Agency Leadership Podcast

Hosted by Chip Griffin and Gini Dietrich

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Aug 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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August 13, 202618 min

The audience has (and always will) matter most for PR and marketing leaders

Times change, but somehow the job hasn’t. In this episode, Chip and Gini dig into what’s stayed constant across their combined decades in PR and marketing, and why chasing the latest platform update is a losing game if you’ve lost sight of the fundamentals underneath it. The episode was sparked by a LinkedIn series from Doug Simon , who asked longtime PR pros what has remained constant in their careers. Gini was asked the question of whether the PESO Model still holds up, and her answer is that the four media types haven’t gone anywhere, and earned media’s third-party credibility now matters more to how LLMs learn. Chip extends the logic to SEO and its successors, advising to chase the people, not the algorithm or the platform. Other changes may also have less of an impact than you might think. Influencer marketing is the latest version of celebrity TV endorsements, but with a YouTube channel. The agency-client relationship continues to run on the same dynamics it did 70 or 80 years ago. Gini brings up the story about a UK agency reportedly running AI agents to pitch journalists undetected for eight months. Chip’s take is that just like with interns and inexperienced team members, there are well-managed AI agents as well as poorly managed ones. It’s the human factor that matters most. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “If you lose sight of the fundamentals, you can have all the technology in the world, and you’re still gonna have rubbish results.” Gini Dietrich: “If you create content for humans, you will win the SEO game. You will win the AEO, GEO game. You will win whatever comes next game.” Chip Griffin: “Chase the people. Don’t chase the algorithm.” Gini Dietrich: “Your job, especially as a communicator, is to protect reputation, build brand, and create thought leadership. That has not changed.” 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’m gonna have to try to rack my memory from way, way back, and as I get older, that, that distance gets longer and my memory gets poorer, so we’ll see how this works. Gini Dietrich: Ok- okay. Well, I have the same afflictions, so let’s see what happens. Chip Griffin: So we thought that this was, this was spurred by something that our friend Doug Simon did recently on LinkedIn where he did a video series and talked to a bunch of people who have been in the PR industry for a long time and asked a series of questions, one of which was, what has- Remained constant over the course of your career in PR. Obviously we talk a lot these days about everything that, that has changed, is changing. There’s no shortage of those things. I’ve talked about it here on the show, you know, how we started with fax machines and mailed press releases and things like that, that just kind of blows the mind of a lot of the younger listeners that we have. But, but even with all of that change and with everything that AI is doing to our industry today, there are a lot of things that have stayed constant. And I think that as we think about how we run our agencies, it’s important to remember the fundamentals that have remained the same no matter how much technology has changed in PR and marketing. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I mean, I think you’re right that the, probably the way that we do things has changed, but not the strategic reason. Like I say to people all the time that the reason you do your job has not changed. The strategy, the strategic reason behind it has not changed. The tools have changed, for sure, but your job, especially as a communicator, is to protect reputation, build brand, and create thought leadership. That has not changed. Yeah. The way that you go about it has changed, but not, not the actual doing of the job has changed. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, the tools have changed. The landscape certainly in media has changed. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yes. Chip Griffin: The landscape in terms of the public and where they go for information and where they receive messaging and all of that, obviously that has changed substantially over the 35 plus years that I’ve been in communications. But it is still about communicating the right message at the right time to the right people. Yeah. And building relationships with the people that you are trying to influence, whether that’s a member of the media or a member of the public or potential client or whomever. And if you remember those fundamentals, it helps you to figure out how to use all of these technologies for their greatest impact. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I mean, I had a convers- I was on Zoom with Fred Cook of former GolinHarris, now at Annenberg Center. I was on Zoom with him last week, and he’s like, “So has PESO changed?” And I was like, “No, because we still do those things, right?” Like, the way that we implement it today versus the way we implemented it in 2014 are completely different, for sure. But we still use earned media, we still use shared media, we still use owned media, we still use paid media. The way that we use it has changed, but we still use the four media types. And to your point, media has changed, so earned media has changed, like the, the recipient of our earned media has changed, but the outcome of third-party credibility is probably even more important today than it was back then because that’s how the LLMs learn too, is by citable information. So yes, the way that we go about it has changed, but the actual work itself, the outcome itself has not. Chip Griffin: Yeah, and I think the, the important thing to think about here is that, that ultimately all of these tools and publications and platforms are all designed to connect one human to another. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: And, and so you know, when you think about public relations, for example, it’s got relations right there in the title. And so you really need to think about how you are building those relationships between whoever the person is on your end and the person that you’re trying to reach. And, if you, if you take the humans out of this entirely, then you’re missing the plot, and you really need to be thinking about how do these tools and how do these techniques allow you to do more of that, to do it better, to do it at greater scale, all of those kinds of things, but not, not just, you know, chuck everything that you knew out the window, have the machines do everything on their own, for you. Gini Dietrich: No. No. Chip Griffin: Abandon proven approaches. None of those things make any sense. Gini Dietrich: No. Please do not do that because that has not changed. Like, the way I- we talked about this last week, like, AI is making us far more productive and far more efficient, but you still have to know how to, to your point, relate to other human beings. Are you creating content and engineering your visibility to show up in AI? For sure. But that’s also because human beings are using AI to get the answer, so you still have to build those relationships with other human beings. Chip Griffin: Yeah, and if you follow the fundamentals, then it allows you to evolve with whatever tools and technology- That’s right come along. It’s similar to what I’ve always said in terms of SEO in the old days and now AEO, GEO, which is chase the people. Don’t chase the algorithm. Yep. Don’t chase the platform. Yep. Chase the, the people because ultimately all of the tools are designed to do that anyway, right? Right. I mean, Google for years has been trying to figure out what is the user actually looking for and trying to deliver that in the results. And so if you are sitting there trying to say, “Hey, I need to figure out how to reach that same person,” you’ll probably be okay no matter how they change the algorithm. If you sit there and say, “I need to figure out what was the latest Google algorithm update, and what does that mean?” “How should I move things around on my page? What should I bold?” If you start thinking in those terms, you may win the short-term battle, but you will lose the war because you do not understand what you’re actually trying to do, and that has not changed over the course of our careers. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I mean, I’ve said for at least a decade, if not longer, that if you create content for humans, you will win the SEO game. You will win the AEO, GEO game. You will win whatever comes next game. Because human beings are still the ones that are purchasing your services. The robots are not. Chip Griffin: Right. Gini Dietrich: And so if you create content, if it’s whatever content it is, it’s earned media, it’s video, it’s audio, it’s written, whatever it happens to be, if that audience, number one audience is human beings, you will win all the other games. Chip Griffin: And look, even most of the things that we look at today as new, they aren’t really. They’re just, they- they’re packaged differently. I, you know- Right … we, we have all of this talk around influencers- Yes, yes … and the rise of influencers. Yes, yes. Which to me is one of the silliest things in the world. Not the influencers themselves, I mean, some of them can be silly. They’re certainly useful to us as communicators, marketers, et cetera. But that’s no different than three decades ago when we had celebrity endorsements. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: Right? The, it is just the modern-day equivalent of it, and we just define celebrity a little bit differently than we might have back, you know- Yep in the ’80s or ’90s, but ultimately it’s the same thing. It’s just they have a YouTube channel now or an Instagram account- Right … instead of, you know, you put them in a TV commercial or a print ad or something like that. But even back in the day, you had celebrity endorsers who were not truly celebrities. They were just someone known in their local community- Right … who you could throw in a newspaper ad and say- Yeah … you know, “Hey, you know, I believe in either this cause or this product or whatever.” So that has not changed. That continues to be exactly the same, just packaged differently. