Most agency owners spend a lot of time thinking about growth, clients, and revenue. Far fewer think carefully about the words that define how they actually operate their businesses. In this episode, Chip and Gini dig into five of those words: leadership, management, accountability, responsibility, and authority.

Leadership and management aren’t the same thing. Leadership is about vision and getting people to follow you. Management is about making the work happen. Knowing which one you’re stronger at is the first step toward building a team that covers your gaps.

Accountability is the wrong place to start when a team member isn’t delivering. You can’t hold someone accountable for something you never clearly assigned, and you can’t hold them accountable if you didn’t give them the authority to get it done.

Gini offers a useful comparison: when a client hires you for your expertise and then second-guesses every decision, it’s demoralizing. That’s exactly how your team feels when you delegate the work but not the authority to do it.

The episode closes with a simple reminder. If you want more freedom as an owner, you have to be willing to actually let go. And if your team isn’t capable of handling more responsibility, you should be asking yourself why you hired them.

Write down who owns what. Pick three ongoing projects or responsibilities in your agency and write one name next to each. If you can’t, or if the answer is “everyone,” that’s the problem to solve first.

Audit one recent accountability failure. Think of the last time a team member didn’t deliver on something. Ask honestly: did they have clear responsibility for it, and did they have the authority to get it done without coming back to you for approvals? Identify the specific gap.

Read Chip’s two-part newsletter series on these five words. They cover the concepts in more depth than a single conversation allows. Then write the five words on a post-it and put it somewhere you’ll actually see it.

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: Gini, I’ve got, uh, I’ve got five words today, and that’s it. And then we’re outta here.

Gini Dietrich: F…U…

Chip Griffin: Words, not letters!

No, we’ve already used more than five words, so.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. No,

Chip Griffin: I guess

Gini Dietrich: you wrote about this.

Chip Griffin: I guess we’re probably gonna need to come up with more than five words for this episode.

Gini Dietrich: We’re, we should probably come up with several words for each of the five words, but you wrote about this and I thought it was really good. So we’re gonna talk about it.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, last fall, as I was sitting there looking for inspiration for my newsletter, I started thinking about some of the language that I frequently use when I’m talking with agency owners. And so it became a two-part series in the SAGA newsletter, about five words that are critical to agency management success.

And so, why not talk about them here?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I think they’re really good.

Chip Griffin: We’re always looking for ideas. Might as well pick something that we actually did a little work on.

Gini Dietrich: Right. For a change.

Chip Griffin: For a change.

Gini Dietrich: We’ve got like four weeks in a row where we’ve done a little work.

Chip Griffin: I mean, this is, I… dear listeners, please do not get used to this.

We are not going to, you know, have actual prepared thoughts in advance of every episode. We just, we cannot handle that. A lot of it just needs to be off the cuff with us reacting to whatever randomly comes to mind in the seconds before I hit record.

Gini Dietrich: That’s right.

Chip Griffin: But this week we can tap into a little bit more depth.

Last week, I mean, last week we did a lot of research for episode 300.

Gini Dietrich: We did. We spent like days on that. It was a year’s worth of content.

Chip Griffin: We did research, we brought AI into it. We started reading through past, I mean

Gini Dietrich: mm-hmm. Yep.

Chip Griffin: It was, it was truly exhausting, so

Gini Dietrich: it was exhausting. I’m still recovering.

Chip Griffin: Fortunately this is work that was already done.

We’re just retapping into it. So, those five words that we’re going to be talking about today are leadership, management, accountability, responsibility, and authority. And we’re really looking at this through the lens of management of your business. So there’s a lot of other things that have to do with agencies where we can come up with other words perhaps, or other context for these words.

But this is really about how you manage the business, how you work with your team, how you work with clients, and all that sort of thing. And that was really what I was trying to get at here when I was trying to drill into these particular concepts.

Gini Dietrich: I think the first two leadership and management are really good ones because I think we are all guilty of thinking that management is, oh, we get to boss people around and tell people what to do and, you know, go on about our days.

And, I think we also confuse leadership and management. And so I think a good place to start is definitely there, which you did too, because it’s part one of your series.

Chip Griffin: I did, I thought those were, yeah, those were big important concepts to get squared away before you get into some of the ones that, you know, later on in the list are, are a little bit more nitty gritty.

And really about the functional aspect of it. When you’re thinking about leadership and management, you really have to think about it in my view in, in a couple of different ways and, leadership is more getting people who are willing and interested in following you somewhere. Right? It is, it is defining a path and convincing people, whether that’s prospects that you’re trying to get to become clients or team members who you’re getting to work together.

It really is, it’s more about, you know, the ideas and the communication around it and the motivation of people that comes together. Management then becomes more about resources and, you know, and more of the, in the management of it to… management’s more about management. How’s that for…there is a limit how much we prepare for these things.

It’s not like I have clear talking points.

Gini Dietrich: I would say management’s more in weeds. So like, if I were thinking about it from my, my agency’s perspective. I tend to be more of the leader, so I’m vision, visionary, I’m setting the stage, I’m talking about where we’re going. And then Shelly, who is our chief operating Officer, she’s doing like standard operating procedures.

She’s creating process, she’s creating procedures. She’s created an intranet where you get where you get out. Like that stuff to me, I would shoot myself in the head if I had to do that stuff. But she’s really, really good at it and she’s really good at creating the process. Like these are the things, this is how we do our work.

And so she allows me to focus on what I’m good at, and I, and then, and she in turn gets to focus on what she’s good at.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And that, and that CEO-COO split is, is a good, you know, sort of simple way of thinking about the difference in leadership and management. It’s not a hundred percent sure, but it’s, it gets you most of the way there in, in how you think it through.

I do think that almost all managers at every level need a little bit of both. Yeah, you can’t totally, even if you are a relatively junior manager. If you’ve got anybody reporting to you or you’re managing a project, you still need to have some of the leadership there in addition to the management.

So, but they are, they’re really important things to have. They are different things, but you need to be, in order to be successful as an agency business, you need to have both of these in robust amounts within the business. Otherwise, you’ll be rudderless, you’ll be profitless, and you probably won’t be generating results for your clients.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I think it’s, I mean, I personally believe that you’re, you have strengths in one or the other. You can probably do both. Like I can manage the business. I don’t love it, so I’m not great at it. I procrastinate, I can do it. But that’s why I hired somebody to manage those kinds of things.

Because I know how important it is. And, but if you can’t, if you don’t, like for many, many years I couldn’t afford to hire a COO. Right? And the business wasn’t big enough to have a COO, right? So what we did instead is we made it part of everybody’s job where I said, okay. As you’re doing this work, I need you to create a standard operating procedure.

I need you to jot down the process. And some were great at it and some not so great at it. So we had some that were good and some weren’t. But I will tell you, AI today helps immensely with that. We use Scribe now, I think Scribe now, or Scribe how? One of the two. And it like creates the SOP for you while you do the work, so you just let it capture your screen.

So there are lots of ways that you can do both. You can both be a manager and a leader, even if it’s not one of those is not a strength.

Chip Griffin: Well look, and at some level we’re all managers, right? Sure. Even if we are a solo and we don’t have any clients or we are just writing a book or something like that.

Yep. And just kind of doing it in isolation. Hard to do. But if you, even if you were that, you still need to have a level of management in the activity that you, yourself are doing. So, you know, none of us can give up on that completely. I think it’s really more thinking about the layers of management, and how deep you go.

So, you know, there are people who are, you know, pretty good at what I would call executive management. You know, figuring out big picture, what are the, what are the general things that we need to be working on and, you know, providing the rails within which you work and operate. Then there are other people who can make the trains run on time.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: I am very much the former, not the latter. If you want someone to make the trains run on time, I’m way too all over the place with too many different ideas in order to do that effectively. And so, you know, and you have to understand as an individual and as a manager, what are your strengths in these areas?

Because if you don’t understand that you are a better leader than manager, you don’t know what to shore up in terms of the team or what things to work on yourself or what safeguards you need to put into place to make sure that you’re not ignoring the important stuff. So like for me, since I’m not great at making trains run on time, I use a lot of software to try to make sure that I record all the little things and put the deadlines in so that I don’t sit there a week later and say, oh, right, I was supposed to file my taxes last week.

I guess I should have done that. Right. So you’ve gotta have the systems in place to buffer yourself against the things that you’re not particularly good at to begin with.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Which I think is a really nice lead to accountability, which was your third word. Like we have to…it’s sort of like, you know, people will say to me all the time, gosh, I wish I was as disciplined as you are about exercise.

The reason I’m as disciplined as I am is because I have accountability partners. Like if I, there are plenty of mornings where the alarm goes off and I just wanna roll over and go back to sleep for an hour and a half. But I have somebody counting on me, either my coach or somebody that’s waiting for me at the gym or whatever it happens to be.

I have the accountability and that’s part of the reason I’m so, so disciplined. And I think we have to take that into our business as well. So even if you don’t have a team that can hold you accountable, there are plenty of resources. You know, there’s Slack communities, the Solo PR Pro community, the Spin Sucks community, the SAGA community on Slack.

I think you can hire a coach. Like there are lots of things that you can do to hold yourself accountable. But I think that to your point, is a really good lead-in from leadership and management.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, the reason why I ended up writing about this over two weeks in my newsletter was not just because it was getting long.

It was.

Gini Dietrich: It was, sure.

Chip Griffin: But, also because leadership and management really do fit together. But then the other three, accountability, responsibility, and authority come together, in important ways. And, and one of the things that I have found with a lot of agency owners, when I talk to them about their teams, they’ll ask me, you know, how can I hold my team more accountable for the results that I need for them?

And it usually then evolves into a conversation about accountability, responsibility, and authority. Because you can’t really have accountability without the other two things.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And so they, they all are very much interconnected. And if you want to achieve results, particularly with your team, you need to think about how you mix these together.

Because look, I mean, employees. Sometimes I say that employees and clients are a little bit like children as far as how you have to coach them and get them to move in a particular direction. But they’re different from kids and, I mean, you can’t just take an employee and put ’em in timeout or send them to their room.

I mean, that’s

Gini Dietrich: Unfortunately not, no.

Chip Griffin: You know, you can try it. It’s, it’s not gonna work out.

Gini Dietrich: It’s probably not gonna work. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: So honestly, it doesn’t work all that well with kids either. But, you know, sometimes it makes you feel better. You know, my kids are way too old to be sent to their rooms now, so. It is what it is.

But when they were little, you, you kind of liked doing that occasionally at least, but you knew it was really never gonna solve anything. It just got them outta your hair for a bit. So, but with employees, you need to think about this because usually accountability is the last place that you go to in order to solve a team problem.

You really need to look at responsibility and authority first. Because you can only be accountable if you’ve been given responsibility for something, right? Right. So you can’t go and hold an employee accountable for something that you never told them that they had to do to begin with.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: And that doesn’t mean you need to tell ’em every little detail, right?

But you, they’ve got to understand that this is a task or a project for which they are responsible. And one of the things I always say to people, and I’m not original in this, but you can’t have more than one person who is truly responsible for a task or project. Because as soon as two people share responsibility equally, it ain’t gonna happen. It’s just human nature, everybody kind of assumes someone else will pick up the slack.

Gini Dietrich: It’s like a group project. Yep.

Chip Griffin: So you’ve gotta be clear who has responsibility for this, who is walking outta this meeting with responsibility to get it done. So you start there and then you can start thinking about accountability.

But, only if when you give them responsibility, you also give them authority, because this one I see all the time. You assign an employee something, you wanna hold them accountable. Because well, I, I, I told Sally that Sally was responsible for getting this done. But you didn’t give Sally the authority to go and get the resources she needed or to give the approvals herself.

You kept all of that to yourself, and so Sally wasn’t able to actually get the job done because Sally was too dependent upon you. So if you want to hold somebody accountable, you’ve got to give them responsibility and authority to get the job done.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, 100%. You know, one of the things that we do internally here is objectives and key results.

And so the leadership team will develop, we develop the company ones as a group, and then they develop their team ones. And then they are responsible for having their teams fill in their own. And so that practice alone has been really great from the perspective of helping everybody understand what they’re accountable for.

So even if you’re a team of two people, you can still do that, right? Like it’s, and you don’t have to use OKRs, you can use KPIs, you can use whatever kinds of goal setting you prefer. But the practice of setting the goal and helping everybody understand who’s responsible for what, I think is a, it does that.

Then of course you have to execute, right? But that’s where the accountability and responsibility comes in. But I think going through the practice of building those goals together really helps build that accountability. So people know, okay, this is what I’m responsible for. This is what so-and-so’s responsible for.

This is what happens if I don’t do my job. And they won’t be able to do their part of the job. So it kind of helps them understand how all of the trains work together.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. And as agency leaders and managers, we think about this in client terms all the time, right? We sit there and we say, well, you know, the client wants us to do these things, but they haven’t given us the ability to make decisions around this. Or they haven’t given us the appropriate budget for something. Or they want us to have an impact on sales, but we can’t even talk to the sales team or whatever it might be. So we think about this naturally. All the time with our clients, and we chafe against the restrictions that our clients put in place, but we don’t think twice about putting those same handcuffs on our own employees.

And so we need to be thoughtful about that and say, look, if I wanna hold an employee accountable for profitability on something, or for results on a client project, or for leads that they’re generating for the agency, then I actually need to give them the responsibility and authority to do what they need to do in order to get that.

Otherwise, I have no business holding them accountable for something that I haven’t given them the flexibility to achieve.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. I think it’s just such a good practice in general, to think about that. And, you’re right, like the shoemaker’s children don’t have shoes. You know, we don’t, we don’t have great websites.

We don’t have great content. We don’t have great thought leadership. We don’t do any planning for ourselves. We sort of just wait for the phone to ring, to drive new business. All of the things that we would never do for our clients, like we plan for our clients. We set goals, we measure results, we do all those things.

That practice has to make it to your business as well, because if it doesn’t, you don’t have all of these things. You don’t have accountability and responsibility and leadership and management. You don’t have the ability to run a well-functioning, profitable business. You have to do those kinds of things just like you do for your clients.

Chip Griffin: Well, and the thing is, if we adhere to these various guidelines that these five words bring to mind, it improves not just the business of the agency, but generally the lives of the agency owner. And as we all know, I’m obsessed with trying to make owners happy in what they do and not just yes, you know, sitting there and feeling tortured by their own business that they decided to create.

And so a lot of these things get things off of your plate. It shares the responsibility and accountability across your team. But only if you’re willing to let go, you have to be willing to let go. And we talk all the time about the value in delegating things and all that. But, it really comes down to thinking about not just that I’ve delegated something, but that I’ve done it in a way that sets that team member up for success.

And if you’re delegating responsibility and authority, that should allow you to have more freedom and to spend your time differently. Now, if you assign those things, but you’re not really giving it and you’re just micromanaging. What’s the point? That doesn’t help the employee. It doesn’t help you. It doesn’t help the business.

So really think about these concepts and how you can internalize them to what the way that you are managing your business, and you’re more likely to see the results that you’re looking for, that your team wants, and ultimately that the clients want as well.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. You know, one of the things that I think is really important for agency owners to understand is that when you try to control everything, when you don’t delegate effectively, when you don’t give your team the authority and responsibility to do their jobs effectively, you are creating an environment that’s not fun to work in.

It’s not gonna be fun for your team, and it’s not gonna be fun for you. And one of the things I think that’s really easy for agency owners to, to understand is to put themselves in the shoes. So let’s say that you’re working with a client and they’ve hired you because of your expertise, and you’re really, really good at website development, let’s say.

Like really good at it. You understand how AI visibility works. You understand how that fits with SEO, you understand how that works with user experience and website design, like you’re one of the best at this. But the client keeps saying, no, I think you’re wrong, or I don’t wanna do it that way, or, and they don’t take your advice and they don’t use your expertise.

They keep talking over you. Or they say like, well, I asked AI and it told me this, and so you’re wrong. How does that make you feel? It doesn’t feel good. That’s how your team feels when you don’t delegate and give them the authority and the responsibility that they deserve to be able to help you grow the business.

That’s how they feel, and I think we can all put ourselves in those shoes to understand that doesn’t feel very good at all. So if you’ve hired the right people and they have an expertise to be able to help you grow the business, let them do their jobs.

Chip Griffin: And, if they still can’t, then you need to look at a different team, right?

Correct. I mean that, yes. You know, because when I talk with owners, a lot of times says, well, so and so isn’t capable of it. Well, who hired so and so? Right? I mean, you did.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: You made that decision. Mm-hmm. You can undo that decision. You can make a better decision next time. Mm-hmm. But you can’t sit here and say that you need to micromanage them because they’re not up to the task.

Either they are and you can let go or they’re not, and you need to find a different solution. And usually, if an owner is honest with themselves and they sit down, more often than not, they realize that they can let go more than they thought. Again, we’ve said before it, it may be that they don’t do it exactly the same way that you would do it.

It may not be as perfect as you would do it. Not that we’re saying you’re perfect, but you know, you may think you are.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: And so if, if those are things that, that are getting in your way, figure out how to move past them. Because you, you really have to focus on making sure that you’re getting good enough and not perfection, not identical to the way you do it.

Because if you do, you’ll never be able to hire anybody and you’ll never be able to delegate and you’ll never be able to live these five words. Because they really, when you think about the list that I put together, it starts from sort of the highest level, the 30,000 foot, the leadership, getting people to follow you, all the way down to that core level of the delegation of authority to get things done across your team.

And you really need all of those elements to come together. Yep. If you wanna be sane, happy, and get the results that you want.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. Yes. So I know Jen will link to both parts of this. I thought it was really, really well done. So you can read that as an accompaniment and have it as a reminder.

Just put it on a post-it. Put those five words on a post-it note, stick ’em to your screen.

Chip Griffin: Perfect. Excellent. Well, I hopefully these five words, we gave you more than five words, but we gave you five words…

Gini Dietrich: Okay. That’s enough. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Okay. My usual, tortured ending. So. With that, I will delegate the authority to all of you to get on with your days.

And, the responsibility to that was live these five words and Okay. We’re, we’re just gonna stop. Okay. With that. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich

Chip Griffin: and it depends.

Eight years and 300 episodes later, Chip and Gini take stock of what the Agency Leadership Podcast has actually been about and where their thinking has shifted since they sat down for lunch outside Wrigley Field and decided to start a show.

Chip shares an AI-generated analysis of the 10 most common themes across 300 episodes. Gini distills them into four she considers non-negotiable: communication fixes most problems, know your numbers, focus on particular wins, and the owner sets the temperature. Chip adds that communication doesn’t just solve problems, it prevents them. Ironic, given that probably everyone listening is in the communications business.

On what’s changed, Gini has moved from annual retainer-focused planning to quarterly reviews that constantly show results and surface what’s working. She also notes that her advice for navigating a tough business environment now mirrors what worked during the pandemic: find the project work, start with an assessment, and build trust before building a retainer.

The biggest evolution for Chip is his position on AI. While he was skeptical a few years ago about the timeline, now he thinks agencies are under-emphasizing it. He and Gini disagree on AI’s limits. Gini believes critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and crisis work still require human judgment. Chip is less certain those guardrails will hold. What they do agree on: AI is turning everyone into a manager, and that puts a premium on skills that were already in short supply.

The episode closes with a lightning round covering worst advice agencies still believe, best scary decisions, and prospect red flags including unreasonable expectations and unwillingness to discuss budget.

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it turns out it’s not just another episode,

Gini Dietrich: it’s not!

Chip Griffin: Of this podcast.

Gini Dietrich: It’s very exciting!

Chip Griffin: Through the magic of counting, we believe as best, best we can tell

Gini Dietrich: We believe, we think

Chip Griffin: According to our producer, Jen, that this is episode 300. And so we’re going with it. We’re gonna stamp it and say, this is the 300th episode of this podcast.

Gini Dietrich: A big accomplishment. Remember we sat across from at a restaurant across from Wrigley Field and talked about doing this, and here we are.

Chip Griffin: I, yeah, that was what, seven, eight years ago now?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Pre pandemic, for sure.

Chip Griffin: Long, long time ago. Yeah.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: I had hair back. No, I didn’t have hair back then.

Gini Dietrich: No, you did not.

Chip Griffin: Still bald, but, but yeah. Who, who would’ve imagined it would still be going Yeah. This many years later. I mean, it’s crazy. You know, we’re no FIR, you know, we’re not up to episode 4,722 or whatever, whatever Shel and Neville are up to.

But, nevertheless, it is an accomplishment. And so we thought we would recognize this milestone and maybe do a little bit of reflection on those 300 episodes.

Gini Dietrich: So we were joking with one another that this is probably the most prepared we’ve ever come for one of these episodes. We actually put some,

Chip Griffin: I’m fairly certain it is the most prepared.

We’ve actually exchanged a few emails. We did a little research.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, yes, yes.

Chip Griffin: We’ve got Claude involved with it. I mean, we’ve, we’ve put some effort into this one.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. So I think what we both were looking at is a couple of things. One, sort of what has shifted over 300 episodes, which is several years.

Right. And we have had many things happen during that time, including a complete shutdown. Where many agencies, if… Didn’t go out of business, got very, very close, myself included. It was a rough time. So a lot has changed. And so we wanna talk about that. We wanna talk about sort of where our own thinking has shifted over the years, especially around AI and some certain things.

And then at the end, we’ll do a lightning round.

Chip Griffin: Excellent. Well, maybe we can start with some of the things that we’ve talked about a lot over the course of those 300 episodes and, and being, you know, lazy, efficient, whatever you wanna call it, I decided to ask my Microchip assistant, which is backed in part by Claude to assess the episodes that we’ve already done and find the common themes that we talk about a lot.

And so there were 10 common themes, and I’ll run through them quickly and then maybe we can react to a few of them, but, not surprisingly, the first one is the importance of good communications.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: I think we do talk about that one a lot. Um, Understanding your financials, obviously we beat that one to death.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: One-to-one meetings, obviously. That is, that is my,

Gini Dietrich: yep.

Chip Griffin: My pet project to try to get every manager to have one-on-ones with every single one of their direct reports every week. Pricing and positioning, obviously that’s a common topic, not just for us, but everybody in this space. So that one’s not particularly surprising.

It always depends, right? That is how we sign off. That should have been top of the list though. It should have been number one. That’s, that’s my biggest issue with, with this Microchip analysis that, it depends, it doesn’t prioritize at top of the list. Build to own, obviously something that I talk about a lot in various forms.

Well, haven’t done a good job of always, you know, branding it as such, but focused on that. Talking about the agency owner modeling behavior and that everybody takes their cues. When we talk about agency culture, it’s all about what the, the owner themselves does. Mm-hmm. So, that is important.

We talk about the, the idea of having some kind of focus and saying no to things. Not just doing everything that you could, serving every client that you could, but really having a plan. We talk about learning from mistakes. We’ve made a lot of ’em over the course of our careers, but we try to learn from them. And that’s one of the, the big benefits of this show is that we’re able to share those experiences. So hopefully you don’t repeat the same things that we’ve done wrong over the years.

And finally, focusing on collaboration instead of competition, not viewing all other agencies and agency owners as the competition or worse, the enemy. And instead trying to figure out what we can all learn. From each other.

So those were the key themes that, that were identified, that’s a pretty fair representation of the things that have come up, quite often. But I didn’t know if there were things there in particular that you wanted to react to or perhaps things that you thought of that our friend Claude may have overlooked.

Gini Dietrich: No, I don’t think he, I don’t think our friend Claude overlooked anything. I think there are four things, four areas that, of those 10 that I think are incredibly important and those are, you know, even, even as agency owners, we may hate these things. They still are true, so.

