In this episode, Chip speaks with agency advisor Tim Kilroy about the challenges and strategies for running a small agency. Tim shares his extensive experience in digital marketing and agency coaching, highlighting the importance of flexibility and adaptability in leadership.

They discuss the notion of many agency owners being ‘accidental’ and the necessity of creative problem-solving and rigorous operational procedures in today’s tough economic and technological landscapes. The conversation emphasizes fostering a supportive and clear environment for agency teams, allowing for autonomy and decentralized decision-making to drive success.

Tim Kilroy is an agency growth coach with a no-BS style, a sharp strategic brain, and a heart for founders who want to build businesses they actually want to run. After years in the trenches -launching, scaling, exiting and breaking agencies, he created the WTF Agency Method to help founders unclog revenue bottlenecks, fire themselves from sales, and turn their teams into content powerhouses.

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

Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of Chats with Chip. I’m your host, Chip Griffin, the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance, and I am delighted to have with me today a fellow agency advisor, Tim Kilroy. Welcome to the show, Tim.

Tim Kilroy: Thanks, Chip. Super glad to be here. And I must say that that intro was very sort of like NPR like.

Chip Griffin: Well, you know, I, I do take some inspiration from, from old fashioned talk radio, in how I do things including the microphone that I have, which is sort of a classic of the talk radio world. But yeah. So, and, and we are classics now, right? That’s, that’s why we get to be advisors.

Yeah.

Tim Kilroy: I, so it has, I, I don’t, I don’t like to think about myself as a classic, but I think that’s probably true.

It’s, you know, I definitely fit into the classic car realm. Anyways.

Chip Griffin: There you go. And, and if you can listen to classic rock on the radio and identify with it, you’re probably a classic. So,

Tim Kilroy: Often when I’m with my kids, there’ll be something that comes on, like in the grocery store, you know, the muzak and like, ah.

That was high school right there, man. That was like, there you go. Like, that was like, I remember jamming that in middle school and they’ll be like, what? Mm-hmm. Like, anyways.

Chip Griffin: Oh, well. Well, for those, for those who who don’t know you, what, what would you like to share about yourself that could perhaps introduce yourself to them?

Tim Kilroy: So, well, first of all, obviously if you are watching… devastatingly handsome. If you’re only listening, unbelievably hilarious. So those are the two things you probably ought to know. But actually I’ve, I’ve been in this, the, in the world of agencies… actually. I’ve been in the world of digital marketing since 1997. And, have been in agencies or senior leadership positions on the client side since 2001.

And I have, you know, I’ve started three agencies, crashed one so hard they had to call in FEMA. And, you know, started and exited two. And just as we discovered earlier, just about the same time you did, I stumbled into agency coaching quite accidentally and have realized that this, like me helping you figure out what the f is going on in your business – like that is, that is the best way to leverage my experience and point of view. Because whatever agency problem that you have right now, I have either had or created some version of that problem for myself. And because I’m a slow learner, I have probably done it more than once. So I have all sorts of solutions to help you figure it out.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. As I always like to tell people, I, I can’t necessarily give you the right answer, but I can tell you a lot of the wrong ones.

Tim Kilroy: Right. Yeah. Yes.

Chip Griffin: That’s from hard won experience.

Tim Kilroy: Exactly. Exactly.

Chip Griffin: And I, I do, I do like how you, you mentioned that, that your current business, you sort of came into it accidentally and, and I, and earlier we were talking and, and you mentioned being an accidental agency owner before that.

I, I think that, that there’s a, a key theme here and, and I’m a big believer that many of the best businesses, if not most of the best businesses, were not intentionally created. Someone didn’t set and in fact, I’ve tried doing this myself where I go out and say, I wanna start a business and I’ll talk with people about different ideas and things like that.

And, and then you sort of pick one. But, but to me, the ones that that tend to be the best are the ones that you come upon out of necessity or an opportunity that’s staring you right in the face. And, and I think that’s something that it’s helpful for most agency owners to appreciate because the vast majority of agency owners are accidental.

The vast majority didn’t, didn’t wake up one morning and say, you know what? I think I’m gonna start an agency.

Tim Kilroy: Right. I would so happily put myself in the line of fire and the line of responsibility for creating ads that are supposed to generate sales on the other end of something where I don’t have full control.