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I mean, when you think about earned media, and you know, we do a, a lot, a lot, a lot of work with universities because PESO model curriculum is in almost every university’s PR, communications, marketing, and some journalism programs. So we do a ton of work with universities, and I, one of the questions I get consistently from professors is, “How are you teaching earned media through PESO?” And we keep talking about traditional media is like, that used to be the thing, right? You would get The New York Times, you would get Oprah, you would get The Today Show. Like, those things don’t matter as much anymore because you have influencers or, local celebrities that have their Substack newsletters, they have their Medium newsletters. You can subscribe to those, you can pay for those just like you would the newspaper, and you get the information that you need. Chip Griffin: Yeah, and, so little technical glitch on my end. I think we’ll clean it up, in the edit. But if you noticed anything, it was just for some reason my home TV studio- … decided to shut itself off. The, the, the smart home devices here just decided that, nope, it was time to turn everything, everything off, so. Gini Dietrich: I was talking to a blank screen. I was like, “Should I keep going?” Chip Griffin: You know, but we just, we roll through these things … on the Agency Leadership podcast because the technology has changed- It is- … but glitches still happen. Glitches, right. I mean, you know, I, I, I remember back in the ’90s, you know, using dial-up internet to do work, and then, you know, someone actually calls your landline and knocks you offline in the middle of, you know- Yep trying to send an email or something. Yep. Yep. And you gotta figure, did it actually send? Did it not send? Yep. So, you know- Mm-hmm … technical glitches- There you go … that’s another thing that has remained constant- It’s still- … despite all the technology. Oh my gosh, it’s so funny. You know, the typewriters that I used to use at work, sometimes the ribbon would get snagged, and, you know, you’d have to unsnag the ribbon, right? So even non-electronic things still had issues. Broke your pencil, whatever. Gini Dietrich: As much as things have changed- … they still remain the same. Chip Griffin: They, they absolutely do. And, and I, so I think it’s part of our responsibility as agencies to work with our clients and help them to understand that the fundamentals have remained constant and will continue to remain constant. Because we wanna make sure that we’re taking advantage of everything that’s out there, but we also need to make sure that we are not overdoing it in one area or another because we’re losing sight of those fundamentals, nor are we either having our clients get scared or us get nervous about it and what it means for our businesses. Because if we follow those fundamentals, then we can continue to adapt, and take advantage of all of these technologies as we move forward. If you, if you focus on the technology first and just say, “Hey, I need to have an AI strategy.” No, you don’t. Gini Dietrich: No, you don’t. Chip Griffin: You absolutely do not need to have an AI strategy- Right or an influencer strategy or anything. Gini Dietrich: Totally agree. Yeah. Chip Griffin: You need to have a strategy that takes advantage of AI or influencers or whatever as appropriate. Yes. But your strategy should be rooted in those fundamentals because that’s how you get ahead. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And like I said at the start, I always say the reason that we do these things has not changed. The tools have changed, the way you go about it has changed, but the how or the why has not changed. So don’t get so wrapped up in, “Oh my gosh, now I’ve gotta figure out AI.” Yeah, you gotta figure out AI- Right … because it’s, it’s going to replace you if you don’t figure it out, and it’s actually really fun, so you should figure it out just from that perspective. But you don’t have to change your strategy. You don’t have to change, like, the things that you do to service clients- Right … because that has not changed. Chip Griffin: Right. Right. And, and I think that that’s a, that’s another thing that has remained constant is the relationship between agencies and clients. You know, we think all of this is changing in the world that we’re in, but it’s really not. The way that agencies and clients work together is the same today as it was 70 or 80 years ago, even before you and I were born, let alone started working in the industry. And so understanding how those relationships and dynamics come together and how you can partner most effectively. Sure, the actual nature of the relationships has changed because of the work that we’re doing, but those relationships still matter in the same way that they always did, and you still need to build the human component into it. We can’t allow the technology to overtake that. We need to make sure that we’re spending the time to get to know our clients. We need to make sure that we’re continuing, even in this remote world that we’re in, to find ways to have additional touchpoints, whether that’s through more frequent video calls to build the relationship or ideally in person whenever possible. Those things still matter, and we still need to try to figure out how to take advantage of them to have those strong business relationships in addition to the results-oriented relationships that we’re looking for. Gini Dietrich: So I’m gonna throw a little wrench in things- Okay … because I just read an article this morning that talked about how an agency out of the UK has created AI agents that are pitching media, and it took about eight months for a journalist to go, “Something doesn’t seem right,” and then started to investigate, and sure enough, the agency owner said, “Yeah, I mean, we’ve created these bots that are pitching the media.” He claims that there are real humans on the back end of it, um, that has not been proven yet. They, the, the investigative journalist said, “I think actually based on what I have here, that there aren’t real humans behind it.” But, you know, I think when, when we hear about AI taking our jobs, we hear these kinds of stories, and we get a little freaked out. Nobody’s happy about it. Every journalist who’s been pitched by these AI bots have come out and said, “This is not okay.” But I think that there are gonna be other experiments like this where you’re trying to use– or you’re trying to build an agency out of AI agents instead of human beings. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, I– what I would say to that is I think that there are probably countless examples that we’re not aware of where the, the AI did work on pitching the journalist and didn’t get called out, right? Because- Gini Dietrich: Right … Chip Griffin: by definition, you can only call out the ones you catch. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: So, I suspect there is a fair bit of this going on. I mean, part of the problem is that, that so much of it is done poorly. I mean- Right. Yes … my, my inbox is full of sales messaging that I’m fairly certain is, you know, whether it’s directly AI generated or AI assisted, it’s hard to tell for sure sometimes. Yeah, yeah. Because it might be entirely AI or it might just be poorly managed AI. But at the same time I’m certain I’m also being exposed to plenty of messages that are AI generated, and, I can’t tell because they are, they’re good at what they do. And I think we will absolutely see more of that. But ultimately, all of the – the AI doesn’t decide to do these things on its own, right? I mean- Fair. Yeah … at least as of now. Yeah, right. And so even in the- Yep … example that you shared, even if it’s just the owner who’s involved in having created this network, you still have the human at one end of this. Yeah. Whether they are managing every message or not, who knows? And, I’m not even sure that that’s necessary as long as they are well targeted and being actually truly genuinely helpful to the journalist on the other end by giving them something that is, you know, that fits with what they write about. I mean, part of the problem with AI is that so much of it is just poorly targeted. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I agree with that. Yeah. Chip Griffin: But that, that’s more on the humans who are sending them out there. Yeah, yep. It’s not on… The AI can do a great job if you give it the right context, the right direction, the right information. If you just say, “Hey, you know, go find journalists” … of course it’s gonna do poorly, right? It’s- But, but so would a human … Gini Dietrich: just like a young professional Chip Griffin: I mean, we’ve talked about this before. Gini Dietrich: Right. A young pro- Yeah … intern Chip Griffin: You bring an intern and you tell them, “Just start talking to journalists and, and get them to cover us,” and you don’t tell them what you do. You don’t tell them what the journalists cover. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, they’re gonna do awful. Yeah. You start giving context and the in- even the intern will do- Yeah … a good job with very little background, but you need to give them something, and the AI needs the same thing. But ultimately it’s still that human on one end and the human on the other end. And so I think that, that we, when we’re talking about fundamentals, that’s what I’m talking about. You need to sort of separate out all of the machinations in between. That can be done well, it can be done poorly, and that changes the outcome, but fundamentally you still have a human on both ends of that conversation. Even though we like to pretend it’s the AI doing it on its own, the AI is never- It’s not … doing it on its own. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Chip Griffin: At least, at least as of this recording. No. We, we don’t have- Gini Dietrich: Not right now, right. … Chip Griffin: AI that just wanders off and does its own thing. Gini Dietrich: This is why I always say please and thank you to my AI, just so that it remembers that I was kind to it. Chip Griffin: Yeah. Well, and, I mean, we can probably talk about this some other time, but I think the AI companies are doing themselves no service by trying to make it seem like the AI operates on its own, and when they say the, “The AI broke out of its constraints and, you know, hacked into another company,” baloney. I mean, come on. Like, just knock it off. And I don’t, from a communication standpoint, I guess, you know, they may think that that’s helping them to, No … to say, “We’re really powerful. You should use us.” That’s not really- That’s not … I don’t think what- Nope … what ultimately- Gini Dietrich: That’s not the message Chip Griffin: comes through. Gini Dietrich: Nope. That’s not the message. Chip Griffin: So, yeah. So it’s, you know, you need to focus on the fundamentals. And I think if, if you take nothing else away from this discussion it’s, is that the fundamentals don’t change, haven’t changed, remain constant, you know, going back to, I don’t know, Ben Franklin or earlier, you know? These are not things that are, you know, wild and innovative. The tools and techniques are, absolutely. And but to me, that’s the exciting bit, right? Right. You can figure out, if you know the fundamentals, then you can always take advantage of the latest tools and technology to do it better, to do it faster, to do it more effectively, whatever it may be. But if you lose sight of the fundamentals, you can have all the technology in the world, and you’re still gonna have rubbish results. Gini Dietrich: 100%, I totally agree. Yep. Strategy has not changed, tools have. Chip Griffin: So with that, I think we will stop beating this dead horse, and we can, we can move along. You can move along from listening to us today, and you’ll have to join us for the next episode where we’ll find something else to rant and rave about. Gini Dietrich: Yes, we will. Chip Griffin: ‘Cause that’s what we do. That’s what we do. At least that’s what I do. Gini Dietrich: That’s what we do. Chip Griffin: So with that, I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And it depends.

