Agency Leadership Podcast

AI has evolved enough now that one-shotting entire deliverables is tempting, and many people online claim to be doing just that. In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss why that’s a bad idea, and how you can train your AI tool to give you less slop-like content.

Chip is fed up with receiving one too many pieces of material with no human thought applied to them, not in preparation, not in editing, not even in the decision to hit send. His take on the broader one-shotting trend is that when the result is actually good, it’s rarely a true one-shot. The person usually spent months feeding their AI tool context first, the same way a good off-the-cuff article draws on years of accumulated expertise.

Gini suggests treating AI like a capable intern. You wouldn’t send an intern’s first draft straight to a client, so don’t do that with AI either. She describes going back and forth with her tools so much that Claude once asked her to batch her edits instead of making them one at a time. Chip pushes back on the intern comparison, arguing that with enough context and consistent feedback, AI has moved closer to a capable mid-level colleague. That feedback loop is also the focus of Gini’s internal training program, Slack sessions where the team is currently learning to push back, reject, and refine AI output instead of just accepting it.

However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that because it needs your guidance, AI isn’t worth using. Being the human in the loop doesn’t make you the savior of your business. Owners who rely solely on humans without using AI are making as grave of a mistake as people who think they can replace themselves entirely with AI.

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

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

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I think we should just walk away and let AI handle this entire episode, and I’m sure it will all be fine. We don’t-

Gini Dietrich: I’m sure it will.

Chip Griffin: We just need to say- Yeah … give us an episode, we can move on.

Gini Dietrich: I like it. Let’s do it.

Chip Griffin: Publish it, and it’ll be great.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. I like it. Let’s do it.

Chip Griffin: Actually, it could be an interesting exercise at some point, just to, just to-

Gini Dietrich: It could be, actually, yeah. Maybe we should do it …

Chip Griffin: just, just, just, just tell Claude- Yes. Yep … “Hey, you’ve got all the transcripts, you’ve seen all of the episodes, just create an imaginary episode from start to finish.”

Gini Dietrich: Actually, we should do that.

Chip Griffin: That, I, um, I’m-

Gini Dietrich: Not today, but in the future.

Chip Griffin: No, not today. Not today. We should, we should do that. But you know what? We will not just publish it without looking at it.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: And that’s what we wanna talk to you all about today. Oh. Because you all know that Gini and I are huge champions of AI.

We strongly believe that it is, it is valuable, it is essential even for the success of agencies moving forward.

Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm.

Chip Griffin: However-

Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm …

Chip Griffin: you still need the human in the loop. You still need to use some judgment. And you need to figure out what you’re putting out actually makes sense, whether that’s to an internal audience, whether you’re digesting it yourself to make decisions, whether you’re giving it to a client or publishing it.

Whatever it is, you need to be paying attention to it. And I have gotten one too many bits of material sent to me in recent weeks that has had no human intelligence applied to it whatsoever.

Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm.

Chip Griffin: Not in the preparation of it, not in the editing of it. I guess in the delivery, the hitting of send.

Gini Dietrich: Maybe. Maybe AI did that too. I mean-

Chip Griffin: I don’t, I don’t- It will … I don’t think so. I mean, that’s- That’s a st- generally speaking, the people who are at that level where you can actually send it have at least given it some of the context in advance to, to help guide it. But there is this whole concept out there of one-shotting things with AI.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And you see all these people talking about how, “I one-shotted this website. I one-shotted this landing page.” Mm-hmm. First of all, in many cases they didn’t, because when you see it and the result is actually good, chances are they built up a whole lot of context within their own personal AI in advance.

Right. So it’s- Right … is it one-shotted? Sort of, but it’s based on a whole pile of information. That’s like saying that, that you one-shotted an article on the PESO model. Okay, sure, you sat down and wrote it all at once, and it’s great, but that’s because of all of the years you spent developing it.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, and we’re just, we, we need to, as, as excited as we are about AI, we need to figure out how to balance in the human judgment piece.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I mean, we talked last week or the week before, recently, about critical thinking skills and judgment, and those are the things that we should be interviewing for and hiring for, right?

Well, the same thing goes for you and your use in AI. It’s great. As you said, big, big fan. I use it every single day. I’m not afraid to admit that I use it. I do use it, but I use it as a thinking partner, not as a create this draft for me and then I send it off. Like, that’s just not how I use it, and that, that’s what you have to be thinking about, is, like, how do you say to it, “Okay- This is good, this was not, you didn’t cite this correctly.

Like, you have to, you have to go back and forth with it. To the point, I do that so much to the point that Claude said to me the other day, literally said, “If you’re going to continue making changes to this deck, please do it all at once so I don’t have to keep redoing it.”

Chip Griffin: Wow.

Gini Dietrich: I was like, “I’m sorry, you’re a robot, and you’ll do it every time.”

Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Wow.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: I, I- Mm-hmm … I can’t say I’ve had that experience myself yet.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I had- So- Just the other day. Happened just the other day. Yep. So all right, fine. So I went through the whole thing and I wrote down all of my notes and I said, “Here are all the things I want you to change, with the caveat that when you change this, you may not do some things correctly, and I may have you redo it again, but here it is.”

And so you, you go back and forth, and it’s totally fine to have it make the updates and have it do all those things for you, but you have to use it, and review what it’s giving you because you can’t just, to your point, one-shot it and send it off. You can’t.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and look, I am perfectly happy for you to use the tool itself to do all of the work, and then you just, you know, send that final deliverable on to whoever, whoever you’re sharing it with.

However, it needs to have that critical bit of thinking, and you need to give it the feedback just like you would give it to an employee so that it continues to refine and develop it. And I mean, look, sometimes, sometimes the one shot does work out. I’m not gonna sit here and say it never happens because I’ve had it happen too.

But usually because I’ve given it that context in advance. And I think you really need to think about this throughout the entire life cycle of the information that you’re sharing with your AI tools in order to get the best quality. You need to give it the background information so that it’s not necessarily as smart as you are, but it has a large chunk of the context and knowledge and experience that you have fed into it.

And it takes time to do that. Yeah. I mean, I’ve been doing it for a couple of years now and it’s still not where- Yep … it needs to be. Yeah. I still am constantly giving it more material, and there’s all sorts of stuff from my pre-digital days that it’s much more difficult to give it. I give it to it by having it interview me, which I’ve talked about, I think, here before.

And so I will, you know, give it sort of an oral history of things that I did in the ’80s and ’90s and early 2000s before I had files that I could feed it. And, so that’s all helpful, but you’ve got to give it that, and then you’ve got to read whatever it’s giving you or watch it if it’s a video or what…

Just you cannot just run with it. You need to actually look at it just like you would look at something from an employee and give feedback to get it where it is, is ideally should be, and not just throw it out into the ether and say, “Good luck, let’s have at it.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s exactly right.

And what I kind of tend to think about it as is it’s a really smart intern. So you would not just take what the intern creates the first shot and send it off. You wouldn’t. You would look at it, you would say, “Okay,” you would provide feedback, and you would go back and forth so that you can coach the intern and you can train them and all the things, right?

It’s the same kind of thing. You have to train it, you have to teach it, otherwise it’s gonna keep giving you the same slop that it, that’s giving to everybody else, and it’s not gonna be differentiated at all. So to your point, like, we- I went through, we do planning in six-month increments, so at the end of the first half of the year as we did our plan for the second half of the year, I went through and updated all of our material markdown documents that we put into ChatGPT and Claude so that it learns, okay, this is what they did in the first half of the year, these are their goals for the second half of the year, so that, especially for me when I use my co-CEO, I’m like, “Okay, here are our objectives and key results.

Here where, here’s where we are against them. Help me, you know, update them and keep them going.” And it does all of that, but I had to give it all of that context, and I have to make sure that it’s correct. Sometimes it’ll say things that are four weeks old even though it has context from last week’s leadership team meeting.

No, you missed that. Like, you have to be able to review what it’s giving you and apply your critical thinking skills to it.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. And, I think, you know, one of the things that I’ve done with my own AI operating system is that I’ve developed a critic pass. So anything that I’m going to share with, with anyone else, or publish, or that’s gonna have a material impact on, you know, some software or tool that I’m building, it runs a critic pass to assess it and make the machine judgment initially on are there gaps here, are there holes here, are there contradictions here, is it pulling on the right data?

And it almost always will find things in that pass. That doesn’t mean that I still don’t have things to find myself, but at least it’s now, it’s improving it before it even comes to me, so sort of like having, you know, the middle manager review the intern’s work.

Although I’d, I’d push back. I think AI has moved well beyond the intern stage.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I would say that too.

Chip Griffin: And I, I think it’s more… but particularly, the more context and guidance that you give it, the more it becomes a, a middle-level employee. Not even a junior anymore. It really can, if you give it the right information and such, I mean you almost think about it as, as yourself five or 10 years ago. And I think that if you, if you do that, you can get more out of it. But again, it does require that, that back and forth, that give and take. You need to provide the feedback so that it continues to improve, because if you’re, you know, let’s say that you’re, you know, creating an outline for a podcast episode.

If you do it with it every week and you show the final product, it will continue to get better. And so the feedback you give in week one is not the feedback that you give in week 10 or 20. Yep. Yep. If it’s working correctly. If it’s not, then you need to look at your process and change it.

And honestly, what I usually do there is I’ll just say, “Hey, we seem to be having this problem every week, Claude. Can you help me figure out why and how do we fix it?” And it is remarkably good at helping you to figure out how to make it better.

Gini Dietrich: So one of the things that we do internally, and I think I’ve talked about this before, is we have a twice weekly what we call Poppy Seeds, and we use Slack for our internal communication.

And so every Tuesday… No. Tuesday and Thursday? Tuesday and Thursday mornings, Poppy pops into Slack, and she has, it does two things. One is sort of like learning and training, and one is we, we discovered that not everybody was reading or listening to or watching my content, and a client would ask them about something that they had read or listened to or watched, and that our team had not.

And so the Thursday one is, “Here’s the content,” and then it asks very specific questions about the content. But the– we’ve just spent the last five or six weeks in Poppy Seeds on this exact thing on from an AI perspective. And right now we’re working on, you have a, you have the ingredients of a great prompt.

You know how to ask it questions. You know how to get the output that you need. Do you know how to ask it questions? And so what we’re, what we’re pushing them on right now is pushing back, rejecting, and refine, and then doing it so that you get something that’s actually valuable. So we have some follow-up questions that we should, that we want them to do, which is what we want them to ask after any AI output.

Why did you weigh that factor over these others? Now argue the opposite idea, which is your critic’s pass, right? And see if it holds up. You gave me the safe answer. Give me the one you would tell a friend. Like, those kinds of things we’re trying to help the team think through from the perspective of actually getting it to being a thinking partner with them.

And I think those are, are ways that you can do that too. Like we, and I think we’re in week five or six. So we started out with, “Here’s how you architect a prompt, a really good prompt.” Right. And then we’ve moved, now we’re getting to the thinking partner piece.

Chip Griffin: I mean, that’s a, that’s a fantastic idea.

And maybe one that I steal as well. You know, which is really the reason we do this show, right? So we can get different ideas for ourselves.

Gini Dietrich: It’s really for us.

Chip Griffin: And, if you all listening happen to get something out of it, that’s great. But, you know… but meanwhile, Gini and I get our social half hour, and then our recording half hour and some ideas out of it, and we get some things off of our chests so that we’re more calm and relaxed for the rest of the week, and we, we take it out on our microphones instead of on our teams or our clients. So anyway, but, I mean, I think you are, you are spot on there, and I think the other thing that we need to remember here is that we can give feedback to the tools much easier than we can give it to humans, right?

We’re always, or many of us at least are like, “Well, you know, do I really, do I really wanna give all of my feedback to Joe because he’s gonna be, and he’s gonna be really sensitive to it, and, you know, now, am I gonna… Is it gonna be counterproductive because now he gets in his head?” The AI doesn’t get into its own head.

Gini Dietrich: Nope.

Chip Griffin: I mean, Nope … it doesn’t have- Nope … feelings to worry about. Nope. I mean, it may- Nope … it may chastise you apparently for giving it too many edits and individual pieces, which I just, I, I’m, I’m just, I am- Yeah … dumbfounded by that. But- Yeah … you, you’ve got this, this room to give it the meaningful feedback, so it really does get closer and closer to what you are actually looking for.

And, you have to be in a position where any time you’re presenting something or publishing something or sharing something that was AI generated, you need to understand how it came together. You need to understand what’s included. One of my personal pet peeves is when I’m in a meeting and someone says, “Oh, I don’t know, you know, Claude generated that or ChatGPT generated that.”

No, that’s, that’s not an acceptable… If you are putting it out there, you have to have- Yep … I mean, that’s, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t gonna be little mistakes. I’m not saying you have to personally fact check every little thing in there. Of course, yeah. There will be mistakes and at that point it is usually better just to, to be transparent and say, “Yeah, you know, I had ChatGPT do it. Uh, apparently it screwed up that link.”

Gini Dietrich: I missed that. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Right? Yeah. But, it ha- that has to be a minor bit of it. It can’t be the major thrust or the broad conclusion. You need to be endorsing all of that, and you would not endorse it without reading it if it came from an employee. You shouldn’t do that with the AI tools.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely, 100%. Yeah, it’s just, it’s shocking to me, and I think we all as humans get lazy, and we’re trying to move as fast as we can, and we’re all having to do more with less, all of the things, right? But we have to, have to, have to, have to review what the output is.

Chip Griffin: Yes. And here’s the but, okay?

Gini Dietrich: Oh, okay.

Chip Griffin: The but is- … this is not your savior. The fact that the human has to be in the loop does not spare your business from all that AI is changing. It does not mean, these people who say, “Well, you know, well, but, you know, the judgment is, is your moat,” and moat is one of my least favorite terms, ’cause AI just loves saying moat.

And so judgment, strategy, those things are not your moat. The AI will help you get there, and you have to be part of it, but it doesn’t stop you from improving because you now have access to AI. So you need to be doing more. You need to be doing better. You need to produce enhanced results for yourself and for your clients.

So just because I’m saying that, that you are essential to this process doesn’t mean you can lay back and say, “See, I told you that AI couldn’t do it all. I have to… I am so important that that is going to be the savior of my agency and my business.” It is not. If you rely only on yourself without the help of AI, you are in just as bad a condition as those people who think they can just one-shot and substitute themselves with AI.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I do, like, I know I’ve said this before, but I honestly and truly don’t know how I did my job five years ago. I don’t. Because now I can do research, like, we have, there’s a, our accountant presented me a plan, for taxes this year, and I looked at it and I was like this doesn’t make sense to me, but I don’t know why.

And five years ago, I would’ve done some Googling, and I would’ve gone down, like, the IRS rabbit hole, and it wouldn’t have made sense to me, like, all… So I put it into Claude, and I was like, “There’s something about this that doesn’t make sense to me. What is it?” And it was like this, like, immediately, and it told me why, and then I started asking it questions.

And then it was like, “Okay, go back and ask your accountant these seven questions,” and I did, and he gave me the answers, and I was like, “Aha, I get it now. There’s… Okay.” Like, but, five years ago, I would have never gotten to that. I would’ve known something was wrong, but I would… And I would have done my research, but the research would have taken me down a path that it would’ve made my head explode because it was, like, all IRS-

Chip Griffin: Right

Gini Dietrich: rules and stuff that I just would’ve been like, “I don’t get it.” And so then I would’ve been like, “This doesn’t make sense to me,” and I would’ve just washed my hands of it, right? Now I know why. I… Now I know why it’s… And I… That would not have happened five years ago.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, it can, it can really help you to understand more complex things that, that you would you either have done some Googling on or more likely just given up on and just said, “Ah.”

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. “Well-” Right.

Chip Griffin: “… they’re the expert.” Yeah. “So whatever-“

Gini Dietrich: Right. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: “… whatever they said, you know, must be true.” Yeah. And the more you understand it, the more you can ask those critical questions to decide if it’s the right solution for you or not. I think one of the things you always wanna be mindful of, too, with all of these tools is how much you steer, right?

So one of the things you said was that you were skeptical of it, I think is how you presented it to the tool. The tools are much better than they used to be, and they will sometimes, you know, not agree with you. Yeah. But I still generally prefer to just say, “Give me your assessment of this.”

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Chip Griffin: And only once I’ve figured out, you know, where the general take is, then revealing to my own tool where my head is at, just to make sure that it’s not, you know, unconsciously biased towards agreeing with me. Same thing I would often do with employees, right? I mean, I think I’ve talked about this before.

Yeah. Sure. Yep. You know, whenever, whenever as the boss or the owner, you’re in a meeting with your team, keep your mouth shut till everybody else has talked. Because as soon as you express your point of view, people are gonna at the minimum pull their punches in all likelihood.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: And so you wanna get…if you want real input, you’ve gotta stay quiet, and so I encourage the same… I mean, it really is just consistent with treating your AI like you would a human employee. Yep. Yep. And if you would, if you would not just, you know, one-shot something with an employee and just say, “Oh, so you’re gonna write this speech for me, and I’ll just get up there and I’ll start giving it without having read it?”

Gini Dietrich: Right! Okay.

Chip Griffin: Now, in fairness, I used to work in politics, and politicians I worked with did that all the time. I would give them a speech and they would. They hadn’t looked at it. They would just get up there and start reading it.

Gini Dietrich: I feel like that’s different though. I feel like that’s different.

Chip Griffin: I, I mean, I personally would not be, I would always wanna, like, read it once, but I, I wrote-

Gini Dietrich: I would, I would too, but yes

Chip Griffin: I wrote so many speeches for members of Congress, and they would just sit up, they would just get up there, and they would just start reading it. And you could usually tell that they hadn’t read it before, because they would stumble over words or, you know, whatever. Because I used to be part of a speech writing group, and we would just create speeches in bulk basically, and some members of Congress would just grab, you know, one from the pile and deliver it on the House floor.

Gini Dietrich: That’s crazy.

Chip Griffin: Yeah.

Gini Dietrich: That’s crazy. Yeah. Wow.

Chip Griffin: So, a lot of them wouldn’t, wouldn’t bother looking at it in advance. They just-

Gini Dietrich: Wow

Chip Griffin: I would want to look at it and put it in my own words.

Gini Dietrich: I would as well. Yes, I would as well.

Chip Griffin: But, there are a lot of members of Congress, at least, at least back in the day.

I can’t-

Gini Dietrich: I’m sure this has not changed …

Chip Griffin I can’t, I can’t speak to today, but back in the day they would do it without, you know. Hopefully they’re not using- I mean, sure the staff probably is doing AI to, to do it now. I mean- I’m

Gini Dietrich: sure, yeah.

Chip Griffin: But-

Gini Dietrich: That’s nuts

Chip Griffin: I liked it when I would sit down and we’d have races to see how fast you could write speeches or op-eds.

Gini Dietrich: By yourself, without AI.

Chip Griffin: By yourself. By yourself- Yeah. Yeah … without, without AI, and off the top of your head with no research. I mean, that was-

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, no research. Great. Yep. Yep.

Chip Griffin: But.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Well, I think that, that’s probably a good spot to end on here, because who knows what other rants we’ll go on if we don’t.

But so use, use the tools to your advantage, keep yourself in the loop, and don’t rely on it, your human judgment, as your, the sole savior of your organization. That’s right. It’s all gonna come together and work in cohesion.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, absolutely.

Chip Griffin: So with that, we will draw this episode of the podcast to a close.

I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

If you’re screening candidates on experience or technical skills, you may be making a mistake. In this episode, Chip and Gini make the case that curiosity and problem-solving are the two traits that separate great hires from mediocre ones, and neither one can be taught from scratch.

Most agency skills, from writing a press release to running Google Ads to using AI tools, can be picked up on the job. Curiosity and problem-solving are different: people either arrive with some baseline capacity for them, or they don’t. Gini makes it about AI, where ever-evolving tools and audience behavior reward the people who keep asking questions instead of coasting on routine.

The two discuss how to actually screen for these traits in a couple hours of interviewing. Gini leaves 15 to 20 minutes at the end for the candidate’s questions and reads a lot into what they ask, or whether they ask anything at all. Chip changes up the order entirely, opening by asking the candidate what questions they have for him before he’s asked anything himself, and he’ll throw a candidate’s own question right back at them to see how they handle being put on the spot. Both dismiss scenario-based questions and interview theater like “what animal would you be” as close to useless. Gini also flags a habit she’s trying to break on her own team, being “Gini-GPT,” where people default to asking her for the fast answer instead of working through problems themselves.

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: You know, Gini, we have a problem today with this recording, and I’m curious as to how we’re going to solve it.

Gini Dietrich: Oh, boy.

I live, I live for your intros ’cause I never know what they are. They’re always really bad. You come up with them on the literal fly.

Chip Griffin: On the fly as I watch that five, four, three, two, one on the screen … I dream something up, which is, uh… I mean, that’s more thought than we sometimes give to what we’re gonna do for an episode.

Although we have- at some point we’ll talk about our new system for this, because we have-

Gini Dietrich: We do have a new system, and it’s very good …

Chip Griffin: it, it is-

Gini Dietrich: It’s very, it’s very good. Thanks to you.

Chip Griffin: You know, thanks to me with a little, little assist from Claude, so,

Gini Dietrich: It’s very good …

Chip Griffin: but we’ll talk more about that in a future episode.

But no, today, normally we, to record this episode, or each episode, we get together, we kibitz for a bit and talk about the world, and then we end up recording as soon as we look at the clock and say, “Oh my God, we’re about to run out of time- Right. … to actually record something before our next meeting.”

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: Um, because really, this show is just an excuse for us to have social hour. I mean, let’s, let’s be honest. That’s-

Gini Dietrich: Right, yes …

Chip Griffin: we happen to end up with content out of it. But today-

Gini Dietrich: We do happen to end up with content because of it,

Chip Griffin: but today it turns out you’re getting a grocery delivery right in the middle of when we would normally be having that panicked conversation about how we’re gonna record in time.

Gini Dietrich: Correct, yes.

Chip Griffin: So-

Gini Dietrich: There, there was a-

Chip Griffin: We’re flipping the script as they like to say …

Gini Dietrich: that was like an hour early, so-

Chip Griffin: Yes … Yes. But-

Gini Dietrich: Although right now it says five stops away even though it’s only four block- … the, the GPS shows they’re only four blocks away, so maybe it’s five stops in between four blocks of-

Chip Griffin: So, so basically, if all of a sudden Gini disappears in the middle of this episode-

Gini Dietrich: You’ll know why

Chip Griffin: you’ll know why. It’s because she didn’t want her milk to spoil, so. Anyway- … we’ll do our best to muddle through as we always do, but we are gonna be talking about curiosity and problem-solving, because I firmly believe that those are the two qualities that agencies should be hiring for first and foremost, not worrying so much about what experience do they have working with the particular industry that you serve, or even their specific technical capabilities for whatever role they may have.

Because a lot of those things can be taught, but curiosity and problem-solving in my experience are things that most people either have or they don’t. And they can, they can perfect it, they can improve it, but starting with a clean slate there is gonna be much tougher than teaching someone how to write a press release or teaching someone about the industry that you’re primarily working with.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, it’s, it’s the things, like when you think about the type of people that you want on your team and the things that you can teach versus the things that kind of come innately, and I think you’re right, curiosity and problem-solving are the, the critical thinking skills are the things that you can’t really teach.

You, they, people have to come with those. They either have it or they don’t. You can teach how to write a release, how to use AI, how to pitch to media, how to write content, how to do Google Ads or social media ads. Like, you can teach those. Those are skills you can teach. The innate sort of curiosity and wanting to know more, like that’s, that can’t be taught.

That’s, that’s just something that people either come with or they don’t.