Communication fixes most problems. So, that transparency, being able to have conversations with your team and with your clients. You know, not being conflict avoidant.

Knowing your numbers, of course. So understanding what your revenue versus your gross margin versus your net profit, net margin. And all of those numbers mean.

Focusing on particular wins. So again, saying no to some things.

And then the owner sets the temperature. So that your team and your clients react to the way that you move things and that you do things and the way you set boundaries of all that. So I think those are the four sort of, to me, big themes that we’ve focused on in the last 300 episodes.

Chip Griffin: I would agree with that. And I think that communication doesn’t just solve problems. It prevents a lot of problems. Mm-hmm. And I think that the irony is, we’ve said this before, we are all in communications in some fashion or another, probably if we’re listening to this show, whether you are in PR or marketing or whatever, it’s all about communication.

And yet we often do a very poor job of it ourselves and our teams don’t necessarily do a good job of it. And so, you know, we need to really double down and focus on that as much as possible because it will help us to avoid problems or as you say, solve problems. So, I’m glad that that did come out on the top of the list in all seriousness.

And not, it depends because I think that that is almost everything that we discuss here, there is at least some element of communications to it.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s exactly right. And, you know, we’ve talked over the years about certain things like being able to, because you are having constant communication with your clients, being able to, you know, for lack of a better term, upsell and extend retainers and get more out of things.

And I think right now we’re in, I mean, everybody knows the world is on fire and it’s not good. And I’ve been having lots of conversations with lots of agency owners. Mostly who are friends, not necessarily clients about how their businesses are taking off a big hit. And so I’m sort of repeating the same things that I recommended, and I think you probably are doing the same in 2020 when we all took big hits, which is find the project work, do things that you can do.

You know, for, not a retainer, but like small things. So do an assessment first for $5,000 and then build that into some, you know, specific projects sprinkled throughout the year. And then maybe next year you build that into a retainer. But really being open to the idea that you’re not necessarily gonna be able to build on retainer business right now, but you can do the, that project work.

And you know, people still need to communicate. People still need to market their businesses. You just have to find creative ways to be able to help them.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, and I think that that’s great advice at all times. Yeah. And, if we think back to the start of this conversation that we had back in 2018, there’s a lot of things that have taken place over the last eight years that we would not have predicted while we were sitting there. No, over that, that, that lovely lunch there. Outside of Wrigley Field. we would never have anticipated a shutdown due to a virus. Most of us would not have imagined a war as widespread as what we’re dealing with now and all of the other things that came along the way too.

Those are just two of the biggest things in the last eight years. Yep. And so I think that, you know, always being willing to adapt and be agile and, you know, just talk things through and understand, you know, what’s on the minds of your team? What’s on the minds of your clients and prospects, and trying to find how you can relate to them as, as best as possible and, find ways to solve their challenges, even if it means adapting to the approach that you would typically take.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. I think that’s yes. And, you know, I keep being, I keep thinking about the quarterly review that we like to do inside my business, which is every quarter you’re having conversations that are advancing the next quarter. Right. So we, where I think eight years ago we talked about annual planning and retainers and things like that.

And now my own thinking has shifted from that to quarterly planning and ensuring that we continue and truth be told, that has, that shift has provided us so much more opportunity for growth and for building the relationship inside our clients’ organizations because we’re constantly showing results.

We’re constantly showing what’s worked. We’re constantly showing what hasn’t worked. And we’re constantly making recommendations for shifting things so that we can continue to grow. That has provided a much bigger opportunity and for me that has been a big shift that I’ve made in the last eight years for sure.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And I think, you know, some things haven’t shifted in the last eight years, right? I mean, some of the things that, that we talk about, you know, do hold up. The format of the show itself has, has held up. We have not made any substantial changes despite all of the, the entreaties we’ve gotten to have guests and all, all of the ridiculous pitches that we get from people.

Oh, so and so would be a great guest on your show. You know, I listen all the time. No, you don’t.

Gini Dietrich: No, you don’t. No.

Chip Griffin: 300 episodes in. Zero guests.

Gini Dietrich: Never a guest.

Chip Griffin: We have never brought a guest on this show to talk with us. So it hasn’t changed. It’s just the two of us and I think that works out well. So,

Gini Dietrich: yep.

It’s never changed.

Chip Griffin: At least it does for us. And you know, if it happens to work for you as a listener, that’s great too. But as we’ve said before, we kind of do this show more for us than, than anything else.

Gini Dietrich: I think that, you just a couple of weeks ago, you had an idea to use AI to respond to those pitches, and I think you should do that.

Chip Griffin: Well, actually, I, I, I believe that, that, well, yes, that was one idea. The other idea I had was to respond in sort of bro like fashion to them. Well, actually no, the, you’re right, the AI was for the pitches. Then the other one I was gonna do though was for all these people who pitch on, you know, you can get 300 new leads, leads this month, you know, and I was gonna give the, the, you know, that’s awesome, bro.

Or something like that. Forget what, what my, I, I had some line that seemed…

Gini Dietrich: Yes, please do that.

Chip Griffin: Wacky and cool at the time.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, I like it.

Chip Griffin: But I hate all of these and I just, my inbox is terrible full of these things. I know. So stop it.

Gini Dietrich: Stop it is right. Yes.

Chip Griffin: Since all of you people pitching this podcast listen all the time. Listen to me.

Don’t do it.

Gini Dietrich: Please do not pitch this podcast.

Chip Griffin: So I don’t know, have I gotten crankier over 300 episodes? I’m not sure.

Gini Dietrich: I don’t think you’ve gotten crankier, but you know, one of the things that has been fun for me to watch personally about you and what you’ve changed your mind on is artificial intelligence itself.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. That is certainly an area where I have, I prefer to call it evolved. And, you know, I, as a technologist, I have always been enthusiastic about the concept of AI. I was, I was skeptical a couple of years ago about how fast it would really be able to take hold, and I thought that frankly, a lot of agencies were overemphasizing AI a couple of years ago and being too optimistic about where things would be near term.

And now the pendulum has swung, in part because the technology has improved so much, right? I mean, yeah. If, if you look at the various models and you, you run the ones that were ever present two or three years ago. They are nothing like,

Gini Dietrich: right.

Chip Griffin: What we have with Claude and chat GPT and that today.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: And I was reminded of that recently because I installed a local LLM on one of my machines just to sort of play around with it. And it did the wacky hallucinations because one of the things I always like to do is, as most of us do, I ask for information about myself. And it completely invented an entire narrative about me that had no bearing on reality whatsoever.

But it said it really confidently, and I mean, it, it had a lot of detail, but it was just totally made up. And I said, this doesn’t sound right. And it came back with, oh yeah, you’re right. I made that up. Okay. Okay. And this is one of the, I forget which, it was one of the Quinn models, I think. Wow. Oh no, it was, uh, no, it was the…

one of the Google ones. But anyway, it doesn’t matter what it was. The point is that it experienced the same problems that we saw a few years ago. And if I was still seeing that today from Claude, I, I would not believe as I do now that agencies are actually under emphasizing the impact

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Of AI. And we’re seeing it evolve at such a rapid pace that I think you really do need to be coming along with it and not continuing to fight it. Which I still see way too much of, in the agency industry. And I think that’s, that is something that, that really hasn’t changed over 300 years. Uh, 300 years.

Gini Dietrich: 300 years. Geez. We are older than dirt.

Chip Griffin: 300 episodes. I mean, if we, if we look back to 2018, there was a lot of resistance to change in the agency community. Mm-hmm. Back then. It’s just what the change is is has changed. But that general mindset, that has always worried me about the agency community, continues to be there and people getting too excited about the wrong kind of change.

We had an episode recently where we mocked the holding companies for, you know, inventing subscriptions. So, you know, the, there are, there are things that have changed, there are things that haven’t changed, but AI is certainly at the top of my list for where my thinking has evolved over the years.

Gini Dietrich: And I think you’re right. Like the, I mean, you know, since 2022 I have been all in on AI because I think it’s pretty phenomenal. And I think part of the challenge that we’re seeing right now is that people are being told that their jobs are going to be replaced. And agency owners and agency employees are being told by clients that their AI can do what they can do.

And, and truthfully, it can, it can do your news releases, you can do your blog posts, it can do all of those things, right? And it’s actually pretty good. What it can’t do though is critical thinking and emotional intelligence and, you know, ethics and crisis and reputation and those kinds of things. So I believe that AI is not going to replace you, but people who know how to use AI effectively will.

So those are the things that you have to be thinking about is how do you use it to enhance the work that you’re doing for clients and train your team to do the same. So that you are continuing to stay abreast and advanced versus getting replaced by an agent, an AI agent, in a year or two.

Chip Griffin: See, I guess the pendulum has swung so far for me that I actually disagree with you on most of the things that you had on your list that AI can’t do, um, including the things that people tend to put at the top of their list.

Uh, emotional intelligence. If you look at, I mean, there are a lot of people who are effectively using these chatbots as their therapist because it is good.

Gini Dietrich: It’s so dangerous.

Chip Griffin: Perhaps, however, that’s the reality, right? And so people are perceiving it to be more emotionally intelligent because it’s responding in a way that a lot of our, you know, human friends and acquaintances might not, for whatever reason, right?

Because a lot of people, you know, even if you have good emotional intelligence, it’s different than how you actually communicate with somebody about that. Right? So I think that there are, there are a lot of areas where the AI, if not today, in the very near future, is going to be able to do it just as well as most of us in our jobs.

And so we need to think about how do we do more? How do we apply that extra human bit on top of it? And I’m not intending to turn this into a whole AI show again. We’ve done a couple of those. I’m sure we’ll do quite a few more. But, you know, I, I think that the fundamentals remain. And when we think about the importance of communication, that is still a piece that at least for now, we have the human touch that we can apply to it, that the AI can’t.

And so, you know, we want to make sure that we’re finding ways to weave that in. But a lot of the strategy and details, I mean, that… AI is absolutely coming for your job on that.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I don’t know if I necessarily agree at a strategic level. I think that the… I think that you’re right if the inputs that you’re, you are giving it are correct and strategic and smart, like I’ll give you a really good example.

We finished the PESO Model certification a month ago. And it took me a really, it took me about six hours for every lesson and there were, there are 10 to 12 lessons in every module. So it was a significant amount of content creation and thinking for me. And I used AI for some of it. I used it to help me organize it and to help me outline and those kinds of things.

But I did the actual work, right? Fast forward to today. I’m working on the recertification, so I took all of the scripts and videos from 2020. I took all of the scripts and videos from 2024 when we did a refresh, and then I took all the scripts and the videos from this new one and I put them all into a folder, and then I use Claude Cowork and I said, here’s what I’m trying to do.

I want to show, because the 2026 version has changed so much. I don’t necessarily want people who got certified between 2020 and 2025 to have to go through the whole certification again. But they do have to understand what all these changes have. So I, I prompted it and I, it probably took me about 90 minutes to prompt it the way I wanted it. But the output, because it has so much content, is so good that it’s taking me about an hour a lesson now instead of six.

Mm-hmm. So I agree with you that I think it can do those things, but I think it still needs us to provide the correct inputs to understand what kind of output we’re looking for, and really to understand strategy. Because if you don’t understand those things, it’s still gonna give you slop. Regardless.

Chip Griffin: Right, right. I mean, effectively, as we alluded to on a recent show, it’s turning everybody into managers, right? Yes. So, even if you were not a manager before, you, now you are being forced to manage the AI effectively as an employee. And, so you need to understand how to do that. Yes. And so it makes, it puts a premium on management skills, which we know is a large area of weakness for most small agencies in general, even before the era of AI.

So, before we run out of time, I know that you also had an idea for a, a lightning round. And as I said in our pre-show conversation, I mean that, that basically is what all of our shows are. It’s just a, it’s just a lightning round because we come up with a topic 30 seconds before we hit record.

Gini Dietrich: Right, right.

Chip Griffin: And neither you nor I have. Any idea, I don’t even know what my opening is going to be. Right. As is painfully obvious on some of the shows. I certainly don’t rehearse the closing out, because a number of those are really crash landings at best. So, let’s, let’s see. I know you did share these, uh, questions with me in advance, but I didn’t really have a chance to look at them.

Gini Dietrich: Okay, good. So let’s let that’ll make it better then.

Chip Griffin: Let’s see where we go with this.

Gini Dietrich: All right. You ready? Sure. Worst, worst advice agencies still believe.

Chip Griffin: That you need to grow by adding more clients.

Gini Dietrich: Oh, I, I think the not tracking time one, like, everybody’s like, oh, we don’t track time. We don’t bill by the hour. Okay, don’t bill by the hour. But you still have to track time because otherwise you have no idea if you’re profitable by client, by employee. You still have to bill time.

Um, best decision you ever made that felt scary at the time?

Chip Griffin: Hiring my first employee.

Gini Dietrich: Oh, I would agree with that. Yep. Totally agree with that one.

A red flag you now spot instantly in prospects?

Chip Griffin: Unreasonable expectations.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I’d say like, yeah. If they, and especially if they can’t answer the budget question. Bye.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, to, to me it’s that with the expectations that just my experience has been you really, if, if someone comes in expecting something, it’s almost impossible to talk them back to a reasonable place.

So if, if someone’s coming in with wild ideas, you’re gonna get me in the Wall Street Journal next week.

Gini Dietrich: Okay.

Chip Griffin: Unless they, they immediately capitulate as soon as you point it out.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Probably not gonna work out.

Gini Dietrich: No, that’s a good point. All right.

And then aside from, this is the last one, aside from what we’ve already talked about with AI an “I was wrong” prediction from early episodes.

Chip Griffin: I mean, usually I’m so right. It’s really, it’s really hard to think about what I might be wrong about. I mean, to be honest, AI is really the thing that jumps out for me where I’ve had a clear change of position. I’m not… off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything substantial that I’ve significantly changed.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I don’t think I’ve necessarily changed my mind, but I’ve evolved on some certain things like, you know, growth from more clients to better clients. From hiring the best to building systems and process, which, you know, eight years ago if you told me I had to build process, I would’ve been like, but now I, now I understand the, the importance and value in process.

Chip Griffin: Yeah.

Gini Dietrich: I still don’t wanna buy it, build it, but.

Chip Griffin: Maybe outside of a lightning round, I can go back and look and, and find some things and we can have a future episode where we talk about, you know, other areas where we’ve evolved. Because I think, I think it can be interesting to look at not just what we’ve evolved on, but why.

Sure. And oftentimes the why can reveal things. So maybe we’ve, we’ve come up with an idea for, you know, another 300 episodes by doing that.

Gini Dietrich: Perfect. Another eight years.

Chip Griffin: Another eight years. Man, I’m gonna be old. You of course will stay young.

Gini Dietrich: No, of course. Yes.

Chip Griffin: Check. Alright. So with that we’ll wrap up this 300th episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast.

We really appreciate all of you who take time to listen to every single one of those episodes. And please, if you’ve listened to all 300, please drop us a note. We would love to hear from you.

Gini Dietrich: We would, yes. Yes.

Chip Griffin: I kind of doubt that anyone has listened to all 300, but if you have, we would certainly like to hear from you. If you have ideas for other future episodes, we’re always looking for those as well. Particularly now ’cause we’ve done 300 of them. And so a lot of times we’ll search and say, oh, we already talked about that.

Gini Dietrich: We do.

Chip Griffin: But the beauty is it’s been over eight years. So we can talk about the same thing that we talked about eight years ago because, you know, a bunch of, you weren’t even agency owners eight years ago.

Yep. So that’s, you probably didn’t hear us talk about it. So with that, I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

Most hiring processes obsess over the wrong things. Do they know our project management software? Are they proficient in this specific tool? Meanwhile, the one capability that actually determines whether someone will make your life easier or harder—their ability to solve problems independently—gets a cursory “are you a good problem solver?” question that everyone answers with “yes.”

In this episode, Chip and Gini break down why problem-solving ability should be the primary hiring criterion, especially as AI makes technical skills easier to acquire and offload. The conversation explores why this matters more now than ever: as AI handles tactical execution, the ability to define problems clearly, break them into components, and figure out solutions becomes the differentiator between humans who add value and humans who get replaced.

Chip and Gini discuss how problem-solving cuts across every role, even ones you don’t typically think of as problem-solving positions. Designers facing impossible deadlines, account people navigating last-minute client demands, anyone dealing with the reality that things rarely go according to plan. They all need to be able to figure out how to move forward rather than escalating every obstacle upward.

The episode tackles the mechanics of actually interviewing for this capability. You can’t just ask “are you a good problem solver?”—you need scenario-based questions that reveal how candidates think through challenges. But not hypothetical scenarios you make up; real situations that have happened in your agency. Ask them to walk through how they’ve handled compressed timelines, missing information, conflicting priorities, or last-minute changes in past roles.

Gini shares how her daughter’s school explicitly focuses on humanities and emotional intelligence rather than technical skills, anticipating that AI will reshape what jobs exist. She connects this to Anthropic’s hiring practice of seeking people with humanities degrees who can absorb information, think critically, and demonstrate emotional intelligence rather than just technical proficiency.

The episode concludes with an important reminder: if you hire problem solvers but then micromanage how they solve problems, you’ve wasted the hire. You need to let them solve things their way, even if it’s different from how you’d do it, or you’ll end up with everything back on your plate anyway.

Rewrite your interview questions to focus on real scenarios. Pull up your current interview script and replace skill-testing questions with situation-based ones drawn from actual challenges your team has faced in the past six months. Instead of “Do you know Asana?” ask “Tell me about a time you got an urgent request at 4pm Friday with a Monday deadline. Walk me through your approach.” Spend 30 minutes creating 3-5 scenario questions specific to each role you hire for.

Test whether you’re letting your problem solvers actually solve. Pick the last three times a team member brought you a problem this week. For each one, honestly assess: did you immediately jump in with the solution, or did you ask “how do you think we should handle this?” If you solved more than half yourself, you’re training your team to be dependent rather than autonomous. Next time someone brings you a problem, pause and ask them for proposed solutions before weighing in.

Audit your hiring criteria for trainable vs. essential skills. List the requirements in your most recent job posting and mark each as either “can be trained in 2 weeks” or “fundamental to the role.” Tools, software, specific methodologies—all trainable. Problem-solving, critical thinking, ability to work under ambiguity—essential. If more than 30% of your listed requirements are trainable skills, you’re screening out good problem solvers who could learn your tools in a week.

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 have a problem.

Gini Dietrich: You do? You have just one problem?

Chip Griffin: Okay. I have many, many, but this isn’t Festivus, so we’re not gonna have an airing of grievances from you.

Gini Dietrich: Would you like me to solve your problem for you?

Chip Griffin: I, I, if, if you could solve some problems for me, that would be fantastic because then, I might even be inclined to hire you. Not that you would ever wanna work for me. That would just be disastrous.

Gini Dietrich: That would not be good though. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: We’re gonna talk about problem solving today, though not, not all of my problems.

We’re not gonna solve any of them on this episode, I don’t think. Probably create some new ones. Problem solving. I wrote an article recently about the importance of focusing on problem solving as either the primary or one of the primary considerations when you are hiring new employees as an agency.

And I, I feel quite strongly over the years that the very best hires or folks who are able to figure out how to, to look at a problem and come up with ideas on how to solve it and ways that are reasonable that they can execute upon to get it solved so that they’re not being dependent upon you or others to do that for them.

And in my view, this is something that’s really hard to train for. Mm-hmm. And so therefore, something more important to focus on during the hiring process than things that you can send someone to a course or a training session or give them a book on, and problem solving just is not that for most people.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I think, you know, as we’re thinking about what the future holds, especially with artificial intelligence. The things that we can do as human beings that AI cannot do are gonna be more important, right? So when you think about problem solving, that is one thing that it will be challenging for AI to do, but really important for a human to be able to do so.

If you can demonstrate that you can solve problems and you know how to hire for people who can solve problems, and clients are hiring you to solve, help solve their problems, then all of a sudden you’ve got AI over here doing, you know, the tactical work, but you’re doing the high level like thinking work that I think is going to help set you apart.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, and AI certainly makes it a lot easier to problem solve

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely.

Chip Griffin: Than it has been in the past. Right? Because it can help you with the basics, like research. But the other thing that you have to think about is in order to get the AI to help you, you have to do a good job of defining what the problem even is.

Yep. And, and that is a key part of being a problem solver, is being able to look at a situation and say, okay, here’s what the real problem is. Yep. You’re not, you’re not focused on some symptom, but you figured out, you know, this is really where we need to zero in on, and AI can probably help you with that a little bit, but the more clear you can be about saying, Hey, here’s my problem.

Here’s where I want to get, you still need to have that mindset for problem solving to get the AI to give you the best results possible without doing a lot of wandering in the wilderness.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. You know, one of the reasons I like, sort of, we’ve talked about this before, but the question process of the new business of the prospecting, you know, process is you ask a bunch of questions. And you do that so that you can educate yourself on the prospect’s organization and their goals and all those things.

Of course. But when you dig deep into question after question after question, you start to uncover things that they didn’t tell you at first. Like you’re not gonna say, so what problem or pain do you want me to solve? Because they’re gonna go, I, I need an agency to do this and this. That’s not their problem.

That’s not the pain that you’re solving for them. You can, you ask questions so that you dig deeper and eventually you’re going to get to that, but it’s the same thing, you know, with AI, you can’t just say like, I need a social media agency to be able to post five times a week. That’s not the problem. What is the problem?

So AI can’t help you solve that. It can give you posts for five days a week, but it’s not gonna help you achieve the goals that you want. So really think about when you’re doing quarterly planning, when you’re talking to clients, when you’re talking to prospects, continuing to ask those questions so that you can figure out what problems or what pains you are trying to solve for them so that you can elevate yourself above what AI is gonna be able to do and even help you do.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, as you say, you know, clients are coming to us as agencies looking for us to solve their problems, which means that, that we need to have that mindset. And you, as the agency owner, you wanna be able to delegate more off of your plate. And the only way that you can do that is if you surround yourself with problem solvers.

Yep. If you surround yourself with the people who know the questions to ask and who can look at it and say, ah, I’ve got an idea for how we can get from here to there. And it keeps you from having to be deeply involved in every single scenario. And that might be as simple as, you know, Hey, this, this report didn’t get done on time.

You know, we need to do something quickly. Great, fine. You, you know what the challenge is. If you’re a problem solver, you’ll come up with that. If you don’t, you’re gonna go to the boss and say, oh my God, we didn’t get this report to the client on time. What do we do? You don’t want deal with that? No, no.

It’s painful for everybody. Everyone. Yes. So you’ve gotta surround yourself with the people who have that problem solving mindset and, and the instincts to be able to, even when they’re confronted with something that they don’t know, right. ’cause a good problem solver doesn’t need to have all of the expertise in the world.

Because they just need to be able to figure out, okay, how do we go about doing this? How do we break this down into its component parts and begin to address it and begin to make progress, and that’s really what the essence of problem solving is.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, it’s sort of like, you know, I’ll say to my team often, I don’t wanna hear problems, I wanna hear solutions.

And it’s training them to come with that. Like, and I’m sure you work that way. I’m sure that people listening work that way. And if they’ve had bosses that have said, if you bring me a problem, I want solutions as well. That’s training the problem solving mentality, right? So it’s very much like, okay, I understand that things are not always going to go smoothly. I understand that we’re gonna have some failure, and I’m willing to take those risks, but I need you to come to me with the solutions. I’m not gonna be the one who, who comes up with the solutions. First of all, it’s not scalable, it’s exhausting. Clients will not ever stop trusting, being able to trust.