August 6, 202623 min

Managing “Shadow AI” at your agency

Most agency owners probably haven’t thought much about shadow AI (the name for when employees use their personal ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini accounts to do work). In fact, owners may be doing it as well. In this episode, Chip and Gini walk through what the risks are and how to respond without overreacting. The instinct to crack down is understandable but wrong. Employees are going to use their own tools regardless, often because personal accounts are better trained or more accessible than whatever the company has set up. The goal should be education, not elimination. Most employees don’t know that personal accounts default to feeding data into training sets, or that a single toggle can turn that off. That one fix alone is worth a conversation with your team. Vibe coding and a plain-language AI policy get discussed, in addition to educating your team. Gini’s team runs weekly micro-learning sessions to help people use AI as a thinking partner, not just a drafting tool. Both Chip and Gini advise that owners and employees who aren’t using AI meaningfully within the next year or two are putting their careers and businesses at risk. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “You’re probably not going to stamp it out. So at a minimum, you need to educate employees, because a lot of employees don’t realize the risks in what they’re doing.” Gini Dietrich: “I also think that shadow AI is one thing, but there are plenty of people who are not using it at all. And I was actually kind of shocked to find that in my own organization.” Chip Griffin: “We need to avoid the knee-jerk reaction when you hear an episode like this, shadow AI, oh my God, I need to shut this down. You cannot have that reaction.” Gini Dietrich: “The real value is that AI helps you operate at a completely different level.” Resources The Birthday Dirge 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 it’s appropriate that it suddenly got dark, in, in- Yeah. … in your office as we were trying to begin this recording- Mm-hmm … because we’re gonna be talking about being in the shadows. Gini Dietrich: Yes, we are. In the dark. But before we do that, happy birthday. Chip Griffin: Oh, thank you. Thank you. You’re welcome. I appreciate that. I thought maybe we’d escape that since- Nope … ’cause we were on hiatus during my actual- Nope … birthday month, so. Gini Dietrich: Nope. Ah, come on. Yeah. It was just a few days ago. Happy belated I guess. All right. Thank you. Especially by the time people hear this, but. Chip Griffin: Yeah. Well, nobody will really know, so. Gini Dietrich: I know. Chip Griffin: I, I, appreciate it, and I mostly appreciate that you’re not singing, so, Gini Dietrich: I can. Do you want me to? Chip Griffin: I do not. I- Okay, well- ‘Cause, ’cause isn’t, don’t you have to license “Happy Birthday,” I think? I think that’s- Gini Dietrich: Well, I have a different song. It’s a song that- Oh … the kids learned in third grade that we sing instead of “Happy Birthday.” Chip Griffin: Is, is this the dirge? Gini Dietrich: No. Chip Griffin: Oh. See, I like the birthday dirge. Gini Dietrich: I don’t know the birthday dirge. Chip Griffin: Oh, it, it, it’s, uh, it goes something like, you know, uh, another year closer to the grave or something. I mean, it’s very more… But, the- I wouldn’t- Our kids learned it, learned it at a kid’s party, you know, 20-some years ago. Oh, that’s so good. I’ll have to look it up and share it with you. It, or- I’ll look it, yeah. I’ll delete it … or maybe, maybe Jen can do that because, and maybe sh- b- maybe she can include a link to it, in, in the show notes, ’cause it is somewhat entertaining, but I, I don’t remember the lyrics, nor do I want to try to, to invent them or sing them even if I knew them. Gini Dietrich: All right, fine. Chip Griffin: But, no, the, the- Gini Dietrich: Maybe for my birthday. You have s- you have several months to, to learn it. You could sing it to me for my birthday. Chip Griffin: Well, more than several, but yes. Anywho, so moving on from that. We, are going to talk about the shadows, the deep, dark shadows of the PR world. No, we’re gonna be talking about, shadow AI, which is, in a lot of organizations, you have employees who are using their own ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whatever accounts to do work. They are not using corporate accounts. A lot of them do not understand the implications of it. The employees do not understand the implications. The employers do not understand the implications. And I’ve seen it, either bite people or potentially bite people of late, so I thought I would raise it as something that, that owners ought to be thinking about in the current environment. Gini Dietrich: I will tell you, not to get anyone in trouble, but almost every one of our clients, and they’re big clients, people do that. Could be, and they’re doing it from their personal devices. It could be because it’s blocked at work. It could be because what they have at work isn’t sufficient. It could be because CoWork is significantly better than, Copilot. It, like, there are lots of reasons, but people will full on pull out their phone or their iPad and do it on their personal device at work all the time. Chip Griffin: It is incredibly common, and, from my perspective and what I advise owners is that you’re probably not going to stamp it out. So at a minimum, you need to educate employees- Yep … because a lot of employees don’t realize the risks in what they’re doing, and they haven’t set up any kind of a, a process to make sure that they’re, you know, doing it as intelligently as possible at least, if they’re- Right … gonna use their own accounts. And, look, I, mean, I, don’t necessarily think that, that it’s awful for them to be doing this. I wouldn’t try to eliminate it. But you do need to educate them because a, a lot of times when I talk with rank and file employees of agencies, they don’t realize that, for example, that their personal accounts, by default, all of the data leaks out for training purposes. And it’s in many cases, depending on which tool you’re using, as simple as a toggle to make- Yep … sure that that information- Yep … does not go straight into the training sets- Yep … of these providers. And that’s the default setting on your corporate accounts if you’ve got them as an agency, but it is not the default on most personal accounts. And so just that one change can make a big difference. But I have yet to talk to any individual employee using their individual account who knows that that’s even something they can or should do. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I agree with you. I think that having just a really easy AI policy is the right way to go because I don’t– I think you’re right. I don’t think you’re gonna stamp it out. I mean, heck, I use my personal one for lots of stuff too. Mostly because I trained it before we had the corporate account, and I don’t wanna go back and retrain what I’ve already worked, what I’ve already created. So, but we just created a one-page, like, bullet points AI policy that says exactly what you said, like toggle it off. If you’re gonna be vibe coding, here’s what you need to be thinking about. You know, all of the things. I think it’s probably 12 bullet points. It’s not a huge lift, but it just helps them understand. And one of the things that we did is we spent some time building the cowork Instance for the organization, and it has, you know, our OKRs and our plan and our vision and, you know, all of the stuff, our brand kit, all of the stuff. So it’s easier for, my team now, it wasn’t six months ago, but now it’s easier for my team to use the company one because it has all of that stuff in there and it’s already been trained. Chip Griffin: Yep. Yeah, I mean, it’s, you know, so I think there’s, this is a multi-stepped process. You know, part of it is the policy, part of it is education. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: Part of it is you should have a standard corporate tool that you are using. It doesn’t mean that it’s the only one, but, it should be– If you do that, it will allow you to do a lot of the information sharing, skill sharing, things like that, that ensure the consistency across the organization and make sure that everybody doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel constantly. But I think the you brought up two things that I think are worth exploring more. One probably is a separate episode in addition to this, but the other, I think, makes sense within this context. The one to sort of put a pin in and come back to is your fear of moving from your personal one to the corporate one because of the lost, you know, memory and context and all of that kind of thing. And, I think that there is, I, I, think there’s a lack of knowledge in the agency community generally about how best to capture all of the, the knowledge and things that you’re developing alongside these AI tools and making it as portable as possible. So, you know, one of the things I’ve been focused on in recent months is really making sure that, that my second brain, if you will, in AI is portable across multiple tools. And so I’ve now built it so, for example, I have one brain that I share across both my Claude and ChatGPT accounts- Gini Dietrich: Yep. I do the same thing. Yep. Chip Griffin: … so that you have consistency, and, I think it’s worth sort of exploring that, maybe not in technical detail, but, you know, how you can share it amongst your own accounts, how you can share it more effectively with your colleagues and coworkers and that kind of thing. So I think that’s worth revisiting in more depth because I think there, particularly as we become more AI forward as agencies generally, that’s something that becomes increasingly valuable and increasingly important. But the, piece that, that I think really fits into this shadows discussion is the vibe coding, and we see a lot of agency employees doing vibe coding, which is fantastic. I am, I’m a huge advocate of it. I think that if you want to get ahead in professional services generally, in the agency world specifically, you need to learn how to do at least basic vibe coding. That said, I think people do not understand all of the risks and complexities associated with vibe coding. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: And, so, there are a lot of basics that, that agencies need to be thinking about here, and again, it comes into that education and training piece in working with employees, because most of them don’t understand if you mess something up and you are not doing version control or keeping backups, you can be, you know, really up a creek without a paddle. Yep … and yes, you can reconstruct it in some fashion oftentimes by going back in the conversation, but it’s not simple. And because most people who are doing vibe coding today do not have any previous programming experience, they don’t understand these concepts like version control and being able to roll back easily and, all of the things that geeks like me who’ve been coding since, you know, the early ’80s get and understand. And, and, that Git reference, by the way, was for those of you who do actually know your coding stuff- … because it’s a great repository tool that most of you who are doing vibe coding should be looking into because it- Yeah … is really helpful- Gini Dietrich: Yep … Chip Griffin: in terms of making sure that when you have an oopsie, you can solve it and fix it easily. But a lot of people if, if they’re doing this on their own devices, they may not even have just regular backups of this stuff because maybe they’re saving their regular agency work to a Dropbox account or OneDrive or whatever you’re using. But whatever they’ve set up to use with Coworker or Codex or whatever, they may not have that in one of those directories that is by default syncing to the cloud and getting updated. And so you wanna make sure that you’re helping them understand that that needs to be part of the process, because how awful would it be if you just lost all of this work that you had been doing? And so much of what you do with Coworker, Codex is device specific, and you cannot access anywhere else. I suspect that will change over time. I suspect that, that those will become, you know, more cloud-like, and we’ve already seen Claude, for example, merging the chat and cowork functions somewhat in their app. Yep … and, so we’ll see a place where I think you can just share it across devices, but right now it is frustratingly difficult for those of us with multiple devices to manage. I’ve got two PCs and a laptop and other and, and so I’ve actually written my own systems for converting the code so that it all is accessible elsewhere. But if you don’t know how to do these things, you could be in a real world of hurt if your computer crashes and you’ve got no backups. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I will say that, not that I speak from experience or anything, but it only has to happen to you once, and then you learn very quickly how to make all of that happen. Because you’re right, I, I was vibe- I love to vibe code. It’s one of my favorite things to do, but the very first time I did it, I didn’t know I was supposed to do version control or any of that stuff. Right. I didn’t know anything about Git. I didn’t know any of it. I do now. Chip Griffin: Yep. And look, that’s, how most of us learned the hard way in the olden days of writing this code. You’re like, “Oh, shoot, I wish I had had a copy of that.” Yeah. You know? And, in the old days, our backups were printouts, right? Because you- Right … there was no way… Like, when I did computer coding on a cassette tape, you know, there was no real way to make a copy of that easily, so, you know, we would just, you know, hit print, and, you know, on a little dot matrix printer we’d have a copy of the code so we could retype it if we absolutely had to. Gini Dietrich: That’s so funny. Ugh … Chip Griffin: not ideal. A lot easier to do things today. Gini Dietrich: Not ideal, no. Chip Griffin: but, you know, those are the kinds of things, and, if we’re all going to become programmers of a sort, we need to be thinking about that. We need to be thinking about, how do you properly test and maintain some of this stuff that we’re creating? Because it’s super easy to vibe code the first version of something. It’s a lot harder to handle the maintenance that’s required on it, you know, when connections to data sources break or technology- Yep … evolves- Yep. Yep … or those kinds of things. Yep. Most, of the people who are vibe coding don’t do anything in terms of security testing of the, the code that they’re writing. And, if that vibe coded thing ties into other systems, which many times they do, you may have created, an opening that you’re not aware of into your back-end systems that could be problematic. And so these are all things that we need to increase the level of education about so that our teams are at least thinking about these things. I’m not saying they’re gonna solve them all. They’re not gonna… We’re still gonna have issues that crop up. But we’ve got to be doing more to try to educate owners, employees, and everybody else involved in the process. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely. I really think that starting with an AI policy is the right thing to do. Don’t make it overly complicated. Like, when we started, we had this big, like, AI policy legal packet. And I was like, “This is way too much. Way too much.” Like, people are not going to absorb that. So I used my AI to dumb it down, for lack of a better term, and, you know, really to highlight the things, and then I went through myself and said, “Okay, great. These, this is a good start. Now I need to add this, this, and this,” just based on how I see people using it. So, I also think that shadow AI is one thing, but there are plenty of people who are not using it at all. And I was actually kind of shocked to find that in my own organization, like, really? O-Okay. So we’ve done a little bit of, you know, we do a, we do micro-learning sessions every week. So we’ve done a little bit of AI micro-learning just to show people, like, it’s not just for a blog post draft or helping you refine an email. Like, it can h- it could be a thinking partner. It can help you with these things. And so we’ve been doing some micro lessons on that too to just help them understand that this isn’t gonna take your job. We still need you to do your work. We still need your brains for all of this, but this will make you more effective and more efficient. Chip Griffin: Yeah. Although I, I, have taken to becoming much scarier, and I’m telling people it is gonna take their job if they are not using it effectively themselves. Gini Dietrich: If they don’t use it. No, I agree with that. Chip Griffin: Yeah. But, I agree with you. Yeah. There are, there are a lot of folks in the agency community who are not using AI beyond very rudimentary use. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: And, and I, I don’t think there are very many who aren’t using it at all, but there are a lot who are using it more like a, you know, a replacement for Google or something to, you know, give them a quick draft of a blog post or an email or something like that. And, you really need to be taking advantage of it at a much higher level if you want to be successful in really any kind of knowledge work moving forward. And- Yeah … and I think people have a relatively short window to get up to speed on this. I think we’re talking, you know, a year, two years tops. Gini Dietrich: If– Yeah, yeah. I think two years is being generous. Chip Griffin: And, I think if, if you are, if you are not, if a year from now you are not actively using AI every single day in a really intelligent way, I don’t know that you have a future. Gini Dietrich: I would agree with that. I would agree with that. And I think you have to use it, to your point, in a really intelligent way. I just answered, or I just had a conversation with a Forbes reporter who’s writing about, there’s a term for it… I can’t think of the term right now. There’s a term for you using it as a thinking partner, using AI as a thinking partner, and he was telling me that almost nobody does that, and I was like Really? Like, that’s the only thing I use it for is, you know, here’s what I’m thinking, poke some holes in it, play devil’s advocate, tell me, you know, what’s strong, what’s weak, what I need to think through more effectively. It has helped me with … I mean, I, I think I’ve mentioned before, I call it my co-CEO, and I’m like, “Okay, here’s today’s challenge. Here’s what I’m thinking. Here’s the documentation. Here’s the backup. Help me think this through.” And it’ll be like, “What about this, and what about that?” And I’ll say, “Well, no, I think you’re wrong about this,” and, “What about that?” And, like, we have ongoing conversations about things, and I don’t … From what he was saying, like, almost nobody uses it that way, and I think that is the real value because it helps you operate at a completely different level. Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, you’ve got … You have to, and, it, feels weird, but you have to treat these tools as if they are actual employees, consultants, whatever you wanna call them. And, it, it absolutely feels weird to anthropomorphize a chatbot. And, certainly there are ways to, to go way overboard, and y- you know, you hear these, you know- Gini Dietrich: You’re not gonna fall in love with it Chip Griffin: these really, really weird stories of, of what people have done. And, you can sort of … You know, the more time you spend with them, you s- you can kinda understand how it, you know, for the right personality, maybe it kind of veers down those- … creepy paths. I’m not encouraging that. No. I’m not encouraging that. Gini Dietrich: No, no. Chip Griffin: But, but you’re absolutely right. You have to be having meaningful conversations about the work that you do, your strategies. They are incredibly good at poking holes, incredibly good at helping you to think through things. I mean, I, have spent probably, I wouldn’t say an inordinate amount of time, but a lot of time having it challenge me. I have Claude interview me on a regular basis on different topics so that it can build its knowledge, because I’ve built a whole second brain operating system kind of thing. Yep, yep. I’ve had it mine through, and, maybe, this is another episode at some point where you and I can talk about some of the systems that we’ve put in place as examples, because I know from our previous conversations there’s some overlap, but also different ways that we do things. But you know, I, I’ve got 20-plus years of, a, a digital footprint, and AI is great at mining through that. And so I’ve had it do that so that it can, it knows more about me. And so when it pushes back, it pushes back with specific examples, and it will say, “Well, when you did this in, you know, 2007, you know, this was the decision you made. You know, why isn’t that relevant here?” Or things like that. And it’s weird at first, but, you’re ne- you wouldn’t even find an employee who could do that because none of them in, in all likelihood have been with you for 20 years. Yeah. And so having that available to you is something that you just should not be passing up, and we want to encourage our employees who probably don’t have a 20-year footprint like we do to be trying to find ways to do it, and we want to try to facilitate them using all of the tools at their disposal. So we certainly need to avoid the knee-jerk reaction when you hear an episode like this, shadow AI, oh my God, I need to shut this down. I can’t- No … I can’t have employees doing– You cannot have that reaction. Mm-mm. And you should not have, while you should have an AI policy, it should be simple- Yeah … and clean. We can’t go back to the early days of social media policies that, that organizations tried to put in place. And again, we’ve been around a long time, so we’ve seen this movie before. And some of the social media policies that people were putting in place 20 years ago were absolutely bonkers and unnecessary. And I fear that we’ll see some of the same thing on the AI front. Yes. And part of this, by the way, is, with all due respect to our lawyer friends, sorry, Sharon, don’t talk to your lawyer first about this. You can talk to your lawyer about it, but, lawyers are naturally risk-averse, right? And so if you, if you put this in the hands of your lawyer, particularly if it’s not someone like Sharon who has deep experience in the agency world, they’re gonna sit down and they’re gonna say, “Oh, you need to say no to this, and this, and this, and this.” And all of a sudden, nobody’s able to even use AI in a meaningful way. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, yeah. Chip Griffin: And so you, you’ve got to try to put reasonable safeguards in place, reasonable policies, but I think the most important is the education piece. Yes. If you educate people, they are much more likely to make the right decision. It’s not guaranteed, but it’s more likely, and right now we’re at a place where we’re not doing the right level of education of our teams. And part of that is because a lot of owners don’t actually know a lot of what we’re talking about. I mean, I think, you know, you and I- Yep … are certainly at the leading edge- Yep … for a lot of folks in the agency community. We need to get more people at that same level and let it flow through to their teams to make sure that we really are leveraging this technology for all that it can do. Because it, I mean, I, I have n- I have not been this enthusiastic about a piece of technology in the world of PR and communications at least since the beginning of the World Wide Web in the mid-’90s. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I agree with you. And, like, the– I know I’ve said this before, but the amount of work and the productivity that I’ve been able to achieve, I honestly don’t know how I did my job without it. It’s, it is, it’s next level. And you know, there are some weekends where I’m so excited about something that I’m working on, it might be vibe coding or something else, that I will literally sit in front of my computer all weekend and just, like, in the zone because I’m so excited about it. So I think that there’s a big opportunity here for you to explore and to understand and to change the way that you do your business, run your business in a really fun and effective way. Chip Griffin: Well, and that’s probably yet another ep- episode topic, going forward in, in trying to figure out how you invest your time in AI, because it is, it is just as easy to go down unproductive rabbit holes because- Yeah … they are fun. Sure. Right? And so I, I often find myself sitting there saying, “Do I really need to build this? Is this- … is this really helpful?” You know, I… and it, it, reminds me a little bit of, woodworking, which is something that I’ve done for- Yeah, yeah, yeah … for many, many years. But, like many woodworkers, I have probably built more things for my shop than I have to use in my house, right? So you, you spend so much time, you know, building workbenches and cabinets and jigs and all of that kind of stuff, which are all really cool, but at the end of the day, they’re not the things that you, you know, it’s not the furniture or the built-ins or whatever that you can use around the house. And so we need to be careful that we don’t get so enthusiastic, that we’re only building for that. So making those decisions about where does AI actually help and where is it, you know, kinda using it for the sake of using it, is, is something to be paying attention to as well. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, totally agree. I love it. I’m, I’m a big fan. Love, love, love it. Love. Chip Griffin: And so we’ve, after our summer hiatus, we sat here and we said, “You know, we should’ve been spending more time thinking of topics to come up with.” And, and so instead we kind of pick a random topic to go with, and we’ve come up with multiple episodes, for future discussions, so. Gini Dietrich: I wrote them all down too. So they’re in our document, so we have- Chip Griffin: Out of the corner of my eye, I can see that our shared document- … has been, been being updated. I, I cannot update while we’re talking because I have one of those really loud clickety-clack keyboards. And so it would, overwhelm the audio here. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Because I, I, like the noisiest possible keyboard you possibly can have. So. I love it. Anyway, on that note, I, I think it’s probably a good time to, wrap up. We can come out of the shadows with AI. Maybe it will, you know, the storm will pass, in Chicago, and it will get a little bit brighter for you in your office as well. It still seems like it- Gini Dietrich: It’s like nighttime … Chip Griffin: it must be pretty dark there. Yeah, crazy. If you’re, if you’re not watching us on video, and you really should watch us on video, because it is so compelling to see us and not just listen to us. But it, it definitely looks dark there. So on that note, we will wrap up here. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: You… Did you forget who you were? There was, there was a long pause there. Gini Dietrich: It’s because you, there’s a delay with you. Chip Griffin: Oh, okay. That’s good to know. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, yeah. Chip Griffin: On that note, it depends.