Chip Griffin: And, and curiosity is taking on increasing importance in the age of AI-

Gini Dietrich: I think so, yeah

Chip Griffin:… because things, things are changing so quickly and so we need to be not just creative, but we need to understand, you know, how to take advantage of all of the tools that we have, how the audience behavior is shifting right under our feet, and all of those things benefit from curiosity.

But I think as we look at problem-solving, I mean, that’s fundamentally agency-client relationships are about just a continuous cycle of problem-solving.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Right? I mean, you… From the problem-solving to acquire the client, to onboarding the client, to keeping the client, to dealing with team members, look, it’s all problem-solving just over and over again, and I think most agency owners, if they looked at how they spent their week, they would be spending a lot of it solving one problem or another.

And, and problems don’t necessarily have to be bad things, right? Problems can be just challenges.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, yeah, of course.

Chip Griffin: But you, you gotta try to figure out how to surmount whatever is in front of you.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. You know, I think, I think a good way to think about this, especially for agency owners, is when you think about the work that you do with clients, which kinds of clients are really fun to work with, and which ones kind of make you wanna poke your eyeballs out?

For instance, we have a client who, their chief communications officer is so incredibly curious that he’s constantly… He– like, he and I are always like brr, to the point where our teams are all like, “What’s happening here?” But be- but he’s- he and I are at the same curiosity level where we’re constantly asking questions, and for me, it’s so fun to work with him.

It’s so fun. Every time I get an email from him or he texts me and he wants to call, I’m like, “Yes,” because I know we’re gonna have a really good conversation, versus the clients who are like, “I don’t understand why we would use social media for the business when, you know, social media is for the kids,” even though it’s been 15 years, right?

It’s the, like the, the kinds of… It’s a different kind of working relationship. And those are the people you want on your team, the ones that are curious and ask lots of questions and want to understand and want to grow and want the professional development to be able to do that. That’s who you want on your team.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, it makes all the difference in the results that you’re producing for your firm and also for the clients because if all you do is show up and do the exact same thing day in and day out and you don’t bother to learn and you’re not curious about, you know, how can you continue to improve what you’re producing, I mean, you’re right, it’s boring- Yeah

and it doesn’t produce good results. So you’ve got… You know, you’re oh for two. And so you need to be better at that.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. It’s funny, you know, there, there’s a common generalization, I would say, about baby boomers, and that baby boomers are not curious. And you find this– I think you find this with your parents, where they don’t ask a lot of questions.

They tend to be more invested. It feels like they’re more invested in the neighbors or the people they go to church with than in their children and grandchildren. And I started to, started to see this a little bit, and I think it’s just as a generation, and it’s, it’s a generalization, like it’s a gross one, right?

But as a generation, because they were taught that children are to be seen and not heard, they’ve never really learned how to ask questions or be really curious. And because of that, I think our generation and our kids’ generation, They’re, they’re seeing that come into play where they aren’t curious about what our lives and about their, their grandchildren’s lives.

And so when you think about that from a personal perspective, you’re like, “Why aren’t you curious?” Right. Now extrapolate that to work, right? The same kind of thing. Like, why wouldn’t you want to work with people who have curiosity and who have the ability to problem solve, so who have critical thinking skills?

Because those are the things that, to your point, are gonna help you excel for your clients faster than anything else.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And I think, I mean, it, you know, I think that curiosity is not necessarily a generational thing. I know plenty of folks who are at an advanced age like myself on the back nine, if you will, and-

Gini Dietrich: You’re not on the back nine yet.

Chip Griffin: I, I, mean, I’m into my 50s, so, um, I, I’m not sure I’m gonna live to be 110, so I think I’m on the back nine.

Gini Dietrich: You might. You never know.

Chip Griffin: I think very unlikely. But in any case, before we really get sidetracked here. I mean, look, there are people who are at that age who are curious. I count myself in that category.

I think I’m intensely curious about a lot of things, but I know a lot of other people who are, you know, like, “Eh, just let me show up. Let me do my job. Let me get things done. I’ll do it well, but I don’t really have any desire to, you know, to be that dog that learns a new trick at this point.” Flip side, I know plenty of young people who aren’t curious either, and, you know-

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, that’s fair. Yeah …

Chip Griffin: and all they really wanna do is show up, collect a paycheck, and move on. And I would actually argue that for young people that’s more common today than I think it was 20 or 30 years ago.

Gini Dietrich: Do you think so?

Chip Griffin: I do. I think there’s … you know, we’ve spent a lot of time, teaching our young people about the importance of, you know, having balance in their lives and all of that, and they keep hearing this message, and I think that for some they’ve found a balance, and for some that pendulum just has swung a lot in the other direction.

And so I, I don’t wanna overgeneralize because I’m not gonna say this is true of all young people, but just in my experience it seems to be more common than I think it used to be. Although, I mean, obviously we all have- Fascinating … we all have different recollections of what things were like 30 or 40 years ago, so.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting, yeah

Chip Griffin: And I always walked uphill to school both ways, barefoot, and- Get off my lawn.

Gini Dietrich: That, that was our parents. Yes. That wasn’t us.

Chip Griffin: I walked to school, so. But anyway, so you know, so we’ve talked about the curiosity, we’ve talked a little bit about the problem-solving, but how do you test for these things when you’re interviewing?

Because it’s all well and good to say you need to hire people who are curious problem-solvers, but how do you figure that out in those- It’s so hard … two or three- Yeah, yeah … we always talk about how little time you actually have- Yeah, yeah … with prospective hires, and you have to make that decision about whether they truly are curious or whether they truly can solve problems when they pop up.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, it’s really hard. I think part of it is, I mean, certainly you can ask scenario-based questions, right? But I think part of it is listening to the types of responses they give, but more for me, it’s the questions they ask. Mm-hmm. And so I say at the end of every interview, you know, with like 15 or 20 minutes left, “What questions do you have for me?”

And I always know if the person is curious or not based on what they say. And I would say 75% of the time people say, “Well, your team already answered all my questions.” Okay, you’re not getting hired. Yeah. Like you, you, you have the CEO sitting in front of you. Ask the same questions. See if you get the same response.

Ask what the vision is. Ask where you think we’re going. Like, be curious, and if you, you say things like that, we’re not gonna hire you because that tells me that you’re not curious. And so I think a part of it is in listening to the conversation that you’re having as well as the questions that they’ll ask.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I, I think that, that you’re absolutely right. The curiosity shows itself in the questions that come up during the interview, and I’ll be honest, I’m a lot more aggressive about this than you are because I actually, I do intros of myself… I do intro of myself and generally what we’re doing, and I ask them to give a brief intro of themself, and then I just, I stop right there and say, “So what questions do you have for me?”

Before I even ask any questions myself, just lead off-

Gini Dietrich: Smart. That’s smart … because that- I like that. Yeah …

Chip Griffin: because that, at that point it tells me, you know, what kind of, of research- Mm … they’ve done coming in. Sure. You know, how… and a lot of times the, you know, the questions may be off base, but I don’t care, right?

I want them to show something that they- Yep … that they were curious enough to have maybe done a little bit of research. They’ve got some ideas in their head- Mm-hmm … and wanted to probe, and so that really helps me. If those, if the questions are all about, “Well, how much does it pay, and what are my hours?”

Yeah. “And do I have to work weekends?” Yes. And you know, that kind of thing, then, then clearly they’re not curious. They’re just, you know, looking to punch their ticket, and I mean, that’s fine for some people. That’s not what I’m looking for.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. When I interviewed for our chief learning officer role, I, we interviewed several people, and the person that we ended up hiring, who’s fantastic, she showed up to the interview with Spin Sucks the book, and she had it, had Post-It notes in there flagged.

And so, but she, the thing about it is she didn’t… it wasn’t like blowing smoke. She said to me, “I’ve done some research. I’ve read the book. You know, I’ve done all the things. I’ve gone through the curriculum. I’ve gone through the PESO model certification. I don’t wanna call your baby ugly, so I’m gonna ask you some questions to help me understand if my hypothesis is right or not.”

And I was like, like I, I could feel myself getting a little defensive. And I was like, “Okay.” But she asked such smart, curious questions that I was like, I actually had never thought about it that way because her, she’s coming at it from an adult learning perspective, right? And I’m coming it from a, from an expertise perspective.

And so when you combine the two, you actually get a product that’s smart for the industry but also positioned in a way that adult learners learn. And the way she did it I, like, I, like I said, I could feel myself getting defensive at first, but the way she handled it and the kinds of questions she asked made me go, “Huh, I’d actually never thought about it that way.”

And so of course she got the job, and that’s how she works. She’s just super curious and delightful from that perspective. But she did say, like, “I don’t wanna call your baby ugly, so I’m gonna ask you some questions to help me understand if my hypothesis is right.” And I was like Serenity. Okay, go. But it works.

Chip Griffin: And so clearly she has more judgment than I do because I just call the baby ugly and move on. So I do it with a smile and a chuckle, but I’ll still call the baby ugly. Mm. You know, it is what it is. But yeah, I, I don’t know. Bringing the book as a prop, that feels, that feels a little extra to me, but-

Gini Dietrich: Well, she had a couple of things that she had- Yeah

that highlighted- Yeah … that she was like- Okay … “Okay, when you talked about this, I need to better understand it.” And I was like, “Well, that was 10 years ago, so things have evolved.” But we were able to talk about it so that she had… ‘Cause she’s like, “This doesn’t seem to be what you’re talking about right now.”

And I was like, “Yeah, ’cause the book was published a decade ago.”

Chip Griffin: Right. A lot has changed in the last 10 years- A lot has changed, yeah … if, if you haven’t noticed- Yeah, yeah … in everything.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. So- And actually, to be fair, she had it down below where I couldn’t see, and finally I was like, “What are you looking at?”

And so she held it up and showed me.

Chip Griffin: Yep. Yep. So, I mean, curiosity, I think the, the questions are a good reveal. I think the other one is I- I like to ask people, you know, what, what are they, you know, most interested in or most excited about professionally right now? I always make sure I add professionally.

Gini Dietrich: That’s for Gen Z.

Chip Griffin: It’s for everybody. I think I’ve shared the story before about how I had a hiring manager, a number of years ago who said to me that his favorite question was asking what people like to do on the weekends. And I’m like, “Please, please do not ask that question.

That, that opens up all sorts of- yeah, you can’t … possible HR issues.” Right. Don’t, don’t do that. Yes, stop. Don’t do that. So, so I do try to keep everybody in a professional lane so they don’t inadvertently volunteer things that would make all of us uncomfortable.

But yes, so but, so I do like to ask that because that then, you know, will tend to reveal, you know, are they, are they excited about AI or not?

Are they excited about, you know, what the, the changing trends in media consumption mean or not? And all of those things contribute to my assessment of their curiosity. And so I think curiosity’s probably the easier of the two to, to sort out in a couple of hours of time. You just, you kind of get that feel from talking to somebody.

Yeah. I think to me the problem-solving is the harder one- Yeah … to get at. And you, you mentioned earlier scenario-based questions. I, I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan of scenario-based questions.

Gini Dietrich: I’m not really either, yeah.

Chip Griffin: Because it kinda, I mean, you’re, you’re, you’re sort of putting people in a very difficult spot because at that point they don’t really know anything at all.

Yeah. And most people are gonna feel the need to perform in that, so they may not, you know- Yeah … give you their, their honest assessment. So I do think it’s tougher. I, I… Here’s where I tend to ask for examples of things that they’ve done, you know. Tell me about a, if they come from an agency background, tell me about a difficult client experience and how you handled it.

You know, tell me about, you know, some particular challenge that you had professionally and walk me through, you know, how you came back from it or those kinds of things. It’s not perfect, because a lot of times those are collaborative efforts and so maybe they’re not the one- Right.

Yeah … who actually solved the problem, they just implemented it. Yeah. But sometimes in, in the hearing, the retelling of it at least, you can sort of pick at those. But I think the, the problem-solving is really the, the tougher of the two qualities to figure out in just, you know, a couple of conversations.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And I will say one of the challenges that I have is the– it’s not lack of critical thinking, but it’s finding an answer fast. And so they call– my team calls me Gini-GPT because it’s faster to ask me a question, and I’m trying to break that habit. So now I say, “What do you think? What you…”

You know? And so it forces them to, to find the answer on their own. But I– they will say, “But it’s so much easier to ask Gini GPT.” And I’m like

Chip Griffin: Right. Well, that, I mean, that’s a good point. I mean, you know, so if, if they, if they ask me a question, you know, about, you know, what I’m most interested in from the perspective of agency world or AI or whatever, I will often throw that question right back at them-

Gini Dietrich: Yeah

Chip Griffin: in the interview because that, that helps- Love that … me see some of their thought process. And it, I mean, arguably it still shows you more of the curiosity side of things, but just their thought process, even in being able to handle the volley coming right back at them as opposed to, you know, having the time to think and-

Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yep. Love that.  Love that. …

Chip Griffin: And all that, you know. Are, are they, are they able to, to work on their feet? And even my first question where I just, you know, immediately go into asking them questions, that sort of shows their general demeanor to problem-solving because almost nobody expects that- I love that

unless they happen to listen to this episode.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I’m gonna start doing that. I think that’s smart. Yep. I’m gonna start doing that. I love that.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And I mean, a lot of times I, you know, there’s nothing, and sometimes it’s just because they’re, you know, they’re, you know, they may be, you know, shy or they’re just not confident or whatever, and that’s fine.

I mean, not everybody’s gonna come into that and be like, “Yes, I’ve got questions for you,” right out of the gate. So it’s not disqualifying if they don’t have them. But it’s certainly, it’s certainly a nod in their favor if they are able to come up with something on their feet. But anything you can do to kind of gently throw them off base helps you understand the problem-solving, not the old style Google, you know, “Tell me what happens when these 17 things happen,” and, or the, the crazy ones where they’re like, “If you were an animal, what, what kind of animal?”

Like, I’m like-

Gini Dietrich: What, what would your tree be if you were a tree?

Chip Griffin: Like, I don’t really want- I don’t know.

Gini Dietrich: I d- I don’t know

Chip Griffin: what that’s gonna do for me, so. Right. But you know, I mean, Google used to be famous for the incredibly difficult questions they would ask during the interview process, and I just, I really don’t have any idea what they were trying to accomplish with that.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I don’t know either. I don’t know what it tells you about the person either.

Chip Griffin: That’s performative interviewing.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think problem-solving and curiosity are two of the most important things that you can hire for, because like I said, you can teach many skills. You might be frustrated if you’re teaching, you know, a seven-year professional how to write a news release, but you can still teach it.

Chip Griffin: Yes. It can be incredibly frustrating to have to teach the basics- Yeah … to people who ought to know it.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: And this isn’t, none of this is to say that, that curiosity and problem-solving aren’t things that you can further develop. You can absolutely hone those skills, and as an owner, as a manager, you need to be encouraging people to further develop these skills.

You need to mentor them on improving their pursuit of curiosity, and their ability to solve problems. But you’ve got to start with a, a nugget of strength there, I think, in order to be successful. And I, I would tell you, if you hire for nothing else, if you hired curious problem-solvers, you will come out ahead of most other hiring individuals.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I totally agree. And not only will you come out ahead, but you really won’t have to be teaching the basics, ’cause they will already know, because they’re curious and they’re problem solvers.

Chip Griffin: Correct. And if they don’t, they’ll figure it out.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah. So. That’s what you want, is people who will figure it out.

Chip Griffin: So just like we did, and we managed to get this whole episode in before your groceries arrived, so.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I think they even went the wrong direction which is fantastic. They did. They’re still five stops away, but now they’re by the lake instead of by my house.

Chip Griffin: Well, what- whatever it took, I’m just- … I’m happy that we were able to record smoothly, and I’m sure that Jen is happy that she has a nice clean episode to edit, and we don’t have any-

Gini Dietrich: You’re welcome, Jen.

Chip Griffin: any weird stops in the middle. So, on that note, thank you all for listening. This draws to an end this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

Some advisers are telling agency owners they don’t need to know AI all that well themselves. They suggest owners go deep on AI for a month or three, then pass the day-to-day to the team and move on with life. In this episode, Chip and Gini explain why that’s backwards, and how owners who step back from AI are making a mistake.

Chip’s argument is that AI doesn’t fit the usual delegation model because it’s moving too fast and touching too much of the business to hand off after just a few months of study. Gini agrees, noting that advice which made sense six months ago is often stale today. Both connect this to credibility with the team: Chip compares the situation to a non-technical manager overseeing developers, who then gets disrespected because they don’t speak the language. Gini says her own coaching works because she’s in the tools constantly enough to give specific workable advice.

They also describe pushing AI into something closer to a personal operating system than a work tool, from Chip wanting an assistant that catches him contradicting his own past positions, to Gini’s agent that calls her out when she takes on work she said she’d delegate, telling her flatly it’s not the best use of her time. The episode closes with the advice that staying curious personally is what keeps owners sharp enough to lead a team through a tool that keeps rewriting its own rules.

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 no creative introduction whatsoever.

Gini Dietrich: That’s fine- So maybe- … because I’m gonna phew.

Chip Griffin: So maybe, maybe we should just take a, a deep dive for w- you know- … couple of minutes here and try to figure out what it is that we’re gonna talk about today.

Gini Dietrich: We’re gonna talk about the bro culture who told agency owners to use AI for three months and then not again.

Chip Griffin: Yes. apparently, agency owners need to, to really get up to speed on AI, but then just to hand it all off to the team and move on with their lives.

Gini Dietrich: This is the most ridiculous, ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard, and I understand that I don’t have context ’cause I didn’t watch the bro video, but that’s ludicrous.

Chip Griffin: And in fairness, I watched it a while back, so my context is a little bit off too. But it- look, this is, this is not, this is not one-off advice. I mean, frequently I hear people advise, you know, agency owners to, to have some general knowledge of something but then to let go. And, I think in some cases that may be worthwhile.

But I think AI is moving so fast- … and has such an impact on our businesses that, that we need to … as leaders, we need to remain curious, we need to be hands-on. We cannot simply rely on our teams to do this because it is transformational to our businesses and to our industry, and that’s not something that you leave in the hands of somebody else.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, and I know I’ve said this before, but I honestly and truly do not know how I did my job five years ago.

Chip Griffin: Yep.

Gini Dietrich: Because, it’s such a huge thinking partner for me to help me figure out what I’m missing, what holes I need to fill, what’s overly complicated, what’s too jargony. Like, I don’t know how I did my job without it.

So the idea that you would do a deep dive for three months and then be like, “Okay, everybody else take over,” like that doesn’t, that doesn’t make any sense at all.

Chip Griffin: No, it does not. Now, in fairness, I think, I think what they were saying was sort of hand over the day-to-day of it, and you can certainly still use it to help you with your own writing and the basic stuff.

But I, think you still need to be beyond that. I think you need to be pushing- Yes … the envelope yourself- Yes … experimenting, innovating-

Gini Dietrich: Yes. Yes …

Chip Griffin: inspiring your team.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: And, if you’re not doing that, you’re not getting the most out of it that you can.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. Like, yes, because this is one of those things that if you’re not using it, you don’t know what has changed, and it’s changing so fast, right?

I mean, a couple of weeks ago, Claude came out and said that they’re watermarking everything, and you can’t just retype it into a new document because the watermark is in the tokens and how it thinks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And everybody freaked out. Like, everybody’s using AI. So, okay, so it’s watermarked.

Like, we all know we’re using it. Everybody’s using it. I use it, you use it. Everybody uses it. Like, okay, so it’s being watermarked, but like, if you’re not using it and understanding it and evolving with it, then you might freak out about that. But it’s not that big of a deal.

Chip Griffin: It is absolutely not that big of a deal.

It’s stupid, in fact, but, you know, if it, if it amuses somebody to, do that, fine. I’m sure that somebody will figure out how to, to reveal those watermarks and post gotchas, kinda like in the old days when people were like, “Gotcha, that CEO didn’t write their own blog post.” No, duh.

Gini Dietrich: Really? Yeah.

Chip Griffin: And, and, and, their shareholders don’t want them to do that either.

Gini Dietrich: Correct. Right. Yes.

Chip Griffin: Not, at their hourly rates. And- No … and that, and that was 20 years ago before their hourly rates got to where many CEOs- Right … have their hourly rates today. But in any case, so

you

Chip Griffin: need to be learning and experimenting and understanding how it’s evolving, because, I mean, even some of the advice that, you know, someone might have given you or I might have given six months ago is not the same advice I would give today.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: And, in fact, you know, some of the things about, you know, the importance of providing instructions and guardrails and all that kind of stuff, that may be shifting. You know, we’re now seeing Anthropic saying, “Well, that’s, that’s not really the best way to get things out of the, the more recent versions of Opus and Fable and that kind of stuff.

You actually wanna give it more freedom than you did before, otherwise you may not like the results.” And- Yeah … and those things are changing. You know, a, a couple years ago, everybody was like, “You need to tell it what kind of mindset to have. Act as a social media strategist.” Nobody will tell you that today, because that’s not the best way to get stuff out of it. But if you’re not continuing to experiment and roll up your sleeves and be in there day to day and figure out not only how it can help your business, but how it can help you personally, and that’s beyond just the thought part of it. That’s figuring out how do I make it my own personal operating system, my second brain, which I am extremely passionate about, and I think that, most agency owners should really be thinking about this whole, you know, whether, you wanna call it that operating system or second brain concept, having something that really knows you and as much about you as possible so that it’s really there, not even just as a thinking partner or a sparring partner.

I mean, it’s, there as a mini you-

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: That can help you to think things through and not forget stuff, which- Yep … as I get older, is more and more important.

Gini Dietrich: Well, and one of the things that I’ve done is I do– I’ve done exactly like that. I’ve done exactly that, and I think I’ve talked about this before, that I have a co-CEO agent that I’ve built, and it will s- it kinda, it kinda makes me mad sometimes.

But one of the goals that we have inside my organization is to have everything less dependent on me, because right now the, the business is very founder-led. It’s, you know, I’m the thought leader, I’m the brand, all of those things, and it’s a big, big goal over the next three to five years to extract me from some of that and start to build other leaders inside the organization that, you know, can help us scale and do all of those things.

So my AI knows that, and I will do something, and it will say Is this the best use of your time? I thought you were trying to extract yourself, and I’m like,

“Ugh. Fine!”

Chip Griffin: See, yours is more polite than mine because mine will just straight up tell me that it’s not a good use of my time. Yeah, yeah, sometimes it will do that, yeah. and, that I shouldn’t do it. Yeah. Or, my other favorite is it will say, “Well, this does not, you know, match what you said in, you know- 2022.”

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, yeah.

Chip Griffin: You know, “Why are you saying this now?” Or something like that.

Gini Dietrich: What has changed, or yeah. Yeah, yeah …

Chip Griffin: yeah, what has changed, or just it’s, it’s not consistent. Yeah … and, so having it call me out, the, I mean, it … Sometimes it’s caught me on things where I’m just not thinking it through, right?

In, the moment I give a quick answer and say, “Yeah, let’s go in this direction,” it’s like, “Wait a minute, hold on.”

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: That c- that conflicts- Yep … with advice you’ve given in the past. Yep. You know, square this up.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. And I will say that, you know, you made the point about using it in your personal life, too.

I have an agent that is helping me parent a teenage girl, and sometimes I get very frustrated and I’m like, “Meh,” and I type something out, and it literally said to me the other day, “So let me get this straight, Gini. You are raising a strong, independent young woman who can think for herself and do things the way that she thinks are best, and you’re mad that she’s doing this?”

And I’m like- Well, when you put it that way, like…

Chip Griffin: to, to which I would be tempted to respond, “You know I can delete you at any time, right?”