They will never be able to trust anybody else on your team because you’re always the problem solver. So it’s really how do you bring your team along? And I think that’s one of the good things and it’s, you have to stay firm to it. Like, okay, it’s, and because in many cases your instinct is to solve the problem, but instead you have to take a step back and say, how do you think we should solve this?

What are some solutions you propose? And really build that capability inside your team’s minds to be able to do that without you having to say, what are the solutions?

Chip Griffin: Right. And I think that, that this matters more than almost anything else you can focus on during the hiring process. I mean, obviously you’ve gotta to make sure you got the right, you know, the right feel, the right chemistry and that sort of thing.

Sure. Because it is, we’re ultimately humans and we all have to be able to engage well with the people that we’re working with. But, you know, I see so many of these interview processes that fixate on proficiency in various things.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Like writing tests. And Yeah.

Chip Griffin: You know, writing tests. Yep. You know, back when I used to hire a lot of web developers and that sort of thing, you know, there was always a desire to test them on particular programming language just to see if they were proficient in it. You know, people are like, oh my God, you know, do you use Asana or a Clickup, or whatever we use in the, oh, you don’t, you don’t know how to use that?

Oh. Oh. I don’t know if we can, ah, I don’t really want to have to teach how to use a different system. I, I’m, I’m gonna discount that. Like, that’s, none of that stuff matters. Right. Those things can all be trained.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And frankly, a lot of those things are being replaced by a lot of the other things we’re doing.

Problem solving cuts across almost every single, and probably actually every single role that we have in an agency. And frankly, even far beyond an agency, even ones where you don’t necessarily think of it as a problem solving role. I mean, if you think about designers, for example. You sit there and say, well, you know, that’s, that’s really not pro That’s a creative thing.

We need to know how creative they are and Sure. I mean, they’ve gotta have some, you know, basic design skills that, that meet the aesthetic that you’re trying to produce for your clients. But ultimately they are actually problem solvers. I’ve never met a designer who felt they were being given enough time for any project.

I mean, you could give them a month and they would still be like, ah, you know, I really could use like six weeks to really

Gini Dietrich: Yes, Uhhuh

Chip Griffin: fine tune my vision.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: So, so there are already almost always starting from that problem solving standpoint of how do you get this done in the timeframe that I’m being allowed?

And the reality is you’re never giving them a month. You’re giving them maybe half a day if they’re lucky. Right. You know, because they’re the last ones. Of the designers, I, I feel bad for all my design friends because they are the last people brought in in most agencies. And they’re brought in, we’ve got all the content ready, we’re getting ready to release this tomorrow.

Can you make it look pretty? It’s like it’s three o’clock, you’re putting this out at 9:00 AM tomorrow.

Gini Dietrich: Oh, sure.

Chip Griffin: Right. I mean, that’s problem solving. You’ve gotta try to figure out how do you, how do you still get a good result? Mm-hmm. Even given all of those constraints. And so you need to think about every role that you’re hiring, problem solving.

And so how do you go about doing that? Right? It’s not, you don’t just say, are you a good problem solver? Right. ’cause guess what, nobody’s gonna say no. And if they do great, it’s easy to just get rid of ’em at that point, because they don’t even know how to interview, let alone

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Right.

Chip Griffin: How to solve a proper problem.

So, you know, it’s sort of like a reference. I think it’s silly to check references because you know what? Nobody gives you a bad reference. Right. I mean, in all the years I’ve been checking references, I’ve gotten maybe one mediocre reference. It wasn’t even a negative, but you know, you kind of read between the lines and you’re like, eh.

Yeah. But almost every one of them is positive. That’s the names you get. Nobody’s gonna tell you they’re bad problem solvers. How do you find out if they are or not? You’ve gotta try to either give them scenarios. And I’m a little, I don’t, I don’t love scenarios because we all have a tendency to come up with fairly unrealistic scenarios.

Gini Dietrich: Fair.

Chip Griffin: But I, I think you can say to somebody, look, you know, tell me about a time where you had a particular challenge and think about it in terms of the role. For that designer, ask. So, you know, you, you get presented to it at, the rough draft at 3:00 PM and you’re, you have to turn it into a pretty presentation by 9:00 AM the next morning.

How do you begin to go about that process? Walk me through what you’ve done before when you had that same scenario confronting you. Because you can, you can learn a lot just from listening to them, and the actual answers don’t matter all that much. Don’t fixate on, well, I would’ve done this instead of that.

It’s more making sure that they can think through the method and approach.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: That’s what signals to you that they’re able to break down the challenge into its component parts to make progress.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I really like the, I’m with you on the scenario based interviewing, but I really like the, all right, like these are things that have happened inside our organization because of like something that just happened the other day.

Tell me about a time that you got something at four o’clock on Friday afternoon, you had tickets to the Cubs game, and you knew it was due on Monday morning. Like, what do you do?

Chip Griffin: Well, they had tickets to a rare night game. Huh?

Gini Dietrich: Actually, we have the Cubs play a lot of night games actually.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I know. I’m, I’m just so old, I, I remember when they didn’t play them at all, so.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah. But like, what do you do about that? How do you solve that problem. And some people will say, I work all weekend, which I don’t love, but some people will say, I will give up the Cubs tickets Also, don’t love that. But are there other ways, other creative ways that you might get that work done so that you’re not working all weekend and you don’t have to give up your Cubs tickets?

So those are the kinds of things that I like to listen for. You know, they, and they’ll give you answers they think you want to hear, which are, I won’t go to the game or I’ll work all weekend. Those are not the answers I wanna hear. I wanna hear like, creative, interesting. Maybe I can’t get it done before I go to the game, but I’m gonna, you know, buckle down and I’m gonna ask for help or, you know, those kinds of things are the things that I’m looking for.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, even if they do say, well, look, I’m gonna, you know, skip this or that because, you know, work would be my priority or whatever. I mean, that it, it’s still okay, that’s fine. But this isn’t, this is this. If your idea of solving a problem is just throwing more hours at it, that doesn’t work for me.

Gini Dietrich: Right. That doesn’t work. Right.

Chip Griffin: So, even if you do end up spending that time, tell me about, you know, what are the actual steps that you’re taking? Because you may be willing to pull an all-nighter, but what about the rest of the team? Right. And, you know, how do you go about getting the information that you need and getting it approved in the right way?

And, you know, how do you think about, you know, frankly, which, which corners are okay to cut and which ones aren’t? You know, when you have to deal with a compressed timeframe, you have to be rational and say, okay. It’s not gonna be as perfect as I would like it to be. And, to continue on with the design example, are you okay with that?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah,

Chip Griffin: and I’ve, I’ve worked with some designers who just, you know, they’re like, I just will not give you something that doesn’t meet my standard. I appreciate that you have a high standard, I also have a deadline. Yep. So work with me on this and figure out what we can get done on this time. Yep. And that’s the, that’s the kind of answer that I’m looking for from them.

If it’s, you know, someone who’s, you know, pitching a new outlet or industry that they’re not familiar with, what are the steps that you go through? How do you begin to think about it? And I, again, it’s not so much about the specifics of it, but just making sure that you’re seeing the logic at play.

Yep. In a way that you’re like, yeah, okay, I can, I can see why you made that choice. But definitely don’t fixate Well, I don’t know why you would look at that. I would look at this instead. I mean, because you haven’t had a chance to imbue any of your own thinking to them to bring your own agency training.

But if they can think about how they make those individual steps possible, that’s really what you need to know.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. You know, one of the things that, I’m sure I’ve told this story before, but when we were looking at schools for, at the time, our 4-year-old to go to, to kindergarten, and then on through school and we were interviewing schools and we were trying, Chicago’s a weird way of doing schools, but, so we were looking at, we were interviewing schools.

And every single one of them, so this is eight years ago, said, we focus our curriculum on the humanities and social and emotional intelligence and learning because we don’t know what jobs are going to be available for these kids because of AI and because of how fast technology is changing. So we know that if we put kids out into the world, out into the community, that can solve problems that have high emotional intelligence, that can think logically, that have common sense, that they will be good stewards and can do the jobs that are available. Versus building kids that can do programming or math or science or STEM or whatever happens to be, right. We’re going to put good stewards of the community out there, and I think about that a lot.

And I just read an article this morning that talks about how Anthropic is hiring people with humanities degrees because they have high emotional intelligence. They can think through things, they can read something and absorb it versus just skimming it. All of the things that, those that, that kind of degree teaches you are the things that companies are gonna be looking for.

And it’s the same thing I think for agency owners is that’s exactly it is how do you find the people that can problem solve, that can take in information and use that to make decisions that, you know, are used to high emotional intelligence kinds of things. Versus I know how to logically solve a math problem. or I know how to program or I know how to write a news release. Because AI can do all of those things. So that’s what we really should be looking for and interviewing for is those problem solving skills.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, and you’ll find if, if you get good problem solvers, they’ll be confronted with things that, that you never even dreamed up.

So you wouldn’t think to ask in an interview. Right. To figure out if they could do it. But they’re good problem solvers.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: They can figure out how to get there. Absolutely. If they’re not good problem solvers, they’re just gonna sit there and stare at it, or they’re gonna make the radically wrong decision just because it’s the easy way out. I think of a plumber that I had in my house 20 years ago, and we were having an issue with water pressure. And so he came in and he’s looking and we, you know, we’re on a well system here ’cause I’m living rural and they’re trying to figure out, you know, all the tanks and this and that.

And he’s like, well, the solution is you need to put in a larger tank. I’m like, really? That’s, that’s gonna solve my water pressure problem. He said, yeah, that’s, that’s definitely gonna solve it. I’m like, and so I just, I, it didn’t feel right to me. So I sat with him. I said, okay, well walk me through, you know.

Yeah. What we’re doing here and, and so I, I had ’em tell me what all the pipes were and what they were doing, and we get to one and it turns out there’s one that was a filter. And I said, I said, well, what if we just tried changing out that filter and just make sure that it’s not clogged up? Yeah. We could try that.

I guess. I mean, okay. Turned out it was a $10 filter that we needed to replace instead of, instead of like a $1500 water tank instead.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I was gonna say multi-thousand water.

Chip Griffin: But he, you know, he was not of the mindset, you know, go through and diagnose it step by step and follow the path of the water and see where it might be being obstructed so that it’s not getting, because I mean the, the current water tank was showing that it had the right pressure.

So it didn’t really make sense to me that if the tank was showing it had the right pressure, that a larger tank was gonna suddenly change, that it would still be at the same pressure setting,

Gini Dietrich: right?

Chip Griffin: So somewhere between the tank and where it came out of the faucet, it was where it was falling apart.

And so you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta try to hire people that can think that way because it’ll keep things off of your plate. And we always talk here about the importance of not bogging yourself down. And so the other thing you need to keep in mind is if you’re gonna be hiring for problem solving ability, you actually need to let your team do the problem solving.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: You have to. You have to accept that they may not solve it in exactly the same way that you do, but because you’ve hired a team of problem solvers, they will get it done.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: If that happens, you don’t have a lot sitting on your plate, which is better for you. And frankly, it’s better for the employee because they don’t feel like you’re breathing down their shoulder and micromanaging them.

So yes, problem solvers solve other problems other than the ones that they’re setting out to solve.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, they do. Yes, they do. I think the article that you wrote was really good. It walks through some of these, some of these ideas. It also gives some other ideas on how to interview for problem solving, so I’m sure Jen will link to it.

But it was a very good thought provoking article, so thank you.

Chip Griffin: I am always grateful to be able to produce thought provoking pieces, and it’s a particular challenge. I’m always looking to try to figure out how I can make you think too, so. Because you’ve got probably all the same answers that I do on most things.

So

Gini Dietrich: sometimes we disagree on things, but yeah,

Chip Griffin: occasionally. Occasionally we haven’t done it that much. But, but maybe, maybe on the next episode,

Gini Dietrich: maybe.

Chip Griffin: Who knows? We might

Gini Dietrich: never know.

Chip Griffin: Just teasing that next episode. ’cause the next one’s a milestone.

Gini Dietrich: It is a milestone

Chip Griffin: at least. At least if, if Jen’s math is correct.

The next episode is episode 300, so,

Gini Dietrich: woo hoo.

Chip Griffin: Stay tuned for that one.

Gini Dietrich: It’ll be a special one. Special one.

Chip Griffin: As they like to say in YouTube land. Make sure you click the subscribe button.

Gini Dietrich: So you don’t miss an episode.

Chip Griffin: Nope. You would never wanna miss an episode of this.

Gini Dietrich: Never. Mm-hmm.

Chip Griffin: It’s the most fascinating podcast on the interwebs.

Gini Dietrich: It is.

Chip Griffin: So with that, that will draw that to an end this episode of the most amazing podcast ever. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends except about the quality of this podcast.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Most agency owners have read Built to Sell. But many have internalized the wrong lesson from it—fixating on that final chapter where the protagonist drives off into the sunset with a pile of cash, rather than the actual business-building advice throughout the book. The result is owners spending years building businesses optimized for a sale that may never happen, or that won’t deliver the outcome they’re imagining.

In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss Chip’s “Build to Own” philosophy as a counterpoint to the built-to-sell mindset. The core principle: focus on creating a business that serves you today, not some hypothetical buyer tomorrow. This doesn’t mean you can’t or won’t sell—it means you stop treating the sale as the primary objective and start treating ownership as the thing you’re optimizing for right now.

Chip breaks down the TMRW framework for thinking about what you want from your business: Time (how much you spend and what flexibility you have), Meaning (what gives you satisfaction—clients, team, impact), Rewards (financial outcomes that fund your life today and tomorrow), and Work (the actual role you’re crafting for yourself). Gini shares her decision to retire from speaking despite conventional wisdom saying agency owners should be out there raising their profile—because the anxiety wasn’t worth the marginal business benefit.

The conversation tackles the uncomfortable reality that most agency owners counting on a sale to fund their retirement are likely building businesses that won’t command the multiple they’re hoping for. Meanwhile, owners who build businesses that throw off enough cash to fund retirement directly—while also being enjoyable to run—end up with something far more attractive to buyers when and if they do decide to sell.

Gini tells the story of a friend who prepared five years in advance for a sale: removing himself from day-to-day operations, hiring a president to build culture, ensuring the business wasn’t founder-dependent. The result? An 18x multiple. But the episode’s point isn’t “here’s how to get a great sale”—it’s that you should make every decision through the lens of “would I still be happy with this if I never sold?”

Define your TMRW priorities this week. Block 30 minutes and write down what you actually want from your business right now across four areas: Time (how many hours, what flexibility), Meaning (what gives you satisfaction), Rewards (what financial outcomes you need), and Work (what role you want to play day-to-day). Be brutally honest—not what you think you “should” want, but what you actually want. This clarity becomes your filter for every business decision going forward.

Audit your last five major decisions against your ownership goals. Look back at recent significant choices—a new service line, a hiring decision, a client you pursued, a speaking commitment you accepted. For each one, ask: “If I never sell this business, would this decision still make sense for what I want from ownership?” If more than half don’t pass that test, you’re optimizing for the wrong outcome.

Calculate whether you’re funding your future or gambling on it. Open your financials and answer three questions: Are you paying yourself a competitive salary (what you’d make if you took a job elsewhere)? Are you contributing to retirement at the level you’d need to retire comfortably without a sale? Is the business profitable enough to sustain both? If the answer to any is “no,” you’re counting on a sale rather than building a business that works for you today—and that’s a bet most owners lose.

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 I think we’re gonna talk about construction today, Gini.

Gini Dietrich: We are.

Chip Griffin: We’re gonna talk about building.

Gini Dietrich: Yes. Structure. I, Nope, I can’t do it. Sorry.

Chip Griffin: It’s my job to torture things. You’re, yes, you’re,

Gini Dietrich: yes. I,

Chip Griffin: you are too grounded in reality.

I’m the one who’s off in Never Never Land making up weird stuff. So, yes. No, we are not talking about about construction, I think.

Gini Dietrich: No, but we are talking about building.

Chip Griffin:  into all sorts of zoning violations and probably code compliance issues and all that.

Don’t listen to us on that stuff.

Gini Dietrich: We’re not touching construction.

Chip Griffin: We are talking instead about my Build to Own concept because it’s something I’ve talked about a little bit over the years, but haven’t really focused on well enough. So I wrote an article about it recently to try to underscore a little bit about my overall philosophy about how you ought to go about running your agency.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think it’s a really good topic because you know, there’s the book called Built to Sell, which I think probably most of us have read, which the idea is that you’re building process and procedure to be able to sell your business someday. But what does that look like if you don’t sell or that’s not part of your goal, or you’ve built a lifestyle business, or you’re in the middle of it, and you’re like, Ugh, how much longer do I have to do this? Right? And so changing your mindset to be around built to own is, I think a really good one.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And look, I mean, I, I think that there is, like everybody else I have read Built to Sell, I think it is a great book. There’s a lot of good advice in there.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: I think, you know, my issue with it is that a lot of people don’t read all of the advice. And so instead they think about the title of the book. Right. And so it’s, it is very much, a build to sell is, or Build to Own rather, is a definite counterpoint to built to sell because it does two things.

First of all, instead of looking in the rear view mirror as built to sell does with the word built instead of build. And also it helps you to understand that you need to think about what’s going on with your business today.

Gini Dietrich: Right? Right.

Chip Griffin: Yes. Maybe someday you’ll sell, but if you focus just on the maybe someday.

You may have a miserable existence until then.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: And too many people read Built to Sell and they dwell on the last couple of pages of the book. Yep. Where it makes it seem like the owner has driven off into the sunset and is sitting on some beach in Tahiti sinking drinking mai tais for the rest of their lives.

That is an unlikely scenario. Yes. For most agency owners. We’ve talked about that before. So fundamentally the same things that you want to do in order to be appealing to a buyer, typically, you’re gonna make it more appealing to own as well. But it’s changing your mindset to think about first and foremost, what you want from the business.

And, and starting from there, instead of saying, what might somebody else want? Why should I, you know, I wanna get into this particular sector because that’s a hot sector that someone wants to buy, or I wanna focus on growing revenue because if I grow it by, you know, 50% a year, someone’s gonna be excited about it.

But what does it mean for you today?

Gini Dietrich: Right. Yeah, I think it’s a really good question to ask yourself and, and I think we’ve also talked about this too, that it changes, right? It may not, it may not be the same that it is right now. I mean, in 2012, I remember looking ahead to 2020 and thinking like 2020, the year 2020, like perfect vision, here’s the things that I want to have accomplished.

And we all know what happened in 2020, right? Just the, right? So things change. Things… you know, the world happens, the economy happens. Sectors change. Your needs change, your desires change, all of those things. And I think it’s really important to say, what is it that I want to build right now? And be okay with the fact that it may evolve in three years.

It may evolve in five years, and that’s okay. Yes. But what is it that we’re trying to build right now and, and how can I be satisfied with that? And I think you raised some really good points in your article, which I will not steal your thunder on, but there’s some really good points in there about how to think through that and figure out what it is that you want right now.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and I think as you say it, it can change regularly. So you ought to be reviewing this regularly. You shouldn’t assume that whatever you decided two years ago is still the right direction because your life changes, the world changes, you learn more. All of those kinds of things. And, so what I typically encourage people to do is, is to think about tomorrow.

And I spell that of course, in the, the weird texter way of TMRW because you know, I am, I am that hip and, and that’s, you know, typically how I, I text people too. Sure. At least whenever I can figure out how to even type something into my, my phone because I, I’m terrible at that. But it’s it. So it’s focusing on four things.

It’s focusing on time, meaning, rewards, and work. So in other words, you need to think about how much time do you want to spend in the business? What kind of flexibility do you want in that time? What kind of things do you want to carve out additional time for.

You need to think about meaning what, you know, how are you gonna get satisfaction from the business?

Is it the kind of clients you’re working with, the people that you’re working with? Is it building something that people are proud of and say, wow, this guy did a great thing. What is it that gives you meaning out of it?

Rewards pretty self-explanatory, but you know, it’s the financial aspect of it.

Are you getting what you want from it? Is it setting you up for your future that you’re trying to have? Whether that’s paying for your kids’ education or funding your retirement or what have you. And you should focus on the business today doing that, not some magical, mystical, possible sale somewhere down the road that may or may not happen.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And then finally, you need to think about the work that you’re doing because ultimately, if you wanted to do work that you were miserable about, you could go work for somebody else. At least for a while, you probably make some more money than what you would make off of your own business. So you need to make sure that you’re crafting a job, a role that you actually like.

So if you think about those things in terms of how you want to build something that you’re happy to own, that’s a good way to start by thinking about the TMRW mindset.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think it’s really important to do that. You know, it’ll be two years in August that I decided I was retiring from speaking. And, not because of any reason other than it makes me super anxious. It, I get really, really, I get super, super nervous. I get really anxious leading up to it. It’s fine once I’m on stage and it’s fine after, but leading up to it is way too much for me. And I discovered through data that I actually make more money when I don’t leave my desk that often.

Right. So while it does help with awareness and all those kinds of things. I’m significantly more productive when I sit at my desk. So I said to myself, from a rewards perspective, what is it that I want to do with the business and with my life? And one of those things was giving up speaking.

And you know, to this day, people ask me to speak and I, it’s, it’s hard for me to say no, but I do, because I’ve said to myself, in myself inside my head. You’re retired from speaking.

Now I’ll do it virtually and you know, all those things. But getting me up on stage, I’m just not gonna do it anymore. Yeah. And that was a reward for me that I wanted to have, and that, you know, it’s been almost two years. It still remains today. So that may change. I may change my mind, you know, later and want to get back out there again and do it again.

Maybe. Maybe not, but, to your point, that’s one of the things that I think about is, you know, how is, how is my life structured right now and what do I want to change so that I’m happier doing it every day?

Chip Griffin: Well, and that’s a perfect example of the Build to Own approach because it really allows you to craft something that makes sense for you, even though it violates almost every quote unquote rule that experts would tell you, right?

Yes. I mean, most expert advisors, yes, will tell you, you know, as a business owner, as an agency owner, you need to be out there speaking and yes, raising the profile for the business and all of these things.

And look, that works for some people. But if you don’t like it, if you don’t want to do it. You shouldn’t. You should think of other ways that you can grow the business. Yep. Same thing with, you know that you will read, including in Built to Sell and elsewhere, that you should get yourself outta day to day client work. Okay. I mean. If that’s what you want, great. If it’s not what you want, figure out how to structure the business so that, that you can do that client service work ’cause that’s what fulfills you.

I mean, really, and I know I say this a lot, but what’s the point of taking on all the risk and stress of owning the business if you’re not getting what you want from it? Right. I mean that’s just, yes. It makes no sense.

Yes. ’cause at that point you are working for the business you own. Yep. Rather than putting the business to work for you.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s such a good way to look at it, because if you think about it from the perspective of let’s just set aside that you will, let’s just say pretend you’ll never sell.

You’ll never sell the business. You know, we don’t know what’s gonna happen to it in the future, but that’s off the table. What do you want right now? Is it the ability to do client work? Is it the ability to work on innovative projects? Is it the ability to sort of think about the future and what that might look like for your business?

Is it to make a crap ton of money? What is it that you want? Write those things down and be really honest with yourself, and then build the business around that. And I promise you that if you do those things, you’re gonna be much more attractive to a buyer later than you are if you’re trying to build a business to sell it.