Absolutely. That’s exactly what everybody wants to do. Yeah, you know, I actually think about things. Like your life is just a series of pivots. You know, you can be super intentional about your day-to-day actions, but, but over the course of your life, you know, you are constantly pivoting from one experience or one point of view to the next.

I mean, there might be a through line that makes them all consistent, but rarely is your intentionality expressed over a long period of time. And so you’re thinking, this is what I’m going to do today and tomorrow, and maybe, you know, next week I’ll do that. But by the time you get to next week, your ability to predict the circumstances is pretty poor. So you then actually, you know, then you’re, you’re forced to pivot your, you know, your way of thinking and your way of being. And, and I think, and I think that’s why those businesses that appear less intentional are sometimes more robust.

Chip Griffin: Mm-hmm. Well, and, and I think that, that this notion of pivoting is, is critical because the, the best businesses do frequently find the need to pivot. In fact, if you look at a, a lot of the, the best companies in the world, what they started out as is not what they are today.

Tim Kilroy: Yes. Slack, for instance.

Yep. Absolutely. Right. They were, they were a gaming engine and they peeled off a tool.

Chip Griffin: Yep.

Yeah. And, and it’s just, it is one of those things where I think that, that one of the challenges that, that agency owners have, at least in my experience, is understanding when and how to pivot. Because pivoting is good, but you can also do too much of it where you’re basically being, you know, carried by the latest breeze.

Yeah. And, and you have, you have no rudder control at all, or you’re so fixated on saying this is the way to do it, that you’re reluctant to pivot and so, so finding the right balance there, I think is right, is something that a lot of owners need to do.

Tim Kilroy: And if, and if you are reluctant to pivot, you are either a genius or you’re really stupid.

You know, because there sometimes there are people who are so pure in their vision, and when they turn out to be right in their vision, it’s extraordinary. Sure. But I think, but I think that those, those, sort of focused geniuses are, are very rare.

It sort of a, a sort of, you know, reminds me of, and I don’t know if this is a true thing that Thomas Edison said is like, he did not invent the light bulb.

He just found like 10,000 ways that it didn’t work, and one way that it did.

Chip Griffin: Well, whether that story is, is true or not, it sounds good. And, having started my career in, in politics, we used to always say, never let the facts get in the way of a good story. So, so we won’t do that here either. No fact checking allowed.

All right. So, you know, obviously I, I, I think, well, let me ask would you first of all agree that we are in challenging times for many agencies?

Tim Kilroy: Oh my goodness. Yeah. As we talk, I think. So I’ll tell you the, my first agency, I started in the, in the rubble of the dot com crash. My second agency, I started just seriously, weeks before the 2008 financial meltdown happened.

 So, you know, I’ve been through some challenging times in agency ownership. But I can honestly say that this particular circumstance where we are fighting macroeconomic issues, macro technological issues, and a rapidly changing social dynamic, I think is, is this could be the hardest. This really could be the most difficult time to be an agency owner that, that I have ever seen.

Chip Griffin: Well, yeah, I, I, I think part of that is right, because the, you, you’re creating challenges that are not just in the business, right? Yeah. So some of the things that you’ve enumerated in the past, those were largely business challenges. Yes. But here, owners are, and employees are facing, and clients are all facing issues, not just in the business, but in their personal lives as well, because a lot of these dynamics are directly impacting them there.

Tim Kilroy: Yeah. You know, and, and I think as I’m, as I’m, as I often say to my clients when they’re talking about macro issues, you know, like most agencies are not big enough to be directly impacted by macro issues. By the time you get to be like WPP and you’ve got a very big footprint. Yes, yes. Global macroeconomic and social issues do impact you. On the, you know, if you’re a $3 million agency, you are not really being impacted directly by macroeconomic or social issues. You’re just experiencing some of the friction. And so, so much of the way to survive these, you know, these really difficult times is by being intentional. And creative. And so both allowing you to, to like make very rational, thoughtful choices and also being open to like following a stupid crazy idea that, you know, that in the words of, of the Scooby Doo gang, you know, this might just be crazy enough to work.

And so, and I, and I really do think that, you know, that the only way to get, the only way to make it through difficult times is through rigor and experimentation. And those two things are actually, people don’t carry them around in the same bucket.

Chip Griffin: So operationally, how do you think about this when an agency owner comes to you right now and says, Tim, you know, it’s, it, it, it’s tough sledding. I’m not sure exactly what to do. How do you help them to operationalize this rigor and experimentation?