Gini Dietrich: But it holds up a mirror sometimes and you’re like-

Chip Griffin: It, does …

Gini Dietrich: “Oh, okay.” Yeah. “You’re right. All right, you’re right. You’re right.”

Chip Griffin: But it, you know, part of it is just is, is playing the what if game too.

And I think that’s something that’s really hard to delegate to your team, or maybe not comfortable for them because- Right … some of those what ifs may result in them not having the jobs that they currently have. Exactly. Not necessarily that they are out of a job, but- Right … but their job would necessarily change.

And, you know, one of the things that, that I will often do is I will say to my AI engine of choice, “So, you know, here’s my challenge. How might I go about that differently?” Or, you know, “How could you help me with this?” Or, when it gives me an answer, well, why do I still… ‘Cause sometimes it’ll say, “You need to do this next.”

And I’ll say, “Well, why?”

Gini Dietrich: Why? You’re right. Why?

Chip Griffin: What is it about it that you can’t do-

Gini Dietrich: Yeah …

Chip Griffin: so I can, you know, make a legitimate decision about really whether it is something I need to take on. And I’d say probably 50% of the time it’s like, no, actually you’re right. I could create a process that would allow me to, you know, maybe not get it all the way there, but close enough.

And I think that, you know, having those kinds of conversations and engagement help you to figure out things that are important not just to you, but to the business itself. And if you simply get a general knowledge and then leave off in delegation, you’re not getting anywhere near the value that you ought to be.

Gini Dietrich: 100%. I totally agree with that. And I think this, this idea that you should just deep dive for three months or one to three months or whatever it happens to be, and then leave it off to your… Like, that’s just, it’s ludicrous. It’s ludicrous. Like it’s, bah. Bah.

Chip Griffin: Yep. And, and I mean, and the, the other thing that I think is helpful is, you know, there’s all sorts of things being said and written about AI, including this podcast, this episode, and previous episodes.

And one of the things that I love to do is I love just taking a link to, you know, one of these podcast episodes or videos and, throwing it to Claude and saying, “Hey, anything I should take away from this?” And what it then does is it reads the transcript and takes a look at, all of the behaviors that I currently have with it and say, “Okay, well, you, you’re already doing 90% of this, but here are the two new ideas that you might consider.”

Hmm. And it, And, so I find it really helpful, so I will… Sometimes I don’t even watch the video. I’ll just, you know, I’ll see the headline on a, a, video on YouTube, you know, “Get 10X the results of Claude Design by doing this.” And so I’ll just grab the link, and I’ll shoot it over to Claude and say, “Anything?

Should I watch this? Is there anything to take away from it?”

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chip Griffin: And, it will come back, and it, because I, do all of the work that I do and because I have systems set up so that it records all of the activity that I do with it and all of the rules and context and all that, it’s able to say, you know, “You’re better than it in these places, you’re worse than it in these places, and this stuff is just, you know, rock stupid- Yeah

and you shouldn’t do it no matter whether you can or can’t.”

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that’s exactly right, and, using it in those kinds of ways are the big things I think most people are missing. And you know, you- before we started recording, you and I were talking about how 99% of humans just in general are not using it in those kinds of ways.

We’re not building skills, we’re not building agents, we’re not curious about what it can do. We’re not using it in ways that can help us. I mean, I use it, to your point, for everything. I use it for parenting, I use it for home design, I use it for all work-related things. I, I honestly and truly, I don’t know how I lived five years ago without it.

I don’t.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, it, can help you find just little things that are just, you know, mind-numbingly annoying and I sometimes will kick myself for not using it as my first port of call. So-

Gini Dietrich: Yep, yep …

Chip Griffin: for example, a couple of weeks ago, I was having, a, a really technical networking issue in my house, as far as how my laptop was talking to my, my NAS. And it wasn’t doing it exactly correctly, and so it was l- leading to very, very slow transfer speed.

So it wasn’t just invisible, it was just really slow- Mm-hmm … in a way that it, shouldn’t have been. And I’m pretty smart about home networking and LANs and all that kind of stuff, and so I, I couldn’t figure it out, and so I did some quick Googling and I couldn’t find it there. And I’m like, “You know what?

Let me just give the, exact situation to Claude and see what happens.” Not 10 seconds later, it has come back with a really bizarre solution. I tested it, immediately worked, solved the problem.

Gini Dietrich: And it worked. Isn’t that crazy?

Chip Griffin: Right. That’s crazy. So I, mean, it, could, it… And, normally you would expect that, the same thing would pop up in Google results, and it didn’t.

Gini Dietrich: It didn’t, right.

Chip Griffin: Because it was, it was such an edge case that I had. But it was able to, parse through all of the detail and figure out what the real problem was and how to resolve it. And so-

Gini Dietrich: And then it worked. That’s crazy …

Chip Griffin: and, then it worked. And, otherwise, I would’ve just given up and just had to live with the fact that my laptop was talking incredibly slowly to the NAS.

Which it, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world- Right. But, yeah … but there were certain tasks that it just made difficult, and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted it to work the way it, it should. And so it, helped. So, but if I wasn’t spending the time with, with the tool myself and I, went to a team member, could they possibly solve it?

Sure. But, that, A, that’s wasteful-

Gini Dietrich: Right …

Chip Griffin: and, B, I’m not learning from it.

And, I think the, the other thing that we need to keep in mind is that when we lack knowledge about something, it’s harder to manage our people on those tasks. And so, you know, if you are a PR agency owner, the fact that you’ve done PR before helps you to manage your team because you can figure out what actually makes sense. Does it really take this long to do that? And, and, not only do you understand what they’re doing and, how it impacts, but also they respect you more, right? If you are– I’ve seen PR people managed by non-PR people- And it tends not to go all that well because they’re not talking the same language.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: And if we want our whole teams to be energetically using AI, and we’re not using it, we can’t speak that same language. Again, I, used to have occasions where I would see a non-technical person managing a dev team.

Gini Dietrich: Oh, no.  That’s a terrible idea.

Chip Griffin: And that’s the worst. Right? Yeah. Because th- because developers know they can pull one over on you if you don’t- Then, yeah … if you don’t know what they’re actually talking about, right? And, I always had a much better time managing devs ’cause I, I can code myself and those… So when they kind of give me a, a baloney answer, I’m like, “Really? Really?” And they’re like, “Oh, yeah.

No, okay. All right. I guess we can’t do that.” So, you need to understand the AI in order to be able to prod your team, manage your team, encourage your team, inspire your team. So- this is, this is really not one of those things where you can say, “Look, I just, I need to be an executive level person on this, and that’s it.”

You need to be in the trenches on AI, at least for the foreseeable future. At some point, it may begin to stabilize, and you can treat it more like a lot of the other activities. But as long as it is developing and evolving as quickly as it is now, you need to be in there, and you need to understand it every single day.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And one of the things I will tell you with my team that I have learned over the last few months is that- They don’t have the same level of, shall we say, excitement that I have around it. And because of that, I’m able to train them and coach them on how to use it. And so I will say, “Well, have you prompted it with this,” or, “Have you tried that?”

And they’ll go, “Oh, no.” And then they’ll do that and go, “Oh, well that worked.” And so if I wasn’t using it, you know, constantly like I am, I wouldn’t know to be able to train or coach those things. So I think you’re exactly right. It’s kind of like I say to my market- our VP of marketing all the time, I’m like, “You have the hardest job in this building because this is my core expertise.”

And I’m sorry, but like I’m gonna have ideas, and we’re gonna have debates over things that you’re doing because it’s my core expertise. And this is the same thing, like you should know enough to be able to say to your team, “Have you tried this?” or, “Have you thought about that?” or, “Maybe try prompting it with this,” or, “Have it play devil’s advocate,” or, “Have it poke holes in it for you.”

So like you can’t do that, to your point, if you’re not using it every single day.

Chip Griffin: Well, and I, think you’ve touched on the key thing here, which is that it’s not doing the work for them. It’s coaching. Yeah. It’s mentoring. Yep. It’s advising. Yep. It’s inspiring. And those are all the, the things that you need to do.

I’m not sitting here saying that you need to build all the processes out and hand over preset skills- Right, right … or bodies of context or whatever to the team, but, you need to know enough that you can have that, those conversations and say, “Have you tried this? Have you seen this?” You know, you, you– I, experimented with this the other day.

You know, I think this is the kinda thing that would really help you doing X, Y, or Z. And you just can’t do that as effectively- Yeah … if you’re just like, “You know, I heard someone say, I heard Chip and Gini talking about this, and I think maybe you ought to do this.” But I mean,

you,

Chip Griffin: just don’t come across as confident if you haven’t tried it yourself.

Gini Dietrich: Yep, 100%. And look, I know I’ve said this before too, but it’s fun. Like, it’s fun. So even if you don’t wanna use it from a business perspective or you haven’t figured out the best use of it, like try it personally, test it out personally. I found this app called Cookshelf where you scan all of the cookbooks that you have, and then it indexes all of your recipes, which is great, and it helps you meal plan and it builds grocery lists and all that.

However, you still have to come up with the meal plans ideas. So I have to say, “Okay, I wanna make tacos,” and then I put tacos into the app, and it gives me like 75 recipes from the cookbooks that I own. Overwhelming. Great, but overwhelming. So now I use my AI to say, “Okay, last week we had this, this, this and this.

Here’s my app. Here’s all the cookbooks. Give me an idea. I wanna have one night pork, one night steak, one night chicken, one night vegetarian,” and then it does that work for me, and then I go into the app and find the recipe, right? So– And it tells me which cookbook it’s in and which page. So then I just go to my shelf, I pull it off and I cook.

Makes things significantly easier. The app made it easier, AI made it even easier. So there are lots of things. I have my books in my library downstairs color-coded, which drives my father-in-law crazy because he thinks I should be using the Dewey Decimal System, but they’re color-coded. They’re like red, orange, yellow, right?

So I took a picture of all of my books on all the shelves, there’s more than a thousand of them, and I put them into Claude and I said, “Create me an index of all of the books by author, by title, and then tell me what, which shelf they’re on and which– and how far in.” Now I have my own Dewey Decimal System.

So there are lots of ways that you can use AI in interesting ways personally to get excited about it and then transfer that over to the business Yes, they’re color-coded. I know you haven’t gotten past that yet.

Chip Griffin: I, I, I just, you’ve left me speechless.

Gini Dietrich: It looks so nice. It’s so pretty.

Chip Griffin: It, I, I, I, I feel like maybe you should be experimenting to see how AI can act as a therapist for some of the issues you clearly must have-

Gini Dietrich: I do have, yes …

Chip Griffin: if, if you, if you’re-

Gini Dietrich: But it looks really nice. It looks very nice.

Chip Griffin: It looks re- it d- that is fantastic.

I’ll, I’ll, I’ll be honest, I’ve gotten rid of all of my cookbooks and most of my regular books because I-

Gini Dietrich: Oh, wow …

Chip Griffin: stopped cracking them open, and I decided that the fact that they looked good on my shelf didn’t really matter to me anymore.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, see, it matters to me, so.

Chip Griffin: And, when it comes to cooking, I prefer the, the, the Top Chef challenge style.

You just go and you grab a couple of ingredients, and you say- … “What can I make with this?”

Gini Dietrich: That’s weekend cooking, which I agree with. Oh, no. Weeknight cooking, I can’t do that.

Chip Griffin: Oh, that’s week, that, that week, that’s-

Gini Dietrich: I just have to, like, have a plan.

Chip Griffin: No, I do that lunchtime, whatever. I mean, just- Yeah, I don’t have- It, just, it’s the shortens the time, right?

So if you’re doing it for lunch- Sure, yep … you know, you got maybe 10 or 15 minutes, so what can I, what can I do with- Yeah … what’s available here? What’s going bad in the… Usually start with what’s going bad in the fridge.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: And, grab one or two of those and say- Hmm … “Okay, how can I put this to work?”

And it, to me, that’s a lot more fun than using some recipe well, first of all, I’ve always hated recipes, but secondly- Yeah … it’s, not as mentally challenging, and I like my cooking to be mentally challenging.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I don’t have the time during the week. Weekends- Hmm … I totally agree with you, but during the week I don’t have the time.

Chip Griffin: Hmm. Well, anyway, on that note, since I feel like we’re starting to veer off topic and off track a bit.

Gini Dietrich: I will send photos of my color-coded shelves that we can include with this.

Chip Griffin: I, I, that is, that is fantastic or disturbing or perhaps both. So- … on that note, we are gonna wrap up this episode. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

Times change, but somehow the job hasn’t. In this episode, Chip and Gini dig into what’s stayed constant across their combined decades in PR and marketing, and why chasing the latest platform update is a losing game if you’ve lost sight of the fundamentals underneath it.

The episode was sparked by a LinkedIn series from Doug Simon, who asked longtime PR pros what has remained constant in their careers. Gini was asked the question of whether the PESO Model still holds up, and her answer is that the four media types haven’t gone anywhere, and earned media’s third-party credibility now matters more to how LLMs learn. Chip extends the logic to SEO and its successors, advising to chase the people, not the algorithm or the platform.

Other changes may also have less of an impact than you might think. Influencer marketing is the latest version of celebrity TV endorsements, but with a YouTube channel. The agency-client relationship continues to run on the same dynamics it did 70 or 80 years ago. Gini brings up the story about a UK agency reportedly running AI agents to pitch journalists undetected for eight months. Chip’s take is that just like with interns and inexperienced team members, there are well-managed AI agents as well as poorly managed ones. It’s the human factor that matters most.

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

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

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I’m gonna have to try to rack my memory from way, way back, and as I get older, that, that distance gets longer and my memory gets poorer, so we’ll see how this works.

Gini Dietrich: Ok- okay.

Well, I have the same afflictions, so let’s see what happens.

Chip Griffin: So we thought that this was, this was spurred by something that our friend Doug Simon did recently on LinkedIn where he did a video series and talked to a bunch of people who have been in the PR industry for a long time and asked a series of questions, one of which was, what has- Remained constant over the course of your career in PR.

Obviously we talk a lot these days about everything that, that has changed, is changing. There’s no shortage of those things. I’ve talked about it here on the show, you know, how we started with fax machines and mailed press releases and things like that, that just kind of blows the mind of a lot of the younger listeners that we have.

But, but even with all of that change and with everything that AI is doing to our industry today, there are a lot of things that have stayed constant. And I think that as we think about how we run our agencies, it’s important to remember the fundamentals that have remained the same no matter how much technology has changed in PR and marketing.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I mean, I think you’re right that the, probably the way that we do things has changed, but not the strategic reason. Like I say to people all the time that the reason you do your job has not changed. The strategy, the strategic reason behind it has not changed. The tools have changed, for sure, but your job, especially as a communicator, is to protect reputation, build brand, and create thought leadership.

That has not changed. Yeah. The way that you go about it has changed, but not, not the actual doing of the job has changed.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, the tools have changed. The landscape certainly in media has changed.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yes.

Chip Griffin: The landscape in terms of the public and where they go for information and where they receive messaging and all of that, obviously that has changed substantially over the 35 plus years that I’ve been in communications.

But it is still about communicating the right message at the right time to the right people. Yeah. And building relationships with the people that you are trying to influence, whether that’s a member of the media or a member of the public or potential client or whomever. And if you remember those fundamentals, it helps you to figure out how to use all of these technologies for their greatest impact.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I mean, I had a convers- I was on Zoom with Fred Cook of former GolinHarris, now at Annenberg Center. I was on Zoom with him last week, and he’s like, “So has PESO changed?” And I was like, “No, because we still do those things, right?” Like, the way that we implement it today versus the way we implemented it in 2014 are completely different, for sure.

But we still use earned media, we still use shared media, we still use owned media, we still use paid media. The way that we use it has changed, but we still use the four media types. And to your point, media has changed, so earned media has changed, like the, the recipient of our earned media has changed, but the outcome of third-party credibility is probably even more important today than it was back then because that’s how the LLMs learn too, is by citable information.

So yes, the way that we go about it has changed, but the actual work itself, the outcome itself has not.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and I think the, the important thing to think about here is that, that ultimately all of these tools and publications and platforms are all designed to connect one human to another.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And, and so you know, when you think about public relations, for example, it’s got relations right there in the title.

And so you really need to think about how you are building those relationships between whoever the person is on your end and the person that you’re trying to reach. And, if you, if you take the humans out of this entirely, then you’re missing the plot, and you really need to be thinking about how do these tools and how do these techniques allow you to do more of that, to do it better, to do it at greater scale, all of those kinds of things, but not, not just, you know, chuck everything that you knew out the window, have the machines do everything on their own, for you.

Gini Dietrich: No. No.

Chip Griffin: Abandon proven approaches. None of those things make any sense.

Gini Dietrich: No. Please do not do that because that has not changed. Like, the way I- we talked about this last week, like, AI is making us far more productive and far more efficient, but you still have to know how to, to your point, relate to other human beings.

Are you creating content and engineering your visibility to show up in AI? For sure. But that’s also because human beings are using AI to get the answer, so you still have to build those relationships with other human beings.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and if you follow the fundamentals, then it allows you to evolve with whatever tools and technology- That’s right

come along. It’s similar to what I’ve always said in terms of SEO in the old days and now AEO, GEO, which is chase the people. Don’t chase the algorithm. Yep. Don’t chase the platform. Yep. Chase the, the people because ultimately all of the tools are designed to do that anyway, right? Right. I mean, Google for years has been trying to figure out what is the user actually looking for and trying to deliver that in the results.

And so if you are sitting there trying to say, “Hey, I need to figure out how to reach that same person,” you’ll probably be okay no matter how they change the algorithm. If you sit there and say, “I need to figure out what was the latest Google algorithm update, and what does that mean?” “How should I move things around on my page?

What should I bold?” If you start thinking in those terms, you may win the short-term battle, but you will lose the war because you do not understand what you’re actually trying to do, and that has not changed over the course of our careers.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I mean, I’ve said for at least a decade, if not longer, that if you create content for humans, you will win the SEO game.

You will win the AEO, GEO game. You will win whatever comes next game. Because human beings are still the ones that are purchasing your services. The robots are not.

Chip Griffin: Right.

Gini Dietrich: And so if you create content, if it’s whatever content it is, it’s earned media, it’s video, it’s audio, it’s written, whatever it happens to be, if that audience, number one audience is human beings, you will win all the other games.

Chip Griffin: And look, even most of the things that we look at today as new, they aren’t really. They’re just, they- they’re packaged differently. I, you know- Right … we, we have all of this talk around influencers- Yes, yes … and the rise of influencers. Yes, yes. Which to me is one of the silliest things in the world. Not the influencers themselves, I mean, some of them can be silly.

They’re certainly useful to us as communicators, marketers, et cetera. But that’s no different than three decades ago when we had celebrity endorsements.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: Right? The, it is just the modern-day equivalent of it, and we just define celebrity a little bit differently than we might have back, you know- Yep

in the ’80s or ’90s, but ultimately it’s the same thing. It’s just they have a YouTube channel now or an Instagram account- Right … instead of, you know, you put them in a TV commercial or a print ad or something like that. But even back in the day, you had celebrity endorsers who were not truly celebrities.

They were just someone known in their local community- Right … who you could throw in a newspaper ad and say- Yeah … you know, “Hey, you know, I believe in either this cause or this product or whatever.” So that has not changed. That continues to be exactly the same, just packaged differently.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I mean, when you think about earned media, and you know, we do a, a lot, a lot, a lot of work with universities because PESO model curriculum is in almost every university’s PR, communications, marketing, and some journalism programs.

So we do a ton of work with universities, and I, one of the questions I get consistently from professors is, “How are you teaching earned media through PESO?” And we keep talking about traditional media is like, that used to be the thing, right? You would get The New York Times, you would get Oprah, you would get The Today Show.

Like, those things don’t matter as much anymore because you have influencers or, local celebrities that have their Substack newsletters, they have their Medium newsletters. You can subscribe to those, you can pay for those just like you would the newspaper, and you get the information that you need.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and, so little technical glitch on my end. I think we’ll clean it up, in the edit. But if you noticed anything, it was just for some reason my home TV studio- … decided to shut itself off. The, the, the smart home devices here just decided that, nope, it was time to turn everything, everything off, so.

Gini Dietrich: I was talking to a blank screen. I was like, “Should I keep going?”

Chip Griffin: You know, but we just, we roll through these things … on the Agency Leadership podcast because the technology has changed- It is- … but glitches still happen. Glitches, right. I mean, you know, I, I, I remember back in the ’90s, you know, using dial-up internet to do work, and then, you know, someone actually calls your landline and knocks you offline in the middle of, you know- Yep

trying to send an email or something. Yep. Yep. And you gotta figure, did it actually send? Did it not send? Yep. So, you know- Mm-hmm … technical glitches- There you go … that’s another thing that has remained constant- It’s still- … despite all the technology. Oh my gosh, it’s so funny. You know, the typewriters that I used to use at work, sometimes the ribbon would get snagged, and, you know, you’d have to unsnag the ribbon, right?

So even non-electronic things still had issues. Broke your pencil, whatever.

Gini Dietrich: As much as things have changed- … they still remain the same.

Chip Griffin: They, they absolutely do. And, and I, so I think it’s part of our responsibility as agencies to work with our clients and help them to understand that the fundamentals have remained constant and will continue to remain constant.

Because we wanna make sure that we’re taking advantage of everything that’s out there, but we also need to make sure that we are not overdoing it in one area or another because we’re losing sight of those fundamentals, nor are we either having our clients get scared or us get nervous about it and what it means for our businesses.

Because if we follow those fundamentals, then we can continue to adapt, and take advantage of all of these technologies as we move forward. If you, if you focus on the technology first and just say, “Hey, I need to have an AI strategy.” No, you don’t.

Gini Dietrich: No, you don’t.

Chip Griffin: You absolutely do not need to have an AI strategy- Right

or an influencer strategy or anything.

Gini Dietrich: Totally agree. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: You need to have a strategy that takes advantage of AI or influencers or whatever as appropriate. Yes. But your strategy should be rooted in those fundamentals because that’s how you get ahead.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And like I said at the start, I always say the reason that we do these things has not changed.

The tools have changed, the way you go about it has changed, but the how or the why has not changed. So don’t get so wrapped up in, “Oh my gosh, now I’ve gotta figure out AI.” Yeah, you gotta figure out AI- Right … because it’s, it’s going to replace you if you don’t figure it out, and it’s actually really fun, so you should figure it out just from that perspective.

But you don’t have to change your strategy. You don’t have to change, like, the things that you do to service clients- Right … because that has not changed.

Chip Griffin: Right. Right. And, and I think that that’s a, that’s another thing that has remained constant is the relationship between agencies and clients. You know, we think all of this is changing in the world that we’re in, but it’s really not.

The way that agencies and clients work together is the same today as it was 70 or 80 years ago, even before you and I were born, let alone started working in the industry. And so understanding how those relationships and dynamics come together and how you can partner most effectively. Sure, the actual nature of the relationships has changed because of the work that we’re doing, but those relationships still matter in the same way that they always did, and you still need to build the human component into it.

We can’t allow the technology to overtake that. We need to make sure that we’re spending the time to get to know our clients. We need to make sure that we’re continuing, even in this remote world that we’re in, to find ways to have additional touchpoints, whether that’s through more frequent video calls to build the relationship or ideally in person whenever possible.

Those things still matter, and we still need to try to figure out how to take advantage of them to have those strong business relationships in addition to the results-oriented relationships that we’re looking for.

Gini Dietrich: So I’m gonna throw a little wrench in things- Okay … because I just read an article this morning that talked about how an agency out of the UK has created AI agents that are pitching media, and it took about eight months for a journalist to go, “Something doesn’t seem right,” and then started to investigate, and sure enough, the agency owner said, “Yeah, I mean, we’ve created these bots that are pitching the media.”