Chip Griffin: Exactly. I mean if, if you’re able to build a business that throws off enough cash that you’re able to fund all of your current needs, to fund your retirement and all of those things, that’s the kind of business that a lot more people are going to want to buy. Yeah. If you’re counting on that maybe someday sale to be your payday that allows you to actually retire or those kinds of things.

And I see a lot of owners who are in this position. You probably have built something that you’re not gonna get that much of a premium on.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And so you actually are helping your future sale by collecting more money from the business today. You’re not actually holding back your opportunities, you’re creating more of them.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think it’s really important to remember that. And you know, I have had several situations with friends who own agencies who have come to me and said, Hey, I’m thinking about putting the business up for sale. I need to be out in the next year. And you’re like, you can’t…. This… what? And have done no preparation for that other than that’s like, I want to retire and that’s the end goal is to sell the business.

And there’s no profitability in the business. They haven’t paid themself a fair wage. Like there’s no preparation for it. You know, one of the biggest lessons I learned is I sit on several boards and in 2019, I sat on a board that sold right before the pandemic. And leading up to that five years before he put the business up for sell, he knew he was gonna put the business on the market in five years.

He started to look for, first of all, he started to look for ways to take himself out of the business, so it was no longer founder led, and he put key personnel in place. Three years out of selling the business, he hired a president who was building the culture and that the team relied on so that that person would be sold with the business.

And he did all of these things to create process and procedure so that when he put the business up for sale, it was not about him as the founder, it was about the business. And he got… I think he ended up with like 18 times multiple because of it. But he spent five years doing that, right? And he built a team and he built key personnel and he ensured that those people had the right contracts in place and the right salaries in place that they would then go with the business when he sold it.

And he, of course, he had a little bit of an earnout, but it wasn’t as significant as if he were the, as if it were founder led. So there were all these things he did that he did to prepare for that for five years. So my team and I look at every 90 days, we do a 90 day sprint and we look at what process is broken right now and how can we fix that.

But at the same time, I’m not doing anything that I don’t enjoy. I’m focused on the things I want to do and I’m building the business around it. Will we put the business up for sale someday? Maybe. I dunno, we’ll see. But right now we’re building a business that I enjoy owning. We’re having a blast.

Chip Griffin: Right.

Well look, I mean, you know, as I say over and over again, because I, the biggest objection I hear when I talk about Build to Own is, geez, you know, I, but, but I wanna sell someday. I, I, you know, I don’t wanna do this forever. Okay. Build to Own in no way precludes it.

Gini Dietrich: Right? Right.

Chip Griffin: And it, all I’m saying to you is that instead of making selling your focus, you should focus on the ownership piece because you know that you own the business.

You know that you will own the business. You’re not sure if you’re going to sell. If you are, you certainly do want to take the steps to prepare that your friend did. And, and the more, time that you have to prepare and think about and structure the business, the more likely you are to have success. But it’s still not a sure thing, right?

You may not get right the kind of offer that you’re looking for, you may not get the terms that you’re looking for. Yep. And so you should always, even if you’re thinking about selling one day and you want to generally position for that, you should always ask yourself the question, would I still be happy with this decision if I didn’t sell?

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: Because that is the, that is candidly the more likely scenario for most people listening to this show.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I think it’s reality. Your, your advice to focus on things as a business owner, which are funding your retirement. Making a livable salary. Making a salary that, you know, if the business were bought, you would, they have to see that you’re making a salary that would compete with, like if you went to get a job, would you make $80,000 a year? Would you make $30,000 a year? No, you would probably make mid to high six figures. You have to be able to pay yourself at that level. You have to have profitability. Like those things are the things that you should be focused on.

And if you do that and you never sell your business, you’re still okay. Correct. Because you’ve funded your retirement and you’ve paid for the things that are going to support your lifestyle.

Chip Griffin: Correct. And you weren’t miserable in the process. I mean, you know, look, it’s often said that life is short.

You don’t know what the future holds. And so, you know, are you happy to spend five or 10 years being miserable because you think right, that maybe someday, maybe someday you’ll be able to sell for some big number.

Gini Dietrich: No. No.

Chip Griffin: Why would you do that? No, and and I’m not, I’m not some woo woo, Oh, you know, you, you have to be happy and everything, and

Gini Dietrich: You’re definitely not.

Chip Griffin: It’s all sunshine and unicorns and all of that.

I mean, no, no. I mean, even if you follow my, my Build to Own approach, you’re still gonna have some. Really miserable days as a business owner.

Gini Dietrich: Yep, yep.

Chip Griffin: It’s not all going to be fun. Mm-hmm. You have to do a lot of things you do not want to do. You do not enjoy.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: However, those should be in the minority and they certainly shouldn’t be because you’re doing something with the sole objective of maybe someday selling.

Gini Dietrich: Right. Yeah, that’s absolutely true. It’s funny you say that because I had a miserable Friday last week and today is Monday when we’re recording this and I feel much better. But yeah, I mean, you’re not, I, I love my job. I love what we do. I love what we’re building, but it’s not all rainbows and unicorns.

That’s life.

Chip Griffin: That’s life. It’s entrepreneurship. It’s, it’s the risk and the stress that I talk about. It’s, it’s all of those things. But you can still structure it in a way. Yes. That gets you more of what you want.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: And is not following someone else’s formula for success. Right. Or what someone else might be interested in potentially buying.

Yes. Is figuring out what works for you? What gives you what you need and want from the business? And I think if you’re, if you spend your time looking at those and evaluating all of the decisions you make in your business, whether that’s, you know, what kinds of clients you’re pursuing, what sectors you’re working in, the service mix that you provide, the people that you hire to be around you, how you compensate yourself, all of these decisions should be looked at through that frankly rather selfish lens.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: Of what you want as an owner.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely.

Chip Griffin: Because it, it will not only make you happier, it will likely make you have a better business. Because if you’re just implementing someone else’s plan, you’re not gonna be as committed to it as something where you can understand, I’m doing this for me, I’m doing this for my family.

I’m doing this to get what I want from my business.

Gini Dietrich: And if you’re implementing somebody else’s plan, just go work for somebody else,

Chip Griffin: right?

Gini Dietrich: There’s no reason to have all the risk and flood and sweat and tears, like just go work for someone else.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, it’s, it is really, if you’re going to be an owner, you have to have an owner’s mindset.

Yeah. You can’t have an employee’s mindset as an owner because that you, you’ll just, you’ll fail and you will feel miserable at the same time.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: That’s not a good combination.

Gini Dietrich: I, I think, I mean, I’m sure Jen will include the link to your article in the show notes. It was, it’s really well done. I read it and I was like, we need to talk about this because it’s, it really helps you change that mindset from building a business to sell it and versus building a business to own it. And I think you still can absolutely, to your point, still sell it someday, but you’ll be much happier if you’re building a business to own it right now.

Chip Griffin: Imagine if the, if the sale is the gravy, right? Imagine if you’ve already stockpiled your nest egg and you know, I don’t have to sell.

I mean, first of all, that takes the pressure off you. You can negotiate a much better deal if you’re not forced into doing it.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And we all know this, right? I mean Yep. Anytime you can walk away from a deal, you’re likely to get better terms.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely.

Chip Griffin: So, so if you can say, look, I’m confident. Now take it or leave it, buddy.

This is, this is what you’re gonna have to pay me for this business. This is what you’re gonna have to give me in terms of an earnout and an employment agreement and all of those kinds of things. And if you don’t, that’s fine. Yeah, I’m still good. I can walk away. Good. Right. Imagine how much more powerful that is.

And imagine now you’re thinking about your sale as something that allows you to do something maybe extra special with your retirement as opposed to just having a comfortable one.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: I mean, I’ll take that any day of the week.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. Yes. Yes.

Chip Griffin: With that, I hope, hope you had a good day of the week by listening to us.

That was kind of a tortured wrap up, but you know, it is what it is. We constructed some good ideas for you today. I dunno, we just, we,

Gini Dietrich: no terrible. No, no.

Chip Griffin: We’re just gonna let this go here. So with that, we’ll wrap up this episode. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich

Chip Griffin: and it depends.

S4 Capital has announced a revolutionary new pricing model that will transform how agencies charge for their services: instead of billable hours, they’re moving to… subscriptions. Fixed monthly fees. Annual contracts that auto-renew. All costs absorbed into the price rather than passed through as variables.

You know, retainers. The pricing model most independent agencies have used for decades.

In this episode (somewhat abbreviated due to Gini’s technical difficulties), Chip and Gini dissect the holding company’s “brilliant innovation” with the appropriate level of sarcasm, then pivot to the more interesting question buried in the announcement: how should agencies price around AI? The conversation moves from eye-rolling at repackaged retainer models to wrestling with legitimate uncertainty about how AI costs will evolve and what that means for agency pricing strategies.

Chip points out that we only know what AI costs today, and it’s likely those costs will rise as platforms realize they’re replacing expensive labor and can charge accordingly. This creates a pricing puzzle—do you transparently pass through AI costs, absorb them into your general cost of doing business, or find some middle ground? Gini shares how she’s handling questions from college students about whether jobs will exist when they graduate, explaining that the work itself is shifting from doing to orchestrating, from creating to editing and refining AI outputs.

The discussion highlights the difference between cosmetic changes (calling retainers “subscriptions”) and substantive challenges (figuring out sustainable pricing as AI capabilities and costs both increase). They land on the principle that AI costs should be factored into your total cost of doing business rather than line-itemized separately, giving you flexibility to adapt as the landscape shifts without locking yourself into specific cost structures that may not hold.

The subtext throughout is that holding companies remain out of touch with how most agencies actually operate, still discovering “innovations” that the rest of the industry implemented years ago.

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 I wanna subscribe to your wisdom. I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna, you know, pay you retainer or anything like that. I wanna subscribe.

Gini Dietrich: Oh okay, sure. $1 million a week.

Chip Griffin: $1 million a week?

I don’t know. Yes. I mean, even, even for you, that might be, that might be a little bit much.

Gini Dietrich: It’ll be worth it. I promise. I promise. I’ll give you some benchmarks. It’ll be, it’ll be worth it.

Chip Griffin: Oh, some benchmarks. Oh, well, I mean, as long as there are some benchmarks.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: That’s really, you gimme some pretty charts to show that.

Absolutely. That you’re achieving those benchmarks, I assume.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, absolutely. I’ll, yes, 100%.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. Okay. Well, that, that should solve it. That’s, that’s good for me. If it’s good for you and so, you know. Let’s do it.

Gini Dietrich: Amazing. Yay. That was easy.

Chip Griffin: Yay.

Gini Dietrich: No, I don’t have to work anymore.

Chip Griffin: We’re gonna talk about pricing today.

We’re gonna talk about how you charge for your services and it seems like we’ve talked about this a lot, but, but now we have a brilliant new idea being foisted upon us from holding company land.

Gini Dietrich: Brilliant is sarcastic, by the way.

Chip Griffin: Where all of the ideas come from. I mean. Holding company mind. I think every, every good idea and innovation in the agency world has come from a holding company, hasn’t it?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I think, I think you’re right. Yep. Yes.

Chip Griffin: And it’s always, it’s always very original thinking that we can expect from the holding companies.

Gini Dietrich: Uhhuh. Yes.

Chip Griffin: So that’s what we have to discuss today. We have the proclamation from none other, none other than S4 Capital. S4 Capital, for those of you who don’t know, is I think, didn’t they originally describe themselves as like the non holding company holding company or something like that?

Gini Dietrich: They did, yes.

Chip Griffin: They tried to pretend

Gini Dietrich: they did

Chip Griffin: That they’re not really a holding company.

Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm.

Chip Griffin: They’re still a holding company folks.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: And so what we are being told is that we should move away from the billable hour to a subscription model. Ugh. Now this wild innovation is something that has never been considered before, so I’m glad they’ve brought this to the table.

Certainly we’ve never heard of retainers in the agency world.

Gini Dietrich: No. Never. Mm-hmm. Nope.

Chip Griffin: So this must be different than a retainer, correct?

Gini Dietrich: Um, nope.

Chip Griffin: No.

Gini Dietrich: I mean, when I dug into it, it’s, it’s essentially a retainer. Essentially.

Chip Griffin: So the brand new. Innovative idea from holding company land? Mm-hmm. Is that, that we should have retainers and not billable hours?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I think the difference that they’re trying to expound, expel, expound upon, expand upon is that, it’s renewable every year, so you don’t have contracts. It’s the same amount every month. Retainer. Mm-hmm. And there was one other piece. Hang on. I, I wrote it down. One year terms, it renews every month.

It’s, it’s not a fixed checklist. So eventually you get more output over time, especially if you’re allowed to use AI. And it allows you to absorb costs. So instead of you doing a pass through on expenses, it just absorbs it into that and you, you still pass it through, but it absorbs it instead of doing it one off because procurement doesn’t like variable pass through costs.

Chip Griffin: Mm-hmm.

Gini Dietrich: So those were the big things in the subscription model versus the hourly bill hourly model.

Chip Griffin: Gosh, I, I mean, I, I really hate to break it to them, but that’s how I’ve run every one of my agency businesses for a quarter of a century.

Gini Dietrich: For years. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: I mean, I consider myself a relatively innovative guy, but I, I don’t, I don’t claim to have invented that, so I’m, I’m not gonna sue them for doing this.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: Because I came up with it first. I certainly didn’t, but I think, I think if they did a little bit of research, they would find this is actually a pretty common way Yes. To do business if you are not a holding company.

Gini Dietrich: Correct. Yes.

Chip Griffin: I think this is one of those circumstances where the holding companies have got their blinders on Uhhuh.

They’ve, they, they drink their own Kool-Aid. They focus only on the way that they do things. And yes, holding companies do a lot of dumb stuff, particularly on the advertising side. They, they like to use billable hours. They like to do pass through expenses with dramatic markups. They like to take kickbacks from publishers and websites in order to place advertising there.

Mm-hmm. They do all sorts of stuff. Mm-hmm. That I think is a really bad idea.

Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm.

Chip Griffin: So I guess maybe we should be encouraged by the fact that they’re going to act in a way that’s a little bit more normal. I don’t think it’s gonna help them. I think all of the struggling that we’ve seen holding companies go through in recent years is only gonna continue because the holding company model is a bad model.

Yeah. It is a broken model.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: And you, you can only put so much makeup on it and try to make it look good. It’s just not gonna happen.

Gini Dietrich: It’s, I mean, I read it and my first instinct was, I think I even said to you, oh, so it’s a retainer. And then I, I dug deeper and I read the comments and I read the article and like I dug deeper and I was like, yeah, this is not, it’s not anything that, to your point, that those of us who have run, been running agencies for years, granted not gigantic ones, but those of us who have been doing it, that’s, that’s how I do it.

I have annual contracts that renew, unless you send me a letter saying we’re done. We have a monthly retainer, we have a, you know, we, there is work that compounds over time because we get smarter about your business and yeah, we’re using AI for certain things and there is some heavy lifting up front to get things started.

So yeah, it compounds over time. Like all of those things are, are true. It’s called a retainer.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and look, I, I mean, I would have more respect if they said, you know, look, in order to, to meet. Where the clients are at in today’s environment, we’re simply going to rename retainers as subscriptions. I, I could respect that.

And, there is a case to be made that for a swath of clients, at least, they are more receptive to the word subscription than the word retainer, especially if they’re in tech. So if that’s what this was, that would be fine. But to pretend that it is a brand new way of doing things

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Is just laughable.

Yeah. Now I do think in reading the Digiday piece that there, there is an interesting tangent that is not fully encapsulated in this thinking, but it, it opens a door that I think is worth discussing and is worth thinking about for agency owners. Agency leaders at, at every level we’re talking, holding companies or a, you know, a solo shop, and that is how you price around AI.

Mm-hmm. And I think that there is currently a strong mindset that if you can do it with AI, this is from the client side, that if you can do it with AI, it ought to be cheaper. There’s a strong feeling from the agency side that if we do it with AI, we should still charge the exact same amount because it’s the value that we’re creating. As usual, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Gini Dietrich: Sure. Mm-hmm.

Chip Griffin: I think one of the real challenges, and it’s highlighted in the Digiday piece, is that we only know what AI costs us today.

Gini Dietrich: Correct.

Chip Griffin: So we need to be really careful as we’re thinking about pricing. We need to keep a close eye on it because as I’ve said before on, on this show and elsewhere, I think it is likely that the cost of AI will go up over time.

Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm.

Chip Griffin: That, that we’re, right now, we are in this adoption phase where typically things are underpriced to get people hooked essentially on it. Mm-hmm. So we’ve all seen what we can do with AI, but as AI becomes more and more of a labor replacement, the vendors understand that the value that they’re creating for you is going up.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And so just as you want to charge your clients more, because you’re providing more value, they want to charge you more because they’re providing you more value.

Gini Dietrich: Yep, yep.

Chip Griffin: On top of that, the cost of actually doing all of this continues to go up. And yes, they’re becoming more efficient in some of the models and that sort of thing so that they can balance the quality and the cost.

But, but nevertheless, it’s likely that over time the cost is gonna continue to rise. So if they’re gonna have a smaller margin, they’re gonna make up for it by fixing that margin, by charging you more. Yep. So regardless of how you get there, you are going to be charge, be paying more for AI in five years than you are today.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely.

Chip Griffin: So, so you do need to be thinking about how you are structuring AI and in particular the Digiday piece put out there, the, the thought of are you transparent about what the AI costs are or do you just consider that part of your cost of doing business? And I, I think this is, there is a lot of room for meaty conversations in the, the coming months and years trying to figure out how to tackle this most appropriately.

Gini Dietrich: It’s funny you say that because I’ve been doing a lot of speaking virtually to juniors and seniors in colleges, in college classes. And one of the question that continues to come up is, and I think it’s really interesting that they’re talking about this at school, which is smart, but it continues to come up, is, is there a job for me when I graduate from college?

And my answer has been the job that I had when I graduated from college is not the job that you’ll have when you graduate from college. Like, you’re not gonna stand at the copier and make clipbooks, you’re not going to open Bacon’s books and make media lists. You’re probably not gonna make media lists at all.

You’re not gonna make clipbooks at all. You’re not going to, you probably, you may not even be pitching media. Like those things are, are going to be done by AI. What you are going to be doing is sort of orchestrating your, or conducting your orchestra of AI bots, so you have to understand how to prompt accurately, how to give it the right kinds of input so that you get the right output.

How to edit its work, you know, those are the kinds of things that you have to understand. And so when you think about, to your point, what this is going to cost, it may not cost the same as a full-time employee. It may not cost the same as five full-time employees, but it’s going to cost you something, and that has to be…

Just like you would absorb an employee’s salary into your, your however hourly rates or retainers or however you’re doing your pricing, that same thing. The AI needs to be absorbed into that.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and I think, I think ultimately, I mean, first of all, I would agree with you on the, the first jobs thing. If I think back to my first job, in an agency as a junior account executive, I can’t think of more than 5% of my job that I did back then that, that today Yeah.

Can still be done. And, and some of it’s because of AI’s not just, you know, technology has Sure. Has improved. I mean, nobody’s standing there at the photocopier. That’s nothing to do with AI.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: But, you know, good luck finding a photocopier most of the time, even if you need one. And so, you know, those are the, the kinds of things technology has, has completely replaced a lot of what we did.

And AI is just accelerating that even further. So certainly those kinds of jobs are not there. And, and I think that it’s fair to say that, that a college graduate going to work for the first time in an agency is, is really going in from a functional level at a, at about a level above where, where you and I started back in the day.

And so fundamentally that means the skill sets are different, right? Because when you, when you’re that level up, you are doing more editing than creating, you are doing more guiding than doing. It doesn’t mean that you’ve gone, you know, completely all the way to being just a manager. You know, not people aren’t just gonna jump right in and just be managers.

Let’s be realistic here. You do. But the, the kinds of things that you’re doing require a different skillset than what we needed going in. Because we weren’t doing a lot of editing of other people’s work. We weren’t doing a lot of guiding and checking and, and all of that kind of stuff. We had someone else who was doing that to our work.

Now, now you have to know how to do that effectively and to your point. And it’s, it’s not just about the prompting. It’s understanding what you’re getting back and then how to re-prompt, how to tweak, how to get the most out of it, how to make sure that it actually makes sense, whatever’s come back.

Because I mean, AI has come a long way in the last year. It doesn’t mean that everything that it does should be immediately blasted out to the universe. And that’s not just because of factual stuff. It may be just sometimes the tone isn’t quite right, or, or maybe it misses the point slightly because you didn’t give it enough information to begin with, and so you need to be able to look at it and have that level of judgment to understand when you need to apply human editing or when you need to ask the, the AI to take another stab at it or to do whatever you need to do to get the quality that the client is expecting.

 And I think, but it, it needs to be priced into your, your total cost of doing business, single invoice, not separate line items for all of this. Because I think to you, as soon as you start getting into, to separate line items for it, you put yourself in a difficult position to adapt as needed.

And the reality is that none of us really knows what the, the innards of an agency in 24 or 36 months is gonna look like. We all have pretty good guesses, right? I mean, but, but the reality is we just don’t know for sure. And so we can’t put ourselves in a box by specifying here’s what it costs or say, Hey, we’re just gonna pass through these costs for the markup or those kinds of things.

It needs to be factored into your cost of doing business.

 And on that note, I think we’ve provided some good food for thought and hopefully you’ll be able to think about pricing in perhaps a way that is a little more. I don’t know, rational, thoughtful, and more usable than what the holding companies are currently thinking or maybe have ever thought. But any case, I’m Chip Griffin for myself and Gini Dietrich.

This has been another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast, and it depends.

The PESO Model has been guiding smart communications strategies for over a decade, but the tactical landscape underneath it keeps shifting. In the latest evolution, Gini and her team have completely revamped the PESO Model Certification to address how AI and large language models are fundamentally changing visibility in 2026.

In this episode, Chip interviews Gini about the newly updated certification and what’s changed in how organizations should think about paid, earned, shared, and owned media. The conversation centers on “visibility engineering”—the intersection of owned and earned media where LLMs are scraping information and making decisions about who appears in AI-generated answers.

Gini explains why owned media remains the foundation (without content on your own properties, there’s nothing to demonstrate to journalists, creators, or LLMs what you’re about), but the recommended path has shifted from owned-then-earned-or-shared to a more deliberate owned-then-earned-then-shared-then-paid sequence. This evolution reflects how AI systems verify information by comparing what’s on your website against what credible third parties say about you.

They also tackle the persistent “X is dead” headlines that plague the industry—whether it’s websites, PR, or press releases. Chip and Gini push back hard on the notion that websites are becoming irrelevant, pointing out that your owned content hub becomes more valuable in an AI-driven world, not less. It’s your source of truth, the fuel for custom AI assistants, and the foundation that persists even as social platforms come and go.

The conversation covers practical questions about implementing PESO in smaller agencies, whether you need to be full-service to deliver on all four pillars, and how the certification meets communicators at different experience levels—from college students to seasoned professionals.

If you’ve been treating PESO as just four columns of tactics rather than an operating system for communications, this episode clarifies what you’re missing.

Audit where your owned content actually lives. Open a spreadsheet and list every place you’ve published content over the past two years—your website, Medium, Substack, LinkedIn articles, guest posts, anywhere. Mark which platforms you own versus rent. This awareness exercise reveals how vulnerable your content strategy is to platform changes and algorithm shifts.

Map one content piece through all four PESO pillars. Take your next webinar, speaking engagement, or major thought leadership piece and plan the full PESO path before you execute: owned content on your site summarizing key insights, pitching earned media opportunities based on those insights, creating social distribution that doesn’t just promote but educates, and identifying where paid amplification makes strategic sense. This forces you to think about PESO as an integrated operating system rather than disconnected tactics.

