Many agency employees feel overworked, yet it can be difficult to convince them to take a vacation from time to time.

Most agencies want to do whatever it takes to win new accounts. There is a natural urge to please prospects and demonstrate your expertise to get that contract signed.

How often should you be meeting with your agency team members and what should you be discussing?

In this episode, recorded in December 2021, Chip and Gini discuss the rapid response ad that Ryan Reynolds helped Peloton create after their product was featured in an unflattering way on a TV show.

No, this isn't a predictions episode, but Chip and Gini do take a look at the agency landscape as the new year kicks off.

Most agencies approach the arrival of procurement and legal teams with a sense of dread. And it isn't without good reason.

With the Great Resignation putting increased pressure on an already tight labor market, agencies are rightly concerned not just about recruiting new employees, but also retaining the talent they already have.

In this episode, Gini Dietrich shares some of her experience embedded with a client to help agencies understand the other side of the agency-client equation.

Many agency leaders haven’t been on the client side, so it is useful to have some perspective about how they perceive some of the things that we think of as standard operating procedure or best practices.

Not surprisingly, some of the things that frustrate agency owners may be different from how the client looks at the same things.

Listen in for some insight to consider, as well as some tips on how to handle specific situations.

View Transcript

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

Chip Griffin  

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

Gini Dietrich  

and I’m Gini Dietrich,

Chip Griffin  

and today we’re gonna learn from Gini’s experiences. Right after this that was my opening.

Gini Dietrich  

That was pretty bad. I’m not gonna lie. That was yeah,

Chip Griffin  

I just it was one of those ones where I just couldn’t think for something clever.

Gini Dietrich  

I mean, to be fair, you do come up with them about 30 seconds in advance. So maybe No, no,

Chip Griffin  

I come up with them. Literally, as I’m speaking I give it I give it not a moment’s thought. Until the words are coming out of my mouth. And yeah, very good. Today, nothing. Nothing was there it

Gini Dietrich  

was. Oh, my goodness, the out. I was

Chip Griffin  

gonna say you, you look, you look sort of like you’re in some weird nightclub or?

Gini Dietrich  

Yeah, well, yes, I have to change that label. didn’t even realize it until just

Chip Griffin  

this moment. reddish hue.

Gini Dietrich  

Yeah, I’ve got my, my fancy lights on the wall, but they don’t like from above.

Chip Griffin  

But that’s okay. My way out right here either. So

Gini Dietrich  

yeah, I was actually surprised that you could get the intro going with your janky setup there.

Chip Griffin  

Yeah, this is this is not how I prefer to record. But hey, it’s working, at least for the moment. Not gonna

Gini Dietrich  

Yeah, let me we should get through this. So before it decides to die on us.

Chip Griffin  

Yeah. So alright. So what we’re actually talking about today is that, you know, for the last, I don’t know, recently, you have been in a role where you have been working on the client side as an agency, right. So you’ve seen from the clients perspective, things that agencies are doing. In the past, I’ve been on the client side of agency relationships, as well. And so I thought it’d be interesting to talk to you about your recent ...

Clients often want to know who at the agency does what. It might be because they want to understand the work that they’re getting, but it also might be because they want to go directly to individuals for certain things.

Chip and Gini tackle this important topic in this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast.

You need to be clear with your team about what their individual roles are so that there isn’t confusion. There needs to be a single person responsible for the completion of each task (even if they need to work with others to accomplish it). 

But how do you handle clients who want this level of detail? It’s fine to communicate the expertise that you have, but be careful about locking yourself in to specific team members doing work for that client. Sometimes the agency’s needs change and as long as you continue to deliver a quality product, it shouldn’t matter to your clients.

Chip and Gini also argue that it is important to have a primary point of contact for each client with your agency so that they aren’t asking for lots of individual items from team members that could get lost in the cracks and not done — or completed but not properly recorded as work done for that client.

View Transcript

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

Chip Griffin 

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

Gini Dietrich 

and I’m Gini Dietrich,

Chip Griffin 

and I’m going to talk about what your role should be on this podcast and what my role should be

Gini Dietrich 

awesome podcasts can’t wait right after this.

Chip Griffin 

So I think we’re going to put you in charge of video editing and all the technical side of things. How does that sound to

Gini Dietrich 

you? Great. No problem.

Chip Griffin 

All right, cool. What should I do?

Gini Dietrich 

Oh, you should do promotion and distribution?

Chip Griffin 

Oh, okay. All right. Sure. Anyway, people don’t really care what our roles are in this podcast. Because really, a it’s not that difficult and be not that interesting. But what, what is interesting is the roles on your agency team. And when you’re working with clients, how do you define the roles of your team? How do you communicate those roles to the client? And how do you set yourself up for success? So we’re going to talk about roles in the client context? In today’s episode?

Gini Dietrich 

Yeah, I think it’s really like anything else, right? It’s setting expectations, it’s communicating correctly, it’s it always makes me laugh, that communicators are not particularly great communicators sometimes. And making sure that your client understands, like, I go to this person for this, or this person for this, otherwise, you get wrapped into the same thing that many of us get wrapped into, which is they come to you for everything. And that should not

Chip Griffin 

happen. Well, and the first thing, you know, like everything else that we talked about on the show is you need to figure out what your role is, right?

With all of the talk about the Great Resignation and the challenges many agencies are having hiring and retaining workers, is now the time to adopt a 4-day work week?

What are the pros and cons of this policy — and is it even feasible for most agencies?

Chip and Gini tackle the idea that has become part of the conversation in many workplaces.

View Transcript

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

Chip Griffin  

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

Gini Dietrich  

and I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin  

And if you’re listening to us, then the clickbait worked. So we’ll talk more about the actual topic right after this we are not above clickbait headlines, so you’re not. So that’s what we went with. We are going to be talking about the four day workweek, which I know all of you would love to have. It’s like a popular topic of conversation. Four days, four hours, let’s go. Let’s go all the way back. wonderful book, The Four Hour Workweek the biggest piece of trash I’ve ever read.

Gini Dietrich  

Tell us how you really feel about it.

Chip Griffin  

i It’s what I blogged about it at the time. In fact, I think that the way I let it off was the book suggested that if you found something to be a waste of time, just stop it. And so I said, so I stopped reading at that point. Yeah, it was, it was a waste of my time. They weren’t were some good ideas in there. But you know, the the whole four hour workweek is just is a dumb idea. I mean, it’s not. It’s not realistic.

Gini Dietrich  

It’s really just like, click Beatty.

Chip Griffin  

Yes. Yeah, it wasn’t really I didn’t read it was actually at the book was actually advocating that you could do, you could work

Gini Dietrich  

just for hours or hours. How short?

Chip Griffin  

I mean? Well, you could if you could charge on out for those four hours that it covered, whatever you wanted to earn. I mean, you can work just four hours a week? Absolutely. You just have to either be able to charge through the nose for those four hours, or you have to not want to make very much. So you certainly could do it if those if those are criteria you want want to meet. But unfortunately, that books set an unrealistic expectation for people. So let’s talk about something that is a little bit more realistic. It’s in the realm of reality, the four day workweek. And there has been a lot of conversation lately, as people are thinking about, you know, what is what is the new work look like? Post pandemic, assuming we ever come out of the pandemic or you know, whatever it becomes, you know, how do we how do we structure work generally, and agencies are are, you know, trying to think creatively. And so I know a number of them are thinking about the idea of a four day work week? And is that something that could work to give the team some more flexibility to have a better opportunity to attract talent, all those different kinds of things. So the four day workweek, what are your thoughts?

Gini Dietrich  

You know, I’m, I am a fan, I have tried for many,