June 25, 202619 min

How can agency owners hold themselves accountable?

Most agency owners will tell you accountability is something they value, but fewer will realize they’re often the biggest obstacle to it. In this episode, Chip and Gini offer suggestions for how to stop being the bottleneck at your agency. Chip tells of his own recent experience where he missed putting out a newsletter after an emergency root canal. Even with Jen repeatedly pinging him, the decision of whether to get something done rested with him. Most employees won’t push back hard because they know who signs the paychecks. The exceptions are rare, and you can’t build your accountability system around them. Gini’s structural fix has been making “less founder dependence” an explicit OKR, tracked at every leadership meeting. When the goal shows up red on a dashboard, the visibility creates its own pressure. Chip thinks it’s less about any specific single system. AI has helped him stop some procrastination, but it’s also added new projects he’d never have attempted before. His takeaway is that you need to figure out what works for your specific wiring, and not rely on someone else’s approach. For external accountability, peers, coaches, and organizations like YPO or Vistage can help, particularly for big-picture questions you wouldn’t bring to your team. But formal advisory boards are another story. Both Chip and Gini are skeptical, since even paid corporate directors with legal obligations frequently fail at the oversight function. For owner-led agencies, the complexity almost never justifies the benefit. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “The reality is that I have told many employees over the years, ‘You need to hold me accountable for this or that.’ 95% of them won’t because they know you sign the paycheck.” Gini Dietrich: “I need people to say, ‘I need this from you. You’re the bottleneck. Here’s why, and here are the consequences.’ So then I can decide, okay, well, it’s not that big of a deal, or shoot, we don’t want that. Let’s get this done.” Chip Griffin: “You need to develop systems and processes and approaches that get you to that accountability. And what works for me may not work for Gini, and may not work for you.” Gini Dietrich: “In the Spin Sucks community, there’s a group of people that they’re each other’s accountability partners. I think they meet every two weeks, and they hold each other accountable. You can certainly have a coach, like what you do. You can join a membership organization like a YPO or a Vistage or something like that.” Related Five words every agency owner needs to understand Accountability as an agency leader Who holds you accountable when you’re the boss? 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, I need some accountability. Gini Dietrich: Okay. I’d be happy to hold you accountable. That’ll actually be fun for me. Chip Griffin: It is very difficult as a business owner to, to be truly accountable, and just before we started, I was relaying how I failed to get out a newsletter last week because I was, I was tied up catching up after an emergency root canal, and so I did not get a newsletter out, and there was nobody there yelling at me to tell me that I needed… Well, actually I take that back. Jen- Gini Dietrich: I was gonna say, I’m sure Jen, I think Jen holds you accountable … Chip Griffin: Jen asked me like 400 times, “Are we actually gonna get a newsletter out today? Are you gonna send me something? Will we have something?” Gini Dietrich: I’m sure that that’s true. Chip Griffin: But, it just, it really underscores that, that as the owner, ultimately you make the decisions, and it is very difficult to have proper accountability for what you do or what you don’t do. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. It’s super hard. You know, it’s funny because we talk internally all the time about how I’m the bottleneck. And people are like, “I really need you to review this,” but there’s also six direct reports, and I’m, and six people, different people saying, “I really need you to review this.” Things get bottlenecked. I just thought, “Ugh, I’ve got my own priorities as well.” So it’s a real challenge, and even when you have, to your point, even when you have people saying, “I need this, I need this, I need this,” you ultimately make the decision on what’s the priority and whether or not it gets done. Chip Griffin: Yeah. And it’s, you know, I, think a lot of times we’ll have employees and we’ll ask, them to hold us accountable, and sometimes that works, but most of the time it doesn’t. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Right. Chip Griffin: The, reality is that I have told many employees over the years, “You need to hold me accountable for this or that.” 95% of them won’t because they know you sign the paycheck. Gini Dietrich: Right. Yes. Chip Griffin: I have been blessed to occasionally have some in that 5% who were persistent and, they would, they would come camp out in my office and say, “You told me you would get me this answer by this time. I need it.” But that’s a very, very small percentage of the people that, that I have worked with at least, and I suspect that most owners have worked with. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I think there’s, I think it’s twofold. I think there is an opportunity for your team to manage up, and by doing that, I think exactly you’re, what you’re saying, like camp out in your office. Or I have one person on my leadership team who is phenomenal at coming to her one-to-one with everything she needs me to make a decision on. And if it’s a document that she needs me to review, she provides me the highlights, and she says, “These are the two areas I need you to, review, and I need it as soon as we hang up.” And then she gives me 15 or 20 minutes back at the end of the meeting so that I can review those things. And then if I don’t, like I’m the asshole, sorry, the jerk that didn’t do it because she gave me the time back and I did something else. So like she does a phenomenal job of managing up, and that’s how she does it. But I think you’re right that it has, it comes with, I think it comes with experience, I think it comes with other leadership roles that they’ve played, like all of the- and some confidence, you know, to be able to say to the owner or the person who signs the check, “Hey, you gotta focus on this.” Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, I think even though you know it, it may not be as effective as you would like it to be to have your employees holding you accountable, you still need to create a culture in which- Yes … it’s possible to do that- Yes … where, they are encouraged to do that, because that will at least provide some degree of accountability for your actions and follow through. Certainly more so than if you scare people off, if you make people, if you kinda flick people away and say, “No, no”- Yep … “stop bothering me about this.” Yep. If you do that, it’s gonna be really difficult to get any kind of sense of accountability with your team and, it really does help you to have that. We complain all the time about, you know, clients who are on our back about this or that, but it does help us to make sure that things get done. And, so as long as it’s not overbearing, there is a benefit to that. Internally, we often have challenges with that, particularly for things related to our own business as opposed to for clients or for prospects. But we need to try to, as best as possible, create that culture where everybody is willing to step up and say, “Hey, this needs to be done. You are the blocker.” And, if you don’t, if they don’t call you out on it, things are probably gonna slip through the cracks. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, for sure. And, I find that I reprioritize based on what I think is the most pressing, right? And for me, what might be pressing may not be the same as it might be for somebody else on the team. So I need people to say, “Listen, I know that you’ve got this and this and this, but I, this is, this will, is what will happen if I don’t get this from you by this date.” And then I can go, “Okay, let me look at everything and kind of rejigger based on, those kinds of things.” So I, like from an owner’s perspective, I need people to say, “I need this from you. You’re the bottleneck. Here’s why, and here’s what it, here are the consequences.” So then I can decide, okay, well, it’s not that big of a deal, or shoot, we don’t want that. Let’s get this done. Chip Griffin: Well, and, part of the accountability function for you as the, boss/owner is to identify, you know, where you are, where you need to be the bottleneck and where you don’t. Right. Right? If, you- Right. Part of this comes down to- Yes … reducing the amount of things that you need to be held- Gini Dietrich: Yep … Chip Griffin: accountable for. And- Yep … you know, we’ve talked in the past about the importance of delegation and, trusting your team and giving them more responsibility, but that is very closely related to the accountability question. So if you are either micromanaging or you are overpromising and saying, “Yeah, I can get to that tomorrow,” when you know you can’t get to it tomorrow, you need to, to- Gini Dietrich: You think you can because you think you have 36 hours in the day instead of 24. Chip Griffin: Fair. Fair. But you need to get better at, estimating how long it’s really gonna take to do things so that you’re in a position where the commitments that you are making, particularly to your team or to others, you can uphold. And so there is something realistic to hold you accountable for. Because if you say, “Look, well, I, you know, I can move this skyscraper tomorrow,” and you know you can’t, it’s hard to truly hold you accountable for it, right? Because- Sure … it was never gonna happen anyway. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: And so you need to be in a position where the things that you promise are, truly legitimately things that you can be held accountable for afterwards. Gini Dietrich: Tell you what we started doing this year, and it has worked extraordinarily well for me. And I know that not everybody wants to function this way, but this is how– this is one way that you could do it. We do objectives and key results, so OKRs. We– That’s the process that we follow internally. And one of the things we said at the beginning of this year is, “If we wanna reach our goals, one of our OKRs has to be less founder dependence.” And so as part of that, everything that’s in my brain has to come out. So we have to understand how Gini does work, how Gini delivers, like, how she has new business meetings, and the questions she asks, and how she does discovery calls. From that all the way through how she delivers, you know, keynotes to how she delivers content, to how she even produces content. And when she produces that content, what does the team need to do to be able to, like, all of the things, right? And so that has been front and center for the whole year and well, half of the year right now, but it will be for the rest of the year as well, is how are we depending less and less and less on Gini, the founder? And that’s through process, it’s through standard operating procedures, it’s through things that are written down. I do video tutorials, all sorts of things, so that by the end of the year, I’m less the bottleneck and more focused on the things that I need to be focused on as the leader of the organization. And because it’s an OKR, it’s in every single leadership team meeting. It’s up there in bright red because we haven’t met it yet, and we can see exactly where we’re scoring against it. And as somebody who likes to have green instead of red, I’m like, “Okay, let’s get this done.” So it works extraordinarily well for me. But, you know, there are other ways I think that you can think about how to let people hold you accountable in that same kind of way that work for you or your brain. Chip Griffin: Well, I, think you’ve really highlighted the key thing here, which is that, that you need to come up with a system that works for you. You are- Yes you are ultimately- Yes … the owner. You are the, most difficult person to hold accountable within your organization in all likelihood, and so you need to develop systems and processes and approaches that get you to that accountability. And, what works for me, will not work for Gini, will not work for you. You know, we all have different styles, different motivators. You know, for you it’s the, red versus green that everybody can see, and, you know, so that sort of, that follows sort of what I would call the name-and-shame approach, to accountability. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. It works. Chip Griffin: And that can work. You know, there are people who have the, you know, the simple discipline that if they’ve got a list, they’re just committed to getting through that list. Yep, yep. And there are some people who that, just seeing that unchecked item on the list is enough. And, certainly at a minimum it’s helpful for you to be tracking all the things that you are accountable for that you need to do so that, you know, you and perhaps your team can see, you know, what’s, outstanding. And, if you don’t have that, it’s really hard to be accountable, right? So you need to, have, in my view, no matter what your style is, some sort of a tracker so that you know what it is. Whether that’s a note card like I use for my daily stuff that’s the most important that needs to be done. I have a task manager for longer term stuff. You know, you might have a project management system. Maybe you’ve got a whiteboard. I don’t really care. Everybody kind of needs their system to make sure that they’re at least doing some basic level of tracking of the things that they need to be accountable for, otherwise your odds of success are, very, very low. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I totally agree with that. And I would say on the flip side, you know, getting the work complete, honestly and truly, and I know we’ve talked about AI to death, but I don’t know how I did my job without AI. Like, I look back on the last three or four years and I’m like, I don’t know how I did my job without it. Because it has stopped that procrastination that I have where I’ll get it done, but it will be the very last minute before the deadline, literally. And it, it has stopped that really bad habit of mine, because what I’ll do at the end of the day is I’ll say, “Okay, these are the three things I need to accomplish tomorrow,” and I will open those projects in Claude Cowork and I’ll say to it, “Here’s the project I need, here’s one project I need to complete tomorrow. Please break it down into bite-sized chunks.” And I do that with the three projects, with the three things I need to accomplish the next day, and I let it work overnight and do that for me. And then I get up the next morning, and it’s, there’s a list of like, “You have to do this first, then this, then this, then this.” And it’s significantly easier than me sitting here going, “Okay, if I start this, it’s gonna take me four hours, and I don’t have a four-hour block.” So it, it breaks it down into 15 or 30-minute chunks for me so that I can get through it. And I do that every single day before I shut my computer down. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, and, again, that, that works for you. For me, you know, AI has, has certainly helped in some areas. It’s made it worse in other areas because, you know, it allows me to, play with a lot of different ideas that, that I might- Gini Dietrich: Yeah, there’s that too. Sure Chip Griffin: … so, I’ve added more to my plate while I’m also becoming more efficient and effective at some of the things that were already there. So it, you know, for me, it probably comes out in the wash. Certainly there’s a lot of things that I, don’t procrastinate on in, in the same way that I used to. I think about a presentation I gave earlier today that I actually put notes together on a week ago because I was using AI, and I just- Gini Dietrich: Amazing Chip Griffin: I took a few minutes to just kind of stream of consciousness- Yeah … share some thoughts with Claude, and then it gave me an outline, so I actually had something ready to cook a week ago on that, that, you know, normally I would’ve been sitting down 15 minutes before the presentation- Gini Dietrich: Right. Yes. Chip Griffin: … and, starting to make some notes about, you know, what I might talk about. So it was, it was A, not last minute, and B, you know, Claude helped me find some things that I might have overlooked. It helped me to organize them into a more logical fashion. And so, you know, in 20 minutes of prep a week ago, I got farther than I would have in the same 20 minutes before the presentation today, which would have been my old style. At the same time, I’ve got a whole bunch of different projects that I’m playing with Claude with that I probably would never even have attempted, so net plus there- Gini Dietrich: Same. Yeah. Fair. Yes. Same Chip Griffin: but also it gets in the way of- … of some of the, basic daily stuff. So, you know, it’s a, it’s, a mixed bag. But, I think the important thing here is just trying to figure out what works for you, what works for your team, having conversations with them, because it’s, most of us are not very good at being, you know, fully self-accountable. We need some sort of forcing mechanism, and part of that is helping your team to understand how, can they best hold you accountable? Is it that red versus green on the screen? Is it by camping out with you in your office? Is it by using those one-to-ones to, to be the mechanism that gets thing- things done? What is it that will help you get your team in particular what they need? But not all of it can be done internally, right? So sometimes it’s helpful to have some sort of external accountability force. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yep. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are everything from, I, you know, in the Spin Sucks community, there’s a group of people that they’re their, each other’s accountability partners. I don’t know how well that works, but they meet, you know, on every, I think they meet every two weeks, and they hold each other accountable. You can certainly have a coach, like what you do. You can join a membership organization like a YPO or a Vistage or something like that. There are lots of opportunities, I think, for you to have accountability partners outside of work as well, outside of your office to help you with those things too. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I think having some sort of a, an external partner or partners, you know, whether that’s peers, whether that’s paid advisors, whatever, it certainly can help because, you know, I, think back to, you know, we used to have folks who, cleaned our house, and we would always clean up before they got here because you didn’t want them to see how messy you really were in real life. And, you know, and, this was, you know, really useful to us when we had little kids and, you know- Yeah … the house was, messy. Yep. But, you know, we would tidy it up quite a bit before the cleaners would come in for their, weekly cleaning. Mm. And so that, that was effectively the accountability for us not to let the whole place just, you know, go to hell- Yeah … in a hand basket. Gini Dietrich: Sure. Chip Griffin: And I think the same thing can happen whether it is, you know, a peer or, you know, your company attorney or accountant or a coach or whomever. There’s… You just don’t want to, let people see things deteriorating, and so there’s, a, value to having those typically in addition to whatever mechanisms you have internally, right? ‘Cause it, this works better for the big picture stuff. If you’re- Yeah … particularly if you’re, you know- Right … sitting with peers- Right … or something like that- Yeah … they’re not gonna help you with the accountability for the day-to-day tasks, but they can help you for the big picture stuff. Like, you know, I’m, I need to think about, you know, shifting my, my focus for the business, or I need to, think about our service offerings or those kinds of things. Gini Dietrich: I need to fill a pipeline. I need a new business process. All of those things, yeah. Chip Griffin: Right. Because some of these things may be things you don’t even wanna discuss with your team, right? Yeah. You know, particularly if it’s, you know, reshaping the business or something like that. That may be scary for a lot of your team to, to contemplate. Sure. They may not have the right skillsets to help you navigate that, and so having other people that can hold you accountable so that, you know, when you’re doing your every other week call or monthly call or whatever you might do with a peer, you, know, you have something to update them on, and it’s not just like, “Yep, pretty much the same as last month.I don’t really have anything new to report here.” Gini Dietrich: There we go. Nothing else. Yeah, right. Chip Griffin: You know, so, there, there is real benefit to having those, you know, external mechanisms in, some fashion to do that same naming and shaming that we talked about before, to, hold you accountable. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, for sure. Chip Griffin: Now, there’s, there are always the people that I talk to who are like, “Okay, well, we need an advisory board or maybe a proper board or those kinds of things, a more formal accountability structure.” I’ll be honest, I think in general, those do not work for- Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I agree with that … Chip Griffin: for most, small agencies. Yeah. Frankly, it doesn’t work for most big agencies either. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I totally agree with that. Chip Griffin: I, I’m candidly skeptical of boards even for huge organizations in many cases because having participated in and around many of them over the years, the vast majority are not as independent as they are made to be. And, so therefore, they don’t necessarily serve the function that you would expect them to. And we see this all the time when there are, you know, big company scandals around CEOs and boards not providing proper oversight. So I, think even, in those cases where directors are paid and they have, you know, actual legal responsibilities, they often fall down on their accountability roles. I think really hard for most small agencies- Yeah … uh, to do that. I, I totally agree with that. Certainly, advisory boards I think are- Yeah. I mean, there’s a little bit of the name and shame in that, right? You know, if you have to, update them on certain things. But, even then, I, think that works better in one-on-one type relationships as opposed to an advisory board. And a proper board just adds complexity to your business that- Gini Dietrich: That you don’t need … Chip Griffin: that probably is not necessary and- Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely not … Chip Griffin: And if you’re gonna create a proper board, by all means, talk to a lawyer and an accountant before you do it because there are other issues that pop up as soon as you start adding those structures in. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I totally agree with that 100%. Chip Griffin: But I think the, you know, really the, bottom line here is that, you know, for your business to succeed, you do need to be held accountable in some fashion for your actions. It’s really hard to do it yourself, so you need to try to find whatever tools will work best to get you as close to that as possible. Understanding that at the end of the day, it is still your business. If you want to let something drop, if you want to ignore something- Gini Dietrich: You can … Chip Griffin: you can. Yep. Right? So, there does have to be- Yeah, absolutely … some degree of, sense of- Yep … sense of, of self-accountability, but you need tools to help you get there better because left only to your own devices, I, know for me at least, I, would let a lot of things slide. Not just the weekly newsletter. Gini Dietrich: Sure, yep. Well, the weekly newsletter will get out. It’ll just be late. Chip Griffin: It’ll get out. Maybe next week. Gini Dietrich: Okay. Chip Griffin: Maybe this week. Who knows? But- Gini Dietrich: That’s true … Chip Griffin: we get it out as often as, we can. We’re a small operation, you know? And I am definitely, definitely the roadblock on the weekly newsletter. Jen always has her part. I love it. She’s al- The weekly roundup is always on time. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: The rest of it, kinda hit or miss. Gini Dietrich: I understand. Chip Griffin: So with that, we will wrap up this episode of, the Agency Leadership Podcast. Maybe it’ll be in this week’s newsletter, maybe it’ll be in next week’s newsletter. I don’t know. It’ll be in a newsletter at some point. And before it goes in the newsletter, it’s on the website, so you can always find it there. Anyway, on that note, we’ll wrap this one up. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And it depends.