Dive deeper into the PESO Model. Visit spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification to learn more about the newly updated certification program. Whether you’re looking to formalize your team’s approach to integrated communications or simply understand how the model has evolved for the AI era, the certification provides a structured path from foundational concepts through practical implementation.

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’ve heard that you might be involved with this thing, I think it’s called the PESO Model.

Gini Dietrich: Oh, maybe.

Chip Griffin: You may you use that, right? That’s, yeah. Just you found it and you said this should, this is something we should use.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Something I just found and thought we should use it. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. Yeah, no, in all fairness, you are in fact the inventor of the PESO model, which is widely used throughout the PR and communications world, and it has been evolving with the times as we all should be. And so I, I think we have some, some new news that you’ve been sharing around the PESO model.

Gini Dietrich: Oh, well, according to a couple of people on the internet, it has not evolved at all because they are not able to use Google or AI to say, has the PESO model evolved since 2014? Perhaps.

It has. And you know, all of last year I spent a good amount of time, especially on the blog and the Spin Sucks podcast, talking about visibility engineering, which is where owned and earned media meet because that’s where the LLMs are getting their information, right.

We’re finding more and more that they’re scrubbing websites and then they’re comparing that to earned media, to the things that media not, and not just traditional media, newsletters, podcasts, things like that, that they’re saying about the brand and looking to see if they match. And if they do, then they’re appearing.

You’re, you start to appear in AI answers. So I spent a good amount of time last year exploring that and understanding that and, you know, using the blog and the podcast as my sandbox to learn more about it and teach the industry about it and understand what was happening. As part of that, I said, okay, it’s time to do a big refresh of the certification.

Because we did the certification in 2020 and then we did a small update to it in 2024. And this one is a completely revamped certification that shows you how exactly AI is… how exactly you’re showing up in AI answers and doing that via the PESO model. So we start with owned, we go to earned, then we use shared and paid.

There’s integration and measurement and it brings it all together. So I’m actually, I said to my team, not to brag, but this is really good. It’s a really, really good course. And we hired, last March I hired a chief learning officer who has helped me build it into something that’s more effective for an adult learner.

So it’s really specific to, you know, you can get the work done while you’re also a working professional. So she has done a really nice job of bringing that element into it. It has AI prompts so that you can use the PESO AI that we built to help you do the work. And it’s, it’s pretty good.

I’m, I’m really proud of it. I’m really proud of the work we did.

Chip Griffin: Well, I mean, it really is something that, that fuels most communication thinking in smart organizations today, whether that’s agency side, client side, that sort of thing. Now it’s not always as well understood it should be. Some people just throw the term around.

A little bit willy-nilly. Yes. You know, without really thinking it through. Of course there are other people who claim that it’s also their invention, which is, you know, but we’re not gonna go down that path ’cause we’re staying positive today, Gini.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, yes. We’re gonna stay positive. Positive, yes.

Chip Griffin: But I think to, you know, to me, one of the things that, when I look at the PESO model, I think is, you know, it’s great because it is an overall set of principles and framework that is effectively timeless when it comes to communications. And then it’s the implementation side of it. The tactical side of it. That’s the piece that needs to evolve. The, I mean, the four letters are still the same. It’s not like you, right? Yes. The evolution has not been to change PESO to something else.

Gini Dietrich: Nope.

Chip Griffin: It, it’s really just saying. Okay. All of these different components, the paid, earned, shared, and owned have evolved over the last 10 or 15 years. Yeah. And so how we implement it needs to adapt to that.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. It’s very much, I mean, when we did it in 2020, it was very much like how, how you’re using content marketing really to inform your contributed content through earned and then sharing that link through, through social and then putting some money behind it to boost it. And that was, you know, that was six years ago, and it worked back then, right? It’s still, social still worked from the perspective that you could post a link and people would follow that path back to your website. Well, people don’t do that anymore. You know, we are in a zero click world. And so how do, how does that affect the work that we’re doing? So, you’re right, the paid, earned, shared, and owned doesn’t change. That model stays the same. It’s the pieces on top that, that have evolved.

And so now it’s really how are we helping to inform humans, search engines, and LLMs so that we’re showing up. No matter if it’s a human looking, if it’s Google surfacing information or if it’s an AI surfacing information, we show up no matter what. And it’s really, that’s what it’s really about is how do you engineer that visibility?

How do you make sure that you’re showing up in the right places at the right time to the right people?

Chip Griffin: And so if you’re, if you’re thinking about leaning into the PESO model for your communications needs. You know, where should you be starting today? Is it owned? Is it social? Is it, you know, how, has it changed?

If at all from that standpoint over the last decade?

Gini Dietrich: Owned is still the foundation because without anything, without your own thought leadership, your subject matter experts, your content, all of that, there’s nothing to demonstrate to a journalist, a creator, a newsletter author, a podcast host, what you’re about and how you’re different.

So that’s the foundation. There’s nothing do than to just create that distribution layer through shared, and there’s certainly nothing to amplify through paid. So that’s always been the foundation.

There are of course exceptions if you’re selling widgets or your, you have an Amazon store or something like that, then I would probably start with paid, but that’s the exception to the rule. For the most part, most organizations need to start with owned. And we used to say that then you could go to earned or shared. Depending on your goals. Now we’re saying actually the best path for engineering that visibility is owned, then earned because you need that credibility, so the LLMs can cite that information.

Then you build your distribution layer, and then you amplify your work.

Chip Griffin: So I, think what I’m hearing you say is that websites are not dead despite all of these, you know, headlines that you like to see people’s,

Gini Dietrich: No, they are not.

Chip Griffin: The, the rise of LLM, websites are dead. You’re not even gonna need a website in five years.

Gini Dietrich: No, we still need a website because otherwise the LLMs don’t have anywhere to get the information about you. Humans don’t have any, I mean, we still go to websites. We might not go, you know, a direct click like we used to, but we still go to websites to get information. So yeah, you still need a website. I hate the, such and such is dead.

The PR, there’s one that PR is dead right now. Like PR is not dead. Come on. You can’t do, you’re not going to show up in AI answers if without PR. So PR is not dead.

Chip Griffin: No, the X is dead has always been one of my pet peeves when it comes to, I mean, that, that really is something that, that took off during the start of the social media era.

Yeah. Whether it was the press release is dead. This is dead, whatever. I mean, and, you know. Just, it’s not true. I mean, we, you know, I always used to say back 20 years ago, you know, people used to say that radio was dead. Radio is still very much around, and radio is still around in certain forms.

I mean, when I’m driving around, I listen to radio. Yes. Is it terrestrial radio? No, it’s satellite radio.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: But guess what? It’s still radio.

Gini Dietrich: It’s still radio. Yep.

Chip Griffin: Right. Podcasts are effectively radio. Transmitted in a different fashion. Yep. And so, you know, I think that the people need to understand that the underlying technology may evolve, some of the tools will evolve, but

Gini Dietrich: absolutely

Chip Griffin: the, principles and concepts will largely remain the same.

Doesn’t mean that everything stays. Yeah, certainly some things, you know, do go away, or become so small that they’re irrelevant, but you know, I think we need to be careful about those things. And, to me, with a website, to me, the other value is it still is a great place to be the central repository of all your information as all of these things change around you. I mean, if, for the last 10 or 15 years you’ve been using your website as your content hub and housing at least your most important, most valuable stuff there, it doesn’t matter whether medium or substack comes or goes. It doesn’t matter whether people move from X to LinkedIn to whatever.

Yep. You still have a source of truth for your own information, which becomes even more valuable in the world of AI and LLMs.

Gini Dietrich: That’s exactly right. I mean, we, have preached for years, we’ve all preached for years that you should not build an audience or content on rented land because to exactly your point, the rented land goes away.

X has become something that nobody wants to hang out on. We’ve moved to LinkedIn. Lots of people have moved to Substack. So, those pieces will change. So don’t, I think that theory, philosophy stays the same. Because you have, you are building something that you own, that you control, and allows you to control that narrative and be, tell the story the way you want to, and then you rent that out to other places versus building on rented land where it will go away.

Chip Griffin: Well, and I think that there are a lot of avenues that are opening up to organizations with, you know, particularly those that have more content already, but also by building it up. And I think in particular of the AI assistant I built on the SAGA website. Mm-hmm. Yep. That would not be possible without a thousand plus articles and videos and that kind of stuff because that is the fuel for that tool. Yep. And, and if I was trying to do it based off of, see what you can find that I’ve posted on LinkedIn or Twitter or things over the years, and it’s just not gonna work. And so having that in a world where you’re able to start customizing your own versions of LLMs for your internal or external audiences, huge value exists there.

So having that central repository, I think is actually of increasing value today, not decreasing.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, that’s actually a really good point. I was talking to a client last week and she said that one of the goals for 2026 is they have 17 different brands. So each brand has its own chief executive. And what she has, what she wants, the comms team for each of those brands to do is build an AI agent that helps them with that CEO’s voice.

And they can’t do that without content. They can’t do it without the executives’ speeches, webinars, podcasts, appearances, media relations, like they have to have all of that content, blog posts that they’ve written or articles that they’ve written for the website. They have to have that to be able to feed that and train the AI.

So without it, they don’t have any, to your point, fuel that will allow them to do that. So 100% that is accurate.

Chip Griffin: So as, we’re thinking about implementing PESO properly, so not just, I heard the term, it sounds cool. I made a list of four columns of each, and I just started just chucking stuff in there.

Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm.

Chip Griffin: I mean, how do I go about learning it the right way? And I’m, you know, we’re not turning this into a QVC

Gini Dietrich: Are you throwing me a softball?

Chip Griffin: you know, show here. But at the same time, I, think it is valuable for people to understand what is out there in a more formal sense, to understand and, adopt the process for their own organization.

Gini Dietrich: I mean, obviously the PESO model certification is the place to get the information because one of the, one of the things we see is exactly what you said, that people create their four columns and they say, okay, well we’ve got some content and we’re doing some media relations, and we’re throwing that on social.

And all right, we’ll put some, budget behind some of our organic social, and we’ve got the PESO model. And that’s, not the PESO model, that’s a list of tactics. So what the certification does is it walks you through exactly. There’s this, a scientific layer to it. It walks you through that scientific layer that allows you to embed an operating system, that let that foundation of your work so that as things evolve and the industry changes and your business goals change, you’re able to change the tactics on top of it.

We also hear, well, gosh, my, you know, my clients can’t afford to do a full PESO program, so what should I do? And in fact, they can afford it. You’re just thinking about it as this huge, overwhelming thing. And so the certification walks you through if you’re a solopreneur or a small agency, that walks you through if you’re a midsize, and it walks you through if you’re a large corporation or an enterprise organization.

And I will say for small organizations, which are most of our listeners. It’s really about how do you take one piece of content and repurpose it. So let’s say that you do a webinar. How do you take that webinar and create some content around it that, from what the webinar was, not promoting it, not trying to get registrations, but saying, okay, here’s what we learned in the webinar.

So we’re gonna create some how-to or thoughtful content for that. And then we’re gonna take pieces of the webinar and we’re gonna break it down for social posts. And then yeah, we’re gonna put some money behind some of it. And we’re also gonna go to some of our trade media and we’re gonna say, Hey, listen, our subject matter expert or our chief executive just did this webinar and here’s what they talked about.

Are you interested in some contributed content? So it allows you to do that in a really interesting, effective way without you having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or have a large team. You can do it without a lot of resources. I mean I built the PESO model framework for my agency and we were not, at the time, a big agency.

Mm-hmm. So that’s what it was built for, is to make it so that we could do more with less and do more with less resources and, less time and less people and less budget and all the things. So it is definitely, definitely feasible. So that’s what it teaches you how to do.

Chip Griffin: So I, you know, I think one of the other concerns that, some particularly smaller agencies have when it comes to PESO is not just the, clients and their budget, but, their own capabilities and, you know, so is it realistic for a small agency to be able to, you know, deliver?

We, we talk all the time about being careful about being a full service agency. Yep. But to, implement PESO, do you have to be a full service agency?

Gini Dietrich: You do not. That’s the other thing that the certification walks you through is if you have the capability yourself in house. Or you yourself can do it.

Then here’s how you do it. If you are building it for an external team or an external agency, here’s how you do it. If the client has a team that can do it, here’s what you’re going to do to build the strategy and the creative brief, and then you’ll hand it off. But here’s what is expected for. Here’s, what’s expected of you to deliver, and here’s what the expectation is for the output from the client team or the agency team, whatever happens to be.

So it has those three paths depending on where you are. So yeah, that’s a really good point. It doesn’t the, certification expects you to, build the plan and the strategy, and then based on where you are, it meets you where you are. So if, you have a team that you can execute or that you can delegate it to, great.

If your client has a team you can delegate it to great. But it meets you where you are so that you don’t have to be the expert, you don’t have to be the strategist, you don’t have to be the influencer, but you do have to build the plan and the strategic path to be able to help the team get there.

Chip Griffin: Mm-hmm. Um, and I mean, let’s talk through some of the logistics around the certification. I mean, how long does it take to get certified? Is this, you know, I, do a weekend course and I’m done. Is it an ongoing process? Is it, you know, is it the equivalent of a master’s degree? I gonna spend two years with, you know, countless hours?

What exactly does it look like?

Gini Dietrich: It’s built to be done in eight weeks, but I will tell you that most working professionals do not do it that fast. I would say most working professionals do it between 10 and 12. Each module is, so you have the intro earned or owned, earned, shared, paid, integration, measurement, and then the operating system and how to embed that.

So it’s eight modules and each module has between 6 and 12 lessons, and each lesson is like 8 to 10 minutes. So, you know, you’re looking at an hour to an hour and a half of learning of content and then you have the exercises for each lesson. So I would venture to guess it’s, you know, if you use the AI prompts effectively, that are in there, it’s between two to five hours a week probably.

Chip Griffin: And, who is the certification best for? Is it someone who’s got, you know, prior experience, is this, Hey, I’m fresh outta college and I want to have this so I can use it to, you know, improve my, my job prospects. You know, what, kind of experience are they expected to have, or knowledge are they expected to have coming in?

Gini Dietrich: It’s, we built it for any level of expertise. The interesting thing about it, of course, if you have more experience, it’s easier for you to grasp the concepts and implement it quickly. But we also use the certification in a hundred plus universities and the kids, the students go through it. So we find that they…

It’s different for them because they have to use a fake business where you can use your own business or you can use your client’s business, right? They have to kind of create the business as they go. But it’s really fun to see what kinds of things come out of that. So it’s built for every level of expertise.

It’s a different way of thinking about communications. So it’s not like you have to have 20 years of experience or only a year of experience. It’s because it’s teaching you something new.

Chip Griffin: Gotcha. And is the, are the certifications only at the individual level? Are there agency certification programs?

What exists in that frame?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, we’ve, that, that’s a great question that we evolved too. So it used to be, it was individual based and now we’ve built it so that you can put a team through it, you can put the whole agency through it. The certification itself goes with the individual because it comes through Syracuse University.

So it is, so if you have a team member that you wanna put through it, if they leave the certification goes with them. So you cannot say that you do the PESO model anymore if they leave. So we always recommend, I mean, you know, I’m an agency owner, so I’d love to see the agency owner themselves go through it, but I also know that that’s not always doable.

So, but if you want the certification to stay with your agency, that’s the way to do it.

Chip Griffin: Mm-hmm. And it, you know, I guess as, we’re winding up here, you know, where do you see the, PESO model headed in, the years, you know, in front of us? I would assume it will continue to evolve. Does your crystal ball tell you anything about, you know, what that evolution will look like?

Gini Dietrich: It will continue to evolve. I have not looked into my crystal ball yet because I’ve been so heads down deep into developing the content for this that I haven’t been able to forward think yet, but I’m very much looking forward to being able to go back to my regular job and, start to think about the future, but I’m not there yet.

Chip Griffin: I, I, guess that’s fair. I guess asking you for the, next version before this version is even fully out in the wild may,

Gini Dietrich: I’ve literally been like blinders on, heads down, creating all of this content.

Chip Griffin: I had to try at least, you know, see if I could get the inside a scoop on where the industry is headed so that I can…

Gini Dietrich: Ask me in a month.

Chip Griffin:  I can get there before everybody else, or at least before everybody else accept you.

Alright. If someone, wants to learn more about the PESO model or the certification or any of that kind of stuff, where’s, the best place for them to go for that?

Gini Dietrich: I feel like we just did an interview.

Chip Griffin: Well, that, that was not the intent going, but it made the most sense to me. And I, you know, me, I, follow the thread wherever it feels like it goes.

That’s fair. Some of these were questions I actually didn’t know the answer to, so I thought I would ask them.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Alright. spinsucks.com. There’s a PESO model certification page. I think it’s actually PESO-model-certification.

Chip Griffin: You love your hyphens on that website.

Gini Dietrich: I don’t know why it’s that way.

That’s just what they do.

Chip Griffin: Oh, well.

Gini Dietrich: Ask our web firm.

Chip Griffin: I’m, sure people can end up finding it.

Gini Dietrich: PESO model certification. Spin sucks.com.

Chip Griffin: There you go. Excellent. Well, I, think this was good information and I think we, you know, we do talk a lot about the importance of, you know, agencies continuing to adapt.

Particularly in, in this age of AI. And, if we are standing still, you know, we are gonna lose our jobs to AI and the other enhancements and improvements that are out there. I think this is one of many ways that you can, make sure that you are not getting left behind and, so, certainly something that most agencies should be at the very least learning more about, if not actually directly implementing within their businesses.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yeah, and, like I said, it has AI baked in, so if you’re still on the fence about AI, it’s a good way to dip your toes in the water.

Chip Griffin: And if you’re still on the fence on AI, why?

Gini Dietrich: It’s so much fun!

Chip Griffin: It really is. It can be a time suck at times, but it’s, yeah. It’s also fun and, frankly useful. I mean, I think that’s the… But anyway, that when this is not an AI show, this is a PESO show.

Gini Dietrich: Right. So, right, right.

Chip Griffin: We, will come back and bash you on AI again in the future.

Not, you, but you the listener. You the listener.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Alright. With that we’ll wrap up this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

David C. Baker recently published a fascinating thought experiment about what he’d do if starting an agency from scratch today—and it’s packed with provocative ideas worth serious consideration. His article offers a comprehensive blueprint covering everything from organizational structure to compensation philosophy, and much of it aligns with how Chip and Gini think about building sustainable agencies.

But the most interesting conversations happen when smart people disagree, which is why this episode focuses on the handful of points where Chip and Gini see things differently. Not because Baker’s ideas are bad, but because they expose the tension between aspirational agency management and the messy realities of running a business with real budgets, real people, and real client demands.

In this episode, Chip and Gini tackle mandatory one-month sabbaticals for every employee, open-book finances published on your website, 360-degree reviews, and incentive compensation structures. They dig into why ideas that sound compelling in theory often create unintended consequences in practice—like how retention-based bonuses can fuel scope creep, or why forced sabbaticals don’t actually solve the single-point-of-failure problem they’re designed to address.

The conversation reveals thoughtful nuance on both sides. Gini shares her brutal experience with anonymous feedback that backfired when presented poorly. Chip explains why he sees most performance measurement systems as “performance theater” while still advocating for more financial transparency with teams. They discuss the logistical nightmares of scheduling multiple month-long absences and why backup systems for unexpected departures matter more than planned time off.

Throughout, they return to a central theme: what works brilliantly at one stage of growth can be completely wrong at another. The goal isn’t to declare Baker’s ideas right or wrong, but to test assumptions and recognize that even the most well-intentioned frameworks deserve scrutiny before implementation.

Read Baker’s full article and identify your three favorites. Don’t just focus on the disagreements—pull out the ideas that resonate most with your vision for your agency and commit to implementing one of them this quarter. The value in thought experiments like this isn’t picking sides, but using them to clarify what you actually want to build. Spend 30 minutes reading, then schedule time to test one concept that genuinely excites you.

Identify your true single points of failure. List every critical role in your agency, then honestly assess what would happen if that person disappeared tomorrow without warning. Focus on unexpected absences—not planned sabbaticals—because those expose the real vulnerabilities. For each critical role, document who could cover the basics for 1-2 weeks while you figure out a longer-term solution. This takes less than an hour and protects you better than mandatory vacation policies.

Replace annual reviews with ongoing feedback. If you currently do annual or 360-degree reviews, shift to giving immediate feedback when you observe something—positive or negative. Make it a two-sentence conversation: “That client presentation was excellent because you anticipated their objections” or “When you miss that deadline without communication, it creates problems for the team.” Save annual conversations for compensation changes and goal-setting, not for dumping a year’s worth of stored-up feedback all at once.

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, we’re going back to a place that we’ve used for inspiration before. And no, I’m not talking about Reddit this time. Oh, I’m, I’m sorry. Dear listeners, this is not one of our Reddit episodes.

Gini Dietrich: I, I’m always scared of the Reddit episodes.

Chip Griffin: The Reddit episodes are always, they’re interesting. We’ll leave it at that.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I saw one the other day that I was like, oh boy, okay. In the real world…

Chip Griffin: Sometimes I just, I read those posts in the, in the agency subreddit, and I just, I wonder if, if they’re actual, real people posting about real stuff, because some of it just seems so insane that it just couldn’t be real.

Gini Dietrich: Yes. And some of it is very junior level entitled frustrations who don’t understand how a business operates. And so some of it you’re just like, Ugh. Okay.

Chip Griffin: Yep. But I mean, we were all once those people sort of a little bit

Gini Dietrich: Fair, true.

Chip Griffin: At one point in time.

Gini Dietrich: Yes. So absolutely.

Chip Griffin: But that is not what this episode is.

We are going to use another source of inspiration for us that we’ve used in the past, and that is David C. Baker. And, in this case, he had a post in his newsletter recently about what he would do if he was starting his own agency today. And it’s a lengthy article that walks through all of the different choices, that he would make strategically and tactically for the business.

And there’s a lot of good food for thought in there. It’s, mm-hmm. It’s probably gonna inspire a few additional episodes, down the road as we dig deeper into some of the specific topics there. But, one of the things that I did on LinkedIn was I broke out into four buckets, my perspective on it, and broke it into things that I agree with, things that I agreed to disagree with.

It depends because, hey, that’s our motto here, so why not?

It does depend. Yes. Yep.

And then of course, food for thought. So, there are far too many points for us to cover in a reasonably length podcast episode. So. I figured why not be controversial? Let’s deal with the disagrees that I had on my list and, use that as our jumping off point.

And we’ll of course include a link to the article in the show notes that you can go read the full article as well as additional context around what we’re gonna talk about today because there is a lot to, to explore here.

Gini Dietrich: And I think the buckets that you, you broke it into are really good. And for the most part I agree with how you’ve compartmentalized them all.

But there are some interesting ones on the agree to disagree bucket. So let’s, let’s do that. Let’s start there.

Chip Griffin: Alright. Do you have, do you have one that you would like to start with or do you want me to just start calling ones out?

Gini Dietrich: Let’s see. Yeah, there’s, well, yes I do. That we require one month annual sabbatical to eliminate single points of failure.

Sounds lovely. I would also like a one month sabbatical every year.

Chip Griffin: It’s as, as I understood the article, and it is possible, I misunderstood the intent in the article, but as I understood it, he was suggesting that every year, every employee.

Gini Dietrich: Everyone. Yes.

