In this week’s podcast, Chip Griffin and Gini Dietrich discuss why your agency should have a focus and how it will make you more successful.
Then they take a look at the different ways that you can have focus. Gini advises thinking about what you’re providing and who you’re providing it to, while Chip goes a bit further and suggests following the Who-What-Where-When-How-Why construct so familiar to anyone who has come from a journalism background (or who took a writing class in school).
Automated Transcript
CHIP: Hello and welcome to another episode of the agency leadership podcast. I’m Chip Griffin and I am Gini Dietrich and we’re here today to talk about finding focus for your agency and normally we’d Kibitz about something but you know the cubs are out, the red sox are playing middling baseball, so I’m not sure we have anything fun to talk about so we might actually have to, you know, talk about the subject of the podcast
GINI: business stuff. I guess
CHIP: I go, it is what it is. Maybe our listeners will actually appreciate that and not have to hit the fast forward button for the first two minutes. Alright, so let’s, let’s talk about, but let’s focus on finding focus. Hey, awesome. Yeah, we’ll see. How many times would you say focus on this podcast if you want to count them up and comment at the, on the podcast afterwards, we’d love to hear how many for you to start
GINI: it. Chris Penn can just do a transcription and have an machine tell us in about 30 seconds. So focus, focus, focus, focus, focus.
CHIP: All right. Anyway, so first, is it important for your agency to have focus or should you just take in whatever business comes in over the transom?
GINI: I think we all know the answer to that is your agency should have focus. However, not every agency that certainly not everybody does that because we all have mortgages to make and car payments to make insurance to pay for and you know, kids and braces and everything else that comes with being a grownup, which kind of suck sometimes. Um, so I think there is a bit of a, I’ll just take whatever comes in over the transom and then five or 10 years later you wake up and there was no focus
CHIP: or, or you accidentally find out what your focus is. Right? I mean, that’s fair. I think that’s an, it’s an interesting question whether you should set about to have a particular focus or you should allow the market to inform it. And I think it’s probably somewhere in the middle. I think, you know, my advice to folks is to start somewhere but be prepared to pivot and I think most of us have pivoted at one point or another with, with all of our agencies, frankly, with me for some of my other businesses as well. Um, and it’s, it’s that it’s having that flexibility to pivot sort of, as we talked about on a previous episode. No, don’t call yourself awesome facebook marketer agency because then when you need to pivot, that’s going to be a lot harder. You know, I think it’s important to, to think about, um, uh, having a focus but then being willing to adjust it as time goes on.
GINI: And I think there’s two areas of focus. One is what you do, you know, if it’s search engine optimization or it’s digital advertising or it’s digital marketing or social media or media relations, whatever it happens to be. And then the other piece is the vertical. You know, focusing in an, in an industry, those things can always, always expand. But when you try to be a jack of all trades, I think that’s when you start to get into trouble.
CHIP: Absolutely. And, and you know, again, as we’ve talked about on a previous episode, you know, most the folks are listening to this are not big enough, that they can be a jack of all trades, right?