He claims that there are real humans on the back end of it, um, that has not been proven yet. They, the, the investigative journalist said, “I think actually based on what I have here, that there aren’t real humans behind it.” But, you know, I think when, when we hear about AI taking our jobs, we hear these kinds of stories, and we get a little freaked out.

Nobody’s happy about it. Every journalist who’s been pitched by these AI bots have come out and said, “This is not okay.” But I think that there are gonna be other experiments like this where you’re trying to use– or you’re trying to build an agency out of AI agents instead of human beings.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, I– what I would say to that is I think that there are probably countless examples that we’re not aware of where the, the AI did work on pitching the journalist and didn’t get called out, right?

Because-

Gini Dietrich: Right …

Chip Griffin: by definition, you can only call out the ones you catch.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: So, I suspect there is a fair bit of this going on. I mean, part of the problem is that, that so much of it is done poorly. I mean- Right. Yes … my, my inbox is full of sales messaging that I’m fairly certain is, you know, whether it’s directly AI generated or AI assisted, it’s hard to tell for sure sometimes.

Yeah, yeah. Because it might be entirely AI or it might just be poorly managed AI. But at the same time I’m certain I’m also being exposed to plenty of messages that are AI generated, and, I can’t tell because they are, they’re good at what they do. And I think we will absolutely see more of that.

But ultimately, all of the – the AI doesn’t decide to do these things on its own, right? I mean- Fair. Yeah … at least as of now. Yeah, right. And so even in the- Yep … example that you shared, even if it’s just the owner who’s involved in having created this network, you still have the human at one end of this.

Yeah. Whether they are managing every message or not, who knows? And, I’m not even sure that that’s necessary as long as they are well targeted and being actually truly genuinely helpful to the journalist on the other end by giving them something that is, you know, that fits with what they write about.

I mean, part of the problem with AI is that so much of it is just poorly targeted.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I agree with that. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: But that, that’s more on the humans who are sending them out there. Yeah, yep. It’s not on… The AI can do a great job if you give it the right context, the right direction, the right information.

If you just say, “Hey, you know, go find journalists” … of course it’s gonna do poorly, right? It’s- But, but so would a human …

 Gini Dietrich: just like a young professional

Chip Griffin: I mean, we’ve talked about this before.

Gini Dietrich: Right. A young pro- Yeah … intern

Chip Griffin: You bring an intern and you tell them, “Just start talking to journalists and, and get them to cover us,” and you don’t tell them what you do.

You don’t tell them what the journalists cover. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, they’re gonna do awful. Yeah. You start giving context and the in- even the intern will do- Yeah … a good job with very little background, but you need to give them something, and the AI needs the same thing. But ultimately it’s still that human on one end and the human on the other end.

And so I think that, that we, when we’re talking about fundamentals, that’s what I’m talking about. You need to sort of separate out all of the machinations in between. That can be done well, it can be done poorly, and that changes the outcome, but fundamentally you still have a human on both ends of that conversation.

Even though we like to pretend it’s the AI doing it on its own, the AI is never- It’s not … doing it on its own.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: At least, at least as of this recording. No. We, we don’t have-

Gini Dietrich: Not right now, right. …

Chip Griffin: AI that just wanders off and does its own thing.

Gini Dietrich: This is why I always say please and thank you to my AI, just so that it remembers that I was kind to it.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. Well, and, I mean, we can probably talk about this some other time, but I think the AI companies are doing themselves no service by trying to make it seem like the AI operates on its own, and when they say the, “The AI broke out of its constraints and, you know, hacked into another company,” baloney.

I mean, come on. Like, just knock it off. And I don’t, from a communication standpoint, I guess, you know, they may think that that’s helping them to, No … to say, “We’re really powerful. You should use us.” That’s not really- That’s not … I don’t think what- Nope … what ultimately-

Gini Dietrich: That’s not the message

Chip Griffin: comes through.

Gini Dietrich: Nope. That’s not the message.

Chip Griffin: So, yeah. So it’s, you know, you need to focus on the fundamentals. And I think if, if you take nothing else away from this discussion it’s, is that the fundamentals don’t change, haven’t changed, remain constant, you know, going back to, I don’t know, Ben Franklin or earlier, you know?

These are not things that are, you know, wild and innovative. The tools and techniques are, absolutely. And but to me, that’s the exciting bit, right? Right. You can figure out, if you know the fundamentals, then you can always take advantage of the latest tools and technology to do it better, to do it faster, to do it more effectively, whatever it may be.

But if you lose sight of the fundamentals, you can have all the technology in the world, and you’re still gonna have rubbish results.

Gini Dietrich: 100%, I totally agree. Yep. Strategy has not changed, tools have.

Chip Griffin: So with that, I think we will stop beating this dead horse, and we can, we can move along. You can move along from listening to us today, and you’ll have to join us for the next episode where we’ll find something else to rant and rave about.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, we will.

Chip Griffin: ‘Cause that’s what we do. That’s what we do. At least that’s what I do.

Gini Dietrich: That’s what we do.

Chip Griffin: So with that, I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

Most agency owners probably haven’t thought much about shadow AI (the name for when employees use their personal ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini accounts to do work). In fact, owners may be doing it as well. In this episode, Chip and Gini walk through what the risks are and how to respond without overreacting.

The instinct to crack down is understandable but wrong. Employees are going to use their own tools regardless, often because personal accounts are better trained or more accessible than whatever the company has set up. The goal should be education, not elimination. Most employees don’t know that personal accounts default to feeding data into training sets, or that a single toggle can turn that off. That one fix alone is worth a conversation with your team.

Vibe coding and a plain-language AI policy get discussed, in addition to educating your team. Gini’s team runs weekly micro-learning sessions to help people use AI as a thinking partner, not just a drafting tool. Both Chip and Gini advise that owners and employees who aren’t using AI meaningfully within the next year or two are putting their careers and businesses at risk.

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

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

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I, think it’s appropriate that it suddenly got dark, in, in- Yeah. … in your office as we were trying to begin this recording- Mm-hmm … because we’re gonna be talking about being in the shadows.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, we are. In the dark. But before we do that, happy birthday.

Chip Griffin: Oh, thank you. Thank you. You’re welcome. I appreciate that. I thought maybe we’d escape that since- Nope … ’cause we were on hiatus during my actual- Nope … birthday month, so.

Gini Dietrich: Nope. Ah, come on. Yeah. It was just a few days ago. Happy belated I guess.

All right. Thank you. Especially by the time people hear this, but.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. Well, nobody will really know, so.

Gini Dietrich: I know.

Chip Griffin: I, I, appreciate it, and I mostly appreciate that you’re not singing, so,

Gini Dietrich: I can. Do you want me to?

Chip Griffin: I do not. I- Okay, well- ‘Cause, ’cause isn’t, don’t you have to license “Happy Birthday,” I think? I think that’s-

Gini Dietrich: Well, I have a different song.

It’s a song that- Oh … the kids learned in third grade that we sing instead of “Happy Birthday.”

Chip Griffin: Is, is this the dirge?

Gini Dietrich: No.

Chip Griffin: Oh. See, I like the birthday dirge.

Gini Dietrich: I don’t know the birthday dirge.

Chip Griffin: Oh, it, it, it’s, uh, it goes something like, you know, uh, another year closer to the grave or something. I mean, it’s very more…

But, the- I wouldn’t- Our kids learned it, learned it at a kid’s party, you know, 20-some years ago. Oh, that’s so good. I’ll have to look it up and share it with you. It, or- I’ll look it, yeah. I’ll delete it … or maybe, maybe Jen can do that because, and maybe sh- b- maybe she can include a link to it, in, in the show notes, ’cause it is somewhat entertaining, but I, I don’t remember the lyrics, nor do I want to try to, to invent them or sing them even if I knew them.

Gini Dietrich: All right, fine.

Chip Griffin: But, no, the, the-

Gini Dietrich: Maybe for my birthday. You have s- you have several months to, to learn it. You could sing it to me for my birthday.

Chip Griffin: Well, more than several, but yes. Anywho, so moving on from that. We, are going to talk about the shadows, the deep, dark shadows of the PR world.

No, we’re gonna be talking about, shadow AI, which is, in a lot of organizations, you have employees who are using their own ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whatever accounts to do work. They are not using corporate accounts. A lot of them do not understand the implications of it. The employees do not understand the implications.

The employers do not understand the implications. And I’ve seen it, either bite people or potentially bite people of late, so I thought I would raise it as something that, that owners ought to be thinking about in the current environment.

Gini Dietrich: I will tell you, not to get anyone in trouble, but almost every one of our clients, and they’re big clients, people do that.

Could be, and they’re doing it from their personal devices. It could be because it’s blocked at work. It could be because what they have at work isn’t sufficient. It could be because CoWork is significantly better than, Copilot. It, like, there are lots of reasons, but people will full on pull out their phone or their iPad and do it on their personal device at work all the time.

Chip Griffin: It is incredibly common, and, from my perspective and what I advise owners is that you’re probably not going to stamp it out.

So at a minimum, you need to educate employees- Yep … because a lot of employees don’t realize the risks in what they’re doing, and they haven’t set up any kind of a, a process to make sure that they’re, you know, doing it as intelligently as possible at least, if they’re- Right … gonna use their own accounts.

And, look, I, mean, I, don’t necessarily think that, that it’s awful for them to be doing this. I wouldn’t try to eliminate it. But you do need to educate them because a, a lot of times when I talk with rank and file employees of agencies, they don’t realize that, for example, that their personal accounts, by default, all of the data leaks out for training purposes.

And it’s in many cases, depending on which tool you’re using, as simple as a toggle to make- Yep … sure that that information- Yep … does not go straight into the training sets- Yep … of these providers. And that’s the default setting on your corporate accounts if you’ve got them as an agency, but it is not the default on most personal accounts.

And so just that one change can make a big difference. But I have yet to talk to any individual employee using their individual account who knows that that’s even something they can or should do.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I agree with you. I think that having just a really easy AI policy is the right way to go because I don’t– I think you’re right.

I don’t think you’re gonna stamp it out. I mean, heck, I use my personal one for lots of stuff too. Mostly because I trained it before we had the corporate account, and I don’t wanna go back and retrain what I’ve already worked, what I’ve already created. So, but we just created a one-page, like, bullet points AI policy that says exactly what you said, like toggle it off.

If you’re gonna be vibe coding, here’s what you need to be thinking about. You know, all of the things. I think it’s probably 12 bullet points. It’s not a huge lift, but it just helps them understand. And one of the things that we did is we spent some time building the cowork Instance for the organization, and it has, you know, our OKRs and our plan and our vision and, you know, all of the stuff, our brand kit, all of the stuff.

So it’s easier for, my team now, it wasn’t six months ago, but now it’s easier for my team to use the company one because it has all of that stuff in there and it’s already been trained.

Chip Griffin: Yep. Yeah, I mean, it’s, you know, so I think there’s, this is a multi-stepped process. You know, part of it is the policy, part of it is education.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: Part of it is you should have a standard corporate tool that you are using. It doesn’t mean that it’s the only one, but, it should be– If you do that, it will allow you to do a lot of the information sharing, skill sharing, things like that, that ensure the consistency across the organization and make sure that everybody doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel constantly.

But I think the you brought up two things that I think are worth exploring more. One probably is a separate episode in addition to this, but the other, I think, makes sense within this context. The one to sort of put a pin in and come back to is your fear of moving from your personal one to the corporate one because of the lost, you know, memory and context and all of that kind of thing.

And, I think that there is, I, I, think there’s a lack of knowledge in the agency community generally about how best to capture all of the, the knowledge and things that you’re developing alongside these AI tools and making it as portable as possible. So, you know, one of the things I’ve been focused on in recent months is really making sure that, that my second brain, if you will, in AI is portable across multiple tools.

And so I’ve now built it so, for example, I have one brain that I share across both my Claude and ChatGPT accounts-

Gini Dietrich: Yep. I do the same thing. Yep.

Chip Griffin:… so that you have consistency, and, I think it’s worth sort of exploring that, maybe not in technical detail, but, you know, how you can share it amongst your own accounts, how you can share it more effectively with your colleagues and coworkers and that kind of thing.

So I think that’s worth revisiting in more depth because I think there, particularly as we become more AI forward as agencies generally, that’s something that becomes increasingly valuable and increasingly important. But the, piece that, that I think really fits into this shadows discussion is the vibe coding, and we see a lot of agency employees doing vibe coding, which is fantastic.

I am, I’m a huge advocate of it. I think that if you want to get ahead in professional services generally, in the agency world specifically, you need to learn how to do at least basic vibe coding. That said, I think people do not understand all of the risks and complexities associated with vibe coding.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: And, so, there are a lot of basics that, that agencies need to be thinking about here, and again, it comes into that education and training piece in working with employees, because most of them don’t understand if you mess something up and you are not doing version control or keeping backups, you can be, you know, really up a creek without a paddle.

Yep … and yes, you can reconstruct it in some fashion oftentimes by going back in the conversation, but it’s not simple. And because most people who are doing vibe coding today do not have any previous programming experience, they don’t understand these concepts like version control and being able to roll back easily and, all of the things that geeks like me who’ve been coding since, you know, the early ’80s get and understand.

And, and, that Git reference, by the way, was for those of you who do actually know your coding stuff- … because it’s a great repository tool that most of you who are doing vibe coding should be looking into because it- Yeah … is really helpful-

Gini Dietrich: Yep …

Chip Griffin: in terms of making sure that when you have an oopsie, you can solve it and fix it easily.

But a lot of people if, if they’re doing this on their own devices, they may not even have just regular backups of this stuff because maybe they’re saving their regular agency work to a Dropbox account or OneDrive or whatever you’re using. But whatever they’ve set up to use with Coworker or Codex or whatever, they may not have that in one of those directories that is by default syncing to the cloud and getting updated.

And so you wanna make sure that you’re helping them understand that that needs to be part of the process, because how awful would it be if you just lost all of this work that you had been doing? And so much of what you do with Coworker, Codex is device specific, and you cannot access anywhere else. I suspect that will change over time.

I suspect that, that those will become, you know, more cloud-like, and we’ve already seen Claude, for example, merging the chat and cowork functions somewhat in their app. Yep … and, so we’ll see a place where I think you can just share it across devices, but right now it is frustratingly difficult for those of us with multiple devices to manage.

I’ve got two PCs and a laptop and other and, and so I’ve actually written my own systems for converting the code so that it all is accessible elsewhere. But if you don’t know how to do these things, you could be in a real world of hurt if your computer crashes and you’ve got no backups.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I will say that, not that I speak from experience or anything, but it only has to happen to you once, and then you learn very quickly how to make all of that happen.

Because you’re right, I, I was vibe- I love to vibe code. It’s one of my favorite things to do, but the very first time I did it, I didn’t know I was supposed to do version control or any of that stuff. Right. I didn’t know anything about Git. I didn’t know any of it. I do now.

Chip Griffin: Yep. And look, that’s, how most of us learned the hard way in the olden days of writing this code.

You’re like, “Oh, shoot, I wish I had had a copy of that.” Yeah. You know? And, in the old days, our backups were printouts, right? Because you- Right … there was no way… Like, when I did computer coding on a cassette tape, you know, there was no real way to make a copy of that easily, so, you know, we would just, you know, hit print, and, you know, on a little dot matrix printer we’d have a copy of the code so we could retype it if we absolutely had to.

Gini Dietrich: That’s so funny. Ugh …

Chip Griffin: not ideal. A lot easier to do things today.

Gini Dietrich: Not ideal, no.

Chip Griffin: but, you know, those are the kinds of things, and, if we’re all going to become programmers of a sort, we need to be thinking about that. We need to be thinking about, how do you properly test and maintain some of this stuff that we’re creating?

Because it’s super easy to vibe code the first version of something. It’s a lot harder to handle the maintenance that’s required on it, you know, when connections to data sources break or technology- Yep … evolves- Yep. Yep … or those kinds of things. Yep. Most, of the people who are vibe coding don’t do anything in terms of security testing of the, the code that they’re writing.

And, if that vibe coded thing ties into other systems, which many times they do, you may have created, an opening that you’re not aware of into your back-end systems that could be problematic. And so these are all things that we need to increase the level of education about so that our teams are at least thinking about these things.

I’m not saying they’re gonna solve them all. They’re not gonna… We’re still gonna have issues that crop up. But we’ve got to be doing more to try to educate owners, employees, and everybody else involved in the process.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely. I really think that starting with an AI policy is the right thing to do.

Don’t make it overly complicated. Like, when we started, we had this big, like, AI policy legal packet. And I was like, “This is way too much. Way too much.” Like, people are not going to absorb that. So I used my AI to dumb it down, for lack of a better term, and, you know, really to highlight the things, and then I went through myself and said, “Okay, great.

These, this is a good start. Now I need to add this, this, and this,” just based on how I see people using it. So, I also think that shadow AI is one thing, but there are plenty of people who are not using it at all. And I was actually kind of shocked to find that in my own organization, like, really? O-Okay.

So we’ve done a little bit of, you know, we do a, we do micro-learning sessions every week. So we’ve done a little bit of AI micro-learning just to show people, like, it’s not just for a blog post draft or helping you refine an email. Like, it can h- it could be a thinking partner. It can help you with these things.

And so we’ve been doing some micro lessons on that too to just help them understand that this isn’t gonna take your job. We still need you to do your work. We still need your brains for all of this, but this will make you more effective and more efficient.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. Although I, I, have taken to becoming much scarier, and I’m telling people it is gonna take their job if they are not using it effectively themselves.

Gini Dietrich: If they don’t use it. No, I agree with that.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. But, I agree with you. Yeah. There are, there are a lot of folks in the agency community who are not using AI beyond very rudimentary use.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: And, and I, I don’t think there are very many who aren’t using it at all, but there are a lot who are using it more like a, you know, a replacement for Google or something to, you know, give them a quick draft of a blog post or an email or something like that.

And, you really need to be taking advantage of it at a much higher level if you want to be successful in really any kind of knowledge work moving forward. And- Yeah … and I think people have a relatively short window to get up to speed on this. I think we’re talking, you know, a year, two years tops.

Gini Dietrich: If– Yeah, yeah. I think two years is being generous.

Chip Griffin: And, I think if, if you are, if you are not, if a year from now you are not actively using AI every single day in a really intelligent way, I don’t know that you have a future.

Gini Dietrich: I would agree with that. I would agree with that. And I think you have to use it, to your point, in a really intelligent way.

I just answered, or I just had a conversation with a Forbes reporter who’s writing about, there’s a term for it… I can’t think of the term right now. There’s a term for you using it as a thinking partner, using AI as a thinking partner, and he was telling me that almost nobody does that, and I was like Really?

Like, that’s the only thing I use it for is, you know, here’s what I’m thinking, poke some holes in it, play devil’s advocate, tell me, you know, what’s strong, what’s weak, what I need to think through more effectively. It has helped me with … I mean, I, I think I’ve mentioned before, I call it my co-CEO, and I’m like, “Okay, here’s today’s challenge.

Here’s what I’m thinking. Here’s the documentation. Here’s the backup. Help me think this through.” And it’ll be like, “What about this, and what about that?” And I’ll say, “Well, no, I think you’re wrong about this,” and, “What about that?” And, like, we have ongoing conversations about things, and I don’t … From what he was saying, like, almost nobody uses it that way, and I think that is the real value because it helps you operate at a completely different level.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, you’ve got … You have to, and, it, feels weird, but you have to treat these tools as if they are actual employees, consultants, whatever you wanna call them. And, it, it absolutely feels weird to anthropomorphize a chatbot. And, certainly there are ways to, to go way overboard, and y- you know, you hear these, you know-

Gini Dietrich: You’re not gonna fall in love with it

Chip Griffin: these really, really weird stories of, of what people have done. And, you can sort of … You know, the more time you spend with them, you s- you can kinda understand how it, you know, for the right personality, maybe it kind of veers down those- … creepy paths. I’m not encouraging that. No. I’m not encouraging that.

Gini Dietrich: No, no.

Chip Griffin: But, but you’re absolutely right. You have to be having meaningful conversations about the work that you do, your strategies. They are incredibly good at poking holes, incredibly good at helping you to think through things. I mean, I, have spent probably, I wouldn’t say an inordinate amount of time, but a lot of time having it challenge me.

I have Claude interview me on a regular basis on different topics so that it can build its knowledge, because I’ve built a whole second brain operating system kind of thing. Yep, yep. I’ve had it mine through, and, maybe, this is another episode at some point where you and I can talk about some of the systems that we’ve put in place as examples, because I know from our previous conversations there’s some overlap, but also different ways that we do things.

But you know, I, I’ve got 20-plus years of, a, a digital footprint, and AI is great at mining through that. And so I’ve had it do that so that it can, it knows more about me. And so when it pushes back, it pushes back with specific examples, and it will say, “Well, when you did this in, you know, 2007, you know, this was the decision you made. You know, why isn’t that relevant here?” Or things like that.

And it’s weird at first, but, you’re ne- you wouldn’t even find an employee who could do that because none of them in, in all likelihood have been with you for 20 years. Yeah. And so having that available to you is something that you just should not be passing up, and we want to encourage our employees who probably don’t have a 20-year footprint like we do to be trying to find ways to do it, and we want to try to facilitate them using all of the tools at their disposal.

So we certainly need to avoid the knee-jerk reaction when you hear an episode like this, shadow AI, oh my God, I need to shut this down. I can’t- No … I can’t have employees doing– You cannot have that reaction. Mm-mm. And you should not have, while you should have an AI policy, it should be simple- Yeah … and clean.

We can’t go back to the early days of social media policies that, that organizations tried to put in place. And again, we’ve been around a long time, so we’ve seen this movie before. And some of the social media policies that people were putting in place 20 years ago were absolutely bonkers and unnecessary.

And I fear that we’ll see some of the same thing on the AI front. Yes. And part of this, by the way, is, with all due respect to our lawyer friends, sorry, Sharon, don’t talk to your lawyer first about this. You can talk to your lawyer about it, but, lawyers are naturally risk-averse, right? And so if you, if you put this in the hands of your lawyer, particularly if it’s not someone like Sharon who has deep experience in the agency world, they’re gonna sit down and they’re gonna say, “Oh, you need to say no to this, and this, and this, and this.” And all of a sudden, nobody’s able to even use AI in a meaningful way.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, yeah.

Chip Griffin: And so you, you’ve got to try to put reasonable safeguards in place, reasonable policies, but I think the most important is the education piece.

Yes. If you educate people, they are much more likely to make the right decision. It’s not guaranteed, but it’s more likely, and right now we’re at a place where we’re not doing the right level of education of our teams. And part of that is because a lot of owners don’t actually know a lot of what we’re talking about.

I mean, I think, you know, you and I- Yep … are certainly at the leading edge- Yep … for a lot of folks in the agency community. We need to get more people at that same level and let it flow through to their teams to make sure that we really are leveraging this technology for all that it can do.

Because it, I mean, I, I have n- I have not been this enthusiastic about a piece of technology in the world of PR and communications at least since the beginning of the World Wide Web in the mid-’90s.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I agree with you. And, like, the– I know I’ve said this before, but the amount of work and the productivity that I’ve been able to achieve, I honestly don’t know how I did my job without it.

It’s, it is, it’s next level. And you know, there are some weekends where I’m so excited about something that I’m working on, it might be vibe coding or something else, that I will literally sit in front of my computer all weekend and just, like, in the zone because I’m so excited about it. So I think that there’s a big opportunity here for you to explore and to understand and to change the way that you do your business, run your business in a really fun and effective way.