Chip Griffin: Had to take a full one month sabbatical.

Gini Dietrich: Yes. That’s how I read it as well.

Chip Griffin: That is, I mean, it’s a nice idea. I think it is highly impractical for most organizations. And look, I think the, stated intent here is truly a good one, which is to avoid those single points of failure, over reliance on any individual team member. Yeah. ’cause this is a giant problem for agencies, honestly, of most sizes until you get to be giant.

But it is something that, that you need to be conscious of. I don’t know that you need a full one month sabbatical for every employee every year in order to get there.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I mean, truth be told, like if you’re designing in the agency of the future and you’re starting from scratch today, I don’t know how you do that.

I mean, to your point, even in a large organization, I don’t know that how, you do that because it costs a lot of money. Not just resources and time, but it costs money to have people out. And so, you know, if you’re a, you’re an agency of three people or you’re an agency of 50 people, or you’re an agency of hundreds of people, it still costs money.

And so requiring that I think is a bit too much. And also, I will say that as somebody who has an extraordinary flexible and generous paid time off plan. There are people who take advantage of those things and you have to adjust to that, unfortunately. And I just don’t think it’s realistic. I don’t think it’s something that you could actually do.

I don’t think it’s something you could enforce. I think it would be extraordinarily stressful for the person and for their team, even though it might be nice in writing. I don’t think it’s, realistic in practice.

Chip Griffin: Well, I, think you, I mean, you, have a number of logistical issues that come into play here in addition to everything else.

And particularly because one of the other, tenants in there that I, disagreed with was, that you would require all employees to take four one week vacations. Over the course of the year. So now you’ve, essentially got all employees out for two out of 12 months.

Gini Dietrich: Two outta 12 months.

Yes.

Chip Griffin: And, that is logistically challenging because how do you do this and make sure that you don’t have too much overlap because inevitably there are certain times where people are going to prefer to do this. I mean, absolutely. If you want to take a one month sabbatical, most people are probably gonna want to do that over the summer months.

Yes. When perhaps, you know, family members have access to vacation or those sorts of things.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: Or they may want it end of year around the holidays and those kinds of things. So you, have collisions between people wanting the same time. If, they, can’t get what they want now, they may be frustrated that I gotta, you know, I have to take off a month in February.

What good is that gonna do me? I mean, it’s cold, it’s snowy outside. My family can’t take the time off. My significant other won’t go. Like,

Gini Dietrich: yeah,

Chip Griffin: so what am I just gonna sit around in my house all day for the month. so I think there are some logistical challenges. So I guess what I, this is one of those ones where I’d say the ideal is nice.

I’m not sure that it is practical to implement in the vast majority of firms. I would encourage instead that owners look and try to identify single points of failure and make sure that you have backups. Yes, yes. And frankly, those are important, whether you have someone taking a month off or a week off. And my view is that every employee should have a backup who can at least do the, minimum required for that role while they’re out.

Particularly if they’re out suddenly, right? Because being able to plan for it. You’ve got a sabbatical, it’s on the calendar, six months ahead of time. You can get some stuff done early, you can push off some deadlines. There’s a lot of things you can do, but really to deal with single points of failure, you need to be able to handle those unexpected absences, right?

Someone has a family emergency, someone has a health issue.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: Someone gets an opportunity to go on a game show, I don’t know, whatever it is, that takes them away suddenly. Those are the kinds of things that you wanna make sure you’ve, handled, with single points of failure. So. Nice idea. I just, I, don’t think it’s practical for most firms.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And the other thing I’ll say on the single point of failure piece is one of the things that I experience as an agency owner quite often is that my certain members of my team will take time off, but they can’t… They can’t allow themselves to take time off. So they’re constantly checking in and they’re constantly asking for updates and they’re constantly, and so one of the things I do with them is.

You know, ensure A, that you have some backup, and B, that when you’re asking for updates or you’re constantly slacking or texting or calling, that we don’t, we don’t give you a response. And, it makes people angry. But what I’m trying to do is A, give you the time off because you deserve it and, I want you to come back refreshed and ready to work.

And B, well, I’ll say C. Actually there’s three, three things, B there, nothing’s going to burn down while one person is out because we have backup and we do have places where there is not a single point of entry. And lastly, it’s really demeaning to your team, like it’s demeaning. And even me as the owner sometimes I’m like, well, don’t you trust me to fall to take care of your clients while you’re gone?

Like, come on, seriously. Right. That’s how it makes you feel. So I would say that it’s important from a single point of entry perspective as well to ensure that on the opposite side, that the team feels comfortable taking time off, that they don’t feel angst about taking the time off, that they can take the time off, and that the team behind them is, feels empowered and ready and trusted to do the work.

Chip Griffin: Spot on. Alright, well there’s, there’s a lot on this list. So let’s move on to, to something different. How about we talk about open book finances, because this is, one that, I, will say that I disagree with an asterisk. So I, what he’s advocating in his piece is open book finances, including public disclosure of finances on the agency’s website.

Gini Dietrich: Nope.

Chip Griffin: So, and in general, I am not a fan of full open book either internal or external.

Gini Dietrich: Nope.

Chip Griffin: However, I do believe that most agency owners would be better off being more transparent than they currently are with their teams. That doesn’t mean being complete open book, but it does mean at a minimum, sharing with them more specifically the trends that are going on with the agency.

You know, Even if you take actual numbers out, I like to show charts that show the directionality of revenue, the directionality of expenses. You know, so that you can kind of see those mapped up against each other so that as an employee, you start to understand more about the fundamentals of the business.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And it starts to make you less surprised when you’re seeing growth and less surprised when you’re seeing, you know, a narrowing of the gap, say, between revenue and expenses. So therefore, profit is shrinking. I, think that there does need to be more communication about that with, as I always say, education.

You can never provide numbers, whether that’s percentages or charts or actual numbers to your team without helping them to understand the economics of the business. Because otherwise you’re just giving them numbers that they will interpret however they want. But I do think the smarter you make your team about these things, the better they can help to manage project budgets, the better and more realistic they can be about compensation and bonuses.

All of these things, information helps, but not in my view all the way to full open books, either internal and certainly not external. No, definitely not. I don’t see enough upside doing it external.

Gini Dietrich: Definitely. I, can’t imagine doing it externally because all that does is open up the, an invitation for your clients to say, well, you don’t really need to be that profitable, so let’s, take some, let’s take a percentage off like the No, no, no, no, no.

And I also think, if I read it correct, his article correctly, he was advocating for open book on everyone’s salaries too. And no, I mean, we do salary bands, but you, do not know exactly how much every person makes. That’s not, that does not contribute to any sort of morale building inside a culture.

Absolutely not.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, the only thing I will say to that is that, I, agree with you. However, the reality is that most people have a pretty good idea of what everybody else in the business except the owner is making anyway. And perhaps other select senior level people depending on, how your organization is structured.

But pretty much all the juniors know what all every other junior makes. They all talk.

Gini Dietrich: Well, and that’s why we have salary bands ’cause everybody pretty much makes the same

Chip Griffin: right

Gini Dietrich: amount. Right? Like they all make the same, but I’m still not publishing it.

Chip Griffin: Exactly. And salary bands, you know, protect you. On that.

And so, I mean, you could make the, case as long as you have tight salary bans.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: Disclosure actually isn’t a problem. But you know, I don’t, I think as long as you have salary bands, you don’t need that. Obviously a lot of states are in here in the US are now requiring more disclosure around salary bands and that kind of stuff.

So, you know, we’re headed there as an industry one way or the other. but I do think that salary bands are probably sufficient and, we don’t need to share actual salaries with team members.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I totally agree with that.

Chip Griffin: You know, that said, I will say that all of your employees think you make far more than you do.

We’ve talked about this before, so there may actually be an upside for, most owners to share what their actual take home is because

Gini Dietrich: that like 10 people actually make more than I do.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know a lot of agencies where the owner is making less than team members.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: Which is wild to me, but.

Gini Dietrich: There’s also the upside on that though, if, you’re profitable and you make enough money at the end of the year, you get, you get that. But yes, from a salary perspective.

Chip Griffin: Right, right. Alright, how about, 360s? My, one of my pet peeves. I consider it performance theater. I think most KPIs and OKRs and all these things, I think it’s all performance theater.

I think it has very little to do with what actual performance outcomes you get from your team. But, 360s, you know, they’ve been popular for a couple of decades now. I don’t understand them. You know, I’ve been in organizations that, have done them. I will confess that, that, you know, at various points in time, my own businesses have experimented with them, and most of the feedback that you get from them is borderline worthless.

Because most of it falls into the category of nobody wants to say anything really bad about anything else, it’s, you know, at worst it’s lukewarm. But then of course, you always get the random ones who just, they have an ax to grind

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And they’re gonna use the 360 Yep. As their way to grind an ax against a colleague. Yep. Or, or another department.

Yep. Or whatever.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And I, I’ve yet to see any, that actually helps to provide good feedback from the employees to the owner themselves. That’s just, I mean, you can tell people it’s anonymous. You can use an outside advisor to organize it, but people are not gonna put in writing. Even if they think it’s anonymous, any perspective about the owner, it just, it doesn’t happen in, the real world.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I agree with you. The only time I’ve, and it this happened to me, the only time I’ve seen it be effective is I, early in my agency life, business life, I hired somebody externally to do interviews. It was all anonymous, it was all verbal, nothing was recorded, and people were absolutely brutal.

And the way he presented it to me made me so defensive that I couldn’t take even the kernels of feedback that I needed to hear. And there was some in there, but it was so brutal. And he, the way, and he presented it, I, in retrospect, I think he embellished some of it to make me, I, to make it like more jarring and alarming. Because he thought that that would make me wake up and pay attention.

And in fact, it had the opposite effect. It was not, not good at all. And then I didn’t feel good about the people I had hired. Because it was, it was brutal. So I agree that, they’re not great. I subscribe to the give feedback, ongoing feedback. And so I don’t do annual reviews, I don’t do 360 reviews.

You get feedback consistently. And when we’re in a meeting and I see something that you did really great or I see something that could use some work, I tell you that immediately. When I’m trying, when I want to coach you on something, I do that immediately and I ask my team to do the same with their team.

So there’s, we have the ongoing feedback and then the annual review, quote unquote, is, Hey. We met our goals, we did really, really well. Here’s a raise, or you know what? This year was shitty and it sucked. You did your part in trying to make it better. I’m gonna give you a cost of living raise or whatever it happens to be, right?

But it’s not a, here’s all the shitty things that your clients say, and here’s all the shitty things that your colleagues say and more about, I, you already know that you’re doing a great job in these areas. You already know that these are areas that need to be worked on, and we just continue to move forward.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I’ll say from, an owner trying to get, you know, feedback and perspective from the team there. You know, you, I wouldn’t do it through a, you know, a normal 360 review process, but you know, what, you’ve described part of it, I think the, whoever you hired got it right in having, you know, very anonymous conversations with team members.

And I think that bringing an outside advisor who has those kinds of conversations, nothing in writing, it’s just it, you know, it’s dialogue back and forth. I do those for my clients from time to time. I’ll be honest, I, you know, I would say it’s maybe 50/50 whether I feel like I’m truly getting candid feedback.

Gini Dietrich: Sure.

Chip Griffin: from the team members, because usually I don’t have any prior relationship with them, so they don’t know whether they truly can trust me or not. But you know, it’s, I mean, even 50% in most cases is enough to start, you know, pulling some common threads. But the whole, the way you use that information as an outside advisor, the way you present that.

Matters a lot. And so you need to really understand how is it gonna land best with the owner that has hired you. And is that by being blunt, is that by sort of internalizing the knowledge and sometimes I’ll just use it in my ongoing conversations to try to steer things. Yes. To address some of that feedback.

Sure. Without even explicitly saying, well,

Gini Dietrich: yes,

Chip Griffin: you know, the whole team said you’re very bad at X, Y, and Z.

Gini Dietrich: Brutal.

Chip Griffin: But instead, try to find other ways Yes. To, achieve the same outcome, because then the team starts to feel like it was useful to talk with me, and the owner then starts to feel good about the way the team starts to pull together and all that kind of stuff.

But it, is, delicate and, I would say that, you know, the, typical 360 process where it tends to be, you know, written survey feedback form type things, I, just, I think that’s, it’s very difficult to see that working in most cases and in my own experience, it has rarely worked out, the way people would like it to.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, totally agree.

Chip Griffin: All right. let’s see. We have time probably for at least one more, or maybe just one more here from the list. I don’t know if there’s something that, that jumps out at you that you would like to have, covered.

Gini Dietrich: Let me look, let me look. Uh, maybe we can mush board of advisors and direct access to CEO together.

Chip Griffin: Sure. Although they’re, well no, because the direct access to CEO is the CEO of the client.

Gini Dietrich: Oh, oh, got it, got it, got it.

Chip Griffin: So they, they are, they are separate issues. Got it. But I, mean, I think either, either board of advisors, the other one I would throw out there is a possible one is the, tying all, employee comp to have an incentive component.

Oh, yeah. I, think either one of those would be good. So I’ll let you pick between board of advisors or employee comp.

Gini Dietrich: Employee comp.

Chip Griffin: So, this is, this is one of my pet peeves. And I’m sure that David doesn’t know this, and, if he did that…

Gini Dietrich: Ha! He wrote it just because he knew it was your pet peeve.

Chip Griffin: But, but his argument was that every employee should have at least some of their compensation effectively at risk as part of a, an incentive compensation plan. And I hate this idea. I hate formulaic, incentive-based compensation for virtually all employees. And I’ll be controversial here, it doesn’t really apply to most agencies, but I don’t think it should apply to most sales reps either. Because I think that when you have incentive compensation, whether that is commissions or for hitting profit targets or you know, other things, the problem that you run into is people tend to the extent that they pay attention to it at all.

Right? So. You’ve got a couple of risks here. One is that you’re paying people for things they don’t even care about. Right? Right. You know, I mean, I’ve had sales reps they were gonna sell or not sell, and it had nothing to do with the commission they were getting.

Gini Dietrich: Fair.

Chip Griffin: Now that’s rare. Most sales reps are incented by their commission and, so they will try harder to get it, but what are they doing?

They’re, focused on the thing that gets them the commission, which is the actual signature on the contract and the revenue. It doesn’t mean that it’s good revenue. It doesn’t mean that it’s profitable. It doesn’t mean that it’s a good client. It doesn’t mean you can get results for them. It doesn’t mean any of those things.

And you’re now creating tension because if you have more than one sales rep, nobody wants to help each other because then they gotta split the commission. And so, but this goes beyond, you know, sales and other ways of doing incentive compensation. You still have, it’s very difficult to craft a plan.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: That doesn’t have unintended consequences. Yeah. And particularly when you’re outside of the sales realm, my experience is that most employees are not truly motivated to hit specific targets for their incentive comp. They’re either gonna do a good job or they’re not. And it has nothing to do with you saying if you hit this target, you’ll get a little bit extra.

But to the extent that it is, it does have those unintended consequences because now they’re fixated on, I mean, let’s say it’s client retention. So now what if, if you’ve got a client retention target and if you have a client retention over 85%, you get a bonus. Sounds great. Right? Because we’re, retaining clients. Except that what are we doing to retain those clients?

Right? Oftentimes that means we’re going to go way down the, rabbit hole of scope creep. Yep. And, we’re just gonna be giving them all sorts of freebies to keep them around. And so those are the things we need to think about. And it’s, why in general, I’m opposed to all forms of incentive comp.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, one of the things that we do do is we say you can earn up to a certain percentage of your salary in bonus. It’s the end of year bonus. And here are the, gates, like revenue, profitability, all the things. But most of it is not reliant on the individual. Most of it’s reliant on the company as a whole.

And so we all have to work together to achieve those goals. And then they sort of know like, okay, well this, this is where we are, so I’m gonna make 90% of that percentage or whatever it happens to be. So they are they are clear about those kinds of things and they tend, because of that, they tend to ask…

They tend to be more engaged and ask more strategic questions about work, and they’re more thoughtful about it. But to your point, we don’t reward scope creep. We don’t reward, you know, keeping a client longer than we should. Those kinds of things. Those, like, we take those pieces out. So we, do it based on, we don’t do it commission or incentive based, but we do do it based on a certain percentage of your salary if we meet certain objectives as an organization.

Chip Griffin: I mean, that’s better, but I’ll be honest, I still don’t like it.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. It works for us. It’s highly motivating for us.

Chip Griffin: And that’s, the thing. I mean, the, as we say at the end of every, episode, it depends. So even these things where

Gini Dietrich: mm-hmm.

Chip Griffin: You know, we may disagree, you know, where David has different ideas than we do, that doesn’t mean that, that none of them can work in your agency.

Right. and I think that it’s, that’s a point that, that he made in a LinkedIn conversation that, that we had, recently as well. You know, some of these may be good ideas, some of them may be bad ideas. Some of them may be good ideas, but you know, wrong place, wrong time or wrong agency, wrong time. And, some of these ideas are good at different stages of the lifecycle of even your own agency.

So something that works when you have two employees may not work when you have 20 or 200. Right. And so, you know, I just, I, love articles like this though, because it gives you that food for thought. It makes you think, it makes you, you know, to test your assumptions. You know that I’m a huge, advocate of curiosity generally.

And so, you know, making you think about things is helpful. And so hopefully we’ve made you think just as David made us think. And, so we, appreciate that and, we hope that we’ve given you those insights here that may help you think through decisions for your own agency. And of course, you know, check out the full article for many, many more ideas beyond what we were able to cover today.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely. It was a really good, really good article.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. So thank you all for joining us. That will conclude this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich,

Chip Griffin: and it depends.

No more excuses. No more waiting to see how things play out. AI has moved past the experimental phase, and if you’re still treating it like a nice-to-have rather than a fundamental shift in how your agency operates, you’re already falling behind.

In this episode, Chip comes out swinging with a wake-up call for the agency community: the ground is shifting faster than most are willing to admit, and the window for meaningful adaptation is closing. Gini backs him up with examples of how AI has progressed from an intern-level tool to something that can genuinely replace mid-level work—if agencies don’t evolve what they’re selling.

They dig into the practical reality of training AI tools to work like team members, not just one-off prompt machines. Chip explains how he uses different platforms for different strengths—Claude for writing, Gemini for competitive intelligence, Perplexity for research, and ChatGPT as his strategic baseline. Gini shares how her 12-year-old daughter creates entire anime worlds through conversation with AI, demonstrating the power of treating these tools as collaborators rather than search engines.

The conversation covers what clients actually want to pay for in 2026 (hint: it’s not social posts and press releases), how to build AI agents trained on your specific expertise, and why the process of training AI forces valuable clarity about your business. They emphasize that this isn’t about slapping the “AI-powered” label on your services—it’s about fundamentally rethinking what value you deliver and how you deliver it.

If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines waiting for the AI dust to settle, this episode is your warning: there is no settling. There’s only evolution or extinction.

Train one AI tool this week like you’d train an employee. Pick the platform you use most (ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini) and spend 30 minutes having an actual conversation with it about your preferences—tone, structure, what you hate (like emojis), and what outcomes you need. Feed it examples of your best work and tell it explicitly when outputs miss the mark and why. The tool won’t improve with one-shot prompts; it needs training just like a new hire.

Map what clients will actually pay for in 2026. Block one hour to list every service you currently bill for, then honestly assess which ones AI can now handle at a competent level. Don’t lie to yourself—if ChatGPT can draft solid social posts or press releases after reviewing past examples, that’s table stakes now. Identify what remains valuable: strategy, teaching clients to use these tools, implementing new processes, or solving problems AI can’t touch. This clarity will drive every business decision you make this year.

Test AI on something personal before rolling it to client work. If you or your team are intimidated by AI, start with meal planning, fitness routines, managing schedules, or drafting birthday card messages. Use it for something low-stakes where you can experiment with conversation-style prompting without pressure. Once you see how it responds to feedback and training in a personal context, you’ll understand how to apply the same approach to agency work.

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, you know, we started the new year off on a note where we weren’t gonna yell at our audience, but I feel like it, it’s time to yell at our audience again. I’ve taken too much time off from being Mr. Nice guy.

Gini Dietrich: Okay, well this shall be interesting. I can’t wait.

Chip Griffin: I, and this is, it’s partly for our audience, but it’s really for the overall agency community, particularly PR and marketing, PR and communications generally, even outside the agency world. I’m just, I’ve become kind of wound up lately because I think that the industry as a whole, and perhaps even some of our listeners are not acting swiftly enough to understand just how much the ground is shifting beneath them.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And how much serious evolution needs to take place. Really over the next year. I mean, I don’t think, I don’t think we’re on a long-term horizon here. I think that too many have waited to change too long in many ways, and AI is now becoming sort of the, the real trigger point for it, but it’s bigger than that.

I think a lot of the, the PR space in general has lagged behind a lot of what’s going on in the business community, and AI is just the fist to the face that’s, that’s gonna separate out the people who are gonna survive.

Gini Dietrich: The fist to the face. Wow. All right, then.

Chip Griffin: I told you I was a little wound up on this one, so,

Gini Dietrich: okay.

So everybody’s gonna be punched in the face. Got it. Okay.

Chip Griffin: If that’s what it takes to wake up and pay attention.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, no, I, yeah, I totally agree with you. And, you know, I have been gungho on AI for going on four years now. And it’s, it’s my second love for sure. But it is time to pay attention to how it is changing things and what it’s going to do to your business, to your teams, to how you deliver work, all those things.

Chip Griffin: I mean, look, a lot of the PR world has been focused in recent years on figuring out how to keep their head above water and survive, and hang on to the old ways of doing things. And this predates the explosion of AI in recent years.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: But, what the explosion of AI has done is really, it has drawn the attention of particularly clients to the issue.

It has drawn the attention of employees. It, and it is still being ignored. And I think we’ve hit that point where we can no longer ignore it. I think we’re at the point with a lot of these AI tools where they are now both accessible and reliable enough that there’s no reason not to accelerate your pace of change using AI as a tool to get there.

And we’ve talked about this before, and I, and I’m not changing my point of view, AI is not the end in itself. The AI is just a way to get there. So don’t mistake what I’m saying here for saying that, you know, you just need to adopt AI for the sake of AI. You still need to find problems to solve first and AI will help you on a lot of them, but you need to be finding those problems.

You need to be thinking ahead to what do clients really want from you? What is going to help them to get the results they’re looking for? It can’t be about how do I use AI to make myself a little bit more efficient in what I’m currently doing. Because everything is changing. And we need to be on top of that.

Gini Dietrich: I read an article on LinkedIn probably in November, and I’ll see if I can find the link to include in show notes. But it, it was from a chief marketing officer at a Fortune 10 company, and what he said was this: if I were an agency wanting to work with clients in 2026, here are five things I would do. And I can’t remember all of them, but one of them was teach organizations, teach marketing and comms teams how to use AI to be more effective. Implement your process, whatever it happens to be. Because we are no longer relying on our agencies to do the work. We are relying on agencies to teach us what’s coming ’cause we don’t have the time. And that has stuck in my head because I think that’s right.

I think that. Yeah, sure, agencies will always, or big companies, will always need arm extra arms and legs to do the work, but that’s not the work that most of us want to be doing. Right?

We don’t wanna be writing the social posts and the news releases. We wanna be part of the strategic conversation. We wanna be part of the of helping to move an organization forward. And if we can do that by teaching our clients how to use AI to be more effective, to be more productive, to accelerate their work, and I know everybody’s worried it’s going to replace me, it’s going to, it’s going to reduce our number, our billable hours, whatever happens to be.