Tim Kilroy: Yeah, so, so the, so the very first thing is we, we talk about what are the connection points between the activity that your team is doing and the outcomes that your clients expect. For many, many, many agency owners, they have built SOPs and they are having their team follow SOPs, but those SOPs are not evolving at the same rate as you know, as technology or, or the, the demands, of the business, change. Because changing SOPs is hard. Like it’s really hard. And so the very first thing that we, we do that when I’m helping somebody rethink and, and sort of re-energize and reshape their workforce is to say, Hey, we’ve gotta get a better operating procedure put together, but guess what? Mr. or Ms. Agency owner, you are not the person to lead that effort because you are too far away from the work. You know, you, you were thinking about this operationally, and your team has a much better grasp on thinking about it tactically.

And so operations is like an abstract thing, tactical things or a to-do list.

And so by helping people or ceding ownership of, of process to your team is, is the most effective way to revitalize and frankly, right size your, you know, your team efforts. It does demand however, that you as an agency owner be unbelievably clear, like crystal, overly, so over explained, kind of clear about expectations.

And so the people, you know, if you’re, if you’re a, a, you know, a media buying agency, the people who run your accounts and the people who do your creative and the people who manage your budgets and your reporting, like they know how to do all this stuff. What they need is a clear, beautifully described, you know, like crystalline expression of the desired outcome of the stuff that they do.

So your job as an agency leader is to make everything super clear as, as, as Brene Brown says, clarity is kindness.

So, if you are exceptionally clear about the expectations of your team and the outcomes that you expect for your clients, you can trust your team to organize themselves. For the most part in a way that will accomplish those results. Now, if they aren’t successful in doing that, the first thing that you have to say is, do they understand what I’m trying to, what we’re trying to accomplish here? And if not, that’s on you. But if they, if they understand what you’re trying to accomplish, and then their activities are still not pushing them in the right direction.

They are probably being held back by something that is maybe, an old expectation or a way of things, way of doing things that they used to do. But you have to free them from the tactical expectations in saying, listen, you can do this in whatever way is most effective. You just have to be very, very, very clear in being able to defend yourself and your actions in saying that this particular set of actions, this process, this course, this, this course of, of direction is bringing us closer to your expressed vision, not further away.

So if, if they have built a process that is neither, that is not bringing the result closer. That’s not a process that’s effective.

And so, and if you put it that way and say, Hey, you are free to do exactly what you think is the right thing, and you can say, okay, cool. If I do these things, that brings us closer to the goal for this particular client. Then that’s a success.

The other thing that is so treacherous is that agency owners want to systematize everything so that their team does not use any of their own discretion. And the landscape for every client is slightly different. They have a different product selection, a different pricing strategy, different customer service policies, a different audience.

So the actual tactics that your team puts together is going to vary by the particular situation. That is why you need to get your team to think about, not you do thing one, thing two, thing three, thing four. In that order, you think here are the bucket of things. Here’s the collection of tools at our disposal.

At this stage in the engagement, we have to make sure that we’re assembling the tools in the right order to get us to, to get us closer to the desired end state.

And yeah, that works just so much better because everybody feels respected and valued. And there’s a real sense of ownership.

Chip Griffin: Yeah.

And that’s increasingly important with today’s workforce. I mean, if I think back to 35 years ago when I first got started, you know, it was enough to just be clear in your expectation. You know, now I think you need to, to be not just clear about, you know where you’re going, but why, and Oh, absolutely.

You have to, to make the team feel like they are part of that. Ultimately, you’re the boss. You, you are the leader. You still have to make final decisions and, and they need to understand that it’s not a democracy. But at the same time, you need to, you need to open up the tent a little bit, bring them in and help them to understand the purpose behind what they’re doing.

Tim Kilroy: Yeah. So, so, you said something, you said something relevant that it’s not a democracy.

But there has to be a democratic approach to opinions. So everybody needs to have the the permission to say what they think.

Chip Griffin: Yes.

Tim Kilroy: And that, I don’t know, like when, when I was coming up, that was not a thing.

No. Like you were told what to do and then yousaid, okay, I’ll do that. And, and you could not say, oh, you know, the result wasn’t right. ’cause the process wasn’t good. Like where you weren’t clearing your expectations. I just remember bringing stuff to one of my bosses and him looking at it like, this is crap.