Chip Griffin: Well, and that’s probably yet another ep- episode topic, going forward in, in trying to figure out how you invest your time in AI, because it is, it is just as easy to go down unproductive rabbit holes because- Yeah … they are fun. Sure. Right? And so I, I often find myself sitting there saying, “Do I really need to build this? Is this- … is this really helpful?”

You know, I… and it, it, reminds me a little bit of, woodworking, which is something that I’ve done for- Yeah, yeah, yeah … for many, many years. But, like many woodworkers, I have probably built more things for my shop than I have to use in my house, right? So you, you spend so much time, you know, building workbenches and cabinets and jigs and all of that kind of stuff, which are all really cool, but at the end of the day, they’re not the things that you, you know, it’s not the furniture or the built-ins or whatever that you can use around the house.

And so we need to be careful that we don’t get so enthusiastic, that we’re only building for that. So making those decisions about where does AI actually help and where is it, you know, kinda using it for the sake of using it, is, is something to be paying attention to as well.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, totally agree.

I love it. I’m, I’m a big fan. Love, love, love it. Love.

Chip Griffin: And so we’ve, after our summer hiatus, we sat here and we said, “You know, we should’ve been spending more time thinking of topics to come up with.” And, and so instead we kind of pick a random topic to go with, and we’ve come up with multiple episodes, for future discussions, so.

Gini Dietrich: I wrote them all down too. So they’re in our document, so we have-

Chip Griffin: Out of the corner of my eye, I can see that our shared document- … has been, been being updated. I, I cannot update while we’re talking because I have one of those really loud clickety-clack keyboards. And so it would, overwhelm the audio here.

Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Because I, I, like the noisiest possible keyboard you possibly can have. So. I love it. Anyway, on that note, I, I think it’s probably a good time to, wrap up. We can come out of the shadows with AI. Maybe it will, you know, the storm will pass, in Chicago, and it will get a little bit brighter for you in your office as well. It still seems like it-

Gini Dietrich: It’s like nighttime …

Chip Griffin: it must be pretty dark there. Yeah, crazy. If you’re, if you’re not watching us on video, and you really should watch us on video, because it is so compelling to see us and not just listen to us. But it, it definitely looks dark there. So on that note, we will wrap up here. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: You… Did you forget who you were? There was, there was a long pause there.

Gini Dietrich: It’s because you, there’s a delay with you.

Chip Griffin: Oh, okay. That’s good to know.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, yeah.

Chip Griffin: On that note, it depends.

Most agency owners will tell you accountability is something they value, but fewer will realize they’re often the biggest obstacle to it. In this episode, Chip and Gini offer suggestions for how to stop being the bottleneck at your agency.

Chip tells of his own recent experience where he missed putting out a newsletter after an emergency root canal. Even with Jen repeatedly pinging him, the decision of whether to get something done rested with him. Most employees won’t push back hard because they know who signs the paychecks. The exceptions are rare, and you can’t build your accountability system around them.

Gini’s structural fix has been making “less founder dependence” an explicit OKR, tracked at every leadership meeting. When the goal shows up red on a dashboard, the visibility creates its own pressure. Chip thinks it’s less about any specific single system. AI has helped him stop some procrastination, but it’s also added new projects he’d never have attempted before. His takeaway is that you need to figure out what works for your specific wiring, and not rely on someone else’s approach.

For external accountability, peers, coaches, and organizations like YPO or Vistage can help, particularly for big-picture questions you wouldn’t bring to your team. But formal advisory boards are another story. Both Chip and Gini are skeptical, since even paid corporate directors with legal obligations frequently fail at the oversight function. For owner-led agencies, the complexity almost never justifies the benefit.

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

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

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I, I need some accountability.

Gini Dietrich: Okay. I’d be happy to hold you accountable. That’ll actually be fun for me.

Chip Griffin: It is very difficult as a business owner to, to be truly accountable, and just before we started, I was relaying how I failed to get out a newsletter last week because I was, I was tied up catching up after an emergency root canal, and so I did not get a newsletter out, and there was nobody there yelling at me to tell me that I needed…

Well, actually I take that back. Jen-

Gini Dietrich: I was gonna say, I’m sure Jen, I think Jen holds you accountable …

Chip Griffin: Jen asked me like 400 times, “Are we actually gonna get a newsletter out today? Are you gonna send me something? Will we have something?”

Gini Dietrich: I’m sure that that’s true.

Chip Griffin: But, it just, it really underscores that, that as the owner, ultimately you make the decisions, and it is very difficult to have proper accountability for what you do or what you don’t do.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. It’s super hard. You know, it’s funny because we talk internally all the time about how I’m the bottleneck. And people are like, “I really need you to review this,” but there’s also six direct reports, and I’m, and six people, different people saying, “I really need you to review this.” Things get bottlenecked.

I just thought, “Ugh, I’ve got my own priorities as well.” So it’s a real challenge, and even when you have, to your point, even when you have people saying, “I need this, I need this, I need this,” you ultimately make the decision on what’s the priority and whether or not it gets done.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And it’s, you know, I, think a lot of times we’ll have employees and we’ll ask, them to hold us accountable, and sometimes that works, but most of the time it doesn’t.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Right.

Chip Griffin: The, reality is that I have told many employees over the years, “You need to hold me accountable for this or that.” 95% of them won’t because they know you sign the paycheck.

Gini Dietrich: Right. Yes.

Chip Griffin: I have been blessed to occasionally have some in that 5% who were persistent and, they would, they would come camp out in my office and say, “You told me you would get me this answer by this time. I need it.” But that’s a very, very small percentage of the people that, that I have worked with at least, and I suspect that most owners have worked with.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I think there’s, I think it’s twofold. I think there is an opportunity for your team to manage up, and by doing that, I think exactly you’re, what you’re saying, like camp out in your office. Or I have one person on my leadership team who is phenomenal at coming to her one-to-one with everything she needs me to make a decision on.

And if it’s a document that she needs me to review, she provides me the highlights, and she says, “These are the two areas I need you to, review, and I need it as soon as we hang up.” And then she gives me 15 or 20 minutes back at the end of the meeting so that I can review those things. And then if I don’t, like I’m the asshole, sorry, the jerk that didn’t do it because she gave me the time back and I did something else.

So like she does a phenomenal job of managing up, and that’s how she does it. But I think you’re right that it has, it comes with, I think it comes with experience, I think it comes with other leadership roles that they’ve played, like all of the- and some confidence, you know, to be able to say to the owner or the person who signs the check, “Hey, you gotta focus on this.”

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And, I think even though you know it, it may not be as effective as you would like it to be to have your employees holding you accountable, you still need to create a culture in which- Yes … it’s possible to do that- Yes … where, they are encouraged to do that, because that will at least provide some degree of accountability for your actions and follow through.

Certainly more so than if you scare people off, if you make people, if you kinda flick people away and say, “No, no”- Yep … “stop bothering me about this.” Yep. If you do that, it’s gonna be really difficult to get any kind of sense of accountability with your team and, it really does help you to have that.

We complain all the time about, you know, clients who are on our back about this or that, but it does help us to make sure that things get done. And, so as long as it’s not overbearing, there is a benefit to that. Internally, we often have challenges with that, particularly for things related to our own business as opposed to for clients or for prospects.

But we need to try to, as best as possible, create that culture where everybody is willing to step up and say, “Hey, this needs to be done. You are the blocker.” And, if you don’t, if they don’t call you out on it, things are probably gonna slip through the cracks.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, for sure. And, I find that I reprioritize based on what I think is the most pressing, right?

And for me, what might be pressing may not be the same as it might be for somebody else on the team. So I need people to say, “Listen, I know that you’ve got this and this and this, but I, this is, this will, is what will happen if I don’t get this from you by this date.” And then I can go, “Okay, let me look at everything and kind of rejigger based on, those kinds of things.”

So I, like from an owner’s perspective, I need people to say, “I need this from you. You’re the bottleneck. Here’s why, and here’s what it, here are the consequences.” So then I can decide, okay, well, it’s not that big of a deal, or shoot, we don’t want that. Let’s get this done.

Chip Griffin: Well, and, part of the accountability function for you as the, boss/owner is to identify, you know, where you are, where you need to be the bottleneck and where you don’t.

Right. Right? If, you- Right. Part of this comes down to- Yes … reducing the amount of things that you need to be held-

Gini Dietrich: Yep …

Chip Griffin: accountable for. And- Yep … you know, we’ve talked in the past about the importance of delegation and, trusting your team and giving them more responsibility, but that is very closely related to the accountability question.

So if you are either micromanaging or you are overpromising and saying, “Yeah, I can get to that tomorrow,” when you know you can’t get to it tomorrow, you need to, to-

Gini Dietrich: You think you can because you think you have 36 hours in the day instead of 24.

Chip Griffin: Fair. Fair. But you need to get better at, estimating how long it’s really gonna take to do things so that you’re in a position where the commitments that you are making, particularly to your team or to others, you can uphold.

And so there is something realistic to hold you accountable for. Because if you say, “Look, well, I, you know, I can move this skyscraper tomorrow,” and you know you can’t, it’s hard to truly hold you accountable for it, right? Because- Sure … it was never gonna happen anyway.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: And so you need to be in a position where the things that you promise are, truly legitimately things that you can be held accountable for afterwards.

Gini Dietrich: Tell you what we started doing this year, and it has worked extraordinarily well for me. And I know that not everybody wants to function this way, but this is how– this is one way that you could do it. We do objectives and key results, so OKRs. We– That’s the process that we follow internally. And one of the things we said at the beginning of this year is, “If we wanna reach our goals, one of our OKRs has to be less founder dependence.”

And so as part of that, everything that’s in my brain has to come out. So we have to understand how Gini does work, how Gini delivers, like, how she has new business meetings, and the questions she asks, and how she does discovery calls. From that all the way through how she delivers, you know, keynotes to how she delivers content, to how she even produces content.

And when she produces that content, what does the team need to do to be able to, like, all of the things, right? And so that has been front and center for the whole year and well, half of the year right now, but it will be for the rest of the year as well, is how are we depending less and less and less on Gini, the founder?

And that’s through process, it’s through standard operating procedures, it’s through things that are written down. I do video tutorials, all sorts of things, so that by the end of the year, I’m less the bottleneck and more focused on the things that I need to be focused on as the leader of the organization.

And because it’s an OKR, it’s in every single leadership team meeting. It’s up there in bright red because we haven’t met it yet, and we can see exactly where we’re scoring against it. And as somebody who likes to have green instead of red, I’m like, “Okay, let’s get this done.” So it works extraordinarily well for me.

But, you know, there are other ways I think that you can think about how to let people hold you accountable in that same kind of way that work for you or your brain.

Chip Griffin: Well, I, think you’ve really highlighted the key thing here, which is that, that you need to come up with a system that works for you. You are- Yes

you are ultimately- Yes … the owner. You are the, most difficult person to hold accountable within your organization in all likelihood, and so you need to develop systems and processes and approaches that get you to that accountability. And, what works for me, will not work for Gini, will not work for you.

You know, we all have different styles, different motivators. You know, for you it’s the, red versus green that everybody can see, and, you know, so that sort of, that follows sort of what I would call the name-and-shame approach, to accountability.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. It works.

Chip Griffin: And that can work. You know, there are people who have the, you know, the simple discipline that if they’ve got a list, they’re just committed to getting through that list.

Yep, yep. And there are some people who that, just seeing that unchecked item on the list is enough. And, certainly at a minimum it’s helpful for you to be tracking all the things that you are accountable for that you need to do so that, you know, you and perhaps your team can see, you know, what’s, outstanding.

And, if you don’t have that, it’s really hard to be accountable, right? So you need to, have, in my view, no matter what your style is, some sort of a tracker so that you know what it is. Whether that’s a note card like I use for my daily stuff that’s the most important that needs to be done. I have a task manager for longer term stuff.

You know, you might have a project management system. Maybe you’ve got a whiteboard. I don’t really care. Everybody kind of needs their system to make sure that they’re at least doing some basic level of tracking of the things that they need to be accountable for, otherwise your odds of success are, very, very low.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I totally agree with that. And I would say on the flip side, you know, getting the work complete, honestly and truly, and I know we’ve talked about AI to death, but I don’t know how I did my job without AI. Like, I look back on the last three or four years and I’m like, I don’t know how I did my job without it. Because it has stopped that procrastination that I have where I’ll get it done, but it will be the very last minute before the deadline, literally.

And it, it has stopped that really bad habit of mine, because what I’ll do at the end of the day is I’ll say, “Okay, these are the three things I need to accomplish tomorrow,” and I will open those projects in Claude Cowork and I’ll say to it, “Here’s the project I need, here’s one project I need to complete tomorrow.

Please break it down into bite-sized chunks.” And I do that with the three projects, with the three things I need to accomplish the next day, and I let it work overnight and do that for me. And then I get up the next morning, and it’s, there’s a list of like, “You have to do this first, then this, then this, then this.”

And it’s significantly easier than me sitting here going, “Okay, if I start this, it’s gonna take me four hours, and I don’t have a four-hour block.” So it, it breaks it down into 15 or 30-minute chunks for me so that I can get through it. And I do that every single day before I shut my computer down.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, and, again, that, that works for you.

For me, you know, AI has, has certainly helped in some areas. It’s made it worse in other areas because, you know, it allows me to, play with a lot of different ideas that, that I might-

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, there’s that too. Sure

Chip Griffin: … so, I’ve added more to my plate while I’m also becoming more efficient and effective at some of the things that were already there.

So it, you know, for me, it probably comes out in the wash. Certainly there’s a lot of things that I, don’t procrastinate on in, in the same way that I used to. I think about a presentation I gave earlier today that I actually put notes together on a week ago because I was using AI, and I just-

Gini Dietrich: Amazing

Chip Griffin: I took a few minutes to just kind of stream of consciousness- Yeah … share some thoughts with Claude, and then it gave me an outline, so I actually had something ready to cook a week ago on that, that, you know, normally I would’ve been sitting down 15 minutes before the presentation-

Gini Dietrich: Right. Yes.

Chip Griffin: … and, starting to make some notes about, you know, what I might talk about. So it was, it was A, not last minute, and B, you know, Claude helped me find some things that I might have overlooked. It helped me to organize them into a more logical fashion. And so, you know, in 20 minutes of prep a week ago, I got farther than I would have in the same 20 minutes before the presentation today, which would have been my old style.

At the same time, I’ve got a whole bunch of different projects that I’m playing with Claude with that I probably would never even have attempted, so net plus there-

Gini Dietrich: Same. Yeah. Fair. Yes. Same

Chip Griffin: but also it gets in the way of- … of some of the, basic daily stuff. So, you know, it’s a, it’s, a mixed bag.

But, I think the important thing here is just trying to figure out what works for you, what works for your team, having conversations with them, because it’s, most of us are not very good at being, you know, fully self-accountable. We need some sort of forcing mechanism, and part of that is helping your team to understand how, can they best hold you accountable?

Is it that red versus green on the screen? Is it by camping out with you in your office? Is it by using those one-to-ones to, to be the mechanism that gets thing- things done? What is it that will help you get your team in particular what they need? But not all of it can be done internally, right? So sometimes it’s helpful to have some sort of external accountability force.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yep. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are everything from, I, you know, in the Spin Sucks community, there’s a group of people that they’re their, each other’s accountability partners. I don’t know how well that works, but they meet, you know, on every, I think they meet every two weeks, and they hold each other accountable.

You can certainly have a coach, like what you do. You can join a membership organization like a YPO or a Vistage or something like that. There are lots of opportunities, I think, for you to have accountability partners outside of work as well, outside of your office to help you with those things too.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I think having some sort of a, an external partner or partners, you know, whether that’s peers, whether that’s paid advisors, whatever, it certainly can help because, you know, I, think back to, you know, we used to have folks who, cleaned our house, and we would always clean up before they got here because you didn’t want them to see how messy you really were in real life.

And, you know, and, this was, you know, really useful to us when we had little kids and, you know- Yeah … the house was, messy. Yep. But, you know, we would tidy it up quite a bit before the cleaners would come in for their, weekly cleaning. Mm. And so that, that was effectively the accountability for us not to let the whole place just, you know, go to hell- Yeah … in a hand basket.

Gini Dietrich: Sure.

Chip Griffin: And I think the same thing can happen whether it is, you know, a peer or, you know, your company attorney or accountant or a coach or whomever. There’s… You just don’t want to, let people see things deteriorating, and so there’s, a, value to having those typically in addition to whatever mechanisms you have internally, right?

‘Cause it, this works better for the big picture stuff. If you’re- Yeah … particularly if you’re, you know- Right … sitting with peers- Right … or something like that- Yeah … they’re not gonna help you with the accountability for the day-to-day tasks, but they can help you for the big picture stuff. Like, you know, I’m, I need to think about, you know, shifting my, my focus for the business, or I need to, think about our service offerings or those kinds of things.

Gini Dietrich: I need to fill a pipeline. I need a new business process. All of those things, yeah.

Chip Griffin: Right. Because some of these things may be things you don’t even wanna discuss with your team, right? Yeah. You know, particularly if it’s, you know, reshaping the business or something like that. That may be scary for a lot of your team to, to contemplate. Sure. They may not have the right skillsets to help you navigate that, and so having other people that can hold you accountable so that, you know, when you’re doing your every other week call or monthly call or whatever you might do with a peer, you, know, you have something to update them on, and it’s not just like, “Yep, pretty much the same as last month.I don’t really have anything new to report here.”

Gini Dietrich: There we go. Nothing else. Yeah, right.

Chip Griffin: You know, so, there, there is real benefit to having those, you know, external mechanisms in, some fashion to do that same naming and shaming that we talked about before, to, hold you accountable.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, for sure.

Chip Griffin: Now, there’s, there are always the people that I talk to who are like, “Okay, well, we need an advisory board or maybe a proper board or those kinds of things, a more formal accountability structure.” I’ll be honest, I think in general, those do not work for-

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I agree with that …

Chip Griffin: for most, small agencies.

Yeah. Frankly, it doesn’t work for most big agencies either.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I totally agree with that.

Chip Griffin: I, I’m candidly skeptical of boards even for huge organizations in many cases because having participated in and around many of them over the years, the vast majority are not as independent as they are made to be. And, so therefore, they don’t necessarily serve the function that you would expect them to. And we see this all the time when there are, you know, big company scandals around CEOs and boards not providing proper oversight. So I, think even, in those cases where directors are paid and they have, you know, actual legal responsibilities, they often fall down on their accountability roles.

I think really hard for most small agencies- Yeah … uh, to do that. I, I totally agree with that. Certainly, advisory boards I think are- Yeah. I mean, there’s a little bit of the name and shame in that, right? You know, if you have to, update them on certain things. But, even then, I, think that works better in one-on-one type relationships as opposed to an advisory board.

And a proper board just adds complexity to your business that-

Gini Dietrich: That you don’t need …

Chip Griffin: that probably is not necessary and-

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely not …

Chip Griffin: And if you’re gonna create a proper board, by all means, talk to a lawyer and an accountant before you do it because there are other issues that pop up as soon as you start adding those structures in.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I totally agree with that 100%.

Chip Griffin: But I think the, you know, really the, bottom line here is that, you know, for your business to succeed, you do need to be held accountable in some fashion for your actions. It’s really hard to do it yourself, so you need to try to find whatever tools will work best to get you as close to that as possible. Understanding that at the end of the day, it is still your business.

If you want to let something drop, if you want to ignore something-

Gini Dietrich: You can …

Chip Griffin: you can.

Yep.

Right? So, there does have to be- Yeah, absolutely … some degree of, sense of- Yep … sense of, of self-accountability, but you need tools to help you get there better because left only to your own devices, I, know for me at least, I, would let a lot of things slide.

Not just the weekly newsletter.

Gini Dietrich: Sure, yep. Well, the weekly newsletter will get out. It’ll just be late.

Chip Griffin: It’ll get out. Maybe next week.

Gini Dietrich: Okay.

Chip Griffin: Maybe this week. Who knows? But-

Gini Dietrich: That’s true …

Chip Griffin: we get it out as often as, we can. We’re a small operation, you know? And I am definitely, definitely the roadblock on the weekly newsletter.

Jen always has her part. I love it. She’s al- The weekly roundup is always on time.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: The rest of it, kinda hit or miss.

Gini Dietrich: I understand.

Chip Griffin: So with that, we will wrap up this episode of, the Agency Leadership Podcast. Maybe it’ll be in this week’s newsletter, maybe it’ll be in next week’s newsletter. I don’t know.

It’ll be in a newsletter at some point. And before it goes in the newsletter, it’s on the website, so you can always find it there. Anyway, on that note, we’ll wrap this one up. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

You’re using AI to handle more of the work that your team used to do. That’s exactly why the human side of the business has become a competitive advantage.

In this episode, Chip and Gini make the case that as AI slop floods everyone’s inbox and feeds, the bar for genuine human interaction has dropped so low that clearing it will make you stand out. Demonstrating real experience and expertise in conversation — not just in content — is where agencies will win.

That starts with having actual conversations. Chip argues that meetings have become more valuable, not less, because you can’t fake a real-time interaction the way you can a written deliverable. And Gini adds that it extends to one-on-one meetings with your team, which can be used to get the specific decisions needed from you.

Written content is increasingly hard to trust, and Chip admits even he can’t reliably tell his own writing from AI output. Video helps close that gap for now. So does the handwritten note, which Chip still sends to podcast guests when he can track down an address. He jokes that the illegibility is proof of authenticity.

In person beats everything. Chip pushes agency owners to budget for it deliberately, with clients, prospects, and remote team members alike. Gini mentions the Augusta Rule as one way to offset some of those costs, though both are quick to say talk to your accountant before you try to benefit from it.

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

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

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I think we’re, we’re people people. We’re-

Gini Dietrich: We’re people people?

Chip Griffin: I’m a people person, so that make us people people. People- People … people. We’ll just keep saying the word people. But in all seriousness, the age of AI, everything seems to be impersonal, so that opens the door to be more friendly to actual people, to be more personable.

And so I think we can talk about how we can set ourselves apart as agencies, as leaders in this age where the tech seems to do almost everything for us.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. You know, it’s funny that this conversation is happening right now because I’m coming to this conversation straight from our bimonthly learning session internally.

And one of the things that we talked about today was, you know, how to use AI, our critical thinking skills, but also how to use questioning and probing with it- new business prospects and with clients to be able to uncover the real problems of what they’re, the real pain points of what they’re facing versus just the surface level, “I have a measurement problem,” kinds of things.

And it’s, it’s definitely not something that you can rely on AI for. You have to actually use your people skills to be able to do that kind of work, and that’s what we spent about an hour going through internally today.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s so many more opportunities now to leverage the human connection piece with your clients, with your prospects, with your team because so much of what they’re seeing is AI slop. Is technology-driven.

And, and whether that’s the pitches that we get in our inbox, and you sit there and you’re like, “I know AI generated this and sent it to me,” and all that. And so trying to find ways where you can break through and make a human relatable interaction with somebody and provide real human insight in those conversations gives you the opportunity to do things that, you know, a couple years ago nobody would’ve paid attention.

Now they do.

Gini Dietrich: Right. Right. Yeah. You know, one of the things I always talk about is, especially with content, and I think this applies here as well, is demonstrating your experience and expertise because nobody else can do that. And I think if, as you’re thinking about those human relations and the people skills and actually interacting with actual human beings, where you can demonstrate experience and expertise is really what’s going to set you apart in all of those conversations. Because nobody else has your experience or expertise.

You know, they may have some of the similar experience, and they may have similar expertise, but nobody does it exactly the same way that you do. And I think being able to demonstrate that in your conversations is where you will win every time.

Chip Griffin: Well, I think the key is having actual conversations.

Gini Dietrich: Fair. Start there.