I think there’s a huge opportunity here for you to reframe how you’re helping clients and using AI to be able to do that.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, but I would be very direct with listeners. If you do not change, it will replace you. It will take away.

Gini Dietrich: That’s fair. That’s totally fair.

Chip Griffin: Your revenue.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, it will. I totally agree with you.

Yeah.

Chip Griffin: So, you know when we say that you know that AI is not gonna destroy your agency, that’s only if you evolve.

Gini Dietrich: That’s fair.

Chip Griffin: If you keep doing the same thing that you’re doing today, it absolutely will destroy you. I don’t care whether you’re an employee or a business or whatever, if you are an employee and you think that AI isn’t gonna take your job in a year, it is If you don’t evolve, that’s and figure out how to use it for yourself.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. That’s totally fair.

Chip Griffin: And we need, everybody who’s listening needs to wake up to that fact.

It requires a huge mindset shift.

Gini Dietrich: Yes. Because AI can write your news releases, it can write your social posts. It can do all of that stuff that

Chip Griffin: not only can,

Gini Dietrich: we don’t wanna do anyway,

Chip Griffin: It should. Yeah.

Because it has evolved enough in the last year that the quality is there now. I used to describe AI as an intern. It is moved beyond the intern stage. Yep. It is at a minimum a junior employee, and if you train it well for your organization, it can be even a mid-level employee or perhaps even in some cases more than that.

But this training piece is important too, because part of the problem that a lot of people run into in my experience is they, they hop onto the AI tool and they just say, Hey, write this press release on this subject. And I look at it, oh, this is rubbish. It still requires a lot of work. You know what? It absolutely does.

The same thing would happen if you hired an employee off the street who knew nothing about you and your clients, and you said, write me a press release. The result would probably be pretty similar to what the AI came up with.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: But once that employee starts writing more press releases and you start telling ’em, this is the tone of voice we use, this is the style we use, these are the facts we use.

You feed more information into it. You explain your preferences. When you’re using these AI tools, you need to just be direct with it. Don’t accept the first response. Explain as you would with an employee what you want done differently. If you do that, it will tailor the outcomes. Even simple stuff. Like I’ve told them, stop showing me damn emojis.

I don’t wanna see an emoji in any response because I think it’s wildly unprofessional and I hate them.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: So guess what? I don’t see them anymore.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: I’ve asked it to tighten up the spacing on it so that I can see more on a screen. It does that. And that’s even before you start telling it, you know, this is the structure of a paragraph that I like.

You start feeding in information. I’ve fed in a thousand articles and transcripts and that sort of stuff into the platforms. It now can speak like me reliably to the point where I don’t know if what it’s giving me is a quote from something I’ve written before or original text that it’s come up with that just speaks so clearly in my voice.

Gini Dietrich: I love that it will say, it will give, usually gives me three options. One is like strategic leadership, like C-level blurbs. That with Gini-isms or like smart, funny, witty blurbs. And then I can decide, and usually what I do is I take a combination of the three, but it has gotten to the point where if it actually calls it Gini-isms, that like it knows how I talk, it knows how I write, it knows how I coach, it does it knows all of those things.

And it has created an opportunity for me to say, yeah, this probably, we probably shouldn’t have some Gini-isms in this ’cause it’s really professional. Or, we can include more because it’s more me talking to a screen or whatever happens to be. So it’s gotten to that point. It’s, when you train it, it’s very, very good.

Chip Griffin: Well, and you can even tailor those recommendations. So one of the things that, that I’ve told it is it’s fine to give me multiple options, but give me your recommendation.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And when you do that, don’t give me a whole lot of backup on the alternative. So spend your time explaining why you’re making the recommendation.

That’s fine. But then, you know, if it’s, let’s say it’s a title or something like that, you know, give me three or four other options, but it, by default, it tends to explain those three or other four other options. And so now you’re dealing with like a 10 page response,

Gini Dietrich: right?

Chip Griffin: For what should be something pretty simple.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: So. I, part of my instructions to my tools are, don’t do that. Give me the alternatives, but just, you know, bullet point them. If I want more information, I’ll ask for it, but it allows it to work more the way that I want it to. And so we all need to do that. We also need to be looking at these tools and understanding that there’s no one size fits all solution.

I have people say, well, should I, you know, should I use Claude or Chat GPT or Gemini? The answer is yes.

Gini Dietrich: Yes to all of them.

Chip Griffin: But they all serve different purposes. Yep. Just like you have different employees who serve different roles, these tools excel in different areas. I mean, Claude is fantastic at writing.

I mean, to me, Claude is my head of writing because it can just absolutely nail it, but there’s a lot of things that it doesn’t do quite as well.

Gini Dietrich: That’s right. Yep.

Chip Griffin: And then I look at something like Gemini, and I love what Gemini does in terms of inferring things from research. So it’s more willing to go out on a limb, and kind of read between the lines of things that it finds to come back with, particularly for competitive intelligence or things like that. You know, deep research.

Whereas Perplexity is very good for research where you really wanna make sure it’s accurate and you really wanna be able to cite all the sources, but it will not go out on a limb. So understanding what the strengths of each platform are is useful. And then there’s Chat GPT, which is sort of my, you know, my default choice for just basic stuff, strategy, et cetera.

But I’ve also told it, tell me when I should go somewhere else. And so it’s good. It’ll say You should hand this off to Claude now.

Gini Dietrich: I love that.

Chip Griffin: Because we’ve, I’ve had an actual conversation with Chat GPT about my stack and, and what I think of it and I bounced things around and, you know, refined it.

So now it knows how I want to handle certain things. And so it will stop at a certain point and say, now it’s time for you to go here. And that’s really helpful.

Gini Dietrich: I love that. I do not do that. I usually move between, but I haven’t had it recommend when to move it. That’s…

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, but it could, because it won’t generally by default tell you to do that.

But if you, if you explain what you have access to and what you want to use it for, it will tell you when is the right time, and sometimes I’ll pause and say, are you really the right one for this? Or should I be using one or the others? And they’ll say, no. Good point. You know, you should use this one instead for this particular task.

Gini Dietrich: I love that.

Chip Griffin: And it’s great. I mean, and I’ll, I’ll bring things back and forth like, so when I’m creating a piece of content, I’ll often, you know, ask more of the strategy piece from Chat GPT, because I’ve put more of the strategy stuff into there. Then I’ll go over to Claude to write it, but then I’ll bring it back for feedback.

Now the next level is then to automate this with agents with n8n and those kinds of things. And, and so, you know, I’ll play with those things too. But for now, even doing it manually is a huge time saver,

Gini Dietrich: huge time saver,

Chip Griffin: and still ends up with really high quality content. It’s not, people talk about how AI is helping put out rubbish.

And that’s because people are doing it without training.

Gini Dietrich: Correct.

Chip Griffin: You need to think through how you use these tools to get the results that your clients are looking for and the results that you need as a business. And this is where people are falling down, and this is where a lot more effort needs to go into it.

If you want to not just survive but thrive.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I totally agree with you. And you know, it’s funny ’cause when somebody says to me, oh, I just can’t get it to output what I need, and I’m like, user error. I usually say that because that’s exactly what it is, is you haven’t taken the time to train it. I, and you have to, I, you said earlier, you talk to it like it’s an employee.

I do the same thing. Talk to it through like, okay, this isn’t quite right and here’s why. Think about this, this, this, and this. We also need to consider these things. And then it goes. Oh, okay. Goes into thinking mode and then it, it outputs pretty close to, but you have to have a conversation with it. I use this example all the time, but my 12-year-old is obsessed. Obsessed with anime, and she like, no, nothing else exists in her world right now other than anime. And she has created an entirely new ecosystem of anime worlds from her favorite shows using chat GPT. I mean, it’s so good that I’ve actually considered. Finding a, a publisher to have it published as fanfiction because it’s that good.

And she doesn’t type into it. She literally has a conversation with Chat. She calls it Gee. And she will say, Gee, I’m thinking about this. I want the guy to do this, and I want the girl to do this. And like she has a whole conversation and it creates this world with her that… it’s fascinating to sit and listen to how she’s using it.

So it’s the same kind of thing. Have a conversation with it. You can do it via voice, you can do it, you know, by typing whatever is easiest for you. But have a conversation with it and teach it just like you would an employee. It’s gonna learn faster. It doesn’t sleep, it doesn’t need to eat. It doesn’t need to work out.

It doesn’t need to take a break. It doesn’t, it’s not going to pause for meetings. You can have stuff running in the background while you’re doing something else. I mean, it’s the more time you spend training it, just like with a human being, the better it is.

Chip Griffin: Yep. And I’m gonna be honest, it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be more work and stress in the short term for you.

Gini Dietrich: Sure.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, this is not,

Gini Dietrich: mm-hmm.

Chip Griffin: You know, this is not a quick fix. It is not. It is not something where there’s some magic formula. You’re gonna have to try to figure out what works for you and for your team. What works for your clients. And the client piece is really where you need to start with this.

You need to spend some time thinking about what are your clients really hiring you for? What are they going to need you for 12, 18, 24 months down the road? Then start figuring out how these tools can help you to get there. Because there’s just, there is too much of this “Well, you know, I need to, I need to protect my billing model, and so I need to do value pricing because of AI.”

That is not the answer. Although if it were, what you would discover is that, that people are valuing less what you are doing today. So if you’re truly going to follow value pricing, that doesn’t mean that you get more. It means you probably get less for a lot of these things because they realize, you know, that drafting of a press release, I actually can get that out of Claude pretty well.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Particularly if you feed it in your last three or four years worth of press releases.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: It’ll be pretty darn good at coming up with them on their own.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: Probably candidly, in less time that it takes to communicate to your team that they want it.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. 100%. Yes.

Chip Griffin: Now there will still be companies that are happy to outsource it generally.

Gini Dietrich: Sure.

Chip Griffin: Right. That’s, that is always going to exist. But the way that they value it from a price standpoint and the other things that they want alongside of it will absolutely change. And you need to be thinking about that. Because AI is not just changing how your business operates, it’s changing how other businesses operate.

It’s changing how the media operates. And so it is truly a disruptive force that we need to be thinking about as communicators and as agency folks because it, it upends a lot of what we have done, tactically at least, in recent years and over the decades. It does not upset the outcomes that are being sought after.

Gini Dietrich: That’s right.

Chip Griffin: From the work that we’re doing.

Gini Dietrich: That’s right.

Chip Griffin: And, and we lose sight of that for the tactics too often.

Gini Dietrich: One of the things that I did is I built an agent, and I call it my co CEO. And as I was building it, I was going through a really rough HR time and so I used it mostly, honestly, just to vent.

But it got to know me, and what’s important to me, and my voice, and what things I wanted to be human forward on, and what things I needed to stay professional on. And so I, as I was building it, it was, I was going through that process. Now I can say to it, okay, we’re thinking about doing this. So for instance, a client came to me probably midyear last year and said, Hey, we really want your team to do an audit of all of our brands and where they sit on the PESO model maturity level.

And I kind of laughed and said, well, I can tell you right now, they’re all at level zero. And he was like, great, that’s good to know. What’s what takes us from zero to one, one to two, and so on up. And I thought about that for a little bit and I was like, hmm. I don’t have an answer for that. And so I went into my CO CEO and I had a conversation with it.

Like, if we were gonna build a maturity model for the PESO model for an enterprise customer, what does that look like? And it probably took two weeks for me to get something that I could go back to him with and feel comfortable and confident with it. But it would’ve taken me two months to do that on my own.

So, you know, it helps you think, it helps poke through holes in things. You have an AI that you’re building and I hope it’s okay for me to mention this ’cause I don’t know if it’s available yet, but I got to beta test it and it’s, I put in there that I was looking for. I said, okay, this is where, this is where the business is at the end of 2025.

These are our goals for 2026. Here’s what I’d like to do in the next three to five years. Here’s like, I put in all of that information, where are the holes? And it started poking holes into things that I had never even considered. And I was like. Chip, this is really good. It’s just, it’s really, really good.

So when you, when you train it, when you teach it what you’re wanting, what your voice is, what you’re trying to achieve, it is going to help you in more ways than one. It’s gonna help you think through problems. It’s gonna help you come up with solutions you didn’t consider. And like I said, it doesn’t need to sleep.

So it can work in the background while you’re doing other things.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And there are a lot of these ways that we can innovate for our businesses and that particular example, it is live on the SAGA website now. It’s an AI agent called Sage.

Gini Dietrich: It’s awesome and everyone should check it out.

Chip Griffin: It’s trained on a huge volume of my both public and private materials that I’ve created over the last eight or nine years, and it does a remarkably good job of mimicking the advice I would give. Is it a hundred percent? One-to-one? No. Yeah, but it’s, it’s pretty darn close to the point where I’ve had a couple of clients now who have tried it and then asked me the same question they asked of Sage, and they got almost exactly the same answer.

And, and so that’s how, you know, it’s, it’s working pretty well because I think, as any listener knows, I have some views that are not necessarily exactly in line with every other advisor in the agency space. And so, and in some of those cases, they were pieces of advice that you wouldn’t get if you went somewhere else.

So, you know, you can tell that it’s actually using the training materials. And not simply doing a general knowledge search. But these are all things, it does take time. You’ve gotta have the material to provide to it. You need to spend the time with it, as you did in conversing and going back and forth.

But the more you go back and forth, the smarter it gets.

Gini Dietrich: That’s right.

Chip Griffin: And the better it can help you the next time something comes along.

Gini Dietrich: That’s right.

Chip Griffin: And I think the other thing is that the more you use these tools, the more it forces you to think about some of these things. Because in order to get the most from them, you really have to be very clear about who is your ideal client?

What are the services you provide? What is the value you deliver? And so, it’s just like a business plan. I always say that the business plan itself doesn’t really matter, but the process you go through to create it does.

The process you go through to train your AI itself is beneficial and helps to get clarity. Because the clearer you are with the AI, the clearer you are with yourself by necessity. And so you need to be thinking about these things.

You need to be really thinking about making much more radical change to your business over the next year or two than you probably have previously thought. You really need to be thinking about how not just technology, but client needs will force this change, otherwise you are gonna get left behind.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I totally agree. And to your point earlier, if you evolve and if you use it, and you’re better, you’re doing a better job of understanding what it is that your clients are willing to pay for, and they’re still willing to do it. They just don’t wanna pay for social posts and news releases.

Chip Griffin: That’s right. I mean, there’s a huge opportunity here. There’s a giant threat,

Gini Dietrich: huge opportunity,

Chip Griffin: and I don’t wanna minimize that, but there’s a huge opportunity.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: But the key is you actually have to evolve and change. You can’t just play buzzword bingo.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, please.

Chip Griffin: Just slapping AI on top of something that you deliver that’s not gonna help you.

Gini Dietrich: And it’s fun. It’s fun to test it. It’s fun to try it out. So do it.

Chip Griffin: Yeah,

Gini Dietrich: Do it, do it, do it.

Chip Griffin: I mean, but we can’t minimize. It is scary for a lot of people too. I mean,

Gini Dietrich: sure, absolutely. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: But you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta embrace that fear if you wanna succeed.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I always say when I have somebody new join the team that’s scared of it, I say, all right, let’s do it.

Let’s use it for something personal. So I will say that to you as well. Meal planning, fitness, hobbies. Managing your kids’ meltdowns, whatever it happens to be, just try it for something. Write a poem in a birthday card. Try it for something personal, and I guarantee you, you’ll be hooked.

Chip Griffin: I had no idea we’d be getting to poems and birthday cards here today.

So I think that’s the note that we’re gonna wrap up this episode on. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

You built an agency you’re proud of. So why does your website still feature that glowing tribute to someone you wouldn’t recommend today, or explain services you stopped offering three years ago?

In this episode, Chip and Gini tackle the unsexy but critical task of auditing your agency’s website content. They share practical approaches for identifying what needs updating, what deserves deletion, and how to prioritize your efforts when you’re staring down hundreds (or thousands) of outdated pages.

The conversation covers everything from quick wins—like updating your homepage and key pages—to strategic decisions about high-traffic content that no longer serves your business. Gini shares her process for using tools like Screaming Frog to audit content systematically, while Chip emphasizes the importance of focusing on human users rather than chasing every algorithm change.

They also dive into the balance between refreshing old content and creating new material, with specific guidance on when each approach makes sense. The episode wraps with a reminder that consistency matters more than perfection—especially when AI is increasingly using your bio and content to determine whether to recommend you.

If your website is starting to feel like a liability rather than an asset, this episode offers a manageable roadmap to get it back on track without turning it into a year-long project.

Audit your homepage today. Open your website and read your homepage copy with fresh eyes—does it accurately reflect who you serve, what you do, and where your agency stands today? If not, block two hours this week to rewrite it. This is your most important page and the fastest way to stop misrepresenting your business.

Check Google Analytics for your top 20 pages. Identify which pages drive the most traffic, then ask yourself if each one still serves your business or if you’re just attracting irrelevant visitors. Kill off pages that generate traffic but don’t support your current positioning—inflated vanity metrics aren’t worth the confusion.

Ensure bio consistency across platforms. Compare your bio on your website, LinkedIn, and other platforms where you appear. Make them consistent (accounting for character limits) so AI can confidently present you as an option when people search for expertise in your area.

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’m old.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, you are.

Chip Griffin: But you know what else is old?

Gini Dietrich: What else?

Chip Griffin: Some of the content on my website.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, sure. Mine too. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: It’s, it’s one of the perils of having been around for a while.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, indeed.

Chip Griffin: Both as a human, as a business.

And so we have a lot of content out there on the website that maybe isn’t as current as we’d like it to be. Some of it I haven’t looked at in many years, so I don’t even know if it’s up to date or not.

Gini Dietrich: Sure.

Chip Griffin: I’m sure that many of our listeners have content on their website or maybe entire websites that are old and out of date.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: So my question to you is, how should we be thinking about this kind of, how do we deal with this problem? Or we, we can’t just spend, I mean, I, I don’t know about you, but my website’s got over a thousand different pieces of content on it. Oh yeah. Now I think most of our listeners probably don’t have websites with quite that much content on it, but some do, and even if you’ve only got a couple hundred, you know, that’s still a substantial body of content that you need to audit in some fashion. So what, what do you do about that?

Gini Dietrich: You know, it’s funny, this conversation is happening right now because about a week ago, right after the holidays, I got an email from a friend that said, Hey, uh, I don’t know if you know this or not, but you have a blog post from, from 13 years ago, literally 13 years ago, praising Elon Musk. And I was like, well, let’s delete that!

But like, I don’t know how she found that. She must have been searching on the site for something and found it. Right. So I think it’s important to do an audit and I did delete it. I moved it to the trash. But, I think it is important to do an audit.

We have a client that said to us, we don’t think we need new content. We have plenty. And we went in and we’re like, okay, great. Let’s do an audit and see. And we audited it and they do have plenty of content, but the most recent is two and a half years old. So one of the things that we’re working on with them right now, well, twofold.

One is going through the audit that we did to see what needs to stay with an update, a refresh, and what should be deleted. There are lots of, there’s lot, there’s lots of content on their site. And actually this will appeal to many of you listeners too. There’s content on their website that has some great SEO value.

You know, showing up first in Google results and things like that. So you don’t wanna get rid of that content, but it probably needs a good update. It probably needs to be refreshed. It probably needs new quotes, new experts, new expertise, new statistics, whatever it happens to be. So that’s what I would do.

It’s pretty easy. We use, Screaming Frog to do the audit, so it’ll, it will look at your entire website and then give you an Excel list of all of your links, and then you can go and you can tell it I want dates and topic and all that kind of stuff.

And you can go through that fairly easily to say, this is old, we don’t need that. Move that to a different tab. This is good stuff. We don’t wanna lose it. And then I would compare that to what you’re keep, I would compare what you’re keeping to do a Google search. Are you show, are those links showing up in Google? And I would also ask AI. Are you showing, is AI showing that content in its answers.

So you probably, I would venture to guess, like you and me, we, it would be a really big undertaking ’cause we have years and years of content. But for most agency owners, I would guess it’s probably a, I dunno… And you can use AI to help you, but it’s probably a two or three hour thing that you can split up over several weeks, right?

To get it done. But 100% you should be, you should have an up update up to date website overall, and you should be updating content so that it’s refreshed, not necessarily the URL, but updating the content inside the article or the blog post or the page or whatever it happens to be.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And I, I think the advice to sort of just kind of, you know, go through a list of it is a really good starting point. Whether you use some third party tool, or frankly, if your website isn’t too huge, if you just go into WordPress and start scrolling back through the pages and posts. Mm-hmm. And just looking at the headlines, it at least, you know, things that are obviously in need of help will jump out at you. Yeah. Or you know, that you praise somebody that doesn’t make sense or whatever. And, and we have to keep in mind that, that sometimes that old content might be a year old, it might be 10 years old, right?

It might still need some sort of an updating. The other thing that’s, that’s often helpful is just to go into, you know, something simple like your Google Analytics and just look at, you know, the top 20, 30, 40 pages in terms of traffic and just ask, are all of these pages the way I still want to present myself in whatever the current year is that you’re listening to us?

Because, you know, that can be a really helpful way of prioritizing what you wanna address, what you wanna update. And particularly if you’re getting a lot of traffic to a page that either is not as relevant as it should be or not as accurate as it should be given the, the way the world has changed.

You know, those are ones that you want to address. I, to me, one of the interesting cases is, you know what, and I’ve seen this a lot, and I, some of the organizations I’ve worked with have had this issue where you’ve got a page that gets a ton of traffic, but it’s frankly totally irrelevant to what they do today.

Right. It’s still, it’s still an accurate bit of content, which is why it keeps getting traffic, you know, because it’s answering whatever question the searcher may have had, but it doesn’t really benefit the organization other than it does produce a fair amount of inbound traffic. So, to me, those are interesting cases.

Trying to figure out what you do with those. And, if you talk to different SEO experts, you sometimes hear different bits of advice on this, right? Because some are like, well, you know, you, you’re still getting people clicking over to your site, and that’s a good signal for the search engines, so that’s good.

The problem is if the signal is that you’re relevant for something that you really aren’t relevant for. Right. So, doesn’t really help you. My general inclination is if it’s completely irrelevant to what you do today, I would kill it off and sacrifice the traffic. But that’s, that’s my perspective on that.

No, I totally agree with that.

Either way you should make a conscious decision about it.

Gini Dietrich: I totally agree with that because I think you’re right. If it’s not some, if it’s irrelevant, if you’re bringing irrelevant traffic to your website, your numbers are inflated. So I would rather have accurate numbers so I know exactly what my pipeline looks like, my lead generation looks like, what my lead nurturing looks like, and be able to work it backwards.

Right. So I completely agree with you and like I said, I killed that article from 13 years ago. Because that’s not how I feel about that man anymore. So, yeah. At all.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. Well, for, for many years on my personal blog, the highest trafficked post was one, was sort of a throwaway post I did on a camera backpack, that I got like 20 years ago.

And it just, it scored, it turned out it was a popular model of the backpack, and so it got a ton of traffic from people who were considering buying it. Obviously that didn’t help me at all.

Gini Dietrich: Not at all. Right.

Chip Griffin: Because that, I mean, you know, I didn’t pitch camera backpacks or anything like that, you know, I didn’t sell ’em, I didn’t even have an affiliate link in or anything like that.