Like, why? Like, what made you think that this would be the right thing? Yep. And I was like, because that’s what you said.

Chip Griffin: Right?

Tim Kilroy: But, you know, I remember, when I was growing up, my, my dad was a, well, let’s, let’s call him, he was an emotive guy to be, to be kind. And he would often say things like, you know, like, what are you stupid? Because like doing that, there’s no way it’s gonna get you where you said you were gonna go, right? Like what are you, like, how, like can’t you think? You know? Like, good job dad, way to be supportive. But, but you know, I think that is the way that management used to work.

And now management today is much more about, okay, team, like this is where we’re going, this is why we’re going there. And actually there’s a, there’s a brilliant, like a truly brilliant sort of exploration of, of the sort of modern management in Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership book. I dunno if you’ve read that.

Chip Griffin: I have not.

Tim Kilroy: So there’s a part about decentralized decisioning, which essentially says, Hey, your job, in order to accomplish anything, your job is to say like, here’s the really big thing that we’re trying to accomplish, like the, the big goal. Here’s today’s mission, or this month’s mission, or this year’s mission, and here’s how it connects to that really big goal and why it’s important to that really big goal.

And here are all the teams that are going to be involved in us in today’s mission or this month’s mission. Here’s what they all do. And so then everybody has a, has the full context of how their work fits into the, into not only the, the big, far away, goal, but today’s mission or this month’s mission, and they understand how the other teams are contributing to it.

And the most beautiful thing is there’s this, there’s this idea that you have autonomy to do the right thing. Whenever you see that there’s the possibility that we’re not going to accomplish the mission. And so that allows you to like have agency inside of your agency to say like, oh, you know what, like this keyword strategy, it might be right, but it’s not sufficient so I can do more.

Right? Or, or like, this thing is not relevant to that client so we can leave it be. And as long as you can be as, as long as you can sort of express your thinking about that your leadership team needs to be like completely open to trusting your discretion because you have the, you as a, as an agency worker or as agency staff, you actually have all of the context necessary to make the right decision.

And so, and so many and so many agency leaders are so afraid that their team will make the wrong decision. They never give them the skills, authority, and autonomy to make the right decision. And that’s the difference between working to succeed and preventing failure. Like there’s those, like those are not the same.

Chip Griffin: Right. And, and I think giving discretion and a degree of autonomy to the frontline particularly because as you noted, they are the people who they know best. They, they are in the trenches every day. They see exactly what’s going on, on both sides of the ball and, and, and they can help make some of those decisions.

The more context that you give them, the more information you give them. It enables those micro decisions to be more likely to be correct. Exactly. Then not. And if you withhold that information, it’s not going to. I, I do want to say that, you know, we, we were talking earlier about the, the challenging environment we’re in and, and in my experience, agency owners, agency leaders tend to become much more controlling, the more challenging the environment around them is.

So the irony is that the things that they really need to do in order to continue to succeed goes entirely against the natural instinct of almost every owner I’ve ever worked with.

Tim Kilroy: Yeah. So, and, and here’s the, here’s my, like pithy encapsulation of this. As the agency leader, your job is to not make happy clients.

That is not your job at all. Your job is to create teams and systems that create happy clients, right? So, and this is, this is the most counterintuitive thing for agency owners. Especially us accidental agency owners. When you start, you are thinking like the, like the thing that I’m supposed to do is work inside the business so it works. And that’s great if you are a freelancer or maybe you’re a freelancer with a helper. But as soon as you hire somebody with skills, your job is no longer to be the subject matter expert or the best marketer in your business. Your job, totally 100%, is to create an environment to get the very best performance out of the team that you have.

And so your job as an agency owner, believe it or not, is to run the agency, not do the stuff that the agency does. And so many people have, it’s so difficult for them to elevate above that. And, you know, part of it I think is like identity maybe. Like I know that, that, at my last agency Ad Chemics, we were doing this like nifty cool neato stuff with data enhanced, you know, and LTV enhanced sort of calculations in paid search.

And so when we started, and since this was all my idea, holy moly, I knew everything about paid search. You know, like where the comments go, where’d that go? You know, which button to push, which lever to pull? And I would’ve put my technical knowledge up against anybody. But you know, 15 clients into it, and a team, like I might be pretty nifty, but I am not nearly as smart as 15 paid search geniuses.