Chip Griffin: I was talking with a leader today who said, “Look, I just, I don’t even have time to read half the stuff that comes in, even from my direct reports. And so for me, the best way to interact with all of my direct reports is through actual conversations, either in person or by video call because that’s, that’s the only way I have an opportunity to focus on it.”

And so, you know, I, I know that we all are of the mindset, geez, you know, we don’t want to be meeting to death and all of that, but I would argue that in the age of AI, meetings are even more valuable than they were before because you can’t fake this kind of interaction.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: If you’re engaging with somebody on Zoom or Teams, I mean, sure, you could have one of those AI apps that, that, you know, the kids are apparently using to interview these days where it puts the answers up on the screen or whatever.

I don’t know. But the reality is nobody’s really doing that that I know of, in the agency and client world. So, you know, it’s reasonable to assume that you are actually being yourself when you are communicating with a client, prospect, or team member. And so take advantage of those opportunities. Don’t say, “Well, this could’ve been an email.”

Well, yeah, it probably could’ve been, but people are gonna think that was generated by AI. So, you know, don’t meeting yourself to death, but certainly be more open to meetings than you might’ve been five years ago.

Gini Dietrich: And I would add to that, that I think the person you mentioned a few minutes ago, I think that’s exactly right.

You know, at, I mean, as my agency grows and as we get bigger and, and like the amount of stuff that comes at me every day is impossible to keep up with, and the meetings, especially the one-to-one meetings that I have with my team that are most effective are the ones that they say, “I need this decision, this decision, and this decision,” and then they walk me through so that I’m not having to review decks.

I’m not having to review documents. They walk me through what they’re doing. They walk me through their problem-solving, and they walk me through the decisions that they need from me to be able to move forward. Otherwise, it’s gonna sit on my to-do list for two or three weeks when they can use a one-to-one really effectively that way.

So I think you’re absolutely right. You don’t necessarily have to have more meetings. You just need to use them more effectively.

Chip Griffin: Right. And I mean, even before the age of AI, I always told all my direct reports, “Use those one-on-one meetings to just get every answer you need from me.” Yep. It, it’s the best way…

you’ve got me focused. Take advantage of that. Absolutely. Don’t walk away saying, “Geez, I should’ve asked him this.” If you can get the answer, get the answer. And I think we can, we can do that, but it’s also your opportunity to show that you’ve actually got the knowledge yourself in these conversations.

You’re not relying on AI to spoon-feed it all to you because, I mean, let’s face it, you know, we’ve all come to distrust the content we see from almost everybody- Mm-hmm … and say, “Well geez, is that really theirs or did that come from AI?” And people are, they’re trying to say, “Oh, well, I can identify the AI.”

You can’t. I guarantee you can’t. I can’t tell the difference between my writing and AI writing unless I do a forensic analysis and go back to figure out who wrote the first draft of something. Yeah. And I think that, I mean, honestly, I think the people who have the toughest time with that are the people who, you know, were prolific writers before because prolific writers tended to write in a certain way, which is what the LLM’s all trained on.

So, you know, those of us who were professional writers … we used a lot of em dashes. That taught the LLMs, “Use em dashes.”

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: Now, you use an em dash, you must be using AI. Yeah. Baloney. Baloney.

Gini Dietrich: Baloney. I still use an em dash, and I will die on that hill because I am not going to stop.

Chip Griffin: No. And, that’s the human style that we used to be able to express in writing.

I think it’s becoming increasingly difficult to truly express yourself in written form, in a way that is fully trusted by folks. And so I think the, you know, for now at least, there is also an opportunity to do more video in your content creation. Because while, yes, you can fake AI, and that’s getting really good, to be honest with you, the avatars you can create and, and I could create it as if this show was me talking, and nobody would be any the wiser.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: It’s still rare that that’s happening today. Right. So for now, you have that opportunity to make that human person-to-person connection through video, and so I’m encouraging everybody to do more video. Maybe not instead of the written, but at least in conjunction with it, because it helps to show that you’re putting these thoughts and ideas into your own voice and not just, you know, generating something with Claude or ChatGPT and shipping it without a thought.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And in person, if you can do it in person, I would recommend that as well.

Chip Griffin: Oh, in person’s even better.

Gini Dietrich: Like, yeah. Like, I mean, I- absolutely, because-

Chip Griffin: ‘Cause you really can’t fake it in person, at least not yet.

Gini Dietrich: You definitely cannot fake it in person.

Chip Griffin: I mean, we, we don’t have convincing holograms out there that someone  can’t tell is a hologram.

Not yet. Not yet.

Gini Dietrich: Not yet. I am very much looking forward to that, but not yet.

Chip Griffin: Well, I mean, I, I do believe- Mm-hmm … that the world needs more of us out there physically.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: I mean, we could take the Chip and Gini Show on the road-

Gini Dietrich: We could …

Chip Griffin: without having to, to leave anywhere. Just have the AI do it all for us.

Gini Dietrich: Fantastic. I love it. Yeah. We’ll just be like Princess Leia and we’ll beam in. I love it. Let’s do it. I think that’s fantastic.

Chip Griffin: Ah, yes. But I mean, I think there are other ways that you can make those personal connections. You know, one of the things that I’ve done for a number of years now is I’ve done handwritten notes to people on a weekly basis.

Not everybody every week, obviously, but you know-

Gini Dietrich: I’ve never gotten a handwritten note from you.

Chip Griffin: Uh, I think you did, like, at the very start of this show, I think. I believe I did, but I would have to go back and-

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think you might be right. Okay, I take it back …

Chip Griffin: pretty, pretty sure that you did. I- All right

you know, I, I try not to overdo it because at some point it- Fine … it gets cheapened. But, generally speaking, when I have a podcast guest on, for example, I send them a handwritten note after the episode goes out, assuming I have their address. I mean, that’s obviously a challenge in some cases.

Sure. And it gets a little creepy when you start asking people for their addresses sometimes. So you gotta … It’s, it’s not as easy as it once was, and sending something to a business address- Right … doesn’t necessarily get there anymore. Yeah, yeah. But when you can get an address to send them a personal handwritten note, it stands out today ’cause nobody gets any mail.

Yep. Nobody sees things that aren’t electronic, and even though, in my case, nobody can read my handwriting, but they still know that I put the thought into it. That’s right. Yep. And the fact that they can’t read it tells them it’s real, right? Because if I paid one of the services, ’cause you can pay services that will, you know-

Gini Dietrich: To type it out, yeah

Chip Griffin: well, no, will do a fake handwritten-

Gini Dietrich: Oh, yeah, yeah …

Chip Griffin: thing. But it’s computer generated, so it’s, it’s fully legible.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: There’s no way anybody would pay for what I send. I mean, it’s just, it’s … I mean, I can’t read half of what I write. And I try. I, I do try, but I just have horrible, horrible penmanship.

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

Any way that we can create the human-to-human interaction, and lots, there are lots of tools available today that make it easy for us, that’s gonna be, that’s, that is going to set us apart. And like I said to my team earlier today, the more time you can spend with a client or with a prospect really understanding their business, the way that they operate day to day, their pain points, the business’ pain points, those are the kinds of conversations that are gonna make you smarter.

And if you use AI, you take that transcript and you dump it in there and say, “These are the kinds of things I’m thinking about. Can you poke some holes in it or tell me what I’m missing?” For sure you can do that, but do that after the conversation so that you, you understand, you can demonstrate your experience and your expertise and really have that human-to-human interaction.

Chip Griffin: Well, and, leaning into something you said before- Look for those opportunities where you can get together with people in person.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And so again, I think the value of that has been elevated. It’s always been important and useful to, to meet with clients, prospects, team members in person, but I think it’s even more valuable today because, you know, we, as we talked about, you can’t fake that kind of interaction.

Technology isn’t doing it for you. But it also allows you to elevate yourself over other people they may be interacting with, whether that’s a prospect looking at different firms, or whether that’s an employee who’s like, “Well, I, I feel disconnected ’cause we’re remote.” I mean, we, we talk about the importance of if you’re running a remote agency, which many of you are, you need to have regular in-person get-togethers, and you need to have budget to get people to travel.

If they’re not all local, you still need to bring them in because those human interactions that you have by getting together, meeting in person, sharing a meal, sharing a coffee, those are all things that allow you to strengthen the connection and really set yourself apart in the age of AI.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, and I think you said something really, really important, which is set the budget. So as you’re budgeting – granted, I know not everybody budgets every year, but you should be doing that. As you’re doing that, set some budget aside for these kinds of things. And I will tell you, and certainly I am not an accountant, I am not a finance professional, but in many cases, you can…

Even if you host that in your home, something like that in your home, not have people stay there, but host, like, strategy planning meetings or things like that in your home, you can deduct some of that from your taxes. So you can… There’s, there are ways that you can do it so it’s not actually costing you money on top of, like, it’s something that’s deductible.

So, you know, talk to your accountant about that, but there are some things that you can do to offset some of those costs, too.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, it’s, you’re talking about the Augusta rule. So when you talk with your accountant, ask about the Augusta rule. It is something that is potentially useful, but please, dear God, do talk to your accountant before you do this-

Gini Dietrich: Yes, please. Please. …

Chip Griffin: Because I’ve talked with some folks, they see someone online say, “Oh, you should use the Augusta rule,” and they’re like, “Oh, cool. Well, I’ll just do…” No, there’s actual proper steps that you have to go through to prove that it’s a legitimate expense, to prove the amount and all of that kind of stuff.

So, so please, do make sure that, because it is, that is one of the more complicated areas of tax law, and so you really wanna make sure that you’re getting that one correct so that-

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, just- …

Chip Griffin: they don’t come in and whack you for-

Gini Dietrich: Take our advice to, take our advice to look into it. Yeah. Do not take our advice to just implement it.

Chip Griffin: Right. But regardless of how you go about getting together in person, the important thing, at least for this episode, is that you do it, because that does, it, it strengthens that human connection, which pays all sorts of dividends. I mean, even with clients, getting together in person, it, it helps you.

You can read body language in ways that you can’t do even on a video call. You can strengthen the relationship so that when you hit that inevitable rough patch somewhere down the road, and we all hit rough patches with our clients at one point or another- it gives you that oftentimes reservoir of goodwill that you can draw on because you made that human connection, and you’re not just, you know, the other end of a contract.

You are someone that they’ve gotten to know. And so we want to try to find as many ways as possible to have that relationship with everybody that we work with at every level, vendors, clients, prospects, team members.

Gini Dietrich: Yep, yep.

Chip Griffin: Whatever it may be.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yeah, I mean, my newsletter that’s going out in a couple of days, talks about how Ocean Spray was one of my very first clients as a young whipper-snapper working at FleishmanHillard.

And there, my day-to-day contact at, there became one of my closest friends. She’s one of my closest friends today, even though we haven’t worked together in 20 years, and the reason being is that we got together in person all the time, we traveled together, we were, you know, sort of in the, the ranks together working through all sorts of issues and challenges and, you know, building…

We built a real friendship. And you can’t do that on Zoom. You just can’t.

Chip Griffin: Right. And, I know we all want to be more efficient and all of that, and that’s all fine and good, and I am a huge believer in using the technology- Oh, yeah … whether it’s AI or otherwise-

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely …

Chip Griffin: to, to make yourself more efficient, but you can’t do that at the expense of losing that human touch.

Gini Dietrich: Right. Totally. People skills, people skills, people skills.

Chip Griffin: They are more important today than they have ever been. And that, that is common throughout history. As, as one thing becomes dominant, the antidote to it, if you will, or the opposite piece of it often becomes equally valuable because everybody else is ignoring it.

So find those places where you can stand out, you can be a little bit different. And, many people went into the agency world because they were people people, people. I… it sounds so stupid.

Gini Dietrich: People, people people, people pleasers. Person, person, people. People, pe- people

Chip Griffin: ‘Cause you’re a people person- A person so if you’re people pe- I don’t know.

Gini Dietrich: I don’t know either.

Chip Griffin: I feel like I’ve taken this off the rails as I usually do, so maybe this is a good point to, to draw ourselves to a close here before people get peopled out.

Gini Dietrich: We are all people people. People people.

Chip Griffin: Makes me think of that old song, what is it, the, The Purple People Eater or something like that?

Gini Dietrich: Yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking of at the beginning. Yeah. Yep.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. Which if I could remember it, I wouldn’t sing it anyway because we’d probably get a copyright strike, so. Or maybe not. I don’t know. I don’t know how all that stuff works. I wouldn’t either. On that note, uh, I’m definitely careening off the rails here, so we will draw this episode to a close.

Thanks for listening. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

Most agency owners think their clients have it easy. But the gap between how you believe your agency operates and how clients and prospects actually experience it is often wider than you’d expect, and it’s usually the small, everyday frictions that do the most damage.

In this episode, Chip and Gini ask if you were on the receiving end of your own agency’s processes, would you be happy? The answer, for a lot of agencies, is probably not. Their point isn’t that agencies should cave to every demand, but if you market yourself as a partner, act like one.

The friction can start before someone even becomes a client. Contact forms loaded with qualifying questions scare people away. And back-and-forth emails to find a meeting time have no excuse in 2026. Use a scheduling tool, have a link ready, and make it especially easy for prospects. Once someone is ready to talk, the goal is to respond fast and remove every obstacle.

When it comes to the handoff from prospect to client, agencies should have a standard proposal template so they can turn paperwork around in 24 hours, not days. Make invoicing and payments as easy on the client as you would want it to be if you were in their shoes. And when it comes to project management tools, if the client already has one they’re using, just use it. The tool matters less than having one.

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

Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I, I’m, I’m easy to work with, right? I mean, you know, I’m not too-

Gini Dietrich: You’re super easy to work with.

Chip Griffin: Well.

Gini Dietrich: I mean, you’re a little cranky, but that’s why I love you.

Chip Griffin: I, I, I think listeners know I’m, I’m cranky.

They just… If you’ve listened to more than two or three episodes, you’ve probably heard me be cranky about something at someone.

Gini Dietrich: Great. I love it.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. Yeah. But we are gonna talk about whether or not you are actually easy to work with as an agency for your clients, and frankly for your prospects as well, because I think a lot of agencies believe that they are easy to work with, but their thoughts or their words maybe aren’t matched up with their actual actions.

Gini Dietrich: Yes. And, you know, I will say that I learned this lesson when I started hiring agencies and solopreneurs.

It’s not easy to work with other agencies. And you’re like, “Oh, that’s not… I thought that that was a good practice.” And then you realize when another agency puts you through it, not a good practice. Like for instance, making them, making you use their project management system when you have your own, bad idea.

Sending emails with invoices that go into the void, bad idea. Like there are some practices that I’m like, “Nope, this does not work.” It’s not, you’re not making it easy on me.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and I, I think part of the problem comes from, I think part of the blame goes to people, people like us who are always preaching to agency owners the importance of protecting their time and their margins and-

Gini Dietrich: Sure

Chip Griffin: and all of that. Yep. And, and I think that, you know, some people listen to that, but they don’t think through, “Okay, well how does that look on the other end?”

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: Yep. And, and so yes, you absolutely need to, to make sure that you don’t have scope creep, and you need to make sure that you are protecting your time so you can get work done, and you’re not just getting eaten alive by meetings and calls and all of that.

At the same time, you should think, “What does the other person on the other end think? How would I feel if I received this communication or if someone I hired acted in this way? How, would I be happy about it?” And I think if you start to do that, you’ll realize that some of your practices may not be as easy to work with as you think.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I think you’re right. You know, I think about a couple of years ago, probably two or three years ago, it was a Saturday night and a client’s website went down, and the client called me, and the reason I remember this is Saturday night is ’cause I probably already had a glass of wine. And he called me and he’s like, “Hey, our website just went down and I can’t reach anybody.”

And I was like, “What do you mean you can’t reach anybody?” He’s like, “I can’t reach anybody at the web firm. Can you help?” And I was like, “Of course.” So I called the web firm, and I finally got ahold of somebody, but I had to go through… I had to email three different email addresses, not a personal email address, and I had to go through their quote-unquote process.

And I finally got somebody to call me and they said, “Well, keeping the website up and restoring a backup is not part of our scope of work, and so it’ll cost $2,000 an hour.” And I was like, “I’m sorry, what? But that’s not, that’s not a thing.” And they had taken this client’s… You know, they had… The client didn’t know, the client didn’t know what they were signing, and they did sign a scope of work that, that wasn’t included, and it was $2,000 an hour for emergency type stuff.

And I was like, “No, absolutely not.” So their marketing manager and I got on with GoDaddy and we restored it ourselves, which it was not a fun process, but it worked, and that, that forced us to… I think they actually ended up firing the web firm, but which they should have. But, like, that kind of stuff I think is exactly to your point.

They had put in a process. They had a contract. They did all the things, but they didn’t think through, like… restoring somebody’s website on a Saturday night is literally a click of a button. It’s not a $2,000 an hour emergency kind of thing. So, you know, yes, you should have a process. Yes, you should have a contract.

Yes, you should protect your time, but also don’t do it at the risk of losing a client over something stupid like that.

Chip Griffin: Right, and obviously there are some clients, as we know, who will abuse some of these things. So- Of course … there, there are certain times-

Gini Dietrich: Of course, yes …

Chip Griffin: where you have to be okay appearing to not be as easy as the client would want you to be.

So this is not, this is not us preaching, “Say yes to everything that you’re asked to do.” It’s simply make some, make some good judgments here. Now, if this is, this is, the website disappears over the weekend, and it, you know, it’s not something that happens regularly, it’s not the, this client doesn’t generally abuse you, I mean, just get it done, and you can have a conversation after the fact and say, “Hey, that really wasn’t part of the scope of work.

You, you know, we helped you as a show of good faith, but we need to, you know, we need to work this into the agreement going forward-” Right … or something like that.

Gini Dietrich: Right, right.

Chip Griffin: It, you know, when, when someone is, when someone is at a low point, that is not the time to try to extract stuff from them. It’s a time where if you truly want, you know, if you believe half of your marketing BS that you put out there about we’re our, they’re our partners, they’re not our clients, well, then, then act like one.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah. And I think the, I think, you know, we think, we have to think about scope creep, and we have to think about margins, and all of those are very real things.

But to your point, let’s not cut our nose off to spite our face. Like, there are some times where you’re just like, “Okay, yeah, sure.” I mean, I didn’t charge the client extra for them calling me instead of somebody on their account team because it was a Saturday night and they knew they could get me. I didn’t charge them extra for that.

We just fixed it, right? Like, and that, that creates more goodwill in your relationship and trust in your relationship than being like, “Well, let’s deal with this on Monday.” No. No.

Chip Griffin: Yep. And I mean, and a lot of it, a lot of being easy to work with is really the small things. It’s not the, it’s not the big giant stuff.

It’s the little bits of friction that just become annoying. So think about how easy is it for clients to book time with you or your team, right? Again, and we don’t want this to be abused, but at the same time, I’ve worked with a lot of agencies where they’re like, “Well, you know, I, I’ve got a half hour two weeks from now for you.”

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: Come on. I mean- … you know, if, if this is a client who’s constantly asking for time, okay, you know, maybe. But in general, you should be trying to find ways to make yourself available.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: You should be doing things like making sure that your team is at least acknowledging emails within the business day.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: Even if they can’t solve it, at least acknowledging it makes you easier to work with. Little things like how you handle billing. You alluded to that earlier, but make it easy to handle billing. Make sure you’re finding out early on who should these invoices go to? Do they need to be copied to multiple people?

Don’t say, “Well, I’ve got this process and it only goes to one person or whatever.” Make the payment process easy. Make it so that people can pay online, make recurring payments. If they want to be able to change a credit card, let them do that.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: I had a recent experience with someone- You did. … that I worked with for a long time and, and I wanted to change my, my business credit card number that was used for it, and I was told I had to call an operator to do that.

I’m like, “That is total BS in 2026. I should be able to do that online. I should not have to get on a phone and read out my card number to a human.” That makes no sense whatsoever. Make it easy for people.

Gini Dietrich: Yes. Crazy easy. Like you should make it easy. It’s, it’s funny you say that because about invoices, because we worked with an accounting firm who would mail their invoice, and we use a PO box because I don’t want mail coming to my home and sometimes we got it, sometimes we didn’t.

Like I, and they would go, “Your invoice hasn’t been paid for 120 days.” And I’m like, “Dude, I don’t have an invoice from you.” And so I finally got them to email them. Like, this is ridiculous. Don’t mail me the invoice. It’s 2022, for heaven sakes.

Chip Griffin: Well, if you want to talk about not easy to work with, the PO box is a perfect example.

I had a PO box for almost 30 years that I used for business, and I finally ended up giving it up recently because the post office was becoming extraordinarily belligerent about wanting various bits of documentation. I’m like, I’ve, I’ve had this-

Gini Dietrich: Yes …

Chip Griffin: post office box for 30 years. Like well you have to show up in person to do this, and so I would show up in person.

They’re like, “Oh, no, you don’t have the right stuff.”

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And we don’t have the right people here today, so we’re gonna have to do it again.” No.

Gini Dietrich: Yep, yep.

Chip Griffin: No.

Gini Dietrich: Yep, yes.

Chip Griffin: Like-

Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm …

Chip Griffin: That’s, that is nonsense. There are so many ways to verify my identity, the identity of the business, what- like come on. Uh-huh.

Also- Yeah … 30 years I had this box. Right. Like, and now you’ve just decided-

Gini Dietrich: Mm-hmm, uh-huh …

Chip Griffin: that now is the time that you need to do this? Give me a break.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah, I think you’re right. Like the, it’s, I think exactly what you said at the beginning, which is you listen to people like us who say you have to protect your margins, you have to protect your time, you can’t have scope creep, you have to have a process, like all of those things, and those are important.

But you also have to be willing to be flexible and nimble to the client’s need within that, right? Like, there are some organizations, agencies I will say, that have a process that they put clients through, and it’s so rigid that it doesn’t meet the client where they are. And it’s impossible to work with them because of that. And I’ve had that experience too as a business owner.

Like, you have to be able to be flexible enough to meet the client where they are and still deliver in ways that you know are going to deliver the results you’ve, that they expect.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And being easy to work with starts before they’re even a client. I am often befuddled by how difficult agencies make it to get in touch with them for a prospect. I see these, these web forms that have like a gazillion questions on them.

Like, do you have a problem that you have a wild number of contacts that you can’t handle screening them if you just get name, company, and email? I mean, do, do you really need to ask them a detailed set of questions in a form?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: I don’t, I really, that’s one I just do not understand, and I’ve talked with a few owners.

I’m like, “Well, why do you do it?” “Well, just to make sure that we’re only getting qualified leads.” I’m like, “Do you, do you have a problem with this right now, though? Do you have… Are you flooded with so many that you can’t even just hit delete on the ones-

Gini Dietrich: You can’t keep up, right, right …

Chip Griffin: that don’t work out?”

 Google to find out if this is someone legit or not? I, I just- Yeah … And the vast majority “No, no, no, no, we just wanna make sure that they’re qualified.” I’m like, “You understand you’re scaring people away.” Every single extra form, item that you put in there reduces your, the completion rate.

Gini Dietrich: Yes,

Chip Griffin: Don’t do that. Make it easy. Yeah. Make it easy to schedule that first conversation with you. Strike while the iron is hot. If someone reaches out and they wanna talk to you, bend over backwards. I have a different Calendly scheduling link for people who want to reach out to potentially work with me that opens up more blocks on my schedule.

Because why not try to reach those people as quickly as you can?

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: And by the way, use a service like Calendly to book time. Stop it with these back-and-forth emails. I can meet between here and here, and this and that. That is, like, 10 years ago. We don’t need to do that anymore. Have a nice little Calendly link that someone can use, or whatever service you wanna use, that just makes it easy for someone to book time.

