rehearse the closing out, because a number of those are really crash landings at best. So, let’s, let’s see. I know you did share these, uh, questions with me in advance, but I didn’t really have a chance to look at them. Gini Dietrich: Okay, good. So let’s let that’ll make it better then. Chip Griffin: Let’s see where we go with this. Gini Dietrich: All right. You ready? Sure. Worst, worst advice agencies still believe. Chip Griffin: That you need to grow by adding more clients. Gini Dietrich: Oh, I, I think the not tracking time one, like, everybody’s like, oh, we don’t track time. We don’t bill by the hour. Okay, don’t bill by the hour. But you still have to track time because otherwise you have no idea if you’re profitable by client, by employee. You still have to bill time. Um, best decision you ever made that felt scary at the time? Chip Griffin: Hiring my first employee. Gini Dietrich: Oh, I would agree with that. Yep. Totally agree with that one. A red flag you now spot instantly in prospects? Chip Griffin: Unreasonable expectations. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I’d say like, yeah. If they, and especially if they can’t answer the budget question. Bye. Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, to, to me it’s that with the expectations that just my experience has been you really, if, if someone comes in expecting something, it’s almost impossible to talk them back to a reasonable place. So if, if someone’s coming in with wild ideas, you’re gonna get me in the Wall Street Journal next week. Gini Dietrich: Okay. Chip Griffin: Unless they, they immediately capitulate as soon as you point it out. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: Probably not gonna work out. Gini Dietrich: No, that’s a good point. All right. And then aside from, this is the last one, aside from what we’ve already talked about with AI an “I was wrong” prediction from early episodes. Chip Griffin: I mean, usually I’m so right. It’s really, it’s really hard to think about what I might be wrong about. I mean, to be honest, AI is really the thing that jumps out for me where I’ve had a clear change of position. I’m not… off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything substantial that I’ve significantly changed. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I don’t think I’ve necessarily changed my mind, but I’ve evolved on some certain things like, you know, growth from more clients to better clients. From hiring the best to building systems and process, which, you know, eight years ago if you told me I had to build process, I would’ve been like, but now I, now I understand the, the importance and value in process. Chip Griffin: Yeah. Gini Dietrich: I still don’t wanna buy it, build it, but. Chip Griffin: Maybe outside of a lightning round, I can go back and look and, and find some things and we can have a future episode where we talk about, you know, other areas where we’ve evolved. Because I think, I think it can be interesting to look at not just what we’ve evolved on, but why. Sure. And oftentimes the why can reveal things. So maybe we’ve, we’ve come up with an idea for, you know, another 300 episodes by doing that. Gini Dietrich: Perfect. Another eight years. Chip Griffin: Another eight years. Man, I’m gonna be old. You of course will stay young. Gini Dietrich: No, of course. Yes. Chip Griffin: Check. Alright. So with that we’ll wrap up this 300th episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. We really appreciate all of you who take time to listen to every single one of those episodes. And please, if you’ve listened to all 300, please drop us a note. We would love to hear from you. Gini Dietrich: We would, yes. Yes. Chip Griffin: I kind of doubt that anyone has listened to all 300, but if you have, we would certainly like to hear from you. If you have ideas for other future episodes, we’re always looking for those as well. Particularly now ’cause we’ve done 300 of them. And so a lot of times we’ll search and say, oh, we already talked about that. Gini Dietrich: We do. Chip Griffin: But the beauty is it’s been over eight years. So we can talk about the same thing that we talked about eight years ago because, you know, a bunch of, you weren’t even agency owners eight years ago. Yep. So that’s, you probably didn’t hear us talk about it. So with that, I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And it depends.