June 18, 202616 min

In the age of AI, people skills matter more than ever

You’re using AI to handle more of the work that your team used to do. That’s exactly why the human side of the business has become a competitive advantage. In this episode, Chip and Gini make the case that as AI slop floods everyone’s inbox and feeds, the bar for genuine human interaction has dropped so low that clearing it will make you stand out. Demonstrating real experience and expertise in conversation — not just in content — is where agencies will win. That starts with having actual conversations. Chip argues that meetings have become more valuable, not less, because you can’t fake a real-time interaction the way you can a written deliverable. And Gini adds that it extends to one-on-one meetings with your team, which can be used to get the specific decisions needed from you. Written content is increasingly hard to trust, and Chip admits even he can’t reliably tell his own writing from AI output. Video helps close that gap for now. So does the handwritten note, which Chip still sends to podcast guests when he can track down an address. He jokes that the illegibility is proof of authenticity. In person beats everything. Chip pushes agency owners to budget for it deliberately, with clients, prospects, and remote team members alike. Gini mentions the Augusta Rule as one way to offset some of those costs, though both are quick to say talk to your accountant before you try to benefit from it. Key takeaways Chip Griffin: “In the age of AI, meetings are even more valuable than they were before because you can’t fake this kind of interaction.” Gini Dietrich: “The more time you can spend with a client or with a prospect really understanding their business, the way that they operate day to day, their pain points — those are the kinds of conversations that are gonna make you smarter.” Chip Griffin: “When you hit that inevitable rough patch somewhere down the road, and we all hit rough patches with our clients at one point or another, it gives you that oftentimes reservoir of goodwill that you can draw on because you made that human connection.” Gini Dietrich: “My day-to-day contact there became one of my closest friends. She’s one of my closest friends today, even though we haven’t worked together in 20 years, and the reason being is that we got together in person all the time.” 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’re, we’re people people. We’re- Gini Dietrich: We’re people people? Chip Griffin: I’m a people person, so that make us people people. People- People … people. We’ll just keep saying the word people. But in all seriousness, the age of AI, everything seems to be impersonal, so that opens the door to be more friendly to actual people, to be more personable. And so I think we can talk about how we can set ourselves apart as agencies, as leaders in this age where the tech seems to do almost everything for us. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. You know, it’s funny that this conversation is happening right now because I’m coming to this conversation straight from our bimonthly learning session internally. And one of the things that we talked about today was, you know, how to use AI, our critical thinking skills, but also how to use questioning and probing with it- new business prospects and with clients to be able to uncover the real problems of what they’re, the real pain points of what they’re facing versus just the surface level, “I have a measurement problem,” kinds of things. And it’s, it’s definitely not something that you can rely on AI for. You have to actually use your people skills to be able to do that kind of work, and that’s what we spent about an hour going through internally today. Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s so many more opportunities now to leverage the human connection piece with your clients, with your prospects, with your team because so much of what they’re seeing is AI slop. Is technology-driven. And, and whether that’s the pitches that we get in our inbox, and you sit there and you’re like, “I know AI generated this and sent it to me,” and all that. And so trying to find ways where you can break through and make a human relatable interaction with somebody and provide real human insight in those conversations gives you the opportunity to do things that, you know, a couple years ago nobody would’ve paid attention. Now they do. Gini Dietrich: Right. Right. Yeah. You know, one of the things I always talk about is, especially with content, and I think this applies here as well, is demonstrating your experience and expertise because nobody else can do that. And I think if, as you’re thinking about those human relations and the people skills and actually interacting with actual human beings, where you can demonstrate experience and expertise is really what’s going to set you apart in all of those conversations. Because nobody else has your experience or expertise. You know, they may have some of the similar experience, and they may have similar expertise, but nobody does it exactly the same way that you do. And I think being able to demonstrate that in your conversations is where you will win every time. Chip Griffin: Well, I think the key is having actual conversations. Gini Dietrich: Fair. Start there. Chip Griffin: I was talking with a leader today who said, “Look, I just, I don’t even have time to read half the stuff that comes in, even from my direct reports. And so for me, the best way to interact with all of my direct reports is through actual conversations, either in person or by video call because that’s, that’s the only way I have an opportunity to focus on it.” And so, you know, I, I know that we all are of the mindset, geez, you know, we don’t want to be meeting to death and all of that, but I would argue that in the age of AI, meetings are even more valuable than they were before because you can’t fake this kind of interaction. Gini Dietrich: Right. Chip Griffin: If you’re engaging with somebody on Zoom or Teams, I mean, sure, you could have one of those AI apps that, that, you know, the kids are apparently using to interview these days where it puts the answers up on the screen or whatever. I don’t know. But the reality is nobody’s really doing that that I know of, in the agency and client world. So, you know, it’s reasonable to assume that you are actually being yourself when you are communicating with a client, prospect, or team member. And so take advantage of those opportunities. Don’t say, “Well, this could’ve been an email.” Well, yeah, it probably could’ve been, but people are gonna think that was generated by AI. So, you know, don’t meeting yourself to death, but certainly be more open to meetings than you might’ve been five years ago. Gini Dietrich: And I would add to that, that I think the person you mentioned a few minutes ago, I think that’s exactly right. You know, at, I mean, as my agency grows and as we get bigger and, and like the amount of stuff that comes at me every day is impossible to keep up with, and the meetings, especially the one-to-one meetings that I have with my team that are most effective are the ones that they say, “I need this decision, this decision, and this decision,” and then they walk me through so that I’m not having to review decks. I’m not having to review documents. They walk me through what they’re doing. They walk me through their problem-solving, and they walk me through the decisions that they need from me to be able to move forward. Otherwise, it’s gonna sit on my to-do list for two or three weeks when they can use a one-to-one really effectively that way. So I think you’re absolutely right. You don’t necessarily have to have more meetings. You just need to use them more effectively. Chip Griffin: Right. And I mean, even before the age of AI, I always told all my direct reports, “Use those one-on-one meetings to just get every answer you need from me.” Yep. It, it’s the best way… you’ve got me focused. Take advantage of that. Absolutely. Don’t walk away saying, “Geez, I should’ve asked him this.” If you can get the answer, get the answer. And I think we can, we can do that, but it’s also your opportunity to show that you’ve actually got the knowledge yourself in these conversations. You’re not relying on AI to spoon-feed it all to you because, I mean, let’s face it, you know, we’ve all come to distrust the content we see from almost everybody- Mm-hmm … and say, “Well geez, is that really theirs or did that come from AI?” And people are, they’re trying to say, “Oh, well, I can identify the AI.” You can’t. I guarantee you can’t. I can’t tell the difference between my writing and AI writing unless I do a forensic analysis and go back to figure out who wrote the first draft of something. Yeah. And I think that, I mean, honestly, I think the people who have the toughest time with that are the people who, you know, were prolific writers before because prolific writers tended to write in a certain way, which is what the LLM’s all trained on. So, you know, those of us who were professional writers … we used a lot of em dashes. That taught the LLMs, “Use em dashes.” Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: Now, you use an em dash, you must be using AI. Yeah. Baloney. Baloney. Gini Dietrich: Baloney. I still use an em dash, and I will die on that hill because I am not going to stop. Chip Griffin: No. And, that’s the human style that we used to be able to express in writing. I think it’s becoming increasingly difficult to truly express yourself in written form, in a way that is fully trusted by folks. And so I think the, you know, for now at least, there is also an opportunity to do more video in your content creation. Because while, yes, you can fake AI, and that’s getting really good, to be honest with you, the avatars you can create and, and I could create it as if this show was me talking, and nobody would be any the wiser. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: It’s still rare that that’s happening today. Right. So for now, you have that opportunity to make that human person-to-person connection through video, and so I’m encouraging everybody to do more video. Maybe not instead of the written, but at least in conjunction with it, because it helps to show that you’re putting these thoughts and ideas into your own voice and not just, you know, generating something with Claude or ChatGPT and shipping it without a thought. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And in person, if you can do it in person, I would recommend that as well. Chip Griffin: Oh, in person’s even better. Gini Dietrich: Like, yeah. Like, I mean, I- absolutely, because- Chip Griffin: ‘Cause you really can’t fake it in person, at least not yet. Gini Dietrich: You definitely cannot fake it in person. Chip Griffin: I mean, we, we don’t have convincing holograms out there that someone can’t tell is a hologram. Not yet. Not yet. Gini Dietrich: Not yet. I am very much looking forward to that, but not yet. Chip Griffin: Well, I mean, I, I do believe- Mm-hmm … that the world needs more of us out there physically. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: I mean, we could take the Chip and Gini Show on the road- Gini Dietrich: We could … Chip Griffin: without having to, to leave anywhere. Just have the AI do it all for us. Gini Dietrich: Fantastic. I love it. Yeah. We’ll just be like Princess Leia and we’ll beam in. I love it. Let’s do it. I think that’s fantastic. Chip Griffin: Ah, yes. But I mean, I think there are other ways that you can make those personal connections. You know, one of the things that I’ve done for a number of years now is I’ve done handwritten notes to people on a weekly basis. Not everybody every week, obviously, but you know- Gini Dietrich: I’ve never gotten a handwritten note from you. Chip Griffin: Uh, I think you did, like, at the very start of this show, I think. I believe I did, but I would have to go back and- Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think you might be right. Okay, I take it back … Chip Griffin: pretty, pretty sure that you did. I- All right you know, I, I try not to overdo it because at some point it- Fine … it gets cheapened. But, generally speaking, when I have a podcast guest on, for example, I send them a handwritten note after the episode goes out, assuming I have their address. I mean, that’s obviously a challenge in some cases. Sure. And it gets a little creepy when you start asking people for their addresses sometimes. So you gotta … It’s, it’s not as easy as it once was, and sending something to a business address- Right … doesn’t necessarily get there anymore. Yeah, yeah. But when you can get an address to send them a personal handwritten note, it stands out today ’cause nobody gets any mail. Yep. Nobody sees things that aren’t electronic, and even though, in my case, nobody can read my handwriting, but they still know that I put the thought into it. That’s right. Yep. And the fact that they can’t read it tells them it’s real, right? Because if I paid one of the services, ’cause you can pay services that will, you know- Gini Dietrich: To type it out, yeah Chip Griffin: well, no, will do a fake handwritten- Gini Dietrich: Oh, yeah, yeah … Chip Griffin: thing. But it’s computer generated, so it’s, it’s fully legible. Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Chip Griffin: There’s no way anybody would pay for what I send. I mean, it’s just, it’s … I mean, I can’t read half of what I write. And I try. I, I do try, but I just have horrible, horrible penmanship. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think that you’re right. Any way that we can create the human-to-human interaction, and lots, there are lots of tools available today that make it easy for us, that’s gonna be, that’s, that is going to set us apart. And like I said to my team earlier today, the more time you can spend with a client or with a prospect really understanding their business, the way that they operate day to day, their pain points, the business’ pain points, those are the kinds of conversations that are gonna make you smarter. And if you use AI, you take that transcript and you dump it in there and say, “These are the kinds of things I’m thinking about. Can you poke some holes in it or tell me what I’m missing?” For sure you can do that, but do that after the conversation so that you, you understand, you can demonstrate your experience and your expertise and really have that human-to-human interaction. Chip Griffin: Well, and, leaning into something you said before- Look for those opportunities where you can get together with people in person. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Chip Griffin: And so again, I think the value of that has been elevated. It’s always been important and useful to, to meet with clients, prospects, team members in person, but I think it’s even more valuable today because, you know, we, as we talked about, you can’t fake that kind of interaction. Technology isn’t doing it for you. But it also allows you to elevate yourself over other people they may be interacting with, whether that’s a prospect looking at different firms, or whether that’s an employee who’s like, “Well, I, I feel disconnected ’cause we’re remote.” I mean, we, we talk about the importance of if you’re running a remote agency, which many of you are, you need to have regular in-person get-togethers, and you need to have budget to get people to travel. If they’re not all local, you still need to bring them in because those human interactions that you have by getting together, meeting in person, sharing a meal, sharing a coffee, those are all things that allow you to strengthen the connection and really set yourself apart in the age of AI. Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and I think you said something really, really important, which is set the budget. So as you’re budgeting – granted, I know not everybody budgets every year, but you should be doing that. As you’re doing that, set some budget aside for these kinds of things. And I will tell you, and certainly I am not an accountant, I am not a finance professional, but in many cases, you can… Even if you host that in your home, something like that in your home, not have people stay there, but host, like, strategy planning meetings or things like that in your home, you can deduct some of that from your taxes. So you can… There’s, there are ways that you can do it so it’s not actually costing you money on top of, like, it’s something that’s deductible. So, you know, talk to your accountant about that, but there are some things that you can do to offset some of those costs, too. Chip Griffin: Yeah, it’s, you’re talking about the Augusta rule. So when you talk with your accountant, ask about the Augusta rule. It is something that is potentially useful, but please, dear God, do talk to your accountant before you do this- Gini Dietrich: Yes, please. Please. … Chip Griffin: Because I’ve talked with some folks, they see someone online say, “Oh, you should use the Augusta rule,” and they’re like, “Oh, cool. Well, I’ll just do…” No, there’s actual proper steps that you have to go through to prove that it’s a legitimate expense, to prove the amount and all of that kind of stuff. So, so please, do make sure that, because it is, that is one of the more complicated areas of tax law, and so you really wanna make sure that you’re getting that one correct so that- Gini Dietrich: Yeah, just- … Chip Griffin: they don’t come in and whack you for- Gini Dietrich: Take our advice to, take our advice to look into it. Yeah. Do not take our advice to just implement it. Chip Griffin: Right. But regardless of how you go about getting together in person, the important thing, at least for this episode, is that you do it, because that does, it, it strengthens that human connection, which pays all sorts of dividends. I mean, even with clients, getting together in person, it, it helps you. You can read body language in ways that you can’t do even on a video call. You can strengthen the relationship so that when you hit that inevitable rough patch somewhere down the road, and we all hit rough patches with our clients at one point or another- it gives you that oftentimes reservoir of goodwill that you can draw on because you made that human connection, and you’re not just, you know, the other end of a contract. You are someone that they’ve gotten to know. And so we want to try to find as many ways as possible to have that relationship with everybody that we work with at every level, vendors, clients, prospects, team members. Gini Dietrich: Yep, yep. Chip Griffin: Whatever it may be. Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yeah, I mean, my newsletter that’s going out in a couple of days, talks about how Ocean Spray was one of my very first clients as a young whipper-snapper working at FleishmanHillard. And there, my day-to-day contact at, there became one of my closest friends. She’s one of my closest friends today, even though we haven’t worked together in 20 years, and the reason being is that we got together in person all the time, we traveled together, we were, you know, sort of in the, the ranks together working through all sorts of issues and challenges and, you know, building… We built a real friendship. And you can’t do that on Zoom. You just can’t. Chip Griffin: Right. And, I know we all want to be more efficient and all of that, and that’s all fine and good, and I am a huge believer in using the technology- Oh, yeah … whether it’s AI or otherwise- Gini Dietrich: Absolutely … Chip Griffin: to, to make yourself more efficient, but you can’t do that at the expense of losing that human touch. Gini Dietrich: Right. Totally. People skills, people skills, people skills. Chip Griffin: They are more important today than they have ever been. And that, that is common throughout history. As, as one thing becomes dominant, the antidote to it, if you will, or the opposite piece of it often becomes equally valuable because everybody else is ignoring it. So find those places where you can stand out, you can be a little bit different. And, many people went into the agency world because they were people people, people. I… it sounds so stupid. Gini Dietrich: People, people people, people pleasers. Person, person, people. People, pe- people Chip Griffin: ‘Cause you’re a people person- A person so if you’re people pe- I don’t know. Gini Dietrich: I don’t know either. Chip Griffin: I feel like I’ve taken this off the rails as I usually do, so maybe this is a good point to, to draw ourselves to a close here before people get peopled out. Gini Dietrich: We are all people people. People people. Chip Griffin: Makes me think of that old song, what is it, the, The Purple People Eater or something like that? Gini Dietrich: Yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking of at the beginning. Yeah. Yep. Chip Griffin: Yeah. Which if I could remember it, I wouldn’t sing it anyway because we’d probably get a copyright strike, so. Or maybe not. I don’t know. I don’t know how all that stuff works. I wouldn’t either. On that note, uh, I’m definitely careening off the rails here, so we will draw this episode to a close. Thanks for listening. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And it depends.

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.