You can always say to them as a polite thing, “If you’d rather just give me a range of times, you can.” But you know what? I’ve been doing this for years, and I have yet to have a single person say, “I’m not gonna click on that link” and instead say, “Well, I just wanna give you some windows.” Right. ‘Cause it’s harder for them.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, right.

Chip Griffin: Make it easy.

Gini Dietrich: Yes. Yeah, I totally agree. I think really understanding, like, think about it too from the, from your client or prospect’s perspective. If I were receiving this, how would I take it? And look at it through that lens to help you understand how you might improve things to make it easier for them.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and when you’ve got someone on the hook and they’re interested, make it easy for yourself to produce the statement of work and the contract, and get them out the door. Have a standard template.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: Don’t spend- I mean- Yep … a lot of agencies take a long time between when someone says, “Yeah, I wanna do this,” and when they actually start sending the paperwork.

You should be able to get that over within 24 hours.

Gini Dietrich: You absolutely should, and I think the problem with that is that people wanna write proposals that are, like, in-depth and strategic, and have tactics, and they’re really a plan. Don’t do that. That’s giving away stuff that you shouldn’t be giving away for free.

You should absolutely have a standardized template. And truth be told, I put ours into AI, and I said, “Here are all the things that need to stay the same,” and it will pump that out, and then it will customize based on the conversation I had, and that’s it. And I always tell prospects, “You’ll get something from us in 48 hours,” and they get it within 24, and then they’re ecstatic, and they’re happy, and all the things.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And make it easy to complete. Make sure you’re sending it so they can get an electronic signature, so all they have to do is click, click. It’s done in five seconds. Yep. If you send it to them, and then they’ve gotta actually sign something, and figure out how to take a photo of it with their phone and email it to you, why are you doing that in 2026?

E-signatures are a wonderful thing. You should be using those. And then once they’ve done that, make sure you have a templated process for onboarding so that you don’t say, “Oh, we’ve signed the agreement. You know, let me get the team together. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll get back to you in, you know-” Right, right. “… a couple of weeks when we’ve had the chance to figure this all out.”

You should have an onboarding process so you hit the ground running. You don’t have to have every answer, but you have to be able to show them that you know what you’re doing. So it’s not just about being easy, it’s building their confidence in those early stages.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, for sure. And you know, one of the things that we find, too, is that, of course, because we have the PESO model, it, it is a very standardized process, right?

But we find that clients, prospects come to us a lot with a problem. They think it’s a problem. And they all say things like, “We have a measurement problem. We don’t know how to measure.” And that, truth be told, like, that’s most comms teams, right? Most comms teams do have a measurement problem. They don’t know how to measure.

And so we have a list of questions that we ask because that’s a symptom, and we’ve, we’ve discovered through all of our work that that’s a symptom. What’s really the problem? And we ask, you know, we start to dig in, and all of a sudden they go, “Oh, now it makes sense that we can’t measure,” right? So you can have a list of questions based on what the prospect tells you.

It used to be that I, I haven’t gotten, had this conversation in a long time just because of the way we’ve shifted the business, but I used to hear all the time, “We’ve had four PR agencies, and they don’t do anything. They pitch a bunch of stuff, and nothing ever happens.” And so I had a list of questions based on that, and I– one of the questions was, “What other– Who, who else have you worked with?”

Because I wanna know if you’re the problem or if they’re the problem, right? Have a list of questions that will help you understand so that then you can take all of that and throw it into your AI and say, “This is what I’ve diagnosed. These are what the problems are. Please fill out the template that you have,” and it helps you build a structure for your proposal really fast.

Like, in two minutes versus two days.

Chip Griffin: I mean, the great thing is being easy to work with tends to make your life easier, too.

Gini Dietrich: So much easier.

Chip Griffin: Most of these things will actually improve your existence. So, you know, rather than fighting it, rather than feeling like I have to just kind of, you know, push in my direction to get people to align with me, if you can find that middle ground, it will likely make things easier.

And you opened by talking about project management, and so I think it’s a good place to, to wind down here as well. Project management tools are something that it certainly makes sense for you to recommend to a client if they don’t have something that they’re already using actively. Yes. You should definitely have one that you’re using and, and that is your default that you would like them to use.

But if they say, “Hey, I’m already using something else, we need you to be part of that,” then go along with that, because ultimately it’s not which tool you’re using, it’s that you’ve got some way of keeping it all organized.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: And if you can do that, you will make your life easier, you’ll make the client’s life easier, and you’ll produce better results.

So, so don’t fight on that. Have it, so that if they don’t have anything, you’ve got a solution.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: You’re not like, “Well, you know, we need to think about it. Let’s try to figure out which one do you like? Should we try this? Do you want, do you want vanilla or chocolate?” Like, who cares?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Just pick one, use it, and move on.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yeah, totally. Yes.

Chip Griffin: There I am being cranky just like you said.

You’re welcome, everybody. You’re welcome, Gini.

Gini Dietrich: Thanks.

Chip Griffin: So with that, I think we will wrap up this episode, but, uh, hopefully we were easy to listen to at least. There we go. On that note, I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

Most owner-led agencies know they should be doing more than media relations. One barrier has always been capability: you can’t execute paid media if nobody on your team knows paid media. AI is removing that barrier, and Chip and Gini dig into exactly how.

Gini built a PESO model operating system AI that prompts you instead of you prompting it. Many agencies are strong in one or two media types and need scaffolding to think through the rest. The tool can be used to help agencies execute unfamiliar disciplines step by step.

Chip frames this as an opportunity to do things that were theoretically possible two years ago but practically out of reach. A paid campaign to amplify a blog post no longer requires hiring a specialist. Beyond drafting, both hosts made a case for AI as a learning tool instead of merely a content machine. Gini tested this directly by vibe-coding a PESO model diagnostic, working through multiple versions with AI troubleshooting each step.

The practical upshot is that you can use AI to build separate knowledge-rich agents for each media type, loaded with client messaging and context, and treat them as thought partners for areas where your team lacks depth. It won’t eliminate the need for people or strategic thinking, but capability is no longer a credible excuse for staying stuck at one letter of PESO.

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

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

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I think we’re gonna let AI do our jobs today. I know we don’t ever talk about AI on this show.

Gini Dietrich: We don’t. We don’t like it at all.

Chip Griffin: But I think AI is gonna let us do so much more here.

Awesome. Maybe even, maybe we can even implement the PESO model as part of the show.

Gini Dietrich: Beautiful. Let’s do it.

Chip Griffin: I’ve, I’ve heard that the PESO model is something that’s really important that we should- … we should focus on. So why not let AI help us with it?

Gini Dietrich: Oh, I love it. Maybe we could use NotebookLM and have it create its, our voices too.

We’ll just be done. We don’t have to do anything.

Chip Griffin: That’s a great idea.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, let’s do it.

Chip Griffin: So then, you and I could just connect and just do our gossiping and chit-chat.

Gini Dietrich: Right. Yes.

Chip Griffin: And we’d still get an episode even without having to take the time to record.

Gini Dietrich: Yes. I like it. Let’s do it.

Chip Griffin: I like it. I like that.

That would be- That would be fun.

Gini Dietrich: We don’t gossip. What do you mean?

Chip Griffin: Gossip, talk about world events. Whatever, however you want. I mean-

Gini Dietrich: Yes. It’s kind of good that those aren’t recorded. Ah.

Chip Griffin: It is. I suspect we would get a lot of listeners, but we’d lose a lot at the same time, so.

Gini Dietrich: Yes.

Chip Griffin: In any event, we are going to talk about AI again because it is top of mind for all of us, and so we all ought to be thinking about it.

And we are gonna talk about the PESO model because we just happen to have somebody here who knows a little bit about the PESO model. So let me explain it to you… Oh, no, I didn’t. Oh. I wasn’t talking about me. With the founder of the PESO model as one of the co-hosts. It, we’ve talked about the PESO model before, but I think, you know, one of the things that, that has occurred to me in recent times, and I’m sure it has occurred to you as well, is that AI can help more PR agencies go deeper into the PESO model, particularly in areas where they maybe don’t have as much in-house expertise.

And, and one- Yep … of the things we’ve talked about with agencies a lot is that the PESO model touches a lot of different things, and it’s difficult for any small agency to have all of the skillsets needed to fully execute PESO properly.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: AI seems to open the door to more of that.

Gini Dietrich: For sure, it does. One of the things that we did late last year is I built a PESO operating system AI. And instead of you prompting it, it prompts you. So it’s built to do exactly that, so that you can say, “Okay, well, we’re really good at media relations, but we don’t have any expertise in shared, owned, or paid,” or, “We’re really great at owned and shared, but we don’t have any expertise in earned and paid.”

Whatever it happens to be, right? And so it will h- it will prompt you with questions to help you think through, “Okay, if we’re great at owned and shared, but we don’t have the E and the P, here are the things you need to be thinking about.” And it will help you either figure out how to execute it on your own with step-by-step instructions, or it will give you a creative brief that then you could hand off to a partner.

So it, it’s built to do that, but the point is, is that- I mean, would I prefer you use the PESO OS AI that I built? For sure, but really any AI could do that. I think if you,you have to prompt it. It’s not gonna prompt you. But I think any AI based on information that’s out there in the, on the web that we’ve created around PESO, it will be able to take all of that and say, “Here are some things you should be thinking about.”

And I think it’s really good at helping you think through things that you’re just not an expert at. And it’s really good at helping you think through, gosh, we should be using paid to amplify our content, for instance, but I don’t have any idea. Do– should I do it on LinkedIn? Should I do it on Instagram? Should I do it on TikTok? Should I do it on Google? Like, I have no idea. So AI is a really good thought partner from that perspective.

Chip Griffin: Well, and I think that’s the, that’s the key point is that it allows you to, certainly you can look at it in, at a 30,000-foot level, you know, with your specialized OS that allows you to really think the whole big picture through.

Yep. But you can also use it in a very granular way to say “Hey, look, I know I want to amplify this content. Let’s, let’s look at the various ways that we can do it, and help educate me about how we do that most effectively.” Yep. And, you know, to me, AI is a great opportunity for all of the things that you wished you could have done two years ago

Gini Dietrich: Yeah

Chip Griffin: That now become much more feasible for you to do without having to go out and bring in-house new expertise, or hiring someone if it’s, particularly when it’s focused, right?

If it, it really is just, “I need a paid campaign to amplify this blog post.” That is a whole lot easier to do with AI, frankly, than it is to go hire somebody in-house- Yeah … and a lot cheaper.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely, yes. And it will give you the step-by, literal step-by-step instructions if you wanna do it yourself.

Right. And if you don’t wanna do it yourself, you say, “Help me create a project brief or a creative brief that will, that I can hand off to a partner,” and it does that for you too. So one of the things that we do is, you know, I have a paid media expert in, on our marketing team, but then we hire out, depending on what we need, we’ll hire out sort of the day-to-day minutia piece of it.

‘Cause, you know, especially in paid media, you have to be in there every day and testing and tweaking and all that kind of stuff. And AI’s great at saying, “Eh, pay attention to this,” but not great at actually pushing the buttons. And so it has helped our paid media team even just outsource some of that stuff too.

So it’s, I think it’s really great from that perspective. You know, it’s still, you, like, I think some, especially PR professionals, are using it for, like, list development and media pitching and things like that, which is fine, but it’s still not… it’s still a good first draft. You still have to add your personalization.

You still have to do those kinds of things. One of the things that we were kind of struggling with, actually not struggling with, we were arguing over internally, was our outbound sales campaigns and what those said. And I felt like they were way too long. Our chief revenue officer felt like the calls to action weren’t right, and so we put it into AI, and we were like, “This is where we’re struggling. We’re not agreeing on these five points.” And it pumped out some stuff that we were like Okay, that’s– I– All right, let’s try that.

So, you know, I don’t know yet if it’s gonna work ’cause we haven’t launched it, but it helped us think about things a little bit differently than we had just the three of us shooting the shit around a Zoom conversation.

Chip Griffin: Well, and to your point, it’s a great jumping-off point. It’s not necessarily a final draft of everything, but, I mean, let’s say you, you know, you’re– you don’t consider your team very adept at creating social posts on their own, but you want to use PESO to amplify content. You can take that piece of content and say, you know, “Give me three to five drafts that I can look at.”

Yep, yep. And you can pick the one that, that resonates most with you, and then, you know, hone that and use that as your post. So again, it just, it allows you to do things that either would’ve taken much longer a number of years ago or just you wouldn’t have been able to do without hiring someone new in-house or that sort of thing.

And so having those opportunities means that you can adopt a lot more of the PESO model as an agency, which certainly benefits your clients, but it benefits your business as well. Because as we’ve talked about, pure PR agencies, despite the renaissance of the importance of earned media as a result of LLMs and all of that, you know, you still, I still think it is very difficult to have a media relations only agency in 2026.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: It’s not impossible. There are certain niches where it works and certain setups that work, but for the vast majority of old time traditional PR agencies, they need to be getting into more of the PESO model, even if it’s not all four letters. Even if you get into two of the letters-

Gini Dietrich: Yeah

Chip Griffin: that’s gonna help you a lot.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yeah, for sure. And it does– definitely helps you, like I think I’ve mentioned before that I have several different agents, AI agents, and one is my co-CEO, and my co-CEO, like, it will argue with me, and it will tell me, like last week it said, “That’s a stupid idea.” And I was like, “Ah, well, screw you, too.”

But it helps you think through those things. So you say, “Okay, what if I want to build an agency that is focused around the PESO model, and I’m gonna go through the certification so that I can create an agency that’s focused on it. What am I missing? What do I need to hire for? What can I use you, my AI, for? What can I…”

Like it helps you think through all of those things. “Help me build a plan to be able to do this over the next two years. I want to create some intellectual property based on what you know about me and how I’ve used you in the past. What is some intellectual property that we might be able to create as an agency?”

It can help you with all sorts of things.

Chip Griffin: It can, and it, it also, you can calibrate it to your own knowledge level or your team’s knowledge level, so you can have it just help you with some, some drafts. You can have it just teach you how to do things.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: And I think that’s an often overlooked use of AI. Yes. Absolutely. It doesn’t have to do it for you, it can help educate you. Yep. And part of that is just communicating with it and say, “Treat me like I’m an absolute idiot.”

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: “And give me out- actual step-by-step instructions. Assume I don’t even know how to click the mouse. Like, tell me to put downward pressure on the button in the middle of the…” Like, you can make it tell you at whatever level of knowledge you need in order to become comfortable with it, and then you actually start to learn it. I mean, I think we, we all think of AI as something that, that’s, you know, can just replace us, but it can also help us learn so that we develop our own skills, and maybe we don’t need the AI for what we need it for today, but instead we can use AI to take us to the next level because we’ve already built in that knowledge from having worked with AI previously.

It should be viewed as a growth opportunity, not as just, you know, the lazy way out.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I, absolutely. I love that because, you know, I kept hearing about this vibe coding thing, and everybody was talking about vibe coding. I was like, “Okay, I wanna try vibe coding. What do I want to vibe code?” And so I actually asked my AI boyfriend, “If you were me, what are some things you would vibe code just to test it out?”

And it said, “You should do a PESO model diagnostic so that people understand where they sit on the PESO model maturity ladder.” And I was like, “Okay.” So I went into lovable.ai, and I built a PESO model visibility assessment is what I built first, and it was a really good first draft. And then I went through it and I had some friends take it, and I had my team go through it and got all of that feedback, and then I built the PESO model diagnostic from there.

So it probably took– I probably had five or six versions before I was ready to take it public. Then I was like, Okay, now I have to figure out how somebody gets their results, and then how do I attach it to ActiveCampaign, which is our software, our email software, so that they can have their results emailed to them?

It’s a little bit harder than it sounds.

Chip Griffin: I, I think that’s, that’s part of the thing with vibe coding. People-

Gini Dietrich: It’s absolute, yeah, a little bit harder. Yeah. But it did exactly what you said. Yeah. I was like, “I am lost.” Yeah. And I actually said, “I think this is above my pay grade.” And, and it said, “Okay, let me help you.” And so it broke it down step by step by step.

We finally got it figured out, but then it wasn’t, it was doing everything that we needed it to do, but it wasn’t emailing. So I had all the tokens in the email, so like, “Hi, first name, here’s your…” Like, I had all those tokens, but it wasn’t triggering that. And so it helped me figure out, it like, it helped me troubleshoot and figure out why.

And I, there’s no way on earth, not in a zillion years, I could have done that on my own two years ago. Absolutely not.

Chip Griffin: Yep. And it really, it really is amazing how it can help you with some of those things. Now, it can also send you down some rabbit holes that are-

Gini Dietrich: Yes, it did that too …

Chip Griffin: not the right ones, and, and then-

Gini Dietrich: Correct. I was like, “No, that’s not right.”

Chip Griffin: And then it says, “Oops. Yeah, sorry. That’s, I, I didn’t mean to do… You’re right- Yep, you’re right. Mm-hmm … that I should’ve gone a different direction.”

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. Yes, it does do that.

Chip Griffin: And so, you know, that is always one of the challenges of vibe coding, is it opens a lot of doors, but it can lead to a lot of frustration, and you have to be ready to handle that.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: And particularly for someone like you, who has not been steeped in development in the past.

Gini Dietrich: At all.

Chip Griffin: You know, it probably takes more effort to get past that frustration than- Yeah … say, for someone like me, where I can spot early on that it’s going in the wrong direction, ’cause I’ve written code, and I’d be like- “Mm, I don’t- That does seem wrong, too … I don’t know if we really wanna do that.” Yeah. Yeah. And, but, but you can also ask it a lot of questions, and part- you know, I use Claude Code personally, and so, you know, it will often give options, or you can ask for options and say, you know, “Let’s go through the pros and cons of these different paths that we can do before we build out a whole product around something that we’re like, ‘Eh, that’s not gonna work.'”

Gini Dietrich: Yep, yep.

Chip Griffin: And you can think them through. You can think through what, what are the maintenance costs? What are the actual hard costs of it? Yep. And there are times where the tools will suggest something to you that, that costs something, and they’ll, it, it’s sort of like, you know, Waze. Waze sometimes likes to avoid tolls.

I’m like, “Don’t, I don’t wanna avoid a toll. I wanna get there faster.”

Gini Dietrich: I wanna get there faster, right.

Chip Griffin: Like, to, to me, I don’t-

Gini Dietrich: Yeah …

Chip Griffin: don’t put me on all these weird side streets so I don’t pay a toll. Same thing with these tools. They often default to the free option, and sometimes you’re like, “Well, I’m willing to pay $5 a month to get this email sent to me correctly, and, and not have to, like- Right … go down to the command line and configure- Yeah … all this stuff. Yes. And then my computer’s always gotta be on, and all that kind of stuff.

So, but the, the point is that that a lot of these tools open up the doors for the things that you can do, which then, again, expands that capability so that you are moving beyond just being one of the four letters and moving into at least two, if not all four, of PESO.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And I would say also that if you, if you want to do this, it’s not a small undertaking, but if you want to do this, you can, there are lots of ways that you can do this, but I’ll make it super, super simple. Using Claude, you can create projects. And the projects can be focused on, okay, we’re gonna have one for earned, we’re gonna have one for paid, we’re gonna have one for shared, we’re gonna have one for owned.

And in those specific projects, you build files, knowledge files that teach it what you wanna do from an earned media perspective. These are our clients. This is what we talk about. These are their messaging. Like all– Here’s our media list. All that kind of stuff goes into the knowledge files. You give it some instructions, and then it becomes your earned media thought partner, or same with your other media types.

So if you don’t have, you know, shared or owned and paid expertise internally, you can use those agents to help you build those things. I will say, though, that, you know, people keep talking about how AI is going to replace us, and I have gone way down the rabbit hole from an agent perspective, and I have built my entire organization using agents.

It doesn’t replace anybody. I still need people to do the work, and I still need people to do the strategic thinking, and I still need people to service the client work. Like, it makes us smarter, it makes us faster, it makes us more productive, but it doesn’t replace anyone. And so I say that because I want you– I don’t want you to be afraid of, oh my gosh, if we use this and we use this, I use it to help me think through the other media types that we aren’t doing, that it’s going to replace us, or the clients aren’t gonna wanna work with us.

That’s not the case at all, at least not in my experience. So I would say test it out, play with it, get really good at it, because it will help you achieve some of the goals that you want to achieve a lot faster than you can do it on your own.

Chip Griffin: Oh, absolutely. And, and it doesn’t even require you to know even the general direction.

You can simply go in there and say, “Hey, look, you know, I’ve got this blog post. It’s not getting much traction, but I feel like it should. Help me to understand why it’s not.” And, and- Yep … so it’ll help, it’ll analyze the structure and content and maybe make some suggestions there. But then in the conversation you can say, “Well, you know, it doesn’t seem to be generating much in the way of inbound traffic from social.

Help me think that through. How can I do that better or differently?” And it, it allows you to do a lot more, and I think particularly for those agencies who are doing any form of video, AI can be a really good tool for helping you to expand the use of that video into other things, right? I mean, the obvious that we’ve had for years is the automatic transcription, right?

So you start from a point of you’ve got a transcription and so you’ve got, you know, more content that’s out there that’s more easily indexable by more tools. You know, some of the LLMs, you know, quote-unquote “watch video,” some only can use transcripts, so you wanna give both ideally.

Yep. But you can go well beyond that. I mean, a lot of people are just kind of slapping stuff up on YouTube without any kind of a good description if they’re doing video. Use AI. Let it, let it give you a quick first draft and you can do that correctly. Let it start drafting social posts so you can get it out there.

Make sure that you’re turning every video into a blog post. There are so many things that you can do from that one nugget. It’s one of the reasons why I love video so much, is because it can spiral out into these other formats so easily. But all of that then helps to fuel your efforts on the PESO model, and all of it can be done in an organization without all of the things that you would have needed five or 10 years ago.

You don’t need a dedicated video producer or a high-end external video, you can use something like we’re using right here today with Riverside, where you can just- free plug there. We’re not, we’re not sponsored by them, but- … you know, we, we use it, and it, it does a nice job of cutting this up.

If you’re watching this on YouTube, it switches camera angles. I don’t do anything except click a little button that says, “Do this,” and I get to choose how aggressive the, the camera switching is.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah.

Chip Griffin: That’s fantastic, right? But it will also then clip things that you can use for social media. And if I’m a traditional PR agency, I don’t know anything about any of that kind of stuff, but it’s all valuable to furthering the PESO model for my clients.

So why wouldn’t I be taking advantage of AI to help me go down that path?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And I would say if you are a traditional PR agency, even things like, “This pitch isn’t landing. Tell me what you think.” Sure. “How would I… Like, I’m trying to reach this, this, and this reporter with this pitch. Analyze it for me.”

Like, that kind of stuff you should be doing every single day.

Chip Griffin: Right, ’cause the PESO model isn’t just about ticking boxes. It’s about doing all those things well, right?

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: You, you can have a nice little report card that says, “Check. I did the P. I did the E. I did the S. I did the O.” But are you doing all of those well?

And, and- Right … maybe even what your agency is, is built around, whichever letter is the core of your personal expertise, there are certainly ways that you can use AI to improve even on that- Absolutely … even before you go down the other  avenues.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely. Yeah. And one of the things that we’ve been, you know, when we, we evolved the model for AI into an operating system, and that is because all of the media types build on one another, right?

So it will help you figure that out. So I can say PESO model’s now an operating system, and I’m sure you’re like, “I don’t know what the freak that means.” And it, it will help you figure out what that means and how you can apply that to your business.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I mean, operating system may be one of the most overused product descriptions these days, but-

Gini Dietrich: It works in an enterprise.