Mm-hmm. And so I had to pull myself out of that idea that I needed to know everything about paid search. I didn’t. Shouldn’t. Yeah. I need to know everything that paid search could do for our clients, so, so that we could help them hit their goals. Like the leverage, you pull the buttons, you push the pulls, you wrangle, not your job.

There’s people who are better at that than you are. Yeah. And also they have, generally speaking, more focused responsibilities so they can go deeper.

Chip Griffin: Well, I just, I really want to underscore what you said about, creating the, as a leader, your job is to create the environment in which your team can successfully do things for clients, where they can be successful themselves.

And, and I think part of the problem is that, that most agency owners don’t have any formal or informal management training. They don’t provide any, of, of the same to their own managers, individually. And, and the whole, the management paradigm that people think of is not really what works. And it’s not, because I talk to, to folks all the time about management and they say, well, you know, my job is to assign tasks and hold ’em accountable to meet deadlines.

No, your job is to, you’re a facilitator now. As a manager, your job is to create the environment, as you said, where, where they can be successful. You are there, I often, make it akin to being a blocking back in American football. Yeah. Right. You know, you are there to clear the path for them, figure out what obstacles are in the way, what resources they need.

If you think about it that way, as opposed to assigning and holding them accountable, you’ll be in a much stronger position to have a successful team.

Tim Kilroy: Yeah, absolutely. So, so I, although this, this, the person who said this ended up being less like this statement. After one of my agencies was acquired, I spoke to the acquiring CEO saying, wow.

Like, like it’s gotta be like pretty complicated to have all these people working for you. You know, there’s just so much to handle. And he looked at me and said, work for me? No, I work for them. Now. As it turns out, that was a giant pile of poo poo from his perspective. But it sounded good. But it’s very true, you know, as the agency leader, like your job is to make everybody else better.

Yeah. Like, that’s it. You know. You might think like it’s about big executive decisions and strategic thinking. No. It’s about thinking, okay, I got these like 15 really smart people who want to accomplish great things. Like what do I need to do to get the best out of them? What do I need to do to help them be the version of themselves that they want to be in this environment?

Chip Griffin: Well, I, I think the perspectives that you’ve shared today have, have helped facilitate that for our listeners and, and hopefully they’ll take some of those lessons away and start applying them in their own businesses. If someone would like to take advantage of, of more of your insights and advice, learn more about you and, and the resources that you provide. Tim, where should they go?

Tim Kilroy: Okay, there’s three places. So one, I spout off on LinkedIn a lot. I’m not hard to find there. And I think it’s pretty entertaining. You might not, but whatever, you know, to each his own. I, I agree. Yeah. So that’s one place where you can get, you know, get the sort of unfiltered version.

 If you’d like to hear from me a little bit less, I do have a newsletter. At www.agencyinnercircle and that also comes with the Slack group, it’s totally free. You know, if you get the newsletter, click on all the ads ’cause I have five kids. And then an offer: something that if you need help and understanding where you might be meddling a little bit too much in your team’s activities, I do have the WTF to WTF assessments.

And that’s, and by the way, that’s what the f to wow that’s fantastic. And that, you can find that at timkilroy.com/wtf-assessment and that will take you like 10 minutes to, to, to, to fill out. And you’re gonna get back sort of a comparison about like where you stand relative to profitability growth. Revenue per employee and your, and how deeply you are involved in the functional areas of your business. And it will give you a roadmap or at least a snapshot of the things that you probably want to fix in order to create bigger opportunity for yourself.

Chip Griffin: Well, that’s great, and we will include links to all of those in the show notes.

So if you’re listening to us on the treadmill, in the car, please don’t fall off the treadmill or crash your car or something like that, trying to write down these URLs. They will be in the show notes and you can just click on them right there.

Tim Kilroy: Wow, thanks. So maybe I, I will use the show.

Chip Griffin: My lawyers made me add that.

Tim Kilroy: That’s the reference for my own stuff later. That’s good.

Chip Griffin: Okay, so there we go. So on that note, Tim, thank you for, for joining me. You’ve been a great guest with lots of insights. I would encourage everyone to check out the resources that, that you mentioned, and I appreciate everybody who has listened all the way through.

And I look forward to having you all back listening to another episode very soon. Thanks for joining.

Tim Kilroy: Thanks Chip.