So what, you know, what was the value of it? Pretty much nothing. You know, it felt nice to see all the spikes in traffic that it generated. Sure. Of course. But yeah. But it wasn’t particularly useful, so, and those are the kinds of things that, that many of us may, you know, maybe we just had a comment on our blog about some story of the day. And it just took off and for whatever reason still sticks around. But it’s not really what our agency is about, so doesn’t really help.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I would really look at, I mean, some of your ideas, especially if you don’t have a ton of content like we do going, just going through WordPress and looking to see. I would start with the content on your website specifically, what’s on your homepage?

Does it represent who you are and what you stand for today? Does it accurately reflect where you are today? I would venture to guess the answer for most of us is no. I would start there at least with the homepage and your top three or four pages, so probably your services page, probably your about us page.

Maybe a resources page, depending on, again, look at your Google Analytics. Then once you’ve done that, then I would definitely go through WordPress and go through any content that you have, podcasts, recordings, videos, blog posts, whatever it happens to be. Go through all of those and then divide and conquer and say, yeah, we’re gonna have to update these.

It may take me all year, but I’m gonna do one a week and I’m gonna update one a week. And it suddenly, you’re taking small bites of the elephant and you can get it done by year’s end.

Chip Griffin: I love your advice to look at the homepage and other key pages before worrying about, you know, old blog posts and that kind of thing, because many, many agencies neglect their websites.

Until they decide all of a sudden, this is how I’m gonna get new business. And so then they over invest in time and money Yes. In their websites. Yes. So it, it, it does seem to be a story of extremes most of the time, but, but looking at that homepage of your website and making sure that it accurately reflects the business that you are: who you serve, what you do, and that it is very crystal clear about those things on your homepage.

Very first step. Do not pass go. Do not do anything else. Just get that done first.

Then I would say, look at the about page and make sure that it accurately reflects who you and your team are. Make sure that the right people are there. Make sure that your bio is accurate and up to date. Make sure that your photo is up to date and have a photo, by the way, because people like to deal with other people.

Yep. And as someone who does professional headshots for people on the side, I gotta tell you, you gotta have something that’s within the last five years at least. I mean, if I put up a photo on the website of me with hair, that’s just, that’s not, that doesn’t make any sense. And yet I see plenty of people,

Gini Dietrich: no,

Chip Griffin: who have photos on their websites.

And then I meet them and I’m like, this is not even in the ballpark.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, you’re right. The other thing I will say to that, and this is incredibly important, is that AI notices inconsistencies. So if you are inconsistent across different, the websites, social media, all the places that you are online, you are not going to show up in AI answers no matter how good your content is. So when you’re doing that audit, I would also audit your bio. Your bio that’s on the website compared to what it’s on LinkedIn compared to what it is on all the other social media platforms. If you have YouTube or a podcast platform, compare it to there. If you have a newsletter, compare it to there. Like ensure that it is the exact same bio, not, not, little changes based on the platform. I mean, you’ll have to make it smaller for Twitter than you would for LinkedIn, right?

But it has to be consistent because if it’s not, AI gets confused and doesn’t know what to do, and so it just doesn’t present you as an option. So as you’re doing that audit, I would ensure that the bio, your own bio and then the bios of your key leadership or key team members are consistent across every platform on the internet, because that’s incredibly important with AI today.

Chip Griffin: Yes. At the same time, what I would say to you is AI and SEO are very important. More important are the humans who actually visit your website.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: And so there’s lots of advice out there, including what we’re talking about here that will help you from an AI and SEO standpoint. However, it should never, ever, ever be at the expense of the actual user’s experience.

Gini Dietrich: No, never. Right.

Chip Griffin: And increasingly, I’m seeing websites that are being tailored for how they think that AI will be reading and indexing their sites. And so, for example, they shift almost entirely to a Q&A format because AI, generally speaking, loves the Q&A format in order to stock the answers that it gives to people.

However, that’s not always the best user experience. Sometimes you need to present things in more of a compelling story like way. And trust me, the AI will figure it out. It may not be as great at it today. It may prefer the Q, but it’s going to improve over time.

And it’s the same thing as for years, people would chase the latest algorithm change at Google. And that’s fantastic until they change it in three months or six months. Right. And so what are you gonna do? Just keep updating your website? Well, if you’re an SEO agency, you love that, right? Because. You know, you can just tell the clients, well, you know the latest version, now you gotta do this.

So you remember all that work we did in January? It’s June now. I’ll do it again. We’re gonna redo all of that for you, right? I mean, it’s a great full employment act for SEO experts. However, it is not generally a good user experience, nor frankly, a particularly good use of resources. So first and foremost, focus on the end user’s experience.

And only after that, think about, okay. Are there tweaks or additions I could make in order to help the search engines or the AI spiders or that kind of thing?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think the point you make about how Google updated updates it algorithm like real often and that you are trying to keep up is, is ludicrous, but it’s something that we’ve always been aware of and I think the strategy has not changed.

If you always write, produce, not just write, but create content that’s compelling to a human. The algorithms and the AI are going to love it so that doesn’t matter. Are there things you can do to help it and AI find you? Sure you can do Q&A’s, you can do the, but that we do that stuff and this is gonna get techy, but we do that stuff on no follow sites, so it doesn’t show up in Google.

It doesn’t show up in our navigation. It’s only there for the AI bots, right? So there are things that you could do for sure. But if you always put the human beings first, it’s going to work no matter what happens with AI, and no matter what happens with the algorithms.

Google came out, gosh, several years ago now, and said, if you’re focused on expertise, experience, authority, and trust, those are the, those are how we’re using, that’s how we’re floating stuff to the top. So I think that’s really good advice because that is always going to A, make your content different, and B, make it valuable to humans. So if you’re always demonstrating your expertise that nobody else has and your experience that nobody else has, that will build authority and trust in both places.

Chip Griffin: Well, I mean, the irony is that all of the experts will help you to chase the algorithms and the technology, but the reality is that all of the search engines and all of the AI engines, they’re all chasing the user. All they’re trying to do is try to deliver what a real person wants.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And so it’s ironic that, that we set them aside, the humans aside to chase the technology when the technology is chasing the people. So it’s kind of a weird circle and I’ve consistently maintained for 20 plus years. If you focus on the user, you’ll get to the right place. You may not be there today.

And, and it, it’s gonna ebb and flow over time as algorithms and technology changes. But chase the user because that’s how you sell your business. That’s how you find new clients and that’s how you keep people happy.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s, yes. Focus on the humans first. That’s always been the advice.

That strategy has not changed. The tools change, the tactics change, the execution changes, but the strategy remains the same.

Chip Griffin: So let’s say, you know, you’re, you’ve gone through this audit on your website. You’ve chucked out the things like the praise of Elon Musk that you don’t want on there anymore.

You’ve gotten rid of the content that’s no longer relevant to the business that you are today. So now you’re left with some things that you could update, you know, maybe you could strengthen them. They’re not obviously wrong. They’re still pretty good. How do you decide where you want to invest your energy as far as which of these do you update?

Which of those do you flesh out and make bigger deals? Because I think that’s where the real challenge comes in. You know, do you, are you better off updating old content or are you better off creating new content?

Gini Dietrich: I think it depends, which is the tagline to this podcast, of course, but, it depends on a few things.

One, if you, if there’s older content that you can refresh and update with minimal resources, like it’s just a five or 10 minute, gosh, this needs to change, this needs to change, and then I republish it and it’s showing up in Google results. I think it’s probably worth doing it. Obviously if it doesn’t support or reflect where you are right now, I would not worry about it.

But if there are things where you have some SEO value or AI is using it to bring real humans to your website based on the questions they’re ans they’re asking and it’s accurate, then I would take a few minutes to update it. And like I said, maybe you, you create a list of things that you need to do and you just check one off a week.

Right? And then I would focus my efforts on new stuff. So where are we now? What are we thinking? How are we? How have we evolved? What kinds of things are we offering to the industry? That kind of stuff. So I would first focus on the stuff that you can repurpose because it’s easier and it’s a smaller lift, and you still have the value of SEO from that perspective, and then focus on the new.

But like I said, if your website in general, your homepage, your about us page are not updated, I would start there.

Chip Griffin: And I think it’s important that you, as you’re looking at the old content, that you’re thinking about refreshing that, that you don’t look at it through the lens of I could make this perfect if I spent some more time on it.

It really, you have to see that there’s some, that the outcome for the user, again, going back to the person on the other end, is meaningfully different because of the additional work that you’ve put in. I mean, if it’s just simply that it’s phrased better, it’s organized, neater. It’s, you know, a little bit clearer that that’s probably not enough for me.

Right. But if you’re able to, you know, things have changed between then and now as far as either what’s going on in the world, what’s out there, what your knowledge is, and you can, you can make it 50% better. Okay. Now you’re talking about something that, that may be worth the investment of time and energy, but if it’s, you know, if you’re just, you know, kind of polishing.

That generally isn’t gonna pay off.

Gini Dietrich: Totally agree with it. Yep. Totally agree. Yeah. If it’s new, like if it’s your thinking has evolved and it supports that and you just need to polish that piece or you know, like… We are constantly evolving the PESO model. And so I’m always looking at that content to say, oh gosh, that doesn’t represent where it is anymore.

Right? Do I wanna put a date on this or a year in the content so that anybody who visits it understands that this is three years old. Do I wanna delete it? Like, so I, you know, I’m constantly. Our marketing team and I are constantly looking at those kinds of things, so I totally agree. If it’s just a polish, I wouldn’t spend the time.

But if it’s evolved thinking, if it’s new services, if it’s new products, if it’s new IP, if it’s, you know, those kinds of things, then I would definitely include it.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. Well, hopefully we’ve given people some good ideas so that they can take a fresh look at their website as we start the year. And figure out, you know, what they might wanna tweak, improve, get rid of, hide from, any of those things.

And it, it doesn’t have to be a giant project as you suggested. No. It can be the kind of thing where you chip away at one piece of content a week or something like that and you’ll see a meaningful difference over the course of time.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. Yep. Get it done. Get that homepage updated.

Chip Griffin: So with that, 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 does depend.

As agency owners settle into 2026, it’s easy to operate on autopilot—chasing the next tactic without reconnecting with what made the business work in the first place. In this episode, Chip and Gini make the case for looking backward before charging forward.

Chip admits his first agency started because “consultant” sounded better than “unemployed.” But the real question isn’t just why you started—it’s why you decided to keep building. That motivation should be informing your strategy today.

Gini shares how she once believed she wanted a large agency with hundreds of employees and global clients. When she hit 30+ people, she realized she’d built something she didn’t enjoy leading. She was buried in HR issues instead of doing the work that energized her.

The Great Recession forced a reset, and she restructured the business around her strengths. Her advice: figure out what brings you joy in the business, and protect time to do more of it. Otherwise, you risk drifting into micromanagement or burnout.

The episode also digs into practical growth tactics from the early days that still work. Gini recalls how she built her pipeline by developing relationships with business development leads at large agencies. When prospects came in below their fee threshold, they’d refer the work her way—a principle that remains just as relevant today.

Both hosts encourage owners to revisit their “things I’d never do” list from when they started. It’s worth checking whether you’ve quietly drifted into those same patterns over time.

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 am Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I’m thinking way, way back, way back decades now to why I started my agency.

Gini Dietrich: Oooh. Decades, huh?

Chip Griffin: And I can’t remember ’cause I’m too old now, so. No,

Gini Dietrich: you can too remember.

Chip Griffin: Well, I mean, the honest answer is that I started my first agency was because I was unemployed.

And it was better to describe myself as a consultant than unemployed. Yeah. Sure. And then than accidentally started accumulating business. Yeah. But I, but I do think it, it is a helpful exercise for us to go back and, and think about why we started the businesses or, or maybe not, in some cases, like mine, because I was unemployed, is not the greatest explanation.

So you know more why did I decide to, to, to build it into an actual business.

Gini Dietrich: Why? To keep going. Yeah. I think that’s good, especially as we’re, we’re thinking about starting out the new year and remind ourselves, you know, of the reasons that we started this.

Some of us do it because we’re, we’re unemployed. Some of us did it because we found a better, we, we think we had a better way of doing things. Some of us did it because we have a problem with authority. Some of us did it ’cause we’d make terrible employees. I mean, there are lots of different reasons, but I think reaching back into our archives in our brains and thinking about why we did it or why we, I think that you’re right, why we continue to do it is a, is a really good exercise.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I, and, and I’ve said over and over again over the years that, that I think too many agencies operate on inertia, as opposed to any kind of a, a fundamental strategy. And so, you know, it’s very easy to say as, as I’m sure many people ask you as they do me, well, what’s the, what’s my next step?

Here’s where my agency is now, what, what should I do next? And the answer is very different depending on what you’re trying to accomplish with the business. So trying to think back to those early days and what motivated you to start the business.

Evaluate it because it, that may have changed, right? You, you may have started it because it served a particular need in the moment, and maybe it’s different today, but thinking about that and thinking about what you really want from the business is usually a better way to come up with strategic decisions than it is to say, well, what do other agencies like mine do when they get to this stage of growth or to this challenge?

It’s, you really need to to match it up because otherwise, what’s the point of taking on all of that risk and stress of being a business owner?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I mean, a really good example of that is I really thought I wanted to build a great big agency with hundreds of employees and, and clients around the globe and all of the, all of the things.

And as I started to grow and we got to about 30 ish, 33, 32 people, I realized that’s not what I wanna do. Right. It was not enjoyable. I had built a company that I was not thriving in, that I didn’t enjoy leading. You know, I was dealing mostly with HR issues and not doing the work.

And so the, the Great Recession did afford me the opportunity, unfortunately and fortunately to kind of take a step back and, and think about what kind of business do I want to have? And what kind of business do I want to lead? And while we’re back up to that same size, it’s a different structured business that allows me to focus in on the things that I do best and do the things that I enjoy versus HR ’cause that is not something I enjoy at all.

Chip Griffin: I, I think I’ve yet to meet an owner who likes, enjoys doing HR or accounting or those sorts of things. Not fun. There are some who do it well. But don’t enjoy it. But I, I don’t think I’ve found any that actually enjoy doing it.

So, but, but I think that, you know, as you think back to those early days and you think about what motivated you, it can often help you to figure out, you know, what is, what is that spark that you need in the business for you to either continue enjoying it for a longer period of time or bring back some of that, that joy that you had in those early days.

Because I know a lot of agency owners these days are, are frustrated and, you know, trying to figure out how to change things for the better. And I think part of the way you inform yourself of that is by thinking back to those early motivations and figuring out how you can inject more of that into your business today.

Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s really important to do that. And I think there, you know, for me personally, I get really passionate and enjoy my job when I’m learning and doing new things. So artificial intelligence, of course, has been a great big thing for me because I’ve really enjoyed learning it and understanding it and implementing it into my business and then taking it to clients.

You know, last month we launched the PESO operating system, AI edition, where the AI prompts you instead of you prompting it. So it will say, what are your business objectives? What are you trying to achieve? What are your audiences? What are your messaging? And then it builds a PESO program for you that’s fully integrated versus you saying I need you to act like a marketing director who can, who understands PESO and can build this and this.

It’s that. So I like, those are the kinds of things that really get me excited. And building those kinds of things gets me excited and motivated. So it’s, it’s easy because I understand that about myself. It drives my team crazy ’cause they’re like, oh, she’s got something new. Or my, their favorite thing is, I had an idea.

And they’re like, oh no, no, not again. But that’s what keeps me, yeah, that’s what keeps me motivated. So finding a way to understand what brings you joy in the business, I think is incredibly important. So that without exhausting your team, of course, but doing it in a way that keeps you motivated and, and not burned out.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. One of the things that always used to, to drive my teams nuts was I would say, you know, over the weekend I was playing with this new thing. And, and you could just see the looks on their faces and they’re like, oh, this is a lot more work for me now.

Gini Dietrich: This is gonna be fun. Yep.

Chip Griffin: This is, yep. Yep. They, they never seemed to appreciate it the way that I had hoped they would when I came to them.

Correct. With these, these brilliant brainstorms of mine.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: I, and I think as, as you know, founders of agencies, most of us come in with some sort of that. Idea that, that we want to be creative or strategic or those kinds of things. And as we end up in more of a management role, we have less and less opportunities to do it.

So I, I think that, that rather than giving up on that dream, we need to figure out how we can sprinkle enough of that in there to keep ourselves motivated. We can’t give up the, the management piece. We can’t give up the business development piece. Many of us would like to. But the, the reality is that, unless you’ve built a fairly large agency, you just don’t have the ability to pull yourself out of that, as a solo owner.

But it doesn’t mean that you have to give up on those things entirely. You can carve out a piece of time to work on that, and if you are structuring your role in such a way that you’re enjoying what you’re doing, it also means that you’re frankly less likely to be doing the, the, the bad things that founders of businesses can do, which is micromanagement and tinkering with things that you don’t really belong in because you, because you’re not occupying yourself with the things that really motivate you.

And instead, you’re continuing to try to do every aspect of the business. And that’s where you start to, to run into team morale problems quite often.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. You know, I think one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned over the years is that, yes, I can do the work, and yes, I can probably do it pretty well, but is it really something that I should be focused on?

And if not, is it something that I can pay an expert to do because in the long run, it’ll cost me less money, less time, less resources, all of the things. And I know as small agency owners, it’s really hard to say, gosh, I’m gonna have to spend $2000 or $3,000 a month on an expert. When in fact it might save you, you know, 15 or 20 grand on the backend.

So I think you have to think about these things as investments in your business and investments in your time so that you can focus on the things that, that you are great at and the things that make you the happiest and the things that are most motivating to you, because that’s how your business will grow.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. And if, if that happens to be being creative and strategic, then, then you can, you shouldn’t be doing it day to day in all likelihood for clients. Sure. But you should find ways to do it either as part of, you know, quarterly or annual client reviews. Or internal brainstorming sessions that you’re engaging in.

There’s a lot of things you can do behind the scenes to be useful and, and to, to exercise those muscles in a way that that gives you satisfaction. But doesn’t put you on the front lines so that you’re, you know, now the, the one that the, the client decides they’re gonna call every time they’ve got an issue. Because that, that ends up eating up a lot of your time in a way that probably you’re not going to enjoy.

So sometimes it’s doing things behind the scenes that gets you the, the most value, or doing annual in person with the client. But they understand it’s special that you’re here, this is not. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. This is not something they can or should expect every week.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. You know, I, I know I’ve talked about this before on the podcast, but we do quarterly planning with our clients.

We do a quarterly look back, and then we, you know, say, okay, based on metrics and data and all that and your priorities, here’s what we’re suggesting for quarter two or in the next quarter. And that has afforded many opportunities. A, for me to, to work in my where I’m, where I’m strong, but it also almost always gets us more money.

So when you’re, when agency owners are like, oh, should I do a cost of living raise every year? Should I increase by 10 or 15% every year? That kind of goes away because you are getting new projects every quarter based on the the plan and the strategic strategy and creativity that you’re providing to the clients every quarter, because they’re like, oh gosh, yeah, we should actually do that.

And some, and sometimes they’ll say, we don’t have extra budget. Can we move some things around? Which is okay, but most of the time they’ll say, you know, we, we have a little extra budget. Let’s focus on doing that. We have to launch a new website. Here’s some extra budget for that. We have to do a series of webinars to maintain our CEUs. Let’s here’s a little extra budget for that.

So there are things and opportunities for you to, for lack of a better term, term upsell when you’re doing these quarterly meetings versus waiting for the annual.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, and so, you know, finding a way to, to inject yourself in those things is a valuable exercise.

Absolutely. From that, look back to the early days. But the other thing that that can be helpful in looking back to your early days of your agency is, you know, what helps drive your early success? Because a lot of times when we’re trying to find solutions to our current growth issues, we can find clues in some of those early days and mm-hmm.

A lot of that, you know, in the early days of, of most agencies, it may be that low hanging fruit from personal networks and things like that. But there are usually other patterns that you might be able to see there that might help you to understand what are, what are the basics that you need to go back to?

How do you, how do you employ some of those rather than, than focusing on, you know, all of the fancy new things that you see, you know, some, you know, genius podcast hosts talking about as far as how to grow an agency and instead say, Hey, this is what worked for me. Yep. Because you may find something that works again today.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we say this to clients all the time, but going back to the basics. It works. And it works for you too, so absolutely you should think about those kinds of things.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, you didn’t get here by accident. Well, maybe you got, maybe it’s a little bit of an accident sometimes that happens.

Maybe, yeah. Some of it. But, if you’ve had any longevity at all, even a few years of longevity as an agency owner, there are patterns that you can find usually that started in those early days. That you can lean into for understanding and rather than trying to do something wild and different, focus on the things that you know, you’ve proved can work for your business.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. One of the things, if I were to dig back into the archives, one of the things that worked extremely well for us is I had developed relationships with people who did business development at the large agencies, and what I found is that if they had an RFP or a current client or a prospect come in and say, we only have a quarter of a million dollars to spend.

They’re not even gonna look at that. And so they started just referring that business to us, which is how I grew the business. Mm-hmm. So if I think about that now, how could we replicate that kind of, you know, pipeline development? It was extremely effective. And I, I gift that to all the listeners too.

Like there are larger agencies in all of your cities that they have a certain threshold, and if any something comes in below that, they are happy to refer business. So there is, there is one way for you to start thinking about how am I going to, you know, keep myself motivated? How am I gonna keep my pipeline full?

How am I gonna keep cash coming in? That’s one of the things that you can think about.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and thinking those things through. I mean, sometimes it’s not a one for one where you did exactly the same way you did it originally, but you take that nugget of an idea. And you know, things like, finding other people who can refer you business that’s not quite a fit for, for them, but might be for you.

It’s a good reminder to be out there and having conversations with your peers. With people even that you might perceive sometimes as competitors, because there are often opportunities. In the work that I do with agencies, it’s not uncommon for some of the other consultants in the space to refer clients to me that are a better fit for my background and the kinds of agencies that I work with and vice versa.

Because you know, we all have our specialties. And as an agency you have your specialties, so it is very common for many agencies to have grown this way. So certainly something to be looking at today, particularly if you’re struggling to find that new business in 2026.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think I really love the advice of thinking back to how you got to where you are and some of the things that you did, and going back to basics a little bit, because those are the things that are going to continue to work.

And to your point, maybe tweak a little bit to make a more, be more effective in ’26.

Chip Griffin: I mean, it also puts you in the right mindset, I think, because if you’re thinking back to those early stages, that tends to be when many agencies have the most growth, when things are most exciting. And so if you can try to bring back even a sprinkling of that, that can be really helpful.

Particularly when times are tougher, or you’re looking for the inspiration to take things to the next level or whatever challenge you may be facing today, those lessons can be extremely valuable and also motivating at the same time.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. Yeah. I used to, I used to get mad at companies that would hire big PR firms for like brand awareness and, you know, sending news releases and they didn’t get any coverage. They didn’t get any results. And I would get, I would get angry and I would call the company and be like, you’re so stupid. I would never do that today. But I had such a, I was just so naive and passionate about what we were doing, that it didn’t bother me to call and be like, we can do this significantly better for you.

And in some cases they laughed and hung up on me. And in some cases, like we became agency of record. Like we took AOR away from Fleischman Hillard one year from a big, big company with a big, big company. And it was because I made a phone call where I was like, I can’t believe that you’re spending this kind of money and getting these kinds, these lackluster results.

They were like, all right, let’s listen. I don’t think I would do that today, but it worked.

Chip Griffin: Right. But, thinking back to those things can help you do two things. One is to think some of the positive things that you can do or the affirmative steps, right. That you can take.

But the, but sometimes looking back to, to how you got started can also be reminders not to do certain things.

Gini Dietrich: Sure, sure.