Chip Griffin: everybody’s got an operating… you know, you read anything AI-related, everybody’s got an operating system.

Gini Dietrich: Works in an, in an enterprise really well.

Chip Griffin: It, it … Oh, I mean, I, I’m not arguing that. It’s just, it’s kind of, it, it’s kind of like 30 years ago where everybody used the word paradigm.

Gini Dietrich: Oh, fair.

Chip Griffin: Like, okay.

Gini Dietrich: Really? PESO model paradigm.

Chip Griffin: I gotta, gotta hear about- There, I like that. That’s nice … OS again. Ugh. Ugh. Of course- Ooh … I’m old enough to remember actual OSs back in the day. You know. MS-DOS, for example. Way, way long time ago.

Gini Dietrich: That’s right.

Chip Griffin: On that note, before I go down memory lane and really bore everybody, we’ll wrap this episode up.

But use the PESO model, and use the AI to help you get there more effectively- Yes … faster.

Gini Dietrich: Yes. Yes.

Chip Griffin: Grow your business, help your clients.

Gini Dietrich: Yes. Make lots of money.

Chip Griffin: Make lots of money. On that note, I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.

Losing a client is never fun, even when you saw the writing on the wall. The only question is how you choose to handle it. In this episode, Chip and Gini cover the practical and emotional side of client departures, from the moment you get the news to the lessons you take away.

Gini points out that there are plenty of reasons a client could terminate the relationship, which may have nothing to do with your work. Strategy changes, budget cuts, and leadership turnover all end client relationships that were otherwise going fine.

Chip’s advice is to not react immediately. Ask for a couple of days to review the agreement and put together a transition plan. That space lets you get the emotion out before you say something you’ll regret.

Once you have your bearings, focus on making the exit clean. Read your actual contract, confirm the notice terms, and hand over everything the client needs: documents, passwords, contacts, work in progress. Chip is blunt about agencies that fight clients on the way out — it accomplishes nothing and just guarantees a bad final impression. Don’t burn any bridges and you just might see those clients come back or send you referrals.

Finally, be honest with your team about what the loss means for the business. If there are financial implications, say so before people start drawing their own conclusions.

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

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

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, as a famous American once said, “You’re fired.”

Gini Dietrich: Oh, no.

Chip Griffin: Okay. Maybe … pack your knives and go. Um- Oh … what would you like to go with instead?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, let’s, maybe we’ll do that one. I like that.

Chip Griffin: Pack your knives and go.

Top Chef is a great show.

Gini Dietrich: I love Top Chef.

Chip Griffin: Not as good as it was in the early days, but-

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I agree. Yeah …

Chip Griffin: it’s still, it’s still kind of fun occasionally, and I, I still- Yeah … do watch part of each season. Yeah. From Restaurant Wars on.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I did love, I did love a little Top Chef. I agree.

Chip Griffin:  Jen and one of my kids watch it up until Restaurant Wars, then they let me know, and I come in and I watch Restaurant Wars through the end.

Gini Dietrich: That’s funny. They’re like, “Okay, your turn.”

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, that’s where it starts to get interesting, so.

Gini Dietrich: That’s funny. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: Anyway, no, we are gonna talk about getting fired. Not fired as an owner. We’re, we’re not at that point yet. We don’t have boards that are gonna fire us, most of us at least.

Gini Dietrich: Right, right.

Chip Griffin: But clients do fire us from time to time, and we’ve had conversations in the past about firing clients ourselves and, and those sorts of things.

But, what happens, what do you do when a client calls you up or, worse, sends you an email and says, “We’re done. We’re out”? Yeah, you know, it’s- What are things you should be thinking about at that point?

Gini Dietrich: I think so. The, I think there’s a couple of things here. One is that the word, using the word “fired” makes it sound so bad.

Sometimes it’s because there’s been a strategy change, there’s been a budget reallocation, maybe leadership has changed, maybe there’s a new VP of marketing or a CCO. Like, there are lots of reasons, right, that have nothing to do with you or the agency or your work. And so saying that you got fired is, I, I just don’t like that term.

Now that I have that off my chest, I’ll step down off my soapbox and say, like, there, I think we should always be prepared for the eventual loss of a client. And because we don’t know, right? We don’t- Uh-huh … we can kind of guess, you know, if there are big changes at a leadership level, or if there’s been a reorg, or if the company has sold or things like that, we can guess.

Like, we’re probably not gonna be working with that client much longer. We could also sort of read the tea leaves from the perspective of they’ve been ghosting us, and we haven’t been able to get any work done. They’ve been declining meetings or not showing up for meetings. Like, there are lots of reasons that you can kind of read those tea leaves.

And so I always think it’s, it’s really good to be prepared. It should never come as a surprise when you lose a client, and you should be prepared. You should have, you should know what you’re going to say, you should know how, what a transition looks like, and you should have a full pipeline that will replace that client fairly quickly, even in a chaotic world that we’re living in right now, so that you’re not caught off guard.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, I think the, you know, the first step when you get this news is, probably 95% of the time you’re gonna be annoyed, upset, unhappy.

Gini Dietrich: Sure. Absolutely.

Chip Griffin: Some negative emotion. A small percentage of the time you’ll be like, “Oh, thank God, I just- … I, I really wanted to get rid of them anyway.” Yeah.

You know? So.

Gini Dietrich: Blessing in disguise, yep. Right.

Chip Griffin: So, so sometimes that’ll be your reaction, but most of the time it’s not gonna be a happy reaction that you have. And so I think the, the first thing is to just, whether it’s on a call with them or you get it by email or, you know, carrier pigeon or whatever, take a deep breath.

Yes. Right? Yes … you, you don’t ever want to react immediately to the news in such a way that you perhaps compound a difficult situation, or at the very least you don’t make it as easy as it could or should be. And I think your advice to, to be prepared for this, certainly if you see the signs on the wall you need to be even more prepared.

But sometimes these things are, you know, in retrospect they won’t be a surprise, but you might feel surprised in the moment because you didn’t pick up on all of the little signals along the way and, and that then becomes a learning experience. And I think that’s… to me, that’s one of the most valuable things when you lose a client for whatever reason, is taking advantage of that to learn for the future.

Learn the signs to look for. Yep. Learn what you could do differently potentially to maintain the relationship, retain the client. Learn to target better ideal clients, whatever it is. But I, I always like to turn these things into a learning experience as much as possible. But you also have the logistics to actually handle the end of the client relationship, so why don’t we talk about that for a little bit.

What, you know, it, it’s not just about the learnings that you can take for the future, it’s how do you handle that immediately? How do you transition the client out?

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I think, you know, I always say that you’re always remembered by how you left an organization versus the work that you did. And so you never wanna burn a bridge, even if you’re caught by surprise, even if you wanted to fire the client and you’re happy about it, you should never burn a bridge because you just never know, right?

So understanding what contract they signed and what the terms of agreement are, you know? We had a situation where I was working with a girlfriend and, she lost a big, big, big, big client. It came out of the blue, that she was not expecting it because she’d had a conversation a week prior that everything was fine.

And so she works with several contractors, and we had to say like, “We’re really sorry. We know that we thought you were gonna be doing work in May and June,” and, like, we go, “The client’s gone.” So, and she had one person come back to her and say, like, “We have a 30-day agreement,” blah, blah, blah. They didn’t have a 30-day agreement, but in her mind they had a 30-day agreement.

Sure. In the paperwork, there was no 30-day agreement. So I use that as an example because in your mind you may have a 30 or 60 or 90-day termination clause that may not have made it to the final piece. Maybe you have it for some clients and not others. Like, you have to really do your research to, and go back and read the executed agreement so you know what those terms are.

And then spend that time ensuring that there’s a seamless transition, that they’re getting all the documents that you’ve created, that they understand where things are, that they understand where the passwords are, where you, what you have access to, all of those kinds of things. ‘Cause I will tell you, there have been situations where we’ve lost a client and we’re still in their Google Analytics.

We’re still the admin on their Facebook page. Like, stuff like that, I’m like, “You guys, we’re not gonna do anything bad, but you really need to take us off.”

Chip Griffin: Right, right. I mean, I’ve had former clients where, where I have had admin level access to a lot of their stuff- Yes … for as much as a decade afterwards.

Gini Dietrich: Yes, yes.

Chip Griffin: Even when I flag it for them and say, “Hey, guys-

Gini Dietrich: Yes …

Chip Griffin: you might wanna take me out.”

Gini Dietrich: Yes, yes.

Chip Griffin: It, it’s kind of amazing at times that- It, it is, yeah … the things that, that people don’t pay attention to. But, I mean, I think that that’s great advice to, you know, to understand what your agreements say, and to really just focus on how do you make it as smooth a transition as possible.

No matter how frustrated you are, you need to try to think through how do we make this as pain-free for everybody? Because you can make it difficult for them, but that’s really just gonna make it difficult for you. Yep. And to your point, that’s how you’re gonna be remembered, as the person who made it difficult.

And so, you know, if you get it on a, if you get the information on a call, you know, certainly say, “Hey, look, you know, let’s, let’s put together a wind-down plan or transition plan,” or however you wanna frame it. Part of that will depend on how sudden it is. You know, are, are they saying, “We’re not gonna renew in, you know, three months,” or is it, you know, “We’re giving you as short a notice as possible”?

That will affect the timelines- Sure … and those sorts of things. Yep, yep. But, but it doesn’t affect the fact that you want to try to make sure that you are making it smooth and clean and painless. And don’t hesitate to say, “Hey, let me, let me think about this and come back to you with a plan-” Right

“for how we do it.” Right, right. You don’t have to have every answer in the moment, and, and giving yourself that time to step back and absorb it may allow you to come forward with a more productive plan all the way around. Because your goal has to be to make sure that you’re fulfilling your contract, while at the same time trying to get them to fulfill their end of it.

Right. And, and the more that you fight, the less likely you are to even get what you are due under the agreement. And so, you know, you wanna try to make it as, as friendly as possible in, in how you wind it down to make sure that you do get those payments that you are still owed.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I think, you know, if it comes as a surprise, I think you’re absolutely right that saying things like, “You know, gosh, I’m really sorry to hear this. I’ve really enjoyed working with you. Let me take a couple of days to craft a transition plan.” That gives you time. They, from their perspective, they’re like, “Okay, they’re being thoughtful about this and, you know, strategic about it, and they’re gonna be helpful.” And that gives you time to settle yourself and, you know, be, get all the emotion out of it and actually create something productive.

Chip Griffin: Right. And it can be a, particularly if it’s done over the phone, it gives you that opportunity to sit down and take a look at the contract and see- Yeah … what it says. Yeah. Because then you can, you can go back to them and say, “Okay, you know, in order to make sure we do this the right way, you know, we’ll need the notification in writing so that, you know, we can memorialize this properly to protect both of us.”

And I think you always wanna use that kind of language when you’re dealing with contract stuff. This is for both of our benefit, even if really maybe it’s more for you- Yeah … than for them, but you wanna stress the, the for both of us. And that’s also your opportunity to then look at other clauses in there that, that maybe are to your benefit, like the notification period, that maybe you didn’t bring up on the call.

You know, you can say, “Hey, you know, we need to make sure we get this in writing, and of course, as, as you know from this agreement, you have 30, 60, 90, whatever the notification period is. So, you know, we’ll work to that, as we wind this down.”

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And I think, you know, there are, we, and we’ve talked about this before too, like our contracts say 90 days, and there are some clients where I’m like, “I don’t need to hold you to that. We’re good.” Like some- Right. Right? And then there are situations-

Chip Griffin: How about, how about 90 minutes? How about 90 minutes? Can we, can we just be- 90 seconds? 90 seconds? We can be done now. We’re just, I’m out.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I’m good. Yep. Good. Yep. See ya. Yep. But then there are also situations, you know, we had the Great Recession, we had COVID.

There are some situations where you’re just like, you just be, you can be understanding and be like, “Gosh, I’m really, yeah, I’m really sorry to hear business sucks, and we have a 90-day termination clause, but let me, let me waive that for you, and let’s do this instead.” And you’re always seen in good light when you do those things.

Yep. And in fact, every time I have done that, either that business has come back or they’ve referred business to us. So you don’t wanna do that in every situation, and you don’t wanna hurt your cash flow, you know, if it’s, if it’s gonna be detrimental. But there are situations where you can be a little more understanding and use, use that kind of language so that they understand that you’re doing them a favor, ’cause you’re, you really are doing them a favor in some cases.

Chip Griffin: Well, more to the point, if the client is coming to you and canceling because they’re having financial issues, whether it’s because of a global pandemic or there’s just something specific to their business, you’re probably not gonna get the money anyway.

Gini Dietrich: Fair.

Chip Griffin: Right? So, so rather than fighting for something that probably isn’t there anyway, why don’t you try to make it as painless as possible and get whatever you can so that you’ve built some goodwill potentially for the future? Because you also have to keep in mind that most of the time we’re not working with the actual owner of the business. Most of the time, even in a mid-sized business, we’re working with someone at least a step or two removed from that level.

And so why are we making their life more difficult when it’s not, you know, it may not even be their ability to make a decision, particularly if it’s financially related. So, you know, think about that, and put yourself in their shoes if you were in a position. If you’ve got contractors, think about, you know, you want to react to them the same way you want your contractors to react to you.

Gini Dietrich: Right. Yep.

Chip Griffin: And, you don’t want your contractors coming at you, right? Yeah, yep. And you wanna try to work something out amicably. You should be doing the same thing upstream from you in the relationship as well.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I just, I think your earlier point about taking some time, and just, you know, it’s, it usually comes as a shock.

Even if, even if we’ve read the tea leaves, it still is surprising. It still is stressful. It still has some risk involved. And so just take a beat and use the language of, you know, “Give me a couple of days to put together a transition plan.” And I think that helps you process it all, get the emotion out, and then start to salvage the relationship as best you can so that there is referral business later, or maybe they do come back later, or whatever happens to be.

Chip Griffin: Right. I mean, time is your friend on these things in order to, you know, to formulate a better response. And most of the time when we react too quickly, it’s when we end up regretting it somewhere down the road. So- you know, buy yourself the time to avoid that future regret.

Gini Dietrich: I will, I will tell you that 100 years ago when I started my agency, the first client I lost, I cried.

And the client felt really, really bad, and I was mortified, but I cried.

Chip Griffin: Oh, you, you cried when the client told you? Oh, wow.

Gini Dietrich: I did. Uh-huh. Okay. So I will say that, you know, you learn and you grow, and you understand that sometimes it’s just not personal. I took it very personally because it was the first time it had ever happened.

Like, I’d, I’d never been fired from a job. I’d never like … it was the first time it had ever happened. So I, I did. I’ve matured since then, but there are, you know, there are things that you’re just like, it’s an emotional time.

Chip Griffin: Sure. I mean, nobody would ever enjoy that kind of-

Gini Dietrich: Yeah

Chip Griffin: experience. Mm-mm. Yeah. I, I mean, certainly any time I’ve ever had a contract end, I, I haven’t been like, “Yay!”

Gini Dietrich: Right?

Chip Griffin: I mean-

Gini Dietrich: Woo-hoo! …

Chip Griffin: it, it sucks. Yeah. I can’t say that I’ve ever cried when I’ve gotten that news, but may have hung up the phone and had a few choice words for the atmosphere around me or something like that.

But, you know, it is what it is. So okay, so, you know, we’re, we’re thinking through the actual communications with the client who has fired us. Sorry, terminated the agreement- Let us go … or shared the decision. Mm, right. Whatever. Yeah. Whatever language you wanna use. I’m, I’m still a fan of firing because that’s kinda what it is.

So now we need to think about two things, I think immediately. One is how do we communicate it to our team, whether that’s contractors or employees, and as a corollary to that, how are we going to act as a client for the remainder of the relationship that we have? So not the technical details of working out the trip, but the, you know, how do we continue to service them in that moment?

And those two are related because as soon as you tell your team, you know, “Hey, this, this agreement is ending,” they’re probably gonna start mentally checking out of that relationship just as you have.

Gini Dietrich: Of course. Yep.

Chip Griffin: And I think we need to really fight that urge. Yep. Because, because it, uh, as you say, it is how you exit that people remember you, and a lot of that comes down to if you had, particularly if you have a longer notice period, right?

If you’ve got a, you know, say a 60 or 90-day notice period, you can’t just, you know, put pens down unless they, the client is like, “No, we just, we’re, we’re done. We’ll just keep paying you, but we’re not.” Sometimes that does happen- It sure does, yep … where they treat it as sort of severance for the agency.

It’s not super common, but it does happen.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: But it needs to be on them to reduce your workload, not on you to say, “Eh, we don’t care anymore.”

Gini Dietrich: Right. And I think, you know, if you’re doing things like media relations, it’s ensuring that those, the stories that are in progress or the things that are in progress, the pitches that are in progress, those get transferred over.

If you, like we said, if you hold the keys to anything, you have to make sure that those are transferred over. All of the things that you have in progress, understand, you know, to your point, that it may be like they just want you to stop work immediately and hand everything over, or they may want you to continue, finish, they want you to finish things that are in progress.

But understand what that is so that you can ensure that. And one of the things I always say to my team, and I repeat that, repeat what I said at the beginning, which is, you know, you’re always remembered how, by how you left. It is our job to transition smoothly and make sure that nothing falls through the cracks.

Yep. And I understand that you’re checked out. I’m checked out. I’m surprised by this. It’s not, you know, this, this is gonna be a little bit of a painful process, but we have to be professional, and we have to ensure that we’re transitioning cleanly.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and please do not fight them. It’s, I mean, ’cause that’s even worse than-you know, we, we just kinda give up. But I’ve seen many agencies where they basically fight clients on the way out the door, and the client will say, “Can I have this? Can I have the latest draft of this even though it’s not finished?” And they’ll be like, “Well, no, because, you know, we’re not gonna be working with you anymore, and so, you know, you don’t get the draft. You only get the final version.” No.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely not. No. No. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: If you’re doing media relations and they wanna know who you’ve reached out to about a press release- Yes … just tell them.

Gini Dietrich: Just tell them, yes.

Chip Griffin: Do not fight them on this. I agree. I, I, for the life of me, I do not understand-

Gini Dietrich: Yep. I totally agree with that

Chip Griffin: the, the way, particularly the PR agencies seem to be particularly guilty of this in my view, where they just will not share with the client anything that they’re doing in terms of detail around outreach or those kinds of things because, well, then they can do it on their own. Okay, fine. Let them, right?

They’ll figure out it’s not that easy. It’s not just having the spreadsheet of what contacts you’ve made. Yeah. I’m not saying you need to give them your whole database with all of your personal notations about, you know, stuff that you do across other clients. But if it’s pitch work that you’ve done for this client, give them the information.

Come on, man.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, yeah. I mean, especially if it’s in progress and there’s, like- Yes … something’s happening, like, there’s no reason on Earth not to give them that information.

Chip Griffin: No, no reason.

And, look, if all you’re good for is, is a spreadsheet, it probably wasn’t worth hiring you anyway. Yeah.

So, you know, you, you’ve got to be realistic about these kinds of things. But as you’re communicating with your team, you want them to understand that, that they need to have this same mentality of being helpful and making sure they finish strong. I think the other thing is to, to make sure that, that you’re communicating clearly with your contractors and employees about what this means.

Hopefully, what it means is you’ve got a strong pipeline, and so, you know, it’s a bump in the road, but it’s not a big deal. But if it is a big deal, don’t try to hide that fact, right? I mean, you don’t have to like terrify them.

Gini Dietrich: Yep.

Chip Griffin: But, but if it does, if you’ve got a contractor and it’s probably gonna mean that you’re gonna have to cut them altogether or partially, if you think it’s, you know, a giant client and it might lead to layoffs, be honest with people sooner rather than later.

Because the more you put this off, the harder it is to deal with. Yeah. And again, it’s a balancing act, ’cause you can’t, you can’t just be, you know, like panicking them, which is again another argument for taking a deep breath, absorbing the information, figuring out your plan. You don’t have to hang up the phone and then immediately call up all your team and say, “Oh my God, we just lost Acme Pharmaceuticals,” right?

I mean, that doesn’t help anybody. Take the time, think it through, think through the questions you’re likely to get so that you can communicate confidently, but also honestly.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I would say If you have access to an HR team or person, if you have access to a legal team or an attorney, reach out to them as well because as you’re crafting this plan because they’re gonna have a different…

They’re gonna look at it through a different lens. They’re gonna have a different perspective, especially if you have a team, getting HR involved in that to say, “Okay, here’s scenarios A, B, and C” to help you plan so that when an employee asks, you have a response, and it’s not just shot from the hip a little bit.

Right. And I, I know I’ve told this story before, but during the Great Recession, you know, we had 95% of our clients left between Christmas and New Year’s of 2008, 2009, and I had to go back to the office and lay everybody off. And the biggest mistake I made, I made two big mistakes in that. One is that everybody was talking about the economy and the Great Recession and all this stuff for a year, but I didn’t pay any attention.

I didn’t… Like, I wouldn’t, I wasn’t mature enough. I wasn’t experienced enough, and so I just kind of put my blinders on and was like, “Everything’s great. We’re growing.” You know? Yeah. And so I didn’t plan. And the second thing I did, mistake I made is I didn’t let the team know ahead of time, and I didn’t think I could.

And I’ll never forget this as long as I live. One of my employees came up to me after I let everybody know, and she said, “I wish you had told us because I would’ve been happy to go part-time.” And I was like, ohhh.

Chip Griffin: Right.

Gini Dietrich: You know? Like, yeah.

Chip Griffin: Yeah.

Gini Dietrich: So be honest and open because I think they will come with solutions too that you may not have thought of or that you may have assumed they’re not willing to do when they are.

Chip Griffin: Right. Absolutely. So then I think that takes us to that, that final piece, as we’re wrapping up here, and, and that is to take lessons away from it. Because there’s something to be learned from the end of every relationship, whether it’s because it was a project and it just, it naturally ran its course, or because you were on a retainer and they decided to end it or what have you.

Yep. There are always lessons to be learned, and I think it’s, it’s really helpful to sit down with your team, not just at the end, but at key milestone points as well and say, “Okay, you know, what, what have we learned from this? What could we have done differently? What should we do differently, not just with this client but with others in the future?”

And make sure that you treat as much of what you’re doing as a learning experience as possible because that’s how you really grow- both individually and as a business. If you just keep doing the same old, same old, you might do okay, but you’re not gonna do as well as you could if you’re actually studying what you’ve done in the past.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. I mean, that’s the example I just gave is a great example of that. Yeah. Now I know.

Chip Griffin: Yeah.

Gini Dietrich: That’s a great lesson.

Chip Griffin: It’s why, again, I watch all of these episodes back so that I can sit there and say, “Okay, you know, what would I do differently next time?” Maybe I’ll lower the microphone a little bit, raise my voice a little bit, talk a little bit less so that we can actually hear from Gini, and I don’t just monopolize all the time.

You don’t monopolize the time.

And have Jen tell me what percentage of time I’ve spoken versus… I do talk a lot. I understand that. But it’s, it’s something I consciously work on every podcast that I’m on because I know that I have a tendency to talk a lot.

Gini Dietrich: Okay. I don’t think you monopolize the time here.

No.

Chip Griffin: Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

Gini Dietrich: You’re welcome.

Chip Griffin: So, I guess we’re not gonna monopolize any more of your time as a listener, so we will wrap up today’s episode, but hopefully we’ve given you a few things to think about the next time that you get that dreaded call or email from a client who is not firing you, but ending the relationship in whatever fashion we wanna call it, so.

Gini Dietrich: It’s not always being fired.

Chip Griffin: Okay.

Gini Dietrich: Fired, fired means that you did a bad job.

Chip Griffin: Okay. On that